Games

It's not even that. He's just wrong, and like all media slop critics placed way too much value on his favorite slop treats while scorning other sorts of media slop treats. Like movies are 99+% pure slop, 99+% of all books ever written have been formulaic mass market slop, 99+% of all music ever recorded has been empty slop, 99+% of games ever made have been low effort slop, 99+% of all painted "art" is just slop commissioned to fill space on a wall.

"There are some examples of [insert medium] that are meaningful and well executed" isn't some profound thing, it doesn't elevate or transform the nature of the rest of the medium it was in, those things are just individually good and potentially meaningful. Trying to cast some mediums as somehow superior and sublime is just silly elitism that's willfully ignoring how vapid the vast, vast bulk of everything in every medium is, especially when the purpose of that medium is making people stare at it in exchange for money, but especially when the purpose of the medium is trying to make funtime reference puzzles for modestly educated special good boys who want to feel smart for getting it like what most "high art" is trying to be.

The artfulness of games is incredibly mature, and video games are just the latest technology applied to an expression as old as humanity itself (possibly older).

Chess is art, and so is Tetris or Monopoly, or basketball. These games may involve some science, but the enjoyment is developed intuitively by a designer or team of designers who may be working in metaphor (such as chess and monopoly being metaphors for war and business) or pure abstraction (like tetris or basketball).

I also think it's disingenuous to dismiss the visual and audio art elements of a game as somehow separate from the game itself when Ebert's medium relies on the same things. "But Dessa, games appeal to the language of movies to communicate the emotional impact of the stories they may contain!" Yes, but movies also rely on the language of theater and literature to do the same (quite literally in the case of silent movies).

Ebert died saying he hated Dark Souls as though personally hating something has any relevance whatsoever to whether it should be considered art. The author of this article seems to do the same when he points out how childish gamer examples can be. Childish things can be art. Art can suck too.

Likewise, the argument that capitalism commodofies art shouldn't be difficult for readers here to break down. Capitalism commodifies movies, music books, and anything else that takes labor to create. You could argue that these products cease to be art under capitalism, but that's a blanket statement about whether art is possible at all under capitalism, not about what media are or are not valid for the expression of art.

Did you read the article or both of his articles before commenting on this. Movies already had works like Metropolis 49 years after the first moving images were captured. Ebert's articles are written 56 years after Tennis For Two, the first rudimentary game. Somehow games are always going to be "a young medium."