Why videogames are not art, and are unlikely to become it anytime soon.

Some time ago now, the great but ailing media pundit Roger Ebert wrote a statement to the effect that videogames are not art. He gave some reasons why. And the whinging from fanboy idiots who were clearly too young to even know what the word Atari means in this particular context was precious to behold. Not because Ebert‘s critique of videogames as an industry was especially well-informed, but rather because the near-illiterate responses betrayed a simple fact about the people making them. Specifically, they had no idea what the word art really means.

The games we play… and what they say about us. E.T. as an example.

In modern culture, a lot of things have a tendency to descend to descend into a pissing competition. Nowhere is this more true than in videogames, an art from that, in spite of what many would like us to believe, seems to be regressing in spite of how much technology we throw at it. (To be fair, the same is proving to be true of cinema, music, and literature.) In order to understand what I mean, it is necessary to go back in time somewhat to the early to mid 1980s, when a little boy had his head so firmly buried in the television that people began to wonder if something was wrong (aww, really?) and if so, how to correct it (you know how it goes). If you did not live in this era, it is pointless for me to try and explain how different things like television and communication were then. The combination of mass networking, highly-affordable (especially by the standards of those days) desktop computing, and portable telephony has changed the world so radically that unless you have lived at least five to ten years of your life in a time before those things, you cannot begin to imagine how different the world was prior to then. And by a time before those things, I mean before more than one out of ten twelve to fifty year olds per street knew what a modem was, leave alone had one. (The street I lived on through most of my boyhood was an irregular oval forming an outer ring around two blocks that was only interrupted by the fenced-off grounds of a community hall. When I was six years old, I was the only one I knew of who had access to a Commodore 64. By the time I was 13, that number had expanded to include four families.)