NO IT FUCKING WOULDN'T. It fucking would fucking blow as a fucking video fucking game fucking just fucking like it fucking did as a FUCKING movie fucking because it fucking would fucking be a fucking generic first fucking person fucking shooter with absolufuckinglutely fucking nothing fucking resembling a fucking remotely fucking original fucking thought fucking behind it's fucking useless fucking conception.

FUCK BIOWARE!

And yes Roger Ebert definitely has some serious generation bias going on. But this guy is not Armond White. He is one of the most respected names in his field and for good reason. And no being a film critic doesn't mean he can't give his two cents on other aspects of pop culture because that's actually a skill a good film critic should have.

Me personally I think he's wrong. But gamers aren't proving him wrong by the cruel and childish insults they have been throwing at him nonstop as part of their "retaliation".

Wether he's right or not, it doesn't hurt to try and see things from an outsider's perspective and if you really want to present the guy with a convincing argument I suggest something that isn't like this.

"FUCK YOU FAT MAN YOU'RE JUST A POOPY NOSE FILM CRITIC ALL FILM CRITICS ARE SNOBBY POOPY NOSES WHO ONLY LIKE POOPY OLD FRENCH MOVIES. CITIZEN KANE R TEH SUXORS. GAWD OF WARRRRRRR 4EVAR!!!11!!"

Just a suggestion, gaming community.

...no, you're going to have to help me on this one.

I can't help you if you're that oblivious to something that is in plain sight.

why do you feel so strongly about this, just let dumb movies be dumb movies and let dumb video games be dumb video games, there's no reason to get worked up about it. White people problems

I just really hate the patriotic hard on shit that dominates American fiction today.

Response to Roger Ebert

Interesting take on the video games as art argument. I think Dreww will really dig this one.

I agree with most of what he says here except the way he judges wether or not a game is good art.

He clearly uses the same criteria for what makes a game good art as what makes works in other mediums good art. I think video games deserve their own criteria for artistic merit, and clearly there isn't one that's commonly used. So I say it should be the same criteria as what makes a game "good". And people should actually think a bit about what it is that makes a game good. And no it's not just about being "fun" because that would be one shallow and incredibly subjective criteria.

Rather games should be judged by the quality of skill and artistry put into every aspect of their creation as well as their relative importance. You could look at many aspects of game design as being art in and of themselves. Like visual design, level design, music composition and the overall direction of the game and how it works as a cohesive whole. Good gameplay itself can be considered an art if you associatate art with exceptional craftmanship.

I think people need to find better descriptions of what makes a game good than just being "fun". Which I find fucking lazy.

So what are the best qualities a game can achieve?

How about being engaging, imaginative, inventive, memorable, charming, expressive, challenging, aesthetically pleasing on various levels and having enough depth and subtance to last you a while and make you want to revisit it even after beating it? A great game doesn't have to have all these qualities but they're all admirable goals.

And games can make you laugh just like movies can, they can scare the shit out of you just like movies can. They can get just about any emotional reaction that a movie can get out of you. And those little moments should not be viewed as not all that important, like how a lot of the gaming sheeple I despise look at games and only judge them by the most basic technical shit. In other words the gamer version of metalheads.

IMO a lot of my favorite games are my favorites because of the little details that make the whole just that much better than the average game.

Yes games can even have a story that leaves an emotional impact or intellectual impact. Unlike Dreww I do think there are a few games that have achieved this. But it's indeed the exception not the rule. So I only think games should be judged by the quality of the story based on how much the story is expected to matter and how much relevance it has in the gameplay experience itself. Aka deducting points in a Mario game because you didn't think the story was complex enough is stupid.

But like Dreww said on another thread, if the developers of the game spent a lot of time on the story, good or bad, you shouldn't fucking ignore it when you're critiquing the game.

Ok that's enough of me trying to sound intellectual. So I'll put it more bluntly. If you call a game which obviously took a lot of serious effort, talent and imagination and was exactly what it was supposed to be a"bad" game just because YOU didn't have fun playing it, as if every game HAS to cater to your own tastes to have any merit at all? Then you're a doucheturd with no understanding of anything.

Also. Call of Duty? More like Call of DOODY. LAWL!

I think even Roger Ebert would concede that LIMBO is art.

Roger Ebert is one of the VERY VERY VERY few film critics I don't want to bludgeon to death. I give him a free pass for the many WTF moments when he gives really shitty movies a recommendation while panning much superior films just because even then he argues his position so well that I have no choice but to respectfully disagree.

He's one of the few critics I can think of who finds the balance between being really intelligent and well spoken while at the same time not being a total fucking snob who writes off whole genres and is completely out of touch with regular filmgoers. It's the key to his popularity, really.

Still I think his idea of art is way off base. At least the way he originally described it. He seemed to dismiss video games as not being art because he considers it inferior to other mediums. As in he seemed to suggest that something has to be of especially high quality to be art. But he eventually came around and said that he simply didn't consider video games to be "high" art.

But still, his criticism of video games largely had to do with him comparing the medium less favorably to movies and literature. As in "video games can't convey emotions and intellectual ideas the way movies and literature can thus they're not art". But I just think it's bogus to judge all art the way you do literature and movies.

I mean abstract art for example. If someone honestly says that stuff gives them some serious revelation about the state of humanity I'll pretty much call that person out as a pretentious cuntsack with great ease. Point is, it's still considered art, because it is art. Because not all art has to have an explicit message. Art is essentially a term for any creative work that isn't intended for anything else other than to be appreciated, yet people also consider architecture to be art even though it has a basic purpose, so even that's not a totally accurate description. Still, I see no reason to dismiss video games as not being art other than critics loving to dismiss anything that is of "low" culture.

Call it bad art if you want, but at least acknowledge that by being a creative work, it IS art.

Another one of Ebert's criticisms is that video games lack singular authorship. Which is ironically what used to be said about movies not long ago. And he's right to the extent that the creator never has sole authority because players can always find ways to do stuff that wasn't intended for them to do. But that raises the question of wether or not art can ever be interactive.

Also the idea that art has to be an individual form of expression and can never be a collaboration of different talents is a ridiculously outdated one.

Maybe Ebert just hasn't been exposed to GOOD games, like Planescape: Torment.

Well in one of his articles about the subject he actually name-drops Shadow of the Colossus as a game that is recommended to him very often, don't remember if he said he played it or not though.

I really would like to know how many games the guy has actually played and which ones. All I know is that he once mentioned playing the original TMNT game for the NES during his review of The Wizard and criticized the film for not representing the game accurately.

The only games I can think off the top of my head that I would consider unequivocally to be art are Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and Majora's Mask.

LAWLZ ICO SUX IT'S JUST A BIG ESCORT MISSION. SHADOW SUX IT'S JUST BOSS FIGHTS. MAJORAS SUX THERES ONLY 4 TEMPLES AND THERES A STUPID TIME LIMIT!!!

HALO IS ART GUYS. IT'S ALL ABOUT HOW EVIL RELIGION IS AND STUFF. DEEP SHIT MAN.

The Battlefield 3 demo is SOOO average. Gameplay has been done a million times over and the graphics actually really suck compared even to MW2 and especially to the build-up they were given. I really hope the final release will be much, much better.

I don't know, but I think at some point, people should just give up on "realistic" war themed FPS's.