Smokescreen said:
I think you have a very different media landscape, too, and it's worth considering how long film existed as media before someone of Ebert's caliber came along--and how long Ebert WORKED for it.
I think that's the most important point. It isn't that games can't be an art form, whatever that is, it's that essentially we're still in the black and white silent film era. Okay maybe we're at the early talkie stage, but we still have a lot of miles to go before we're looked on as any sort of art form by the general public.
But that's another thing when you compare games to other modern art forms such as film. Games haven't really been as accessible as film nor has there been any sort of cultural progression like what proceeded film.
Let me explain what I mean. We started with radio which at first was pretty primitive but also had a low entrance cost. So low that you could actually build your own AM receiver, still can for that matter. Add to that the fact that the broadcasts were ad revenue sponsored and therefore free it's not surprising that listening to the radio became a national pastime. This in fact produced the social concept of people gathering together to listen to a popular radio program. Then films started to come on the scene, still a fairly low cost of ownership, while for the audience anyway. As well it was an extension of the radio's ability to bring groups of people together to be entertained. Then of course this all progressed to T.V. which was basically a free theater in your own home in a very similar form to radio.
There is a common theme running in each of these "art forms" they're all designed for passive consumption by large number of people at the same time for a relatively low cost, and there's been a logical progression from one type of media to the next.
Games are different, they're not passive, and even in a MMO they're not really designed with hundreds of players in mind, they have a high cost of ownership (even the so called free ones) when you consider both hardware and software, and lastly they're unlike anything that's come before. I guess you could say tabletop games were the forerunners to video games, but they were in the same sense that books and theater were the forerunners to our more modern entertainment forms. And consider the average market for tabletop games, compared to the one for books and the theater before radio became available.
Video games won't really reach a point where they would be considered a modern art form by most people till they penetrate our society to the point where anyone over the age of 14 doesn't feel somehow silly when they say they play. Where videogame competitions are seen as real serious contests by the general public instead of just games. Till that point is reached there just isn't enough general interest to sustain a public personality/critic like Ebert.
