Movie Critic Gets Thumbs Down From Game Critic

Roger Ebert brought the wrath of an entire industry down on himself by declaring that video games are not art. Well, after author Clive Barker called him out on it, Mr. Ebert clarified his statement. Video games will never be high art was the new mantra from the man who reviews movies. Knowing the people who make up the video game fan base, this was never going to fly either. Who will step up next to defend our medium from the realm of art mediocrity? N'gai Croal, Newsweek superblogger, to the rescue of gamers everywhere.

Wow. Only two paragraphs into his column, Ebert proceeds to dismiss an entire medium in just five sentences--two rhetorical questions; a list; and an assertion--none of which display much familiarity with the subject. Ebert knows roughly how many games he's played; were the number high enough for him to speak authoritatively, he'd have said so. It's no accident that the one game he cites by name is Myst, because that 13-year-old title--whose reputation is somewhat tattered as befits its stature as one of this emerging medium's evolutionary dead ends--is probably the last game that he played for any meaningful length of time.

If someone went on a jeremiad about the current state of movies, but the last movie they'd seen was the 1994 flick "The Specialist," I doubt that Ebert would take them seriously. Similarly, if someone were to attack the entire medium of film on the grounds that they tend to involve (1) romance and comedy, (2) action and suspense and (3) don't do a good job of portraying characters' interior lives, Ebert would likely be dismissive. Yet he feels quite comfortable making pronouncements about videogames whose sweep is matched only by their ignorance.

Oh, and he's just getting started.