On Art
tbray.org
tbray.org
The gameplay elements are integrated into the storytelling in a way I can only describe as art. Desolation, terror, desperation, and triumph experienced in the gaming elements are as well integrated into the story as the best soundtracks are integrated with the best made movies.
The experience of holding on by your fingertips, as the grip bar shrinks, the horror experienced when scoping out the 8th colossus from a distance and letting it close with you, the hopelessness of operating the last character to appear... these are all integrated with the emotional intent of the part of the story they are in, to the point where the gameplay is integral and not a bolted-on gimmick.
Interactivity is just another element, like color, sound, music, CG, 3D, or any number of technical innovations. It's just another tool to be used, artfully or clumsily. It may start out as a gimmick, but creative and talented people will figure out how to properly integrate it over time.
(Yes, soundtracks, color, CG, and 3D were once all pronounced to be gimmicks that added nothing to the art of movies.)
One factor that you're leaving out is the moral horror of painfully slaughtering these giant and beautiful creatures. Often the colossi are completely benign, and you have to figure out a way to injure them to get their attention or bring them down to your level. My wife watched me play the first level, and left the room horrified.
Thus, the emotional reaction of the player is a key component of the art. I began the game tackling the first colossus with feelings of guilt and shame for being such a butcher, but that was tempered by the knowledge that the kill was a necessary act. You have a love to save, after all.
However, as you progress through the game your revulsion subsides. You become numb to the screams of pain, the frenzied attempts to shrug you off. It becomes simple sport, instead of a vile but necessary act. The kills devolve to "just a game". Your character physically reflects this, as you become gradually darker and deformed, but at such a slow pace that you don't notice until the corruption is quite far along.
And then, at the end, after you thrill to the final hard-won kill, the morality comes rushing back. What you've done was wrong. Evil. Even though you set out with the best of intentions, your soul is now irredeemable. The guilt is intense. Then, finally, redemption of a sort.
SotC is emotionally richer than most films, and the responses that it evokes would not be possible in any other medium. SotC is art of the highest caliber.
If smearing human fecal matter on different things, or squatting in a bus stop and then cutting 1 ton of raw onions constitute art, then the beautiful stories and and visual effects (and sounds and music and etc...) of video games that arouses genuine emotion in the players who experience them should indisputably be called art.
Simply because fun is one of those emotions that is often felt while experiencing the games doesn't mean it isn't art. That's not written anyone.
What's even the point of not calling it art?
Absurd. All of these arguments.
The reason this painfully obvious idea has trouble being accepted is that most people enjoy food, and most people don't enjoy art. They need barely-art for the same reason kids need barely-beer. They don't like beer, but they want others to think they do.
A long long time ago art, craft, science and even what then passed for engineering and manufacturing, were all pretty much the same thing.
Over time we started to separate things, first science split off, but eventually we even split craft from art.
And what's left in art is not some sensible definition like what can educate the illiterate, enlighten the literate, and entertain the enlightened.
It's not even some fuzzy definition like what ever is a comment on the human condition. The stand for an art piece could totally be that, until the artist tells you it's just the stand the art is still coming. Even some artists who make amusing and animated art have been accused of not making art at all but some kind of crafty floss for the eyes bullshit that so totally not art.
(Please be aware that when I wrote the above I had sculptures in mind, not video games.)
Art, and I don't just mean the products of art, but the all encompassing culture, critics, buyers, sellers, "artists", groupies, the whole thing: it is all a social hack.
If you totally buy into and can't use your own taste to tell something good from something else, we'll then you've been totally 0wn3d.
If you just like music and some other artsy type things, but don't get "it". Well then you're doing much better then people who overpay for crap they don't understand, but you still don't get it.
If you get recognition and/or fame, money, what ever, but you get for something which requires a lot of work/effort/time/talent, what ever, then you're really good at that thing! But you're not necessary also really good at art. Even if the thing is something everyone agrees is super artsy, like painting.
If you're getting paid, especially if it's a lot, for anything that doesn't require much of anything, this includes work/time/loss of dignity/etc, if you can get paid a lot from "art" for not doing much, well then you get it and are winning at this particular game.
Art is the social objects that people like to own, produce, view, reproduce, etc., in order to advertise certain aspects of themselves: their taste, their wealth, their vow of poverty, their snobbery, their connection with "the real", their flights of fantasy, etc.
Art is like rational argument, but with metaphor in the place of logic.
Art is that which is perceived while in a self-consciously art-consuming mode of thought.
Art is symbols in a web of epistemology, postmodern constructs the mastering of which generates academic status.
None of these is truly correct, and there may be many more. It's up to you which judgements to use. But don't expect other people to agree with you if you put all your eggs in just one of these baskets.
Myself, I hew most closely to the metaphor as logic approach. Art, for me, has to be visceral, it has to engage the senses; as well as being interesting, engaging the intellect; as well as being emotive. It should engage at all these levels, and resonate with me, things in my experience of life, and make it richer.
The specific thing that distinguishes video games are game mechanics. And, self contained, game mechanics are basically the physics of the game's universe.
Are well implemented game mechanics art? No. Game mechanics need to be transparent, unless the game is trying to make a statement on game mechanics or something (Braid?).
Video games are a nexus of things that are art, but it just doesn't seem technically okay to call the game itself art.
The best thing video games have going for them is that they can be good for the imagination. The very best video games are exploratory (Myst, Shadow of the Colossus), where interaction is not inconsequential, and they use the medium to its fullest potential. However, this inspires a sort of vacant awe that really doesn't teach you more than "there are a lot of possibilities out there."
Video games are basically just low-density information relays. They're like those "Baby Einstein" videos for older people. Soothing to the brain, but strengthen the wrong facilities.
Like anything else, moderation is key. You need a healthy diet of books, music, movies, food, with a pinch of video games to top it off, to relax the mind from all that high density information.
(Note: I am an old school gamer. These new games really do confound me, and the only game I've purchased in years was the recent Rocket Knight.)
First, your opponent can counter with "I don't find them very good", and the productive part of the discussion is over, especially if you are arguing with Ebert.
Better yet, they can argue that subjective quality is irrelevant to the definition (the point you should be making). If bad art is nonetheless art then good non-art is nonetheless non-art.
As another commenter pointed out, the whole discussion is a tactic of misdirection. It doesn't matter what's art, it matters what's good, and this quibbling over semantics is a diversion from that asymptotically complex matter, which old farts like Ebert would rather not face.
Ebert argues that games are not art because they have failed to motivate him to ever experience one for himself. If you need more than that fact to win the argument, you are probably over thinking it.