“One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.”

This quote can be found in Roger Ebert’s “Video Games Can Never Be art.”

I first want to start out by stating one criticism I have about this article, which is one out of many. I found it very strange and peculiar that out of Ebert’s entire article about how, like the heading states, video games cannot be art, ever, that you would think he could have some variations in his video games when it comes to the timeline and progression of the gaming world. The article was written in 2010. The games he screen-shot and posted look like they were made back in the 1990′s, back when Mario was just 16 red white and blue pixels if we were to look back at it today. Many of his sources to ‘back-up’ his opinions are video games which, in all honestly, had crappy art work. But i can only say this because the technology didn’t exist to create more life like games back in 1996, which is obviously the era of which he decided to choose to grab his source of games from. Theme- I think that if he is going to say video games aren’t art, maybe he should use an example of a game created in 2010, when the graphics were actually beautiful and inspiring and made you WANT to play the games, not pixelated , never-played-in-the-past-6-year-games.

Secondly, I wanna criticize how he thinks that video games can never be art into one counter-statement that might blow a few minds.. Video games are made of art. Art is what makes a video game. As Kellee Santiago says she likes the definition of art from wikipedia the best “Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotion”. This arranging of elements is what makes a video game.. reality. Without an expression of one’s senses, we would have a blank page. The game would be ..nothing, which would’t make it much of a game at all really.

Thirdly, and finally, continuing and going off of the leading quote and my last statement, Flower was a game that Ebert mentions. It doesn’t seem like an actual game to me either, as it has no winning or losing theme. But Flower is one of the most artist game plays i’ve ever seen out of anything. The fact that it isn’t really a game and more of an adventure, (which almost 95% of all games have a campaign mode theme), makes it more artsy. Ebert disregards the ART and design that went into making that game by by-passing it completing into his own tangent about how you can’t win or lose it.