"Greatest Critic Of All Time" Said Video Games Can't Be Art

[Lucca]

I'm not mad at him. I don't think we should be mad at him.

Yeah, he was a great film critic, but he was also a person with opinions of his own. He just expressed his opinion (yes, a very ignorant and outdated opinion, but still his opinion) on his personal blog. As he's not known as a great video game critic, no one cared. That doesn't make him a bad film critic, and it shouldn't affect us as gamers. I mean, who cares if that guy thought that games couldn't be art?

I profoundly respect Roger Ebert for his legacy in the film industry, but in this article, he failed to acknowledge two things:
1) The passage of time: George Melies' works, as he mentions as an example of art, were not viewed as art when they were first made. They were viewed as entertainment. People went to see his films because it was something that they'd never seen, special effects. It takes time for a medium to be valued as art.
2) A video game is defined as an audiovisual interactive experience: When he says "Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game", he's objectively wrong. A game doesn't need to have points or rules to be a game. It just needs to be an audiovisual interactive experience.

Not to mention that "art" is an almost impossible concept to define.

He was clearly someone old (he was 67 at the time) who hadn't played any games and who only knew about the mainstream ones and didn't bother to do his research before getting to his conclusion. It's basically like watching Transformers and saying that movies can never be art or reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid and saying that books can never be art. But I'm not mad at him. It's normal for people to reject something that threatens them. He probably thought gaming was going to make the film industry crash.