An Apology for Roger Ebert

[Music] this is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia the systematic defense of an opinion or position it's a defense of Roger Ebert the pillager prize-winning film critic for the New York the Chicago sun-times who for little over five years ago annoyed our industry by declaring that quote video games can never be art for those few of you unacquainted with this controversy I'll spend just a few minutes recounting what happened it all started with a bad movie on October 21st 2005 Universal released its adaptation of the classic first-person shooter game Doom I didn't see doom but Roger Ebert

did he rewarded the movie 1 star in his review he wrote quote towards the end of the movie there is a lengthy point of view shot looking forward over the barrel of a large weapon monsters jump out from behind things and are blasted to death in a sequence that abandons all attempts at character and dialogue and uncannily resembles a video game few days later a reader from Missouri responded on Ebert's blog he wrote that doom the movie is doomed the game brought to the screen without messing around too much with the original doom works as a tribute because it fails so utterly as a movie Ebert's reply was terse there are sites on the web devoted to video games and they review movies on their terms I review them on mine unfortunately Ebert couldn't resist

throwing in just one more zinger quote as long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book on read I will continue to be unable to find time to play video games the response from gamers was prompt hundreds of indignant blog comments poured in from everywhere at first Ebert seemed willing to discuss his opinion when a reader from Denver asked are you implying that books are better mediums or just better uses of your time Ebert responded I believe books and films are better mediums and better uses of my time but how could I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbender azu Hertzog Scorsese and Kurosawa and have recently read novels by Dickens Cormac McCarthy velone avakov and Hugo and if there were video

games in the same league someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense the comments increased in volume and temperature on November 27th a reader wrote I was saddened to read that you consider video games and inherently inferior medium was not film itself once a new field of art did it not also take decades for its respectability to be recognized Ebert responded yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature there is a structural reason for this video games by their nature require player choices which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film in literature which requires authorial control he continued I am

prepared to believe that video games can be elegant subtle sophisticated challenging and visually wonderful 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 or composed 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 cultivated civilized and empathetic after this aside from an occasional snark EEB art appeared how to have written everything he cared to say on the subject now to many of you this issue probably seems like a thoroughly dead horse I thought it was dead too not

because anything was actually decided mind you but because after nearly 5 years of table pounding everyone seemed tired of arguing about it oh is this one off now hold on they're switching me to higher technology [Applause] can you hear me sound better good but a few weeks after GDC ended last March the flame war erupted again the fuse was a TEDx lecture by Kelly Santiago co-founder and president of that game

company her lecture was titled stopped the debate video games are art so what's next she cited three games Wako resurrection braid and her own company's flower as examples of games that she believes already qualify as art a video of her lecture appeared on YouTube some trouble maker recommended it to Roger Ebert on April 16th Ebert posted a critique of Santiago's lecture under the blunt headline videogames can never be art he dismissed Waco Resurrection braid and the flower as quote pathetic and sternly predicted that no video gamer now alive will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form thousands of comments followed nearly all of them in fierce protest finally on the first of July just before the call for

submissions to this conference was announced Ebert posted what again seemed to be his final word on the subject under the title ok kids play on my lawn Ebert wrote I declared as an axiom that video games can never be art I still believe this but I should never have said so he went on to admit that his arguments might be more convincing if he actually bothered to play some games he also appeared to back Pitts backpedal a little bit he wrote what I was saying is that video games could not in principle be art that was a foolish position to take particularly as its to apply to the entire unseen future of games it is quite possible that a game could someday be art his weary conclusion I have books and movies to see I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place having heard

all this you may be wondering what is there left to defend Ebert caved he admitted games couldn't be art eventually didn't he given enough time anything not impossible is inevitable right well maybe but that's not the part of our Ebert's argument I'm here to defend I'm here because of this sentence 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 Kellee Santiago conceded this point in the first 60 seconds of her TEDx lecture and as Ebert himself never tired of pointing out not one of the thousands of comments he received seriously attempted any such comparison now although I'm not as experienced as Roger Ebert experienced being a polite euphemism for elderly I'm no spring chicken either my

formal education is English I've read many of the great books in our language and in other languages in translation I've also watched a number of great movies seen a number of great paintings and sculptures and heard a lot of fine music although never as much as I would like I've also been in the video game industry for nearly 30 years unlike mr. Ebert I have played many of the games widely regarded as great and seminal I have the privilege privilege of knowing many of the author's personally but as much as I admire games like mule balance of power SimCity and civilization it would never even occur to me to compare them to the treasures of world literature painting or music and I'm pretty sure the authors of those particular games wouldn't presume to either why are some people in this industry so anxious about wrapping

themselves in the mantle of great art it occurred to me that an art museum might be a really good place to think about this as it happens there's a really good art museum just a few blocks east of Worcester Polytechnic I find myself in the galleries of wam the Worcester Art Museum wandering among the Monet's and mayonnaise Matisse's and Magritte's one canvas in particular caught my eye it was painted in 1730 by James Northcote a member of the British Royal Academy of Arts Northcutt was amazingly prolific over 2,000 works are attributed to him he painted historic and current news events Eames in the Bible classic literature together with hundreds of portraits it was his animal paintings that attracted the most attention though Northcutt made a fortune with his dramatic depictions of jungle cats elephants dogs and birds a rival artist Henry Fuseli is said to have a marked

Northcutt you are an angel and an ass but an ass and an angel this Northcutt in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum is not for the most part about animals the chess players sosa shows a pair of gentlemen pondering over an endgame there's a boy standing behind one of the players and a little dog sitting in a corner if you've studied this painting for a while you'll notice a couple of interesting details for one thing the chess players are clearly not the center of attention they dressed in dark sober colors that recede into the space of the painting by contrast the boy appears in blazing gold it looks as if he's under a spotlight yet he shows no interest in the chess game his attention is directed away from the world of the painting in fact he appears to be staring directly at you the viewer in his left hand is a sheet of paper covered with undecipherable characters

his right finger appears to be pointing at something but what the sheet of paper the head of the man beside him what's that stupid little dog doing there well we'll probably never know everyone connected with the creation of this painting has been dead for generations I spent a long time sitting in front of the chess players on the bench the elements of his painting came to symbolize for me the predicament I faced by choosing to defend Roger Ebert at the biggest game conference in the world the two chess players are like the game industry self-absorbed satisfied confident that they will soon are in their place among the fine arts if they haven't already and the golden boy is art itself silently watching us pointing at a secret he longs to share in

preparing this lecture I plow through a 700 page anthology of Western art philosophy including the writings of Plato Aristotle plotless Augustine Franchino Kant shelling Hegel Schopenhauer Shaftesbury Croce Nietzsche Dewey and Heidegger I also read a deadly boring book on twentieth-century aesthetic theory including the writings of whites Dickie and Dan toe nowhere in 25 centuries of philosophy did I find a single author who regarded games or sports as a form of art when they mentioned it all they dismissed as a pastime harmless at best an evil destroyer of youth at worst now it's true then a number of art museums include antique toys and games in their exhibits some of them including occasionally MoMA the Whitney and soon the Smithsonian even display antique videogames it's also true that games usually dice or cards have often been the subject or theme of great art I

found a website with over 220 pictures of people playing chess and it doesn't even include this one by Northcote it's also true that certain twentieth-century art movements including Dada Fluxus and new games incorporated rules and play into their works these are remembered now chiefly academics except for Fluxus which is famous because one of its members married a Beatle and you'll occasionally come across a philosopher or artist who admires the playful aspect of games or the elegance of a chess problem some people admire the elegance of math equations too but nobody confuses mathematics with art there are different categories of human activity and that's how philosophy has traditionally regarded art and games categorically different suggesting that a game could be great art is radical on the other hand the idea of great art is itself

somewhat radical it only dates back about 500 years before that art was essentially practical you valued the thing in artwork represented not the artwork itself since that time the definition of art has undergone a continuous evolution as new ideas and technologies appeared this process has never been rapid or easy it took many decades for photography and cinema to earn their places among the Hegelian Fine Arts of painting sculpture poetry and drama music dance and architecture now it's natural and tempting for us to expect the games will follow the same pattern but there's a big difference Photography and cinema where new technologies games are not new they've been part of our culture for thousands of years they're much older than the Bell arts of the Renaissance older than the representational art of the Greeks older than the cave paintings of prehistory by what right to games

suddenly demand the status of great art if chess and go arguably the two greatest games in history have never been regarded as works of art why should missile command our digital games somehow privileged somehow more artistic than analog games or does the fact that video games are now almost as big as dog food somehow entitled them to a free museum pass now before we can proceed any further we need to pause and address the basic semantic problem you knew this was coming all of us even roger ebert can clearly say what a video game is can any of you tell me what great art is trying to define great art is like trying to

define experience we all have an internal sense of what it signifies but articulating it is really difficult and the intellectual fat of relativism makes it practically impossible here's a classic demonstration suppose I'm walking along a beach and come across a stick of driftwood I stop in my tracks I don't touch the driftwood I don't say anything I know point out the trip point to anyone right there in that moment is that driftwood a work of art I pick up the driftwood and without changing it bring it home and put it on my mantelpiece is the driftwood art yet I sign and date the driftwood and send it to an art gallery they put it on a pedestal under a spotlight are we having art yet and our collector buys the driftwood at auction for over a million bucks what did that collector buy let's

play the art game again this time I walk into a plumbing supply shop and pick out a standard white porcelain urinal I sign and date the urinal and ship it to an art gallery is that urinal art I am being completely serious when I inform you that michelle duchamp's fountain is considered by many critics to be the single most influential art work of the 20th century it would probably also be the most valuable art work of the 20th century if it had not been accidentally thrown away with the gallery trash luckily all was not lost no less than 11 authentic replicas individually certified by the artist are available for your contemplation at various art galleries one of these was auctioned in 1999 for 1.7 million dollars a number of so-called performance artists have been

arrested for trying to pee in these replicas most of them are now protected in transparent plastic cases the replica is not the performance artists Duchamp and his so-called ready-mades broke the renaissance idea of art wide open he and generations of so-called conceptual artists changed the focus of Mardin art appreciation instead of aesthetic value the emphasis shifted to novelty value by the 1960s Marshall McLuhan was being only a little cynical when he wrote art is anything you can get away with it seems totally fair to ask if a pisspot can be great art why not a video game another argument for games as art goes something like this video games incorporate and even generate still and moving pictures which everyone agrees can be great art they incorporate and generate writing music

sculptured objects and architecture which can also be great art suppose I design a platformer with backgrounds by Michelangelo black and white characters from aguar Bergman movies pop-up quotations from Shakespeare and music from the well-tempered clavier I call it all your art is belong to us [Music] the presentation of that game is filled with great art games can obviously be a context for presenting great art Roger Ebert admits this but is this enough does artistic presentation make a game art of course it doesn't none of you would presume to call that game art unless you had a chance to play it first or at least watch somebody else playing it the identity of a game emerges from its mechanics and affordances not the presentation that supports them but can an arrangement of mechanics and affordances rules and goals itself

constitute a work of art before you stream yes explain to me why chess is not regarded as a work of art before you scream it is ask yourself are we so willing to dismiss the wisdom of Ages to flatter ourselves does it even make sense to speak of mechanics and affordances apart from presentation is it that all one piece or is it all just mathematics with a sprinkle of positive psychology the gamification is certainly seem to think so it's hard for anybody even so-called experts to agree on what constitutes great art back in 1900 the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium around the edges of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques three on the left three on the right and three across the top the plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers we can imagine the names that

were being thrown around no Bach Mozart hailed and Hyden Brahms but when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored the trustees couldn't make up their minds and so for the past 111 years visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques only one at the very top of the stage contains a name the only one the trustees could all agree on Beethoven everyone has their own taste right beauty is in the eye of the beholder this commonplace was noted by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant who strongly criticized it his argument went like this if you declare that something gives you pleasure nobody can argue with you subjective pleasure is absolutely in the eye of the beholder assuming that the eye is the organ involved but if you

announce that something is beautiful you have made a public value judgment you've identified that thing as a source of pleasure that can be enjoyed by anyone in making such a declaration you exercise the Faculty known as taste it makes no sense to say that everyone has their own taste this is tantamount to claiming there's no common pleasure at all only personal pleasure but our everyday experience tells us that's not true people agree that objects are pleasant or unpleasant all the time psychologists even have a fancy technical term for this kind of agreement when an emotion is shared by more than one person they call it intersubjectivity certain people make it their business to exercise taste these people are called pinkies up connoisseurs if it connoisseurs disinterested exercise of taste earns the agreement of many over time he or she is called an expert such an expert is Roger Ebert here is a point I hope we

can all agree on Roger Ebert knows movies he's been writing about them since the 1960s he's reviewed hundreds and hundreds of films in print on the web and on television and published over a dozen books it's no exaggeration to call him one of the world's best-known and most widely read film critics his opinion about the relationship between video games and art may be plausibly dismissed as uninformed he admits this he admits that he doesn't play video games it doesn't even want to play them nevertheless most of us would hesitate to dismiss his opinion on the relationship between movies and art so what does the tasteful expert connoisseur Roger Ebert have to say about the relationship between cinema and art he says this hardly any movies are art okay maybe Roger was

having a bad day let's move right along to another one of the world's great film critics here's what the late Pauline Kael wrote about the relationship between movies and art listen carefully quote there is so much talk now about the art of a film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them so here we have two of the world's great film critics sadly assuring us that most movies are not great art defining great art apparently won't be enough we also have to figure out how to distinguish great art from trash but first let's set aside a couple of issues regarding the word art in English the word art has several meanings in one sense art is used as a synonym for craft any artifact made by an artist son is a

kind of art in another sense any exercise of skill any practice can be spoken of as an art the art of cooking the art of war the art of motorcycle maintenance in these sentence in these senses the products and practices of game making are obviously qualifying as art but Ebert and Kael weren't using art in either of those sentences when Ebert refers to art he means and actually spells art with a capital a great art fine art or the term I prefer sublime art art that deeply rewards a lifetime of contemplation art that's good for you the kind of art that in Ebert's words makes us more cultivated civilized and empathetic well that kind of talk has earned mr. Ebert that most deadly of anti intellectual epithets elitist

the horror novelist Clive Barker led the mob dismissing Ebert as quote an arrogant old man pompous high-handed while adding if the experience moves you some way or another even if it only moves your bowels I think it's worthy of some serious study hey it made you laugh he's right it is art many people seem to share Barker's belief that the function of art is to elicit emotion to make you feel things to move people let's quickly dispose of this last April the US Supreme Court ruled that videos of small animals being deliberately stopped to death was a constitutionally protected form of free speech would you like to see one of these videos if I press that play button I promise

you will experience strong emotion stock videos may make me feel things but I reject them as art and I look forward to the highest court's opinion on whether or not video games are also constitutionally protected speech the function of art is not merely to elicit emotion a slip on a banana peel can do that the function not the purpose the function of all art high or low from angry birds to Hellraiser to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is attraction art has no practical purpose nobody needs art why wouldn't anybody bother to make art that nobody would be attracted to but how do we distinguish sublime attractions from the common attractions pauline kael dismisses as trash why do even and kael believe that very few movies are sublime art and how can either predict with such confidence that

no video game is ever likely to be sublime art without even playing any and if he's wrong if a game really can be sublime art why hasn't anybody made one such are the questions I pondered as I sat before it's chess players it seemed to me as I studied the painting that there are three reasons why video games have failed to deliver sublime art these reasons are neatly symbolized by the three major elements of the painting the most obvious has been staring you in the face since two o'clock it's not the chess players it's not the golden boy or his secret if he has won it's the dog we don't know who if anyone commissioned this painting from Northcote but if it was a commission we can say one thing with a high degree of certainty whoever it was had plenty of money in the early 18th century when the chess players was painted there were generally two classes of people in Europe the well-to-do and

the near starving get used to it we'll be there again soon most 18th century people didn't worry about buying paintings it was all they could do to keep their families alive but things got a little better in the 19th century political changes urbanization improvements in mass production and education gave rise to what we now call the middle class these people had enough money to keep their families reasonably comfortable with a little money left over the occasional small luxury as their social standing improved the petit bourgeois wanted some of the things that rich people enjoyed like books nice clothes and decorated homes so around the 1860s or 70s a market developed catering to their limited budgets and tastes they still couldn't afford commissioned art but there were plenty of second-rate painters happy to provide a quick knockoff to hang over the fireplace

these paintings resembled grade art picturesque landscapes idyllic domestic scenes portraits of celebrities the art dealers of Munich were apparently the first to nickname this new mass-market art some scholars think it was a mispronunciation of the English word sketch others claimed it was a contraction of a German verb which means to make cheaply whatever its origin by the 1920s this nickname had become the International expression for those pink flamingos velvet Elvis's and adorable puppy dogs we all know and love as Kitsch quite a few books have been written about the aesthetics of Kitsch one of the best is by thomas colca of tel aviv university Kolka argues that Kitsch is not bad art he sees it as a unique aesthetic category a special kind of art characterized by three properties one

hitch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions Kitsch is about simple feelings Universal ideas good and evil happy and sad your response to these ideas is automatic you know how you're supposed to feel about sad clowns James Dean and horses running along a windswept beach in fact part of the appeal of kitsch seems to lie precisely in recognizing that as you look at it you're feeling the way you're supposed to hich validates you to the objects our theme depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable kitsch art is utterly conventional there's never any doubt about what it is you're looking at it's a leprechaun and only a leprechaun it's Santa Claus and only Santa Claus

kitsch art is surface art it's just what you expect three and most important hitch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes the last thing Kitsch wants to be is challenging pure kitsch is never ironic ambiguous troubling or innovative hitch art is popular art and nearly all popular art is kitsch our mass-market culture is so thoroughly imbued with kitsch it's the own kind of art many people ever experience Broadway musicals theme parks casinos rock stars cable news all Kitsch all advertising is Kitsch all media driven by advertising devolves into Kitsch

sequels spin-offs knockoffs reboots and adaptations from other media are automatically Kitsch politics thrives on Kitsch and Roger Ebert has spent over 40 years in dark theaters sitting through thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of shameless hollywood kitsch could anyone be more familiar with what happens when you apply commercial pressure to popular art is there anyone on the planet more qualified to predict that videogames will suffer the same fate listen to this review of call of duty black ops published in The New York Times a few days after it was released last December quote I never play video games twice but call of duty black ops has made a happy liar out of me I wanted to try to assassinate Fidel Castro again and break out of a Soviet prison camp

again and pilot a gun boat through the Mekong Delta again shooting ups and pans while listening to sympathy for the devil the Cold War has never been so much fun black ops does not really innovate but it doesn't have to rather it reflects a keen intelligence in a rigorous discipline understanding of each individual element of modern game design it then executes son delivers in a way that demonstrates how well oil the game making machine Robert a cultic Activision's chief executive has created call of duty black ops made more money faster than any entertainment product in history how by depicting instantly identifiable themes highly charged with stock emotions by not trying to enrich players associations with those themes

by not innovating video games are an industry you are attending a giant industry conference industries make products video game products contain plenty of art but it's product art which is to say kitsch art kitsch art is not bad art it's commercial art art designed to be sold easily and in quantity and the bigger the audience the kitschy or it's gonna get hich is a risk reduction strategy a risk reduction strategy time-tested and good for business kitsch is robust details of execution don't matter very much you can change the parameter T but sublime art is fragile it lives or dies

in the details there's nothing superfluous or out of place as author CS Lewis wrote that word and no other in that place and no other caches like Duchamp's urinal you flush it when you're done using it Kitsch is fundamentally standard and when standards change it first becomes irrelevant and then corny and finally the subject of nostalgia sublime art is either always relevant or not at all it is never the subject of nostalgia but often the subject of discovery pitch can be brilliantly executed wonderfully entertaining and culturally significant it is often mistaken for great art and awarded with honors especially by those industries that specialize in it one way to deal with the overwhelming prevalence of

Kitsch is to celebrate it while you're here in the city take a trolley up to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill down in the sub sub-basement you'll find one of the best surviving examples of 40s Tiki Kitsch the Tonga room yes the food and the Tonga room is practically inedible but after the second fall after the second faux Polynesian umbrella cocktail served in a real pineapple you won't care in the middle of the room there's an artificial pond with a little island that floats around a band on the island plays tinkly pop music but here's the best part every hour there's a simulated tropical thunderstorm it rains around the edge of the pond the Tonga room is delightful I smile when I walk in there and I'm smiling even more and I leave the technical term for the celebration

of kitsch is camp welcome to San Francisco the camp capital of the world ultimately though camp is an evasive strategy camp embraces Kitsch but refuses to the commit to the risk of creating art we shouldn't expect publicly traded game studios to produce anything but Kitsch but what about the Indies Indies are small and nimble their stockholders are the employees they can afford to risk creating art right well that's the fantasy in reality and these are under the same commercial pressures as the big studios they have a little more wiggle room for innovation and risk but only a little and if they fail they have no cushion if anything there's even more pressure never to fail as a result most Indies secretly or not so secretly

aspire to produce authentic-looking kitc kitchen with an edge if they're good but kitsch nevertheless the well-oiled game making machines manufacture kitsch the indie struggle to imitate them who's left to create sublime art the people who create art anyway the artists if anyone is going to pone Roger Ebert they'll probably be the ones to do it there is genuine hope there but there is also a subtle danger if you consciously set out trying to make an art game it is possible that you will instead create an arty game a game with the trappings of sublime art solemn themes classical music literary quotations participation from artistic celebrities from other media these things don't necessarily

make a game artistic I should know I've tried them all but this warning should not be taken as an excuse never to try many embarrassing failures would be worth the effort if they culminated in a single authentic work of art the dog is in the painting because whoever bought the painting asked for a dog but the kids that dogs our industry isn't the only reason we fail to produce sublime art consider again the two chess players masters of the game all art forms depend on mastery painters sculptures writers musicians filmmakers and architects are required tools instructions and years and years of hard actual practice we gain developers and no different but we are at a distinct disadvantage the tools and Technology we work with are and always have been slippery in 1894 Thomas Edison

and William Dixon introduced the Kinetoscope you would used plastic 35 millimeter film perforated on both sides each image frame occupied for perforations the film ran vertically to the camera and projector at a speed of about 16 frames per second within a few years Edison's 35 millimeter film standard became the worldwide de facto type of film cameras and projectors improved a few minor changes were made for the M Trent introduction of sound but the basic format the fundamental engineering parameters controlling the design production distribution and exhibition of movies remained virtually unchanged for over a hundred and fifteen years compare this to the first four decades of video gaming dozens of computer architectures seven generations of consoles zero uniformity and processing power memory resolution color space or audio a bewildering array of platforms from cell phones to pimped up alien wares

now let's talk about the business of video games during the five years I worked at Lucasfilm the management of the games division changed six times acquisitions layoffs cancellations closing studio doors lawsuits you've all been there how could a potential artist hope to accumulate any deep practice in this maelstrom hopefully create and such an atmosphere the third reason why video games have failed as a sublime art is the most subtle the most speculative and maybe the most important is their as Roger Ebert suggested a structural intrinsic reason why video games cannot be sublime art let's turn again to the golden boy as you meet his haughty gaze let me read you some of the things Roger Ebert has written about video games and art quote I believe art is created by an

artist if you change it you become the artist quote art cease to lead you to an inevitable conclusion not a smorgasbord of choices quote video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultivated civilized and empathetic at one point Clive Barker pleaded with him I'm just saying the gaining is a great way to do what we as human beings need to do all the time to take ourselves away from the oppressive facts of our lives and go somewhere where we have our own control Ebert's retort to this was I see I do not have a need all the time to take myself away from the oppressive facts of my life however oppressive they may be in order to go somewhere where I have control I need to stay here and take control these

quotes are Boulder sized clues as to Ebert's sensibilities he objects to the idea of self-directed effort as a means of experiencing art he sees the intention of a single artist as primary he speaks of inevitability he's jealous of his free time those precious hours he has left for cultivation he sees art not as an escape from life but a way to understand and accept life as it is no doubt about it roger ebert is like me a hopeless romantic arthur schopenhauer is the philosopher most closely associated with Romanticism do you think roger ebert succumb budgin where do you meet Schopenhauer when he was appointed lecturer at the University of Berlin in 1820 the faculty included the world-famous philosopher Georg Hegel

the young Schopenhauer considered Hegel to be quote a clumsy charlatan he scheduled his lectures at exactly the same time as Hegel's to draw his students away well it didn't work his classrooms are empty he eventually left academia and discussed Schopenhauer once wrote that marriage is like quote reaching blindfolded into a sack hoping to find an eel among the snakes he was also an atheist he did not believe in a personal I'm nipa than God instead Schopenhauer believed that the essence of the universe is being a blind irrational unquenchable first to exist he called will zoom Leoben and that everything we perceive is a representation of this will to live because we ourselves are products of

will we spend most of our lives trapped in a cycle of striving and boredom we're constantly willing ourselves to attain our goals but when we do attain them we're disappointed and move on to something else again and again until the final disappointment of death to Schopenhauer free will and real choice were cruel illusions and desire a prison Schopenhauer does have a reputation for being pessimistic but he really wasn't because he also believed that there's a way to leap off the wheel of desire that way is the contemplation the contemplation of sublime art sublime art is the door to our perspective on reality that transcends will it frees us

from the agony of contingency and causality and gives us a brief precious glimpse of what we really are one thing already complete and perfectly ambiguous Bob Dylan echoed Schopenhauer when he said that the purpose of art is to stop time to Schopenhauer the creation of sublime art was the noblest of human undertakings and artists especially musicians were the high priests of civilization not surprisingly a lot of 19th century artists really like this guy Brahms Tolstoy Mahler Proust Einstein Freud and Jung were all strongly influenced by Schopenhauer recut vogner was practically a disciple if we could go back now and ask

Schopenhauer whether or not a game any game could become a sublime work of art how would he respond he'd probably just patch on the shoulder shake his head and chuckle why is this as you all know games are about choices Sid Meier famously defined games as a series of interesting choices and choice is a fundamental expression of will how can an activity motivated by decision-making striving goals and competition a deliberate concentration of the force of will be used to transcend will itself you might as well try to smother a flame with oxygen game designers are taught that the ideal player experience is something called flow flow is that mad

chuckles state of highly focused motivation a kind of skating on the fine edge of effort and challenge flow leads to a state of euphoric exhilaration bow before she sent me high in Poppins the prophets of flow game flow is work made fun flow keeps you joyfully working even in your free time you heard it here first game flow will be the harness of the new labor class flow is painless effort but pain management is not the business of art and trance meant is not insight flow is an aesthetic in my digital game design one class I define play as superfluous

activity i define a toy as something that elicits play and a game as a toy with rules and a goal games are purposeful they are defined as the exercise of choice and will towards a self maximizing goal but sublime art is like a toy it elicits play in the soul and the pleasure we get from it lies precisely in the fact that it has no rules no goal no purpose Oscar Wilde was not being flippant when he wrote all art is quite useless if the romantics were right if the purpose of sublime art is to solve the mystery of choice it's hard to see how goal chasing can be anything but a distraction we can admire an elegant game design from the

outside like a museum game under glass but once you enter we zingers magic circle and start groping at preferences the attitude of calm radical acceptance necess sorry to cultivate insight is lost the concert pianist glenn gould characterized the romantic conception of sublime art most vividly when he wrote the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow externalized public manifestations the purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is rather the gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity the conference

program promised that I would offer you my own definition of art here it is in all its moldy old romantic splendor sublime art is the still advocate of the inexpressible if these definitions of art do not speak to you ignore them time is on your side but if they do speak to you beware you too may someday be dismissed as a tiresome old fool who doesn't get it games have been good to me I love playing them and I love giving my students a space to learn about them an hour or two spent playing Defense Grid or plants vs. zombies isn't a waste of time there's nothing wrong with recreation we

need it I need it it's good for me but when I feel the need for reflection for insight wisdom or consolation I turn my computer's off these needs are the ambit of the sublime arts which are inspired and informed by philosophy and by faith all sublime art is devotional 24 gain developers conferences ago I sat in Chris Crawford's living room together with a few dozen other young hopefuls and imagined a future in which video games would be recognized as a great art form as important as the movies they reviewed every week on Siskel and Ebert look at us video games are now bigger than movies

but they didn't need to be great art to get here they just needed to be great fun you can argue that this kitschy dog spoils the effect of North gets painting but I've come to kind of like the little guy he keeps the chess players and the golden boy from taking themselves too seriously I'm told that the Fairmont is tearing down the old Tonga room pretty soon to make way some some for some fancy new high-tech condos tell you what what do you say we all go up there right now one more time raise a few my ties to Roger Ebert share a few laughs and listen to the rain thank you

thank you very much you