[In a presentation originally given at GDC 2011 titled "An Apology for Roger Ebert," Infocom and LucasArts veteran Brian Moriarty (Loom) came to the defense of film critic Roger Ebert and his views about video games as art. Here, his lecture is reprinted in full with his permission.] The title of this lecture, "An Apology for Roger Ebert," may require a bit of clarification. I'm not here to offer an apology in the sense of regret for anything done wrong. This is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia, the systematic defense of a position or opinion. It's a defense of Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who, a little over five years ago, annoyed our industry by declaring that "video games can never be art." For those few of you unacquainted with this controversy, I'll spend just a few minutes recounting what happened. It all started with a bad movie. On October 21st, 2005, Universal released its adaptation of the first-person shooter game Doom. I didn't see Doom, but Roger Ebert did. He awarded the film one star. In his review, he wrote, "Toward the end of the movie, there is a lengthy point-of-view shot looking forward over the barrel of a large weapon ... Monsters jump out from behind things and are blasted to death, in a sequence that abandons all attempts at character and dialogue and uncannily resembles a video game." A few days later, a reader from Missouri responded on Ebert's blog. He wrote that "Doom ... the movie is Doom the game brought to the screen without messing around too much with the original. Doom works as a tribute because it fails so utterly as a movie." Ebert's reply was terse. "There are ... sites on the Web devoted to video games, and they review movies on their terms. I review them on mine." Unfortunately, Ebert couldn't resist adding one more zinger: "As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games." The response from gamers was prompt. Hundreds of indignant blog comments poured in from everywhere. At first, Ebert seemed willing to discuss his opinion. When a reader from Denver asked, "Are you implying that books and film are better mediums, or just better uses of your time?" Ebert responded, "I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense." The comments increased in volume and temperature. On November 27, a reader wrote, "I was saddened to read that you consider video games an inherently inferior medium ... Was not film itself once a new field of art? Did it not also take decades for its ... respectability to be recognized?" Ebert responded, "Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did 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." He continued, "I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic." After this, aside from an occasional snark, Ebert appeared to have written everything he cared to on the subject. To many of you, this issue probably seems like a thoroughly dead horse. I thought it was dead, too. Not because anything was ever actually decided, but because after nearly five years of table-pounding, everyone seemed tired of arguing about it. But a few weeks after GDC ended last March, the flamewar erupted again. The fuse was a TEDx lecture by Kellee Santiago, co-founder and president of thatgamecompany. Her lecture was titled "Stop the Debate: Video Games are Art, So What's Next?" She cited three games, Waco Resurrection, Braid and her own company's Flower, as examples of games that she believes already qualify as art. A video of her lecture appeared on YouTube. Some troublemaker recommended it to Roger Ebert. On April 16th, Ebert posted a critique of Santiago's lecture under the blunt headline, "Video games can never be art." He dismissed Waco Resurrection, Braid and Flower as "pathetic," and sternly predicted that "no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form." Thousands of comments followed, nearly all of them in fierce protest. Finally, on the first of July, just before the call for submissions to this conference was announced, Ebert posted what again seemed to be his final word. Under the title "Okay, kids, play on my lawn," Ebert wrote, "I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so." He went on to admit that his arguments might be more convincing if he actually bothered to play some games. He also seemed to backpedal a bit. "What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games ... It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art." His weary conclusion? "I have books and movies to see. I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place." Having heard all this, you may be wondering, what is there left to defend? Ebert caved. He admitted games could be art, eventually, didn't he? Given enough time, anything not impossible is inevitable, right? Maybe. But that's not the part of Ebert's argument I'm here to defend. I'm here because of this sentence: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers." Kellee Santiago conceded this point in the first sixty seconds of her TEDx lecture. And, as Ebert never tired of pointing out, not one of the thousands of comments he received seriously attempted any such comparison. Now, although I'm not as experienced as Roger Ebert (experienced being a polite euphemism for elderly), I'm no spring chicken, either. My formal education was in English. I've read many of the great books in our language, and other languages in translation. I've also watched a number of great movies, seen a number of great paintings and sculptures, and heard a lot of fine music, though never as much as I would like. I've also been in the video game industry for nearly thirty years. Unlike Mr. Ebert, I have played many of the games widely regarded as great and seminal. I have the privilege of knowing many of the authors personally. But as much as I admire games like M.U.L.E., Balance of Power, Sim City and Civilization, it would never even occur to me to compare them to the treasures of world literature, painting or music. And I'm pretty sure the authors of these particular games wouldn't presume to, either. Why are some people in this industry so anxious to wrap themselves in the mantle of great art? It occurred to me that an art museum might be a good place to think about this. As it happens, there's a really good art museum just a few blocks east of Worcester Polytech, where I teach game design. So, late one morning, I found myself in the galleries of WAM, the Worcester Art Museum, wandering among the Monets and Manets, Mattisses and Magrittes. One canvas in particular caught my eye. 
It was painted around 1730 by James Northcote, a member of the British Royal Academy of Arts. Northcote was amazingly prolific. Over 2,000 works are attributed to him. He painted historic and current news events, scenes from the Bible and classic literature, together with hundreds of portraits. It was his animal paintings that attracted the most attention, though. Northcote made a fortune with his dramatic depictions of jungle cats, elephants, dogs and birds. A rival artist, Henry Fuseli, is said to have remarked, "Northcote, you are an angel at an ass, but an ass at an angel." This Northcote in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum is not, for the most part, about animals. The Chess Players shows a pair of gentlemen pondering over an endgame. There's a boy standing behind one of the players, and a little dog sitting in the corner. If you study the painting for a while, you'll notice a couple of interesting details. For one thing, the chess players clearly are not the center of attention. They're dressed in dark, sober colors, receding into the space of the painting. By contrast, the boy appears in blazing gold. It almost looks as if he's under a spotlight. Yet he shows no interest in the chess game. His attention is directed away from the world of the painting. In fact, he appears to be staring directly at you, the viewer. In his left hand is a sheet of paper, covered with undecipherable characters. His right finger appears to be pointing at something. But what? The sheet of paper? The man beside him? And what is that dog doing there? We'll probably never know. Everyone connected with the creation of this painting has been dead for generations. I spent a long time sitting on the bench in front of Northcote's Chess Players. The elements of this painting came to symbolize for me the predicament I faced by choosing to defend Roger Ebert at the biggest game conference in the world. The two chess players are the like the game industry, self-absorbed, satisfied, confident that they will soon earn a place among the fine arts, if they haven't already. And the golden boy is Art itself, silently watching us, pointing at a secret he longs to share. In preparing this lecture, I plowed through a 700-page anthology on Western art philosophy, including the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Ficino, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Shaftesbury, Croce, Nietzsche, Dewey and Heidegger. I also read a deadly-boring book on 20th century art definitions, including the writings of Weitz, Dickie and Danto. Nowhere in 25 centuries of philosophy did I find a single author who regarded games or sports as a form of art. When they're mentioned at all, they're dismissed as a pastime. Harmless at best, an evil destroyer of youth at worst. Now, it's true that a number of art museums include antique toys and games in their exhibits. Some of them, soon including the Smithsonian, even display antique video games! It's also true that games, usually dice or cards, have often been the subject or theme of great art. I found a web site with over 220 paintings of people playing Chess, and it doesn't even include this work by Northcote. It's also true that certain 20th century art movements, including Dada, Fluxus and New Games, incorporated rules and play into some of their works. These are remembered chiefly by art historians and academics, except for Fluxus, which is famous because one of its members married a Beatle. And you'll occasionally come across a philosopher or artist who admires the playful aspect of games, or the elegance of a Chess problem. Some people admire the elegance of math equations, too, but nobody confuses mathematics with great art. They're different categories of human activity. And that's how philosophy has traditionally regarded Art and Games: Categorically different. Suggesting that a game could be great art is radical. On the other hand, the idea of "great art" is itself somewhat radical. It dates back only about 500 years. Before that, art was essentially practical. You valued the thing an artwork represented, not the artwork itself. Since that time, the definition of art has undergone a continuous evolution as new ideas and technologies appeared. This process has never been never rapid or easy. It took many decades for photography and cinema to earn their places among the Hegelian fine arts of painting, sculpture, poetry and drama, music, dance and architecture. Now, it's natural and tempting for us to expect that games will follow the same pattern. But there's a big difference. Photography and cinema were new technologies. Games are not new. They've been part of our culture for thousands of years. They're much older than the belles arts of the Renaissance, older than the representational art of the Greeks, older than the cave art of prehistory. By what right do games suddenly demand the status of great art? If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command? Are digital games somehow privileged, somehow more artistic than analog games? Or does the fact that video games are now almost as big as dog food somehow entitle them to a free museum pass? Before we can proceed any further, we need to pause and address the basic semantic problem. (You knew this was coming.) All of us, even Roger Ebert, can say what a video game is. Can any of you say what great art is? Trying to define "art" is like trying to define "experience." We all have an internal sense of what it signifies. But articulating it is really difficult. And the intellectual fad of relativism makes it practically impossible. Here's a classic demonstration: Suppose I'm walking along a beach and come across a stick of driftwood. I stop in my tracks. I don't touch the driftwood. I don't say anything or point out the stick to anybody. Right there, at that moment, is that driftwood a work of art? I pick up the driftwood and, without changing it, bring it home and put it on my mantelpiece. Is the driftwood art yet? I sign and date the driftwood and send it to an art gallery. They put it on a pedestal under a spotlight. Are we having art yet? A art collector buys the driftwood at auction for over a million bucks. What did that collector buy? Let's play the art game again. This time, I walk into a plumbing supply shop and pick out a standard white porcelain urinal. I sign and date the urinal, and ship it to an art gallery. Is that urinal art? 
I am being completely serious when I inform you that Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is considered by many critics to be the single most influential artwork of the 20th century. It would probably also be the most valuable artwork of the 20th century, if it had not been accidently thrown away with the gallery trash. Luckily, all was not lost. No less than eleven authentic replicas, individually certified by the artist, await your contemplation at various art museums. One of these was auctioned in 1999 for $1.7 million. A number of so-called performance artists have been arrested for trying to pee in these replicas. Most of them are now protected in transparent plastic cases. (The replicas, not the performance artists.) Duchamp and his so-called "readymades" broke the Renaissance idea of art wide open. He and generations of so-called "conceptual artists" changed the focus of modern art appreciation. Instead of aesthetic value, the emphasis shifted to novelty value. By the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was being only a little cynical when he wrote, "Art is anything you can get away with." It seems totally fair to ask: If a piss pot can be great art, why can't a video game? Another argument for games-as-art goes like this: Video games incorporate, and even generate, still and moving pictures, which everyone agrees can be great art. They incorporate and generate writing, music, sculptured objects and architecture, which can also be great art. Suppose I design a platformer with backgrounds by Michelangelo, black and white characters from Ingmar Bergman movies, pop-up quotations from Shakespeare and music from The Well-Tempered Clavier. 
I call it All Your Art Is Belong to Us! The presentation of that game is filled with great art. Games can obviously be a context for presenting great art. Roger Ebert admits this! But is this enough? Does an artistic presentation make a game art? Of course it doesn't. None of you would presume to call that game "art" unless you had a chance to play it first, or at least watch somebody else playing it. The identity of a game emerges from its mechanics and affordances, not the presentation that exposes them. But can an arrangement of mechanics and affordances, rules and goals, itself constitute a work of art? Before you scream "Yes," explain to me why Chess is not regarded as a work of art. Before you scream "But it is anyway," ask yourself: Are we so ready to dismiss the wisdom of the ages to flatter ourselves? Does it even make sense to speak of mechanics and affordances apart from presentation? Isn't it all one piece? Or is it all just mathematics with a sprinkle of positive psychology? The gamificationists certainly seem to think so. It's hard for anybody, even so-called experts, to agree on what constitutes great art. Back in 1900, the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium. Around the edge of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques, three on the left, three on the right and three overhead. The plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers. We can imagine the names that were being thrown around. Bach, Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Brahms. But when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored, the trustees couldn't make up their minds. And so, for the past 111 years, visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques. Only one, at the very top, contains a name, the only one the trustees could all agree on: Beethoven. "Everyone has their own taste," right? "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This commonplace was noted by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who strongly criticized it. Kant's argument went like this: If you declare that something gives you pleasure, nobody can argue with you. Subjective pleasure is absolutely in the eye of the beholder (assuming that the eye is the organ involved). But if you announce that something is beautiful, you have made a public value judgment. You've identified that thing as source of pleasure that can be enjoyed by anyone. In making such a declaration, you exercise the faculty known as taste. It makes no sense to say that "everyone has their own taste." This is tantamount to claiming there's no common pleasure at all, only personal pleasure. But experience tells us this isn't true. People agree that objects are pleasant or unpleasant all the time! Psychologists even have a fancy technical term for this kind of agreement, when a feeling is experienced by more than one person. They call it intersubjectivity. Certain people make it their business to exercise taste. These people are called (pinkies up) connoisseurs. If a connoisseur's disinterested exercise of taste earns the agreement of many over time, he or she is called an expert. Such an expert is Roger Ebert. Here is a point I hope we can all agree on. Roger Ebert knows movies. He's been writing about them since the 1960s. He's reviewed hundreds and hundreds of films, in print, on the Web and on television, and published over a dozen books. It's no exaggeration to call him one of the world's best-known and most widely-read film critics. His opinion about the relationship between video games and art may plausibly be dismissed as uninformed. He admits this! He admits that he doesn't play video games, and doesn't even want to play them! Nevertheless, most of us would hesitate to dismiss his opinion on the relationship between movies and art. So, what does the tasteful, expert connoisseur Roger Ebert have to say about the relationship between the cinema and art? Just this: "Hardly any movies are art." Okay, maybe Roger was having a bad day. Let's move right along another of the world's great film critics. Here's what the late Pauline Kael wrote about the relationship between movies and art. Listen carefully. "There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art ... Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them." So, here we have two of the world's most highly-regarded film critics, sadly assuring us that most movies are not great art. Defining "great art" apparently isn't enough. We also have to figure out how to distinguish great art from trash. But first, let's side aside a couple of issues regarding the word art. In English, the word art has several meanings. In one sense, art is used as synonym for craft. Any art-ifact made by an art-isan is a kind of art. In another sense, any exercise of skill, any practice can be spoken of as an art. The art of cooking. The art of war. The art of motorcycle maintenance. In these senses, the practice and products of gamemaking obviously qualify as art. But Ebert and Kael weren't using "art" in either of these senses. When Ebert refers to art, he means (and actually spells) Art with a capital A.art Great art, fine art, or the term I prefer, sublime art. Art that deeply rewards a lifetime of contemplation. Art as cultural monument. Art that's good for you. The kind of art that, in Ebert's words, makes us "more cultured, civilized and empathetic." This kind of talk has earned Mr. Ebert that most deadly of anti-intellectual epithets, elitist. The horror novelist Clive Barker led the mob, dismissing Ebert as an "arrogant old man," "pompous" and "high handed," adding, "If the experience moves you, some way or another, even if it just moves your bowels, I think it's worthy of some serious study." 
Many people seem to share Barker's belief that the function of art is to elicit emotion, to make you feel things, to move people. Let's quickly dispose of this. Last April, the US Supreme Court ruled that videos of small animals being deliberately stomped to death was a Constitutionally protected form of free speech. Would you like to see one of these videos? If I press that play button, I promise you will experience strong emotion. Stomp videos may be free speech, and they may make me feel things, but I reject them as art. And I look forward to the High Court's opinion on whether or not video games are also a form of free speech. The function of art is not merely to elicit emotion. A slip on a banana peel can do that. The function - not the purpose, the function - of all art, high or low, from Angry Birds to Hellraiser to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is attraction. Art has no practical purpose. Nobody needs art. Why would anyone bother to make art that nobody would be attracted to? But how do we distinguish sublime attractions from the common attractions Pauline Kael dismissed as trash? Why do Ebert and Kael believe that very few movies are sublime art? How can Ebert predict with such confidence that no video game is ever likely to be sublime art, without even playing any? And if he's wrong, if a game really can be sublime art, why hasn't anybody made one? Such are the questions I pondered as I sat before Northcote's Chess Players. It seemed to me, as I studied the painting, that there are three reasons why video games have failed to deliver sublime art. These reasons are neatly symbolized by the major elements of the painting. The most obvious has been staring you in the face since two o'clock. It's not the chess players. It's not the golden boy, his silence or his secret, if he has one. It's the dog. We don't know who, if anyone, commissioned this painting from Northcote. But if it was a commission, we can say one thing with a high degree of certainty. Whoever it was had plenty of money. In the early 18th century, when The Chess Players was painted, there were generally two classes of people in Europe, the well-to-do and the near-starving. (Get used to it. We'll be there again soon.) Most 18th century people didn't worry about buying paintings. It was all they could do to keep their families alive! Things got better in the 19th century. Political changes, urbanization, improvements in mass production and education gave rise to what we now call the middle class. These people had enough wealth to keep their families reasonably comfortable, with a little money left over for the occasional small luxury. As their social standing improved, the petit-bourgeois wanted some of the things rich people enjoyed, like nice clothes, books and decorated homes. So around the 1860s and 70s, a market developed catering to their limited budgets and tastes. They still couldn't afford commissioned art. But there were plenty of second-rate painters happy to provide a quick knock-off to hang over the fireplace. These paintings resembled great art. Picturesque landscapes, idyllic domestic scenes, portraits of celebrities. The art dealers of Munich were apparently the first to nickname this new mass-market art. Some scholars think it was a mispronunciation of the English word sketch. Others claim it was a contraction of a German verb that means "to make cheaply." Whatever its origin, by the 1920s this nickname had become the international expression for those pink flamingos, velvet Elvises and adorable puppy dogs we all know and love as kitsch. Quite a few books have been written about the aesthetics of kitsch. One of the best is by Tomas Kulka of Tel Aviv University. Kulka argues that kitsch is not bad art. He sees it as a unique aesthetic category, a special kind of art, characterized by three properties: One: Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions. Kitsch is about simple feelings, universal ideas. Good and evil. Happy and sad. Your response to these ideas is automatic. You know how you are supposed to feel about sad clowns, James Dean and horses running on a windswept beach. In fact, part of the appeal of kitsch seems to lie precisely in recognizing that as you look at it, you're feeling the way you're supposed to. Kitsch validates you. Two: The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable. Kitsch art is utterly conventional. There's never any doubt about what it is you're looking at. It's a leprechaun, and only a leprechaun. It's Santa Claus, and only Santa Claus. Kitsch art is surface art. It's just what you expect. Three (and most important): Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. The last thing kitsch wants to be is challenging. Pure kitsch is never ironic, ambiguous, troubling, or innovative. Kitsch art is popular art ... and nearly all popular art is kitsch. Our mass-market culture is so thoroughly imbued with kitsch, it's the only kind of art many people ever experience. Broadway musicals, theme parks, casinos, rock stars, major league sports, cable news ... all kitsch. All advertising is kitsch. All media driven by advertising devolves into kitsch. Sequels, spin-offs, knock-offs, reboots and adaptations from other media are automatically kitsch. Politics thrives on kitsch. And Roger Ebert has spent over forty years in dark theaters sitting through thousands and thousands of hours of shameless Hollywood kitsch. Could anyone be more familiar with what happens when you apply commercial pressure to popular art? Is there anyone on the planet more qualified to predict that video games will suffer the same fate? Listen to this review of Call of Duty: Black Ops published in the New York Times a few days after it was released last December: "I never play games twice. But Call of Duty: Black Ops has made a very happy liar out of me ... I wanted to try to assassinate Fidel Castro ... again. And break out of a Soviet prison camp ... again. And pilot a gunboat through the Mekong Delta again, shoo
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