Great read, very inspiring actually. They're both 100% correct.

Ebert is in really bad shape. He can't even eat solid food. I suspect he won't be around much longer. I used to love the reviews that he made on "At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert". Out of respect for the guy, I say we let him have this one.

This may have already been stated, but any-who... I see art as a result of dedication, something that you've put your whole heart and soul into. It doesn't have to be the obvious form, even gardening, cooking or... organising furniture in a house ( :P ) can be considered art if it comes from a person who uses their imagination to complete it. So of course video games can be art :D. ^_^ And that's my thought on the matter.

(For brevity I coalesced two of your posts)

Isn't that an arbitrary limitation, though? There are ways to design gameplay that build up the experience just as the visuals or writing can during the non-interactive parts. Case of interest: the hand-holding game mechanic in ICO.

It's a gameplay design choice that clearly resonates with most gamers, that enriches the message the game tries to convey no less than the choice of verbal incommunicability between the characters or the visual personality of the castle itself. A game design choice that I remember not in the technical sense, but for the emotions it helped to summon. Just as I remember particular scenes of movies and section of books not merely for their technical content, but as the experience they always granted me.

It looks like Ebert is thinking of the most basic level of gameplay design to entertain in a chess/sport kind of way. He seems to be missing that many games offer additional layers of meaning or additional evocative power right in their gameplay design. You also refered to gameplay in the very same basic, let's say technical, way. But I'm sure that you have a much wider experience that his, and thus might see the restrictions of this approach?

How is getting to the end of a story based game different from getting to the end of a movie? Does getting to the end mean that I won? Or just that I finished it? There are plenty of art forms where someone else is preforming. Does this mean any that have you participate are no longer art? Just because it is something created that you can interact with shouldn't mean its not art.
And although you don't win for seeing or hearing art I do sometimes feel like I've lost.

One hting in particular I do take issue with is Ebert's assertion that games do not have their masterpieces comparable to the greater works of literature or cinema. That simply isn't true.

Look at Super Mario Bros.

Well, I also take issue with his definition of "art" and his assertion that art is based on taste (which is something he puts forth in the comments), as the two ideas don't mesh well and I don't agree with either anyway. But yes, he's right when you allow him to set down the rules and definitions of his own discourse.

I would really be interested how he would formulate a definition of the term "Art" that includes movies but excludes games.

We could do that. I'm not really a fan of his film reviews, but what he's gone through is the stuff of nightmares. Merely looking at him makes me cry.

Or we could explore the origins of his video game hatred:

LOL PWNED VIDEO GAMES ARE ART CONFIRMED

I sadly think most gamers don't see Super Mario Bros as art.

Which in of itself is an issue.  Of the groups claiming videogames are art... they have varying defintions.  For some it would be the flawless level design of a game like Super Mario Brothers.

For others it is the atomosphere of L4D and how it perfectly puts you in what it would feel like to be in a Zombie Apocolypse.

Others would compare it to something like Animal Crossing, where there is no real goal, and you are just given a big world in which to make your own stories.

Others yet still, would say it was like Metal Gear Solid and it's use of cutscenes to be like a movie.

Others see the opposite as true, that it's telling the story without having to rely on cutscenes, cutscenes being a sign that you can't tell a story properly in a game setting.

While in art there are often many different movements... in general all except the newest kinds are seen as art by the experts.

Modern art experts will still tell you DaVinchi's work is art.... etc.  Among the experts who "decide" art, there is largely a consesus.

Additionally, there really aren't even any "experts" yet who could fully identify which of these claims if any are valid.

I alluded to that last point earlier in the topic: the ugly truth about the academic state of art is that it's not something that's inherent to a work, it's based solely around the critical discourse that surrounds a work or a medium. Critics, not artists, decide what is art, though the sheer fact of talking about something as if it were art.

If there were popular research papers dedicated to, say, the agency of the player outside of his avatar in EarthBound, or the subversion of goal-based narrative in Shadow of the Colossus, these games would be art in academic circles by sheer virtue of being taken that seriously on a wide scale.

That's what disappoints me so much about gaming criticism as it is now: they seem very much concerned that games should be perceived as art (which is not an altogether coheren or even meaningful concern) but then they keep the critical discourse on a decidedly lower, less critical level. I don't mean to take away from people who talk about how fun games are, either - fun is an immense part of what defines games as an art form - just that people who want video games to be take seriously should do their best to take their own contributions to the discourse seriously.