Game Devs on Ebert's Put-Downs

Gamsutra has a writeup of a recent Austin Game Developers meeting. Damion Schubert, Allen Varney, and Scott Jennings took the stage to discuss games as art and Roger Ebert's opinions. From the article: "McShaffry then asked the panel to consider whether Ebert was picking on youth culture in general, and assuming technology wasn't an issue, whether popular games like Grand Theft Auto would be played 500 years from now, like the works of Shakespeare are enjoyed today? Jennings didn't want to speculate that far into the future, but he admitted to still playing and liking the Final Fantasy games released for the Super Nintendo."

Have to agree the answer is No

[WillAffleckUW]

Heck, sometimes I can't even play games that are from this decade, or they want me to have a specific set of video drivers.

So, given that I've got some Apple II+ computers sitting in my garage with floppy disks that are probably melted to goo now, I'd guess that the chance that any game from today will exist 500 years from now is close to nil.

of course, most movies won't be around then either.

Re:Gonna say "No"

[tukkayoot]

Plus there's the fact that Shakespeare wrote at a time when work would still enter the public domain, instead of being locked up in perpetual copyright.

Art != Entertainment ?

[Austerity Empowers]

First, movies and television were often scoffed at by snobs for lowering the IQ of {America, The World, The Universe, etc.} A Movie critic arguing that games are dumb or "not art" (intending the same meaning) is not a shocking departure from the norm.

Second, how many movies are art? Very few, fewer in reality than in the minds of those who made them for certain.

Third, who cares? Unless you are trying to get in some university liberal arts curriculum, whether games fall under "art" or "entertainment" is purely academic. As long as any of the above entertains me, I'm interested. Art for art's sake has never appealed to my sense of functional technology. If it doesn't entertain me, I won't pay for it, and I won't go out of my way to see it. Worthless is a word that comes to mind.

In terms of what time will view of any of these things, we just don't know. Movies aren't even old enough to achieve immortal status. How many people have seen "the classics" of movies? Probably only the older crowd (when they were first run), film students or movie buffs. Video games are in a more difficult position of sometimes being positively inaccessible due to technological means, in addition to only being 30 years old.

Finally, do games matter? Do sports matter? Does gambling matter? Does drinking till you puke followed by casual sex matter? Yes, obviously. A sufficient number of people feel games are so powerful that people kill over them (not just video games, remember the Dungeons & Dragons nonsense?) They're in the media, a lot of money is spent on them. They matter. Will they matter in 100 years? It's hard to imagine there won't be video games then. Will they be the same games? Probably not in their original 8-bit NES implementation. However, is Romeo and Juliet a brand new work, or a from-scratch-rewrite of older books, the oldest of which I have read dates back to ancient greece?

Re:Have to agree the answer is No

[Perseid]

Games [tosec.info] will [gamebase64.com] survive [abandonia.com].

Re:Gonna say "No"

[Petrushka]

But there will always be paper.

Random dude 1000 years ago: "But there will always be parchment."

Random dude 2000 years ago: "But there will always be papyrus."

Random dude 3000 years ago: "But there will always be clay tablets."

Hmmm.

Worthless, my ass.

[Ivan Matveitch]

Normal people have feelings besides boredom and amusement. Americanism has certainly stunted your emotional development.

Re:Have to agree the answer is No

[XenoRyet]

You can watch a movie based on Shakespear's works today. Same work in a different form. I suspect that will be the case with games, new forms, same ideas.

However, as to which game? Not GTA, not Final Fantasy. It'll be Tetris. That game will never go away, it's made the transition to every new platform that has come out since it's conception, and it will contiue to do so indefinitaly. Tetris' combination of simplicity and addictivness will give it staying power well into the time where GTA's game mechanic looks antiquated and silly.

Ebert is wrong

[Kohath]

Ultima 4

Also, there are lots of good games. Even if you don't agree that Ultima 4 was a classic, there WILL be classics.

Video games have been around for 40 years or so. Saying there won't be any profoundly classic games at this point is like saying there would never be classic literature 40 years after writing was first invented.

Also "making ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic" is self-righteous and pretentious. Way to congradulate yourself, Ebert. Your entertainment doesn't just entertain, it makes you better than the rest of us. Bravo.

Re:Gonna say "No"

[Ben Newman]

Actually you had to worry about that a lot. The First Folio was published after Shakespear's death by a group of his friends to help combat just that, and to cut down on the business of bad copies of his manuscripts being made. These things were great, imagine Hamlet re-written by the folks that make those howlingly bad subtitle for pirated chinese DVDs and you'll get the idea. Of course Will himself freely listed plots, characters and whole lines from his contemporaries, so who to say who would have benifited more from elizabethian copyright protection.

Re:Honest-to-God question

[C0rinthian]

There is something to be said for the mindshare that classic works still carry to this day. (I'm a musician, so the first things that come to mind are music related) I dare you to find someone who doesn't recognize the opening to Beethoven's 5th symphony, or the 4th movement of his 9th symphony. How about the Habanera from Carmen? Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor? People may not know them by name, but they will recognize thim if they hear them.

What have we created recently that will be remembered in 400 years? Who knows, but it will probably be what we least expect. Bach's compositions were unknown until long after his death...

Ebert? What does he know about video games?

[Red Flayer]

Not to be crass, but Ebert can suck it.

He mentions that video games are typically just a waste of time; I would posit that movies are just as much a waste of time. It's like asking a classical music critic to judge whether or not a certain modern sculpture is art -- don't ask a movie critic about video games.

I've had plenty of "oh wow" moments in video games. I've also been affected emotionally in video games (which, I'm sure, was intended by the designers). I've also been stimulated to think critically about a topic by video games. All these things indicate that video games *can* be art.

Yes, there are artless videogames, just as there are artless movies and artless novels. There is also "bad" art out there, in every media. I believe that as video games continue to be developed, very many more of them will be intended as art pieces, and will succeed in being considered art.

/My 2 cents, at least as valid as Ebert's when discussing video games.

Also, keep in mind that the movie industry is losing $$ to the videogame industry -- video games are eating away at film's cultural mindshare. Ebert, as a part of that industry, has a professional interest in promoting movies over video games.

Re:Gonna say "No"

[sqlrob]

It was also a time where you didn't have to worry about someone copying 'Hamlet' and passing it off as his own work.

Considering there's controversy over whether or not Shakespeare wrote those plays or if it was someone else that was the real author(Bacon, IIRC), things haven't changed.

Perpetual copyright is bad, agreed. But it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the topic at hand

If Rockstar exists, and doesn't want people to port GTA III to the new platforms since it will interfere with the sales of GTA XXII and the PS VII won't run GTA III, yes, it does have to do with the topic at hand.

Re:Gonna say "No"

[Rob T Firefly]

There are many more fundamental differences between Shakespeare and GTA. GTA is a finished product, and apart from minor upgrades in performance like when you play a PS1 game on the PS2, it will look the same 100 years from now as it does when we play it today.

Shakespeare's works are only scripts and stage directions, requiring countless other artists and performers to flesh out the material into a finished product. Something like that evolves rapidly over time and in countless directions thanks to the talents of the people currently involved.

What Shakespeare on saw Hamlet's opening night may have been nothing like a recent performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the film version with Mel Gibson, the bunch of guys in jeans and t-shirts with Brooklyn accents who performed it in Central Park, or the mental imagery of the story experienced by someone reading the play out of a book. Those wildly different concepts were all Hamlet, but anyone playing "Vice City" now or in a ROM downloaded from future version of theunderdogs.org will hear the exact same music and voices, and see the same graphics.

Re:Gonna say "No"

[C0rinthian]

This is true, but the means to copy something then were not as widespread as it is now. You want to copy a Shakespeare play back then? Hopefully you're literate, which wasn't exactly the norm... How about ripping off Mozart? Well, you better be able to play as well as he can, considering there is no such thing as 'recording'.

In this day and age, exact duplicates of a work are insanely easy to mass produce. That is the biggest difference between the past and the present.

500 years from now, I'd say "maybe"

[grumbel]

Will people play GTA in 500 years? I would say no. That game, while not bad, doesn't really have much stuff in it that would survive a longer periods of time. The story isn't ground breaking, the gameplay could be done better (aiming, vehicle physics, etc) and in almost all aspects of the games you will have a easy time picking something that could be improved. And if I have the choice between something that is good and something that is better, I'd pick the better one and in a few hundred years we will have seen very many games that have cars and guns in them, so no reason to play GTA, except for historical interest.

However that doesn't mean that games from today will be completly forgotten. Such games as Tetris or Pong will survive in mobile phones or other portable devices for a long long time. There simply isn't a reason why they would disappear, they are cheap to produce, simple and basically perfect at what they do. Graphic improvments won't help and the gameplay is also so simple that there is little room for improvment. Games such as SuperMarioBros are similar, even so a lot more complex, they do what they do almost perfectly. A totally different kind of game that will probally survive for quite a while are some adventure games, those LucasArts games, while quite old, are still among the best, if not the best, of the genre. And again, they do what they do close to perfection and new technologie can't do much to improve the game experience those games provide.

So in the end many of the games released these days will probally completly forgotten in a few years, since there will be newer games that do, what they did, but simply a lot better. But all those games that focus on something that isn't limited by todays CPU power, be it pure gameplay or story, are here to stay Will they survive 500 years? Some might, especially those that broke new ground. But 500 years are a long long time and I doubt that many/any movies of today will survive for that amount of time.

Ebert is definitely wrong

[AgentDib]

When you come down to the differences between movies and games, there is really only one. Games require interactive participation while movies are entirely passive experiences. Adding interactivity to a movie turns it into a game - in fact quite a few developers tried to incorporate this into PC gaming in the mid 90's.

The real question becomes whether true art is possible when there is a level of interaction with the viewer. The answer to this is clearly yes, in fact it is one of the key characteristics of the postmodern art movement. A simple example of this would be the Hypertext, a postmodern novella form that depends entirely on the user to navigate their own path through the story.

What Ebert is really addressing is that the presence of interaction encourages game developers to focus on gameplay elements to the detriment of the traditional artistic potential of the game. This brings up a valid point, namely the existence of "good art" vs. "bad art". Any veteran gamer can probably give several dozen examples of each, as any movie fan can no doubt give several dozen examples of each as pertains to movies. There's no way that a movie like Gigli is more artistic than an excellent game like Fahrenheit simply because it is non-interactive.

In the end, however, I can't really blame Ebert for being wrong about games. He would change his mind if he was exposed to any of the hundreds of games that feature "good art", such as Fahrenheit, Fable, KOTOR, Max Payne, etc, but even when those are given media coverage it is the other features that are hyped instead of their artistic prowess.

Re:Honest-to-God question

[NorbrookC]

Are Shakespeare's works seriously "enjoyed" today?

Yes. Next question?

How many people who have to study his works today in school enjoy doing it vs. playing GTA?

I recall having to study many things in school that I didn't enjoy versus playing any game. Including Shakespeare. Interestingly, after I'd gotten several years out of school, I came to appreciate his works much better, and yes, enjoy them.

And what's the deal with the "500 year standard", it's circular and self-fulfilling. We read/view performances of Shakespeare 500 years later, because they're so great, as evidenced by how people still read/view it 500 years later! Go us!

No, it's not that they're 500 years old, it's that they're great works that speak to common themes in the human condition. Just as Don Quixote is still read and enjoyed, even though it's almost as old. Even as Beowulf is read and enjoyed, even though it's far older. The Odyssey, the Iliad. They're great stories, which deal with human conflicts and actions that are still going on. The themes carry on throughout the generations. That's what makes them great. We read them because they're great, they aren't great because we still read them.

Re:Gonna say "No"

[RedWizzard]

There's a fundamental difference between Shakespear and GTA: one was on paper, one is digital.

That's a difference, but it's not the fundamental one. The fundamental one is that one is passive and the other is interactive. According to Ebert, interactive media cannot be considered art in terms of narrative. You can read his entire comment (about half way down) [suntimes.com], but the critical bit (and not quoted in TFA) is:

I [do] indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

So Ebert's position is that a game can only be considered art in terms of it's visual (or aural) components. I.e. games are artistically comparable to paintings or music but that are not comparable to literature or movies.

I don't agree with Ebert. I believe that by giving a player choices you can make a point even more strongly than you can in a passive or narrative medium. This seems obvious to me: choices mean a player can explore consequences of different actions in a way that is much more natural than attempting to do so in a narrative. But then I play games and I suspect Ebert doesn't. So why do we care about his opinion?

Re:Honest-to-God question

[LeonGeeste]

Shakespeare wrote in modern English. About 90% of his English is identical to what we speak today.

Uh........... no. You're just reciting the ivory tower story that gets repeated over and over until it's finally accepted as common knowledge. Think about this claim for once. "identical" to what we speak today? REALLY? Could we lay off the hyperbole? "identical" would imply mutual comprehensibility. Now, can you imagine the average person following a few lines from Shakespeare without guidance, let alone talking like that today? The article you linked is correct that many of the *words* are used, but all that glitters is not reductionism. Every Shakespeare text I remember using is dotted with little footnotes "oh, that term meant something else back then". If you have to study even the most basic line to figure out what it means, it's not "identical to what we speak today".

I've known a lot of people who, despite not knowing German, correctly guessed that "Der Feind meines Feindes ist mein Freund" means "the foe of my foe is my friend". Does that mean German is "identical to what we speak today"? I've also seen a questionaire given to schoolchildren that read exactly as follows: "Agree or disagree: 'The evil that men do lives after them. The good is [often buried] with their bones.'" Yet, people still say "oft interred", don't they? They don't? Fuck.

Shakespeare wrote in English. But please, for the love of God, stop parroting that his English was "identical to what we speak today".

Re:Gonna say "No"

[westlake]

Plus there's the fact that Shakespeare wrote at a time when work would still enter the public domain, instead of being locked up in perpetual copyright.

Shakespeare's plays were the prime assets of his theatrical company.

He was part owner of the Globe theater, remember, and he functioned under a patronage system that settled teritorial disputes privately.

Shakespeare's plays were never published in his lifetime.

The idea that plays could be read for pleasure, that English drama was something more than disposable popular entertainment scarcely exists before the death of Shakespeare.

"Film and games are so OBVIOUSLY different!"

[Jacius]

Five hundered years from now, we don't know what the technology will be like.

I wonder if Mr. Ebert expects expects films to be viewable in their original media in 500 years. What with periodically-changing film sizes and speeds, and now digital video codecs, Ebert's own favorite art form doesn't seem particularly "eternal" either. In fact, just like video games, the only ways to appreciate old films are to 1) preserve the associated film player, or 2) convert the film to the new format. Sure, you could bust open the film reel, hold it up to a light, and look at it frame by frame, but that goes against the artist's intended viewing scenario, something Ebert considers extremely important.

Perhaps Ebert realizes all this, but thinks that the contents of the film (if not the physical medium) is safe from the ravages of time. After all, there are works 100 years old which can be enjoyed by film buffs even to this day! ... And yet, the vast majority of people are not interested in these classic films, preferring instead the lastest and greatest blockbuster hits. Just like classic video games, only a relatively small group of people regularly enjoy classic films, this small group having a "deeper appreciation" for the art form. The general public just wants to see more explosions and/or more melodramatic love stories, and are not impressed by the efforts of the early film masters, whose works are quite dull by contemporary standards.

Mr. Ebert might notice other points where video games are plainly different and not-at-all-identical to film:

• Most of the best-selling titles are devoid of artistic statement, and simply exist to entertain audiences and make profit.
• The market is currently (and has been for most of its history) controlled by a handful of big studios, who often re-hash ideas, bring back "stars" from previous titles, and inflate prices in order to make an extra buck.
• Studios think that new titles must provide ever-increasing levels of special effects, features, and gimmicks in order to continue to attract new audiences.
• Only a small number of independent producers exist, and most indie titles fly under the radar of the general audience, with only the very occasional title getting noticed and becoming a "cult classic" or even a public sensation.

Which brings me to my point: does Ebert intentionally ignore the obvious similarities between film and video games, or is he simply too ignorant of the history of video games to see them in the first place?

Re:Gonna say "No"

[1u3hr]

"But there will always be clay tablets."-Babalyonian Historian 5000B,

Almost literally true (3000 BC, but who's counting).

Tablets [netcom.com] ... Vast quantities of these have been excavated in the Near East, of which about a half million are yet to be read. It is estimated that 99 percent of the Babylonian tablets have yet to be dug. The oldest ones go back to 3000 B.C. They are practically imperishable; fire only hardens them more.

Get back to me on how good your CDR backup is after 5000 years.

Dick, sure. But inferior?

[Ivan Matveitch]

To someone who dismisses artistic works because they do not entertain him as much as his television does?