The comic strip points at the fundamental issue with the discussion of the "high art" or "work of art" as composition status with so called video games.
Like a lot of polemic rubbish in the academic and pseudo academic circles the discourse of this comic starts with a statement rather than an argument and then engages in an exercise of re-framing or re-contextualization. This is accomplished by introducing some form of relativism such as, the academic has no experience with "video games" and as such he or she's opinion is invalid. If this is not an outright straw man it is an unjustified assumption.
Just as "Critical Miss" calls into question the educational/experiential status of the academic on the subject of "video games" the same is said by the academic (especially the art history professional) as to the knowledge possessed by the "video game" consumer as it relates to literary theory, art history, art as a practiced and studied skill, serious study of art movements, and last but not least, the artist or lay person's ability to discuss those movements. Additionally due to the tremendous amount of technology that is leveraged in these software installations a question can easily be begged as to "what extent" the artist or lay consumer is capable of discussing or even understanding the very formal systems in which their work is being created on.
Art, begs an Artist, so who are these artist of these works? Are you able to name them, are you able to name the people responsible for the particular bits you found particularly interesting in a particular title?
The discussion then falls into an appeal to "reason" or "reasonable" definition of "art". This is fine, assuming that one has bothered to provide a definition without appealing to "common sense". This simple mechanism works in that by declining to accept the "appeal" to an undefined definition or appeal to an unqualified authority, "Critical Miss" takes the high road of the rational and sensible and as such dismisses the discourse out of hand in much the same fashion as the original unjustified assumption or straw man did.
The trouble is the academic perceives this lazy appeal for what it is a lazy appeal paving the red carpet road into the conformation bias.
The academic, heavily schooled in the polemic, will consistently undermine all attempts by the pseudo academic to establish some form of ontological primacy leveraging any particular game as being art. This continues ad absurdum until the discussion tangents into the "value" of art. Now that the boundaries of the term have been expanded to the absurd and everything has becomes art the term becomes
cognitively meaningless as it relates to the statement "video games = art".
Video Game "Art" is now linguistically categorized as Artifice, essentially products produced by the hard working indigenous people of "wherever", crafted products specifically designed to market at the mass audience consumer level.
Right back to the syllogistic merry go round, one finds oneself looking at the
art of video games rather than any specific product or work as "a work of art compositionally".
Once the term has become meaningless it becomes impossible to establish an epidemiological structure to evaluate a work critically. If the work cannot be evaluated by any sort of studied measure there will emerge no legitimate critic of the works.
To answer Warren Spector on the subject, no video game has yet to have been devised that could withstand the rigor of a critical analysis.
As Ebert conceded, they are "art" in the sense that they are kitsch and camp, mired in the dada movement and suffering from all the same syllogistic problems of that movement. Postmodern art has yet to get out of it... Eventually Ebert noted that most "films" where not (high/composition works) of art as well... go figure.
If the audience has no experience outside of a comic book and video game popular culture then video games are "art" (in that limited context) but the ability by those consumers to articulate a convincing argument within the greater context of human arts is seriously lacking.
My provisional hypothesis is that the vast majority of consumer and fan of "video games" simply do not command a useful knowledge beyond that limited perception and experience that they have grown up on for the last 100 years in dada.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_as_an_art_form
In a 2006 interview with US Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, well-known game designer, Hideo Kojima announced that he agreed with Ebert's assessment that video games are not art. Kojima acknowledged that games may contain artwork, but he stressed the intrinsically popular nature of video games in contrast to the niche interests served by art. Since the highest ideal of all video games is to achieve 100% player satisfaction whereas art is targeted to at least one person, Kojima argued that video game creation is more of a service than an artistic endeavor.
If Kojima (and others) put this to bed back in 2006 (and this discussion is old), one has a lot of work to do if one plan to "actually" make an argument to the contrary.
