Critique of a Critique

WARNING! I'm gonna go off on a rant here. Seriously, this post is nearly 2,000 words. DO NOT PROCEED UNLESS YOU'RE REALLY REALLY BORED!


So some of you may have read Mr. Ebert's recent blog post reiterating his stance that video games cannot be a form of art. As anyone familiar with me can predict, I am... perturbed by such a proclamation. What follows is a purely cathartic rant, posted here exclusively for my own satisfaction. It serves its purpose in that I felt better after writing it all down. Part of me wants to shout it from a rooftop, but another, more sensible part of me acknowledges that even if it didn't get me sectioned, nobody else really cares. I guess what I'm saying here is, don't bother reading this unless you've just got absolutely nothing better to do with your time.


First, as the first commenton on your blog pointed out (and I really do say this with respect) you just don't get it. Your comments on Braid were based on its part in a 15 minute presentation. This is the rough equivalent of damning a theatrical play after viewing a photograph of it. Video games have the unique disadvantage of needing to be played in order to be experienced. Any attempt to voice an opinion about a video game without having played it is an exercise in futility. Many people don't care much for paintings. If you drag them to a museum and point their heads at one, they might nod and say "OK, that's pretty good" but they won't really be touched by the artwork the way others can be. The same can be said for plays and movies, and the more effort it takes to experience a work of art, the smaller its core patronage gets. Video games, requiring an investment not only of many hours, but also a suspension of disbelief that few people can muster if they didn't grow up playing them, may very well be beyond your ability to understand.

Next, you repeatedly assert that there has never been a game that can be compared with the timeless poets and authors and movies. You are basing your argument on a logically unassailable position. No game can pass the test of time required to share a shelf with those classics because no game has been around long enough to be subjected to it. I would note, however, that many games have remained popular long after they stopped being contemporary. 15 years after first being published, I still hear people speak fondly about Super NES's Legend of Zelda. Like the cave drawings in your article, it was constructed with crude tools by comparison to today's technology; but just like an elaborate sidewalk chalk drawing, it is still more than capable of expressing the creativity and passion of those who worked on it.

Perhaps most telling is that you seem to completely overlook the impact video games have had on other forms of art. To understand this, first consider the manner in which movies blend the art of acting with the art of music. Marlin Brando portraying the Godfather was art, sure, but think bout how much that music helped. How much better were some of those scenes than they would have been if carried out in silence? What's interesting here is that the music that fits so well into those scenes will frequently never work as a standalone musical number. How many people would have fallen in love with "La donna è mobile" if the world had never seend Rigolleto? These are examples of how one art form bolsters another. The art of telling a story with actors created a need for a specific kind of music, one that never would have come to be otherwise.

Now consider a man named Nobuo Uematsu. He was working part-time in a music rental shop, hopping from one amateur band to another, and composing the occasional commercial jingle. He had a buddy at a failing software firm, who asked him to compose some game music. He like the job because it was a "side job," and was a way to make some extra cash that didn't get in the way of his exciting career in music rental. This firm, sadly, didn't do well. Before long, they ran out of money, and were faced with the prospect of closing their doors. They decided to go out with one last hurrah, and as this was their last chance to fulfill the dream they'd all had of making video games, they jokingly dubbed it the "Final Fantasy." Uematsu composed every virtually piece of music that ever appeared in a Final Fantasy Game until he left the company after Final Fantasy 11. Obviously, Final Fantasy 12 and 13 still use all of his old classics.

What was really fascinating here is that when Uematsu made these early contributions to what would eventually be a lifetime of achievement, he was severely restricted. The NES had a very limited number of variables, which left him with only a handful of sounds that could be used for tracks of only a relatively short length. Worse still, he was give the onerous task of crafting relatively short musical numbers that would cycle back to their start at the end and could be looped for as long as it took the player to find his way through the cave or dungeon or whatever they were exploring. Think of it as being asked to create a version of The Song that Never Ends that can be played for an hour without driving its listener mad. Uematsu had to use rudimentary tech to create music that evoked a certain sense of wonder but was unobtrusive enough to be considered "background noise." This is a concept that is unlikely ever to have been so thoroughly explored outside of a video game.

Likewise, consider the abominations we gun down in Left 4 Dead. Or perhaps the colorful and surprisingly detailed boss monsters of Zelda. Or the sprawling behemoths that must be scaled in Shadow of the Colossus. All works of art unlikely to be called for outside of the video game genre, but bold contributions nonetheless.

I could go on, but I've written a brief novel already. Instead, I'll conclude with only one more drawn-out example. Consider the following scene, from Modern Warfare 2. Spoilers, if anyone cares.

The place is Washington DC. It's the not to distant future. After a series of events, Russia has launched a blitzkrieg invasion of the United States. The first battle of the war has been raging for more than 24 hours. The Americans fight bravely, but so do the Russians, and the latter has more manpower. In a desperate move, and British black ops team has hijacked a nuclear submarine and detonated one of its warheads above the city, creating an EMP shockwave that has shut down every electronic device in the city. It's the middle of the night. Street lamps, night vision goggles, and even flashlights have stopped working. The only illumination comes from the fires burning all around the city, and the occasional flash of lightning. Helicopters are literally raining down from the sky. Aside from these sounds, an eerie silence has fallen around the city.
One beacon shines brightly throughout all of this. Somehow, the White House still has power. It is the only building in the city that has lights, and therefore the natural high ground. With no orders anyway, your squad makes for the White House, and begins a harrowing fight through its narrow hallways. While preparing to storm a heavily occupied radio room, the equipment inside suddenly springs to life with chatter from the higher-ups. Lacking word from any of the US forces since the city went dark, the military brass has made the decision to pursue a scorched earth policy, rather than allow all the secrets in Washington DC to fall into enemy hands. The planes are en route. Any surviving US forces able hear the message are ordered to secure what buildings they can, and deploy green smoke on the rooftops. You have only minutes until the plane arrives.

What was a slow, tedious war of attrition to control the rooms and halls of the White House is now a race against time. Enough US forces are working the other areas of the building, but between your squad and the roof are several well-defended choke points, and you can no longer take your time in getting past them. The fighting is intense, and as you reach the staircase to the roof, you can already hear the planes approaching. You and your squadmate ignite your green flares, and race tot he roof as fast as you can, only to find an F-17 streaking right at you, missiles armed. Its pilot sees you at the last second, and the plane pulls out of its dive. Exhausted, you fall to your knees. Looking up from your prone position, you see the green smoke rising from the rooftops across the city, implying that it remains in US hands.

The point is this: if you haven't been following the story so far, or approach MW2 from the perspective of "hur hur, let's shoot things," then this sequence is just a generic bit of patriotic machismo and a fine bit of "wiz-bang shooty fun." However, if you are one of those people who can utterly suspend disbelief and permit a game to simply suck you in, this is in fact a very emotional scene. In the grand scheme of things, the whole event is really just tragic, as neither the Americans nor the Russians are actually bad people (Russia was responding to what it genuinely believed to have been a preemptive strike by the Americans) and nobody on either side actually deserved to die. However, while the game does give the player a notion of how things played out on the grand scheme, this scene is shown through the eyes of a simple soldier, and from that narrow viewpoint, where things are so much simpler, it was a shining vision of a brave and determined people defending their homeland; which it was. But if the player can't place themselves inside the mind of said soldier, then it really will just be one of a thousand FPS shooting sprees.

Which brings me to the conclusion. There are some people who can look all day at The Mona Lisa and just never really get it. There are some people who can sit through Don Giovanni and feel nothing but boredom. And because video games require a greater commitment to the experience than any other art form on earth save a very long novel, there are going to be many people who simply never really get it. And that's OK. That's exactly why we have so many different forms of artistic expression. A little something for everybody.

But Mr. Ebert, with deference to your noteworthy expertise on the subject of artistic expression, I would humbly contend that you were simply too late to this party. Video games are a fundamental departure from artwork as you have known it your entire life, and for that reason, you just don't get it. You lack a true understanding of the art form, and because of this, your opinion of video games should not carry the same professional weight as would your critique of movies, paintings, music or plays.