The Ebert of Videogames

[The Random One]

Does the gaming public want artsy ruminations and anecdote-driven analysis of intent and craft? Do people want to talk about kinesthetics, ludonarrative dissonance, narrative mechanics, gamification, and power creep?

Why yes, Mr. Young, I do read Rock Paper Shotgun. Why do you ask?

 

[TAdamson]

List of people who talk intelligently about video games.

- MrBtongue (Tasteful Understated Nerdrage)

- Chris Franklin AKA Campster (Errant Signal)

People who write intelligently about video games.


?????????? Shamus Young????? But he mostly rants about stupid plot doors, or plot armor.

 

[Woodsey]

Most people know who Spector is, but if you're too young to remember a world before Pokemon, then a little refresher: Wing Commander, Thief, System Shock, and Ultima. And if THOSE aren't familiar to you then I shudder to imagine what they're not teaching you in history class these days.
Read more at http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/10492-The-Ebert-of-Videogames?utm_source=latest&utm_medium=index_carousel&utm_campaign=all#YWXq5wrXmDzcZGxR.99

*cough* Deus Ex. *cough*

Does the gaming public want artsy ruminations and anecdote-driven analysis of intent and craft? Do people want to talk about kinesthetics, ludonarrative dissonance, narrative mechanics, gamification, and power creep?

Why yes, Mr. Young, I do read Rock Paper Shotgun. Why do you ask?

RPS don't really do it all that much. They're good for having some perspective on all the Call of Duty-type bullshit and such but they're not all that academic about the medium.

Video games are nowhere near deserving a Roger Ebert. Slow down folks. If you compare video games to the timeline of cinema here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation) is where video games are at.

Different medium, different world. Trying to compare the progress of video games to the progress of cinema is like trying to fuck thin air. (Pointless.)

Having said that, just running with the idea that gaming will eventually "deserve" an Ebert, it's slightly paradoxical to claim that gaming is currently not "deserving" of its Ebert when Roger Ebert is often credited (at least in part) with legitimising film criticism - i.e. gaming would need to appear largely "undeserving" to have someone come along and make it "deserving".

 

[EightGaugeHippo]

We don't need an Ebert.
And by that I mean, we don't need someone telling us what can and cannot be art, art is subjective.

I shall decide what I think is art, I will then proceed to appreciate it.

I feel no need to justify my hobby with the words of another. I don't need recognition or legitimizing, because I'm having too much fun playing games to care.

 

[GamerKT]

The closest we have is Adam Sessler, I think.

 

[Darkness665]

Well, Ebert may or may not have gotten hate mail. I have gotten nasty comments from reviewing games that I was not a FanBoi of on Amazon. Pretty silly overall.

Ebert is a great writer and I loved going back over some of his articles I missed or from before I first found his print work. He does explain many things, allows that there are other reasons to watch or enjoy a movie than his personal favorites. He doesn't dictate what you watch or how to enjoy it but he does broaden the experience for everyone.

Besides you, Yahtzee and Ben Kuchera there are very few in the industry that I am willing to read on a regular basis. If one of you aren't Ebert then at the very least the three of you are.

 

[Gezzer]

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.

 

[Casual Shinji]

We already have plenty of videogame Eberts. The problem is that they're being drowned out by everyone else with a Youtube account. Roger Ebert was mainly staying in the picture because of his pre-internet legacy.

We live in an age where media gets consumed by the bucket loads. By the time I finished writing this post I'll likely have watched 5 or so videos on Youtube. Red Letter Media made a good point in one of their reviews, that the more media options we get, the more everything will blur together, and the less anything special will stick out in our minds for very long.

 

[wulfgar_red]

There are few palaces that are above average:

MrBtongue
Bunnyhopshow
Errant Signal
Spoiler Warring/Diecast
Zero Punctuation
Extra Credits

IGNs, Gamspots, Gamestars, (...) those are just advertisements sites

 

[Second World]

I think it'd be quite grand if Extra Consideration was revived as a weekly segment and included some of the latest reviews and perhaps included escapists outside Yahtzee, MovieBob, and Jim Sterling as regulars. Perhaps the three and someone to add some technical insight?

I imagine that'd be close to Siskel & Ebert. I know Yahtzee must be rather popular and Jim Sterling has a certain nuance of spoken language that's instantly recognizable. Typing "zero" in a search engine often offers "zero punctuation" as one of the top three suggested searches, and it's not like he forcefully extends his sphere of influence like Ebert did.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extraconsideration/

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Watching little clips on the internet is a kind of devolution that you've just gotten used to. Like hunching over to stare into tiny screens that don't deliver content so much as you use them to hunt down little artifacts of content.

Off topic, but this. So much this. I love the additional choice that the internet has given me, and the freedom its given me to consume media on my own schedule instead of that of some network executive, but the thing is, there's no way to channel surf on Youtube, you know? Hulu kind of creates rudimentary channels based on shows you're already watching, but it's so close to totally random that it's not exactly an elegant solution. It's kind of annoying to have to be so active in choosing your flavor of a fundamentally passive medium, and with the reduced chances to stumble upon something randomly, you wind up missing out on a lot of great shows and movies, too.

As for getting a Roger Ebert of gaming: why would I ever want that? We have tons of them, they're called games as art hipsters and they annoy the crap out of me with there incessant attempts to "move the medium forward" by removing everything I love about it and replacing it with things better done in books and movies. I think I speak for everyone who was ever annoyed by an episode of Extra Credits when I say "screw that."

 

[Asimus]

Adam Sessler is pretty close.

 

[Kahani]

The truth here is that gaming is a minority thing

Not even close. The majority of people, in the West and Japan and Korea at least, are gamers.

I know that the budgets of AAA games have gone up massively but they are still smaller than your average summer blockbuster.

There are 16 films that have ever made over $1 billion. Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 2 both made that much in two weeks. And it's not just money. Sticking with Black Ops 2, over 10 million sales in its first month, and millions of people queuing up to buy for a midnight release. There's a reason it's described as the biggest entertainment launch ever - because it was bigger than any film has ever been. And obviously it's not just a couple of popular games that are like this. Wii Sports - over 80 million copies sold. Super Mario Bros, a game originally released in the 80s, has over 40 million copies sold. World of Warcraft is considered to be slipping because it's dropped below 10 million subscribers - not sales, but people who actually pay money every month to carry on playing. Farmville is currently in freefall, and has dropped all the way down to 13 million people playing it every single day. Angry Birds has been downloaded nearly 2 billion times.

Or forget about specific examples and simply look at the industry as a whole [http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry] (from 2008):

Video game industry in the US - $22 billion
Movie industry - $9.5 billion

If you throw in DVD sales as well then video games are still a bit behind, and up to date global figures seem a bit hard to come by. But the idea that video games are still some niche thing not worth the attention of the mainstream press is just ludicrous. Whether they've actually become the biggest sector of the entertainment industry or not, they're certainly very much up there with the big boys.

 

[SandroTheMaster]

Oh, Shamus... didn't you already know? You're our Ebert.

Spoiler

Yeah, I was about to pull the Oz and say to Shamus that our Ebert was inside him all along.

All he needs is the confidence and some stability in his life. If you follow his site, you'd know that now, finally, that last part is a done deal.

Shamus, you can take thick programming vernacular and filter it for the layman. You have a really good thing going on with Spoiler Warning. All you need is to find a way to get some exposure.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Watching little clips on the internet is a kind of devolution that you've just gotten used to. Like hunching over to stare into tiny screens that don't deliver content so much as you use them to hunt down little artifacts of content.

Off topic, but this. So much this. I love the additional choice that the internet has given me, and the freedom its given me to consume media on my own schedule instead of that of some network executive, but the thing is, there's no way to channel surf on Youtube, you know? Hulu kind of creates rudimentary channels based on shows you're already watching, but it's so close to totally random that it's not exactly an elegant solution. It's kind of annoying to have to be so active in choosing your flavor of a fundamentally passive medium, and with the reduced chances to stumble upon something randomly, you wind up missing out on a lot of great shows and movies, too.

As for getting a Roger Ebert of gaming: why would I ever want that? We have tons of them, they're called games as art hipsters and they annoy the crap out of me with there incessant attempts to "move the medium forward" by removing everything I love about it and replacing it with things better done in books and movies. I think I speak for everyone who was ever annoyed by an episode of Extra Credits when I say "screw that."

Point#1. I don't channel surf at all. In fact I sort of look down my nose at folks that do. Including my family.

But TV to me is a guide I can look through to select things to DVR so that I can pick from my DVR list to watch or have on in the background at my leisure. Maybe that's the modern equivalent of surfing. I think with Smart TVs websites can be syndicated into their own TV channels. And then satellite companies can download the channel from the web and then rebroadcast it to everyone's DVRs in a future where every website that could be can be a television channel.

I honestly think games should be delivered just like television too. You DVR the games and play them at your leisure. This is a way to deliver massive amounts of GBs of games without everyone hogging the bandwidth of the internet by having hundreds of GBs delivered directly to them personally. But anyway. It's just easier in my book. I don't have time to be my own agent. And its more practical in bandwidth terms as already mentioned.

Point#2. People who say this probably don't know who Roger Ebert is. In terms of you probably haven't spent a lot of time being in his audience, and you probably don't have a lot of other critics to compare that too if you have. Ebert isn't just a critic. He's a national if not international treasure. Or was. You can't compare him to all the critics of the internet combined. Or anything like that. If a critic badmouths Ebert its either pure jealousy or pure ignorance. It also suggests that the speaker doesn't comprehend the gulf that exists between movies and video games as a whole in terms of diversity depth and cultural relevance.


PS: Just to tack this on for anyone who has read this far down... I will say one thing. I often wonder about people who watch movies in theaters. I wonder frankly if they are mental or what. Because I couldn't imagine watching a movie in a theater, much less paying for it. It would be a complete waste of time. Full of distractions. And heaven forbid you must skip off to the toilet 3 times or even 1 time, well you are screwed and not getting a refund. Never mind that I can hardly sit through a 1 hour movie without picking it up the next day. Why give up the ability to rewind? So I don't understand how Hollywood expects to make money this way. If its profits don't come from royalties on television viewings etc. I don't understand how Hollywood plans to keep this up. Maybe every chair in the theater doubles as a toilet. Or maybe we all go there and watch the movies on glasses at our leisure. Still might as well be spending an afternoon in an insane asylum in my book.

When MovieBob bemoans low attendance I just want to reach out and smack some sense into him.

Point #2 is more about the way Ebert regarded films as an artform, and relayed it in a way that the average person could understand. I don't /want/ games to get more artistic, because games don't do arty all that well, and attempts to force them to be arty tend to result in terrible games. Good art, maybe -- that's totally in the eye of the beholder -- but terrible games. Some people would argue that that's because we haven't discovered how to properly use the medium yet, but I'd say we were doing it right from day one, with titles like Pong and Spacewar. These new "art games" are more like poorly directed movies than good games.

As for point #1, channel surfing when there's nothing you know to be good on is a good way to find cool stuff that you'd otherwise totally pass up. I'm not saying you should never settle on a single program while doing it (it annoys me to no end when I'm watching a show and someone else in the room is trying to watch that and one or two others at the same time and on the same screen), but there's something to be said for flipping through the channels while looking for something to watch, especially during the dead hours of late night, daytime, and to a lesser extent weekend TV.

Also, videogames as TV channels has been done. It's basically how the Bandai Satelliview for the Super Famicom worked, although it was satellite channels instead of cable channels. It wasn't all that great of a system by modern standards because, in true TV fashion, if you wanted to play a new game, you had to play it when it started, or barring that, catch a re-run at some point down the road. Anything that gives the "viewer" more control would for all intents and purposes be a digital distribution service, like Steam and its competitors. As someone who has accounts with a solid half dozen of them, it's a functional method of distributing games. I guess you could go the route Gakai and Onlive use and stream the game from a remote server, but that has its own issues with input lag. No matter how fast they get the data to flow, there's a hard speed limit in the form of the speed of light, which when we're talking about button presses in videogames where milliseconds often count, actually will come into play for anyone not living right down the street from the server.

Edit: Oh, and the theatrical experience is a social experience (if you live in the US, anyway. People in the UK are stodgy and don't do emotions, if their reactions to learning what our theaters are like can be believed) where, unless the theater is absolutely terribly maintained, you've got better sound quality than in the average person's home (although it can typically be beaten by a home theater setup for well under $500, especially if you're good at getting cheap and used components), and a picture that literally cannot be beaten in the home, unless you're so fabulously wealthy you have room for a screen taller than most people's houses.

 

[Albino Boo]

The truth here is that gaming is a minority thing

Not even close. The majority of people, in the West and Japan and Korea at least, are gamers.

I know that the budgets of AAA games have gone up massively but they are still smaller than your average summer blockbuster.

There are 16 films that have ever made over $1 billion. Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 2 both made that much in two weeks. And it's not just money. Sticking with Black Ops 2, over 10 million sales in its first month, and millions of people queuing up to buy for a midnight release. There's a reason it's described as the biggest entertainment launch ever - because it was bigger than any film has ever been. And obviously it's not just a couple of popular games that are like this. Wii Sports - over 80 million copies sold. Super Mario Bros, a game originally released in the 80s, has over 40 million copies sold. World of Warcraft is considered to be slipping because it's dropped below 10 million subscribers - not sales, but people who actually pay money every month to carry on playing. Farmville is currently in freefall, and has dropped all the way down to 13 million people playing it every single day. Angry Birds has been downloaded nearly 2 billion times.

Or forget about specific examples and simply look at the industry as a whole [http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry] (from 2008):

Video game industry in the US - $22 billion
Movie industry - $9.5 billion

If you throw in DVD sales as well then video games are still a bit behind, and up to date global figures seem a bit hard to come by. But the idea that video games are still some niche thing not worth the attention of the mainstream press is just ludicrous. Whether they've actually become the biggest sector of the entertainment industry or not, they're certainly very much up there with the big boys.

The Avengers sold 79,601,474 tickets in the US. Cod MW3 sold 26 million units worldwide.

 

[Woodsey]

EDITED: I mean, 70 more years before we'll see a guy on a couch on PBS reviewing the video games that came out this week doesn't seem so crazy to me. The idea alone seems so futuristic that it's not even worth thinking about. This is where movies were 100 years ago.

See, this is exactly why your comparison is useless. TV is already dying, yet you're using it as a yardstick for success 70 years into the future just because, hey, that's what worked for films 40 years ago.

Internet, man - a place in which gaming is already taken very seriously, and is sure as shit more relevant than TV.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

I think with Smart TVs websites can be syndicated into their own TV channels. And then satellite companies can download the channel from the web and then rebroadcast it to everyone's DVRs in a future where every website that could be can be a television channel.

I honestly think games should be delivered just like television too. You DVR the games and play them at your leisure. This is a way to deliver massive amounts of GBs of games without everyone hogging the bandwidth of the internet by having hundreds of GBs delivered directly to them personally. But anyway. It's just easier in my book. I don't have time to be my own agent. And its more practical in bandwidth terms as already mentioned.

Interesting idea, but unless the world completely abandons wired Internet, what we'd save in bandwidth isn't nearly worth the loss of convenience. You'd have to "reserve" a website you want to look at and wait for whatever time of day the cable company decides to "air" it, instead of having it at your fingertips whenever you need it. With games it might be less of a hassle, especially with all the people wanting it the day it comes out, but what happens if there's a disrupted signal? (Which is especially likely if you're dealing with satellite, as you suggest.) With television you get a momentary blip on the screen and then you're back to the show; with a game you could end up with a critical bit of data corrupted and no way to get it back because, sorry, the broadcast's over for today. Gotta wait 'til tomorrow and hope the signal is perfect the whole way through then.

 

[Darth_Payn]

Shamus, you forgot Deus Ex as one of Warren Spector's works. But the whole "Video Games' Roger Ebert" thing sounds like a reaction to what Ebert said about games not being art. Art is subjective and only fits to certain people's tastes. Other people mentioned Escapist staff as candidates for gaming's Ebert, so why not you? Or Jim? Or Yahtzee? the Extra Credits gang could also fit, if they went for actual reviews of games in their videos (which I'm way behind on).

The closest we have is Adam Sessler, I think.

Better him than Morgan Webb; I found her reviews to snooty and "humor" too dry to be funny. What has the former cast of X-Play been up to since it went off the air?

 

[balfore]

I definitely think Adam Sessler is the closest thing we have and it's quite nice to watch some of his reviews now in comparison to when he was at G4 and had to make lame jokes on Xplay.