About a year ago, film critic Roger Ebert stated that he believed video games could not be "art." He later amended this statement to say video games could not be "high art," as he understood it.

I regret that I cannot find his original post, or his definition of "high art," but I will take two statements as his reasons why games can't be high art because: "I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist" and "Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices"

Let's take the first one:
I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.

Any of us who have played Mario or Quake or KOTOR or Tetris knows that these games are overwhelmingly defined by the artists who create them. Think of each of those games and how incredibly, radically different they are from one another. Those deep core differences have nothing to do with choices or changes made by the player-- we only dabble on the surface.

An analogy might be a statue: The artist defines and carves the statue. It has an unchangeable shape and texture and size. BUT you the viewer can change the angle which you view it, or the time of day, or the lighting or whatever, and change your perception of the piece. This is roughly the same set of choices we have with most games. You can't change the underlying code; you can only change what the creator (or artist) has defined as acceptable for you to change.

So that statement exposes Ebert's somewhat superficial knowledge about what games are and how we interact with them.

Now the second one:
Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.

Okay, this is trickier. We all know our favorite games let us arrive at a number of (predefined) "endings." Especially role-playing games.

However, remember that an artist created each one of these endings for you to experience, with a thought to how they affect the overall dramatic arc. Just as a movie-maker would. Because there are several possibilities doesn't mean each possibility isn't supported by the narrative, with a particular goal in mind.

I think maybe Ebert believes this "smorgasbord of choices" to be somehow happenstance or random. As a game designer, I can tell you this is simply not the case. It's an illusion created so that you, the player, feel more engaged in your experience.

A game is like a movie where the director is allowed to explore a number of possibilities for his or her narrative. Film doesn't support this kind of flexibilty, but games do. Imagine if Lucas had explored Luke's sacrifice at the hands of Vader on Bespin, or Leia's training as a Jedi, or Yoda's confrontation of the Emperor in ROTJ, or some arc of Chewbacca's that he didn't have time or money to show us?

There are any number of narrative possibilities he could explore, which could all expand on his themes of myth and hero.

Now Ebert might, maybe, take issue with that and say THAT wouldn't be art either, but... at least you can see how possibility and choice don't categorically negate "high art."

I believe the central problem here is that Ebert hasn't played many games and is probably not going to. And to really "get" games as more than casual entertainment, you kind of have to jump into the genre with both feet. It's easy to see them as fluff-- light and sound-- unless you are fully prepared to analyze them in terms of their potential for artistic merit.

Much like film.