I once heard a great line from the Pixar film Ratatouille, if I may paraphrase. The life of a critic is an easy one, simply being able to tell people what is good and what isn't, and to be able to rely on one's own taste to give people advice. The one area this is not the case however, and where critics take risks, is in the discovery and defense of the new. By defending what is new in the eyes those hoping to judge hotly controversial material, be it food (And its tiny rat-chef) in the Pixar film, or be it a budding and developing art form as it is in the case of video games.
I might not be a critic, but I stand my ground and defend what I love even when it is relatively new and unproven in the eyes of traditionalist critics. Why do I do it? I'm not quite sure I can answer that fully, but the closest answer I could give is that where there is passion, there is appreciation. Where there is appreciation, there's a desire to see that appreciation reciprocated by others with like minds, a community formed, and a usage of that community to make the object of passion that much better a thing to present to the world.
Roger Ebert has my respect; he is a man who seems to have sampled the world, in much the same way as the antagonistic food critic in Pixar's Ratatouille had. He has an awful lot of credibility to say the very least, and his opinions have had the power to make or break a feature film's success in the box office. He is one of the titans of criticism and as such, when he speaks, people listen.
Some years ago, Roger Ebert had posted an article on his personal blog, stating that he did not believe that video games will ever be as artistically worthy as movies or literature, although he managed to do so in a way I would call respectable.
His argument is that video games suffer from a limitation on the fundamental level;
"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."
I can certainly see what Ebert is going for here, but he seems to miss the point; the fact that gamers can make these choices at all is a direct result of the effort put into the game by its creators. Video games, at least some of them, are often designed with player choice as their bedrock foundation. A game like Heavy Rain, which I had covered in my last post, is so saturated with player choice that the permutations seem almost limitless, and yet every single one of those end results was designed by a living human being with intent on bending human emotions to his or her whims. If that isn't authorial control, I don't know what is!
This argument, however, was a full five years ago. While it is fascinating to debate about, it is ultimately obsolete, especially in the face of Ebert's newest article released just this past Friday, in which he jumps back into the games as art debate.
The article is a fascinating read, in which Ebert goes toe to toe with a game designer defending her own craft as an artform. He debates and gives his own reasoning for his beliefs in a way that, to my eyes, feels warm and inviting. While I could go on and on about this new article, the fact that this article exists at all is proof positive that video games can spark debate as rich as any other medium.
While I respect Mr. Ebert's opinion and enjoy reading his thoughts, I cannot agree with them. Art, to me, is what you find deep inside you when a particular work of human creation moves you. Games do that to me, in much the same way that films speak to and resonate with Ebert. What is important is what we do with those feelings, and how we turn them into something meaningful to the world.
And that is why this blog keeps on going where it's going.
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