Roger Ebert says video games can never be art

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Khuutra said:

Part of me wonders if it's all right to accept a sense of accomplishment as part of an artistic experience - games are a medium that requires effort, and I still hold that if there is any artistic merit to them then effort, the drive to accomplish some goal, is at least one criteria by which the experience can be measured.

Take something like the first Super Mario Bros. (because it's the easiest to reference for me) - I only beat the game in earnest for the first time last year. It takes a tremendous and intimate familiarity with the game and the way it works in order to beat it, and you have to be able to circumvent a lot of challenges. In a way, the game trains you almost solely for your run through the final level, with Hammer Bros. and spinning fire sticks everywhere - not to mention Bowser.

When I finally beat it, I had a sort of euphoric feeling that cam not just from having completed a challenge, but that I had internalized the mechanics necessary to beat the game, as if I had actually learned something in conquering it. When I play the game, the way that I think and operate is intrinsically changed, in a way that is more easily identifiable than with other hard games. Could a game's ability to elicit effort, to train a person to be able to experience the whole thing, be taken as one of the design elements necessary for critical analysis?

Yeah I think so.

Well with film, or storytelling in general, I'm sure you're aware that the beginning and end are usually very related.  The very beginning should introduce every element of the ending in a good story, so nothing comes out of the blue in a deus ex machina moment.  In most games the first thing you do is talk to some NPC to learn about the story, and then the last thing you do in the game is blow up a giant monster.  I think Super Mario Bros. is brilliant in that the first and last thing you do in the entire game is a single jump with a simple tap of the A button.  There's no intro, you just start jumping, and the climax is just the coolest jump ever.

I figure if "interactive art" is indeed an art form, then we need to focus on the unique features of that art form.  The interactivity is what separates a movie-game from a movie or a music-game from some music.  And in discussing the interactivity, a game's ability to elicit effort is very important.  It's also what holds games back in a way though.  If you're bored with a movie or an album you can let it keep playing and only pay half as much attention, but if you're bored with a game you can't set it to auto-play.  If you stop caring about a game, you're just going to turn it off and never play it again.