Roger Ebert is a world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, author, and journalist. He’s probably the only film critic many people have ever heard of, in fact, and he popularized the phrase “two thumbs up”. He also doesn’t think that video games can ever be art, and for that, he loses my respect.

I don’t think he’s ever even played a video game, though. I think that he’s making obscenely biased, uninformed, and downright ignorant remarks about an entire medium, a field he has never himself explored. I don’t think that he’s being reasonable in the least.

His claim is that they aren’t art now, nor will they ever be art. He claims that they will never reach comparison with ‘the greats’, the Mona Lisa’s and great symphonies. His claim is that because in their thirty year run, video games have not produced Shakespeare, they will never create it. How long did it take to get from Cuneiform to “Hamlet”?

Ebert’s argument is based in uneducated opinion, with no basis or experience to call upon. Has he played every video game? No, (I’m doubtful he’s played more than two or three, even) so how does he know what each and every one is and isn’t. I’ve played hundreds of games, both good and bad, and my conclusion is unique to each experience. While one game, say, Halo, is certainly not art, does that mean that they all aren’t? It’s all rooted in word-of-mouth and presumption, and it has no real basis for such a rash and ultimate statement. Transformers is not art, so neither is Citizen Kane, or any movie, for that matter.

Now you may say that Ebert is simply biased on the issue, just as I (an avid gamer) am in the reverse. I’ve played video games my whole life, spent countless hours absorbed in them. So my opinion is as moot as his, correct? No. Ebert is making his conclusions on the outside, from videos and lectures and descriptions alone. It’s like judging a movie on its trailer alone. Furthermore, he is using audio and visual evidence to back his opinion on a largely kinesthetic media. He hasn’t experienced games as they were meant to be—in ways that movies or paintings or books never could, in ways unique to the medium. The beauty of games comes in the immersion that comes through interactivity. The ability to go in and out of the story, to experience it at your own pace and in your own way, is a facet that no other medium can effectively replicate.  A game can absorb you more thoroughly than any film. You may spend two hours getting to know the characters and worlds they inhabit in a film, but a video game can give you anywhere from five to fifty more hours within it, even more, if you so choose. I’ve lost sleep, “forgotten” meals, been moved almost to tears, and been left stunned, in awe, all from a game. I’ve seen worlds and traveled places impossible anywhere else, and been absorbed so thoroughly that nothing else in the world even matters, even if just for a time. I’ve lost myself in a game, before. Never a painting, never a song.

Now I keep using that word, “experience”. Its simplicity is at the heart of my argument, though. Any artwork is just that, a vessel for the experience of the viewer, the listener—whatever. No art tells you what to feel or how to feel it, and that’s the beauty in it; it’s coming to your own conclusion that’s important, and that’s precisely what video games excel at: giving you the ability not only to manipulate your conclusion and interpretation of the matter, but the course at which you come to it. I have never re-played a game and not gotten something new from the experience, or added to its depth.

I won’t hide behind the old maxim, “art is subjective,” either. Not everything is art to everyone, and that’s a simple fact. Ebert may choose to denigrate video games, to disbelieve in their artistic merit, and that’s okay. It’s his refusal to give them the time of day, and the respect of half a doubt, that angers me. It’s simple ignorance, is what it is. He may ‘experience’ video games however he chooses, but to the best of my knowledge, he never really has, and never really will.