Letter to Roger Ebert

I sent a letter to Roger Ebert just now, in an attempt to start a dialogue on games as art. Enjoy:

I have been reading your thoughts on video games as an art medium recently. I want to bring the types of reviews you do to the gaming world, in an attempt to reduce the stigma they carry as childrens' toys, or at least not art. Still, you are convinced that games cannot be, or at least, aren't currently capable of being art.

First of all, Clive Barker's defense was weak. He suffers from a limited vision even within gaming, as he talks about games as though all of their narratives have to always branch, which is mostly a western point of view. Japanese games are more often entirely linear in their storylines, so that ruins the scope of many things he said about video games.

Anyway, that was more than a year ago, and I need to construct my own points here, you've already responded to his. You said recently that you thought video games were getting better, but still not capable of art. In my opinion, games actually have a natural advantage over other mediums in the art they can produce, though certainly they haven't produced art to the point of any other so far. Just as film can utilize text, photography, and music, video games can use all of the above including film.

One basic problem with these arguments about gaming as art, I think, is society isn't familiar enough with video games to understand the scope they cover. Some video games are like board games, while some are like books, and others almost nothing but music and visuals. Other video games are just "games" that don't try to pursue any narrative. In the film medium, the boundaries here are clearly understood, as commercials, TV shows, narrative feature films, and animated shorts are all basically considered different things. People don't immediately realize this distinction in games right now, because game magazines and award shows all cover all kinds of video games, from Cooking Mama and Bejeweled to Metal Gear Solid and Valkyria Chronicles. Distinctions in coverage tend to follow which console a game is on rather than any sort of genre or technique, which is rather arbitrary in one sense, but only meaningful from the consumer end.

I really think game criticism has to advance for games to at this point as well. The game companies won't care about writing and art design until somebody does. All gaming journalism is stuck in the "enthusiast" mode right now, and most reviews focus on gameplay and technical details over writing and art design. As long as Battlefield: Bad Company sells well and gets an 85 on Metacritic with such completely awful writing, why should companies hire better writers? The average age of gamers (at this point around 33) also needs to move up, which should happen if games can start to be considered a serious art medium.

Another quick point: Games also have the potential power of procedural rhetoric, which as far as I know was an idea first put into writing by Georgia Tech's Ian Bogost. Rather than arguing points with words, games can argue with numbers, basically, representing a real world system in an interactive way so people learn something. SimCity is a well-known example, though the recent editions of that series have abandoned all sense, resorting to a "have fun creating a city that looks cool" objective instead of showing people how a city must be run.

Okay, well, there's an awful lot to talk about on the topic, and I would be honored if you would reply to these considerations as jumbled and unedited they are. Thanks for reading.

Nathaniel Edwards
http://www.legalarcade.com
Location: Travelers Rest, SC