Video Games Can Never Be Art Analysis

Roger Ebert was a famous movie critic from the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century. According to www.thefamouspeople.com, Ebert started his career with Chicago Sun-Times Newspaper and worked there until death. In his time he was a writer, Ebert wrote the article, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” in which he gives us the basic response to questions asked to him early on that video games are childish and simply cannot be considered art. While many may agree with Ebert, his argument is invalid. Video games, to me, should be considered art because they introduced me to the art of graphics at a young age, they are an artform in the eyes of the law, and have been displayed in an actual art museum in the United States.
At a very

young age, I was introduced to the world of video games. One game that had impacted me the most goes by the name of Mario Kart. At that time, I did not take into thought about how well thought out this game was. My parents thought it would just be a great idea to buy me a child-aimed game that had no purpose at all but to keep me occupied. This is what Roger Ebert believes is the sole purpose of video games and I realize that that statement is completely wrong. At the time his article, “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” was written, Ebert was an old man, up in his sixties who was strongly opinionated with the thought that video games do not count as art. Now, being a sixteen year old, I still enjoy Mario Kart and maybe even more than I did than when I was younger. When Roger said, “the only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation,” about Kellee Santiago, a video game producer and enthusiast, he expressed that he himself does not like video games at all, which would greatly bias his opinion. As a renowned movie critic, Ebert, “is hopelessly handicapped because of (his) love of the cinema.” Being a lover of the movies, Roger Ebert has always valued movies above many other works of art, like video games. The main flaw in his point of view seems not to be bias, but that in which he never seems to define art in his article, “Video Games Can Never Be Art.” Being someone who can accurately define art, Christian Ketelsen, a philosophy and mathematics major, talks in his article, “Aristotle, Art, and Greek Tragedy,” about the contradictions of many renowned philosophers definitions of art. With Ketelsen giving credit to Palmer, he says that Aristotle and Plato shared a same thought. Christian writes, “This bears a relation to art because for both Plato and Aristotle art is an imitation of the actual world,” (Palmer, pp 447-452). As video games are imitations of the real world, they fit into some great philosophers views of what art is.
Art to me seems like playing the videogame Mario Kart. While it is just another video game, the concept is like street racing with more imagination. In order to win you need to get in front of everyone else and by that means, you could use obstacles. For instance, a banana that would send your opponent in a spinning redirected path, slowing them down. My experiences seem to reflect those of John Michael Bell, a freelance writer from New Bedford, Massachusetts, as he writes the article, “Are Video Games The New Novels?” about several video games that give the player a new and realistic perspective other than real life. As Bell tells us how video games can be played to fit the player’s individual story, he explains, “Just as novels were once a new a form of storytelling that included a character’s inner life, narrative games have transformed author-controlled plots with player interaction.” Interviewed by Bell, Janet Murray reveals that “One of the most important features of video games is the ability to replay the same scenario with different choices or different parameters,” which is exactly what a novel is made to do: give the reader an opportunity to reread a book from different perspectives of different characters. As video games can be very similar to novels, which by many are considered a relevant artform, video games can be art.
For many people, when someone’s piece is submitted into an art museum, it is a big deal because only so many art pieces are accepted.

Presented in an actual art exhibit, video games must have some artistic place in the world if they are put into the the renowned Smithsonian Art Museum in the United States. As a public coordinator for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Laurel Fehrenbach interviews composer Austin Wintory in the article, “The Art of Video Games: The Music.” According to Wintory, who composed the video games Journey and flOw, “Scenes can be built around it (music) and it can add subtext through means only accessible to music.” By this, Austin tells us that much of a video game can revolve around the music and how it adds to the overall mood of the person playing the game. For instance, if the game being played is a creepy or eerie type, the kind of music that should be played should be lower noted strings with a dark sound to it. Getting to how easy it is to put a sound to a game in the twenty first century, music in the gaming industry has come a long way from what it was twenty years ago. Mentioned by Wintory, instead of the chopped sound of the 80s, today’s games can include very sophisticated composed works that require a professional musician, like orchestra pieces. The art in a video game is very important, even more than the music. One gaming company tells how ideas come together as art in a video game in the article, “The People Behind the Video

Games: thatgamecompany,” by Georgina Goodlander, an Eye Level coordinator, as it depicts a very small game company with a big task: create an actual video game. Made up of 10 people, thatgamecompany was in the making of their newly released video game, Flower. For a video game to be made, there has to be inspiration or a draft of ideas to work off of. For Jenova Chen, his inspiration was his hometown. Chen thought that by conveying the place he grew up in in a video game, people would understand and respect the beauty of his hometown, Shanghai, China. Chen reveals, “That’s when I realized I’m a game designer. With a game, I could do that,” when he was telling Eye Witness about his ideas for a huge landscape game that turned out to be Flower. Chen also adds, “Then, there’s the wind. There’s the smell. Everything there was necessary to recapture that strong experience I had.” This was his inspiration for ThatGameCompany’s video game called Flower. Although a game might take years to develop, Goodlander says it doesn’t take an enormous amount of people to focus and work towards one goal by saying “Thatgamecompany, however, employs only twelve people and focuses entirely on one game at a time.”
In the United States law system, the Supreme Court is the highest degree a case can be taken to.

The question if video games are art or not is put into the legal system and is summarized by Adam Liptak, a writer for The New York Times. He explains in his article, “Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children,” how it is an individual families’ choice to decide what video games their children should play, not the government’s. Liptak, quoting the U.S. Justice, Antonin Scalia, informs us about the first amendment right the people have in the United States by including, “Depictions of violence, Justice Scalia added, have never been subject to government regulation. ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,’ he wrote, recounting the gory plots of ‘Snow White,’ ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel.’” Scalia, quoted in Liptak’s article tells, “No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.” Since in America, the people are free to have rights, the government should not be able to tell it’s people what they can or cannot play related to video games unless it’s a threat to the country itself. Closely related to Liptak’s article, Seth Schiesel, a The New York Times author, composed, “Supreme Court Has Ruled; Now Games Have a Duty,” which gives us a legal view of the question if video games are an art form. Schiesel wrote, “It is now

the law of the United States that video games are a creative, intellectual, emotional form of expression and engagement, as fundamentally human as any other.” Schiesel thinks, “This decision reflects society in that video games have already become the most vibrant new form of media entertainment in decades.” Many would agree because of the extensive graphics and designing it takes to make one of these “works of art.” With all being said, the late Roger Ebert is proved wrong with thinking video games should never be considered art; a law is a law.