There is an interesting debate on RogerEbert.com on the artistic viability of video games. It all started when Ebert proclaimed:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

I am at a slight disadvantage here because I do not regularly play video games. A lot of the games referred to in responses are ones I have never heard of. But the question of whether any existing games rise to the level of art is different from whether it is even possible.

It's the last two sentences of Ebert's comments that I have a questions about. The last sentence about how video games are used is logically irrelevent to the question at hand. It actually represents a personal distaste for video games (or at least the effect they have on us) that undermines the rest of what he has to say.

More interesting to me is the sentence prior to that. If something is a visual experience, isn't it almost artistic by definition? It's worth noting that the forums that he gives the artistic thumbs up to do not include what immediately comes to my own mind when I think of art: paintings. They are a visual experience that engage the mind. Approached in that manner, so are video games.

But, Ebert points out in the preceding paragraph, "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

And I would say that is a fair point. One of the reasons that I could never get into pen-and-paper RPG's despite my overactive imagination is that there was no mechanism for complete authorial control. I was a game-master for a little while in high school and frustrated that the character players just wouldn't do what I wanted them to. Since my artistic aspirations or moralistic in nature, that cuts at my vision of what are should be.

It is just that, though, my vision.

My preference in artistic work depends if not entirely on narrative, then almost so. My taste in music is largely defined by lyrical content. Be it the straightforward narrative of more country music or the more ethereal content in alternative bands, what counts is the narrative drawn by the artist and interpreted by the listener. Classical music and film scores may be pleasant for the ears, but they do little for me. I'll go out on a limb here and say that Ebert, who views composers as true artists, would disagree with my assessment. And he would have a point.

However, the less strong a narrative, the more experience-oriented art becomes. How one experiences Beethoven's Ninth is as much a listener choice as moving along a particular path in a video game is a player choice. Both represent a loss of control. Without explicitly declaring what something means, an artist leaves it more open to audience discretion. There is very little art that declines to give the audience any discretion -- and with good reason.

A composer or image artist has control over the actual content from which the audience can draw from, but similarly a game's designer controls nearly every aspect of the universe in which the game is being played. A painter cannot control audience interpretation, but they do have complete control over what they are interpreting. A game designer cannot control whether I move Zelda to the right and left, but they can define what is to the right and left of Zelda.

But as far as the narrative goes, Ebert is dead-on. Video games tend to make lousy movies and vice-versa because they tend to approach narrative differently. The more narrative-driven a video game is, in my experience, the less options there are for the character to explore. Laying out a bunch of hoops for characters to jump through and giving the player complete discretion as to how and when they jump through them makes for a pretty loose plot, which makes for a pretty lackluster movie. It often makes for a better game, though, because the player gets more control over the actions (and indeed the personality) of the character he is controlling. That does not make for compelling characters on the big screen.

This is where the strength of Ebert's argument lies. Video games and narrative-driven art are at cross purposes. Video games most frequently set out to give its audience as many options as possible. It's no accident that as video game systems have developed, controllers have accumulated an increasing number of buttons and knobs. Narrative-driven art, on the other hand, generally sets out to lay out as much of the story as explicitly as possible. Director's cuts are usually longer than the actual release because they are too explicit and it gets (in the mind of producers anyway) too tedious in its explanations.

I agree with Ebert that video games are on the whole less artistic than narrative art and to an extent experience-oriented art. I find it interesting, however, that Ebert uses the word "craftsmanship" as a description of what video games are. Writing a novel or directing a movie is often considered a "craft", though I would argue that in the same way that video game development falls short in the "artistic" category, they excel in the craftsmanship category.

And on further reflection, I think most works and types of work fall somewhere on a spectrum from art to craft.

Architecture, for instance, is referred to as both but in my mind clearly falls more on the "crafts" side of the spectrum. Architecture serves a practical purpose independent of aesthetics, just as video games do. Except in the most mundane examples, though, both incorporate aesthetic traits because those that both serve a function and are pleasant are more useful than those that simply perform a function. Even the most complicated video games could be reduced to 4-bit pixels, but why would anyone want that? Ultimately, though, it would be far more interesting than most video games that had wonderful graphics but no goal for the user to aspire to.

On the other side, aesthetic-oriented artwork serves little practical utility. A painting might cover a whole on the wall, but so would an empty canvas. A painting is special not for what it does, but for what it represents to us. The same, I'd guess, could be said of lyricless music.

Somewhere in between lies narrative art because it serves as a way to communicate concrete ideas or emotions. Those that set out to communicate emotions fall more on the aesthetic/art side of the spectrum and those that set out to communicate ideas on the utilitarian/craft side. They use pleasing or disturbing images and expressions as a sort of an enzyme that helps us break down whatever medicine they are trying to serve. Ayn Rand novels are famously crafty in their attempts to get the reader to comprehend certain ideas, without which the story would lose a great deal of its heft. Nora Ephron movies, on the other hand, primarily exist to elicit an emotional response and the story collapses if it fails to achieve that goal.

The spectrum, I think, runs more than just right to left. Crappy works implements neither art nor craft or (more likely) tries to implement one, the other, or both, and fails miserably. In the best of art, utilitarian craft and artistic vision feed off one another to create something greater that is amazing in both its artistry and its craftsmanship.

Video games, by-and-large, fall quite short of the latter category compared to other artistic expressions because very little seems to get through except the experience. I have no lack of admiration for those that draft video games, but my admiration comes from the logistician in me rather than the artist.