Another one to consider: this, despite being a Flash browser applet, is certainly art of some variety. The actual game-ness isn’t particularly compelling; it’s a very rudimentary platformer. What makes it interesting is its art-ness. It uses the fundamentally interactive tools of the video game medium to create a literary experience that other media cannot.
Roger Ebert’s at it again, apparently, with his steadfast insistence that, whatever video games are, they absolutely are not art and don’t you forget it. Robert Brockway over at Cracked has written a big sweary deconstruction of Ebert’s piece that I’m pretty much totally on board with. But I’d like to add a few things.
First off, hey Rog, see that bit where you say you know for a fact that no video games anywhere ever have ever been art, even though you’ve never played one? Come on. I know for a fact that you’re smarter than that. If I were to peruse your work on great movies and — to take the very first film on the page — tell you that I’d never seen Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana but that I know without question that it’s not the least little bit artistic, what would you think? A guess: you’d think that I’m some crank talking a mountain of shit about stuff he doesn’t understand. Hmm.
Also, you want me to cite games that are worthy of comparison to great poets, filmmakers, and novelists? Fine. Let’s do this. I’ll start the bidding at Super Mario Galaxy, which had top-notch presentation and was absolute sheer joy to play, but which, moreover, required us to rethink our understanding of how objects in space relate to one another in a way that no non-interactive medium could. By taking concepts that we’re already intellectually familiar with — such as gravity, and the fact that the world is, contrary to the evidence of our senses, round — and reducing them to absurd limit cases, Mario Galaxy not only allows us but requires us to consider these things in a much more immediate fashion than the real world ever does.
Or if you don’t like that, what about Mass Effect? Mass Effect contains a very powerful scene in which (spoiler alert!) a soldier under the player’s command is killed in the line of duty. But, making things more complicated, there are two soldiers in danger in this scene, and the player has the ability to save one and only one of them. These are both characters who are developed and significant — not Star Trek-style red shirts — and with whom the player may or may not be romantically involved. And the player must choose which one of them will die. This is some pretty heavy stuff, and it’s not something that can be easily duplicated in other media — the element of choice is what lends it its power.
I mean, seriously, Roger, yes, there is Halo, and there is Borderlands, and there is Guitar Hero, and those games are not particularly "art" by your definition. But there are other games also — games which can in fact cause the players to rethink their views of things, or gain a greater understanding of the world, or broadly "improve" in some other fashion. I gotta say, man, I think I can speak with greater authority on this one than you can, since I’ve played a whole damn lot of games, and you, by your own admission, haven’t ever played a single one.
