Game Design as Art (Re: Ebert)

A Roger Ebert article that apparently made waves a few months ago just recently caught my attention. In his piece 'Video Games Can Never Be Art," Mr. Ebert attempts to explain why video games can never reach the level of film, poetry, literature or theatre as 'art.' The most interesting bit of this article, for me, was the thread comparing chess to video gaming. I think I'm willing to concede that playing chess, like playing a video game, is a skill and not an art. However, the problem with this analogy is that simply VIEWING a film or painting is not tantamount to art either. The art lies in the creation, not the consumption. As Ebert notes, someone may write about or criticize art, but he is generating his own art, not contributing to the original.

This leads me back to the parallel with chess: might we consider those who designed and created chess as artists? The people who craft individual boards and pieces are surely artists creating sculptures and woodworkings. Of course, we could simply consider these individuals 'sculptors' or 'woodworkers' and separate them from our definition of Chess as art. Similarly, one who wrote a fictional narrative to accompany a game of Chess would be creating literature, not contributing to our 'new' artform. We are then left with the unknown individuals who developed and refined Chess' basic mechanics and structure. The rules and logic of chess allow for an aesthetically and intellectually stimulating experience for the 'viewer' on a level perhaps eclipsing the greatest works of cinema. The parallels between Chess' design and the design of any games (including video games) should be immediately apparent. The designers incorporate the visual/audio/narrative elements created by other artists with game mechanics of their own design to create a product to be experienced and enjoyed by others. In this sense, are the game designer's goals or methods really fundamentally different than the filmmaker's? Perhaps the question should be "Can game design be an art?"

Unfortunately, any amount of argument is basically worthless without an agreed-upon definition of 'art.' Mr. Ebert seems content with rejecting others' opinions while stopping short of offering a clear, stronger alternative. Without a definition, Ebert's insistence that "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and painters" rings hollow to me. Could I not just as easily claim that "No one has ever been able to cite a film worth of comparison to the great poets, novelists and painters"? Surely people have ATTEMPTED to cite such examples, but Ebert rejects them without providing a clear rubric for doing so. He seems to immediately dismiss a game with a score/goal as incapable of being art...but finds it difficult to accept 'Flower' as a game because he is not sure how it could be scored! I think if Ebert examined the process of creating a video game as a parallel for the process of producing a film, he would find it much more difficult to revere the final product of one process while insulting the other.

Maybe working out a functional definition of art will be the next post...