Some video games certainly qualify as performance art where a sole creator provides a framework for interaction and audience participation defines the piece. Performance artist Marina Abramovic, in presenting Rythm 0, sat still while viewers participated by toying with various props she provided on a table. Among the props were a pistol and a knife, both genuine and lethal. Unscripted, an audience participant pointed the loaded pistol at Marina. She remained still and another participant stepped in and disarmed the first. Here we have a theme - aggressor and protector, violence, silence, and intervention. Yet while all was potentially in her vision when she first set the stage, none of it matured until others agreed that this potential should be met. I'd even venture that the agreement was tacitly shared; that the agressor did not want to harm Marina and hoped to be disarmed.
Some games - Braid, for example, or Flower, are even purer in form. The potential experience is so broad and nuanced as to blend into a spectrum, each individual's track bleeding into others. The creator sets a stage and invites particpants to interact and make art. How is it purer? Because the creator proffers it without judgement at all. Marina, silent, was still present, and her potential killer needed to confront his feelings about killing. Unintentional, she served in his mind as a recriminating arbiter, silent but still condemning, and this role could be played by any ethical person. A video game serving as art provides the framework entirely within the mind of the player. Each in its own way serves as art, engendering emotions within the beholder. But with a video game the artist as a person is a step removed and the artist as a creator can take over. We interact with his creation and his intentions, not the person. But purity aside, each requires interaction. Without interaction, Marina would have a queerly set table and a video game would be some prettily rendered wallpaper.
Roger Ebert's stubborn refusal to open himself to the possibility he may have erred is in the end a sad one. He rightly deserves his powerful reputation as a discerning critic but in the end his purview is cinema, a medium that typically demands no more participation than observation. Applying the same yardstick to video games shortchanges the infant medium and inevitably leads to their dismissal as art. A video game cannot influence someone who approaches it as cinema, just as a movie cannot hope to affect a person who reads a plot synopsis and list of cast members. We rob art of its teeth and claws when we approach it in a different medium. Charles Dickens would no longer be in print, since CliffsNotes is available and more accessible. Were it described as a ceiling mural we could easily dismiss the Sistine Chapel as interior decorating, religious instruction, or an illustration in an unusual creationist textbook. Take your pick; the distinctions are meaningless. Art outside its medium is meaningless.
In his meandering set piece Roger Ebert explains that his impressions of Braid and Flower are derived from videos of gameplay and a verbal description, and in the same breath breezily misstates several key concepts in the games. He's failed to derive the most elementary conclusions provided to any mature adult who actually experiences these games in the first person. His entire article reeks of a snarky prejudice. Misstatements are the norm, internal contradictions abound, and he is careful to strip context from Santiago's speech, the sort of nitpicky detail that might derail his straw man argument. In the system he constructs his artless conclusion is inevitable. That for most people experiencing the games would challenge his conclusion is immaterial. The games are not worth the effort of experiencing firsthand, since they cannot possibly be art. His circular reasoning aside, from his point of view over someone else's shoulder, he's content to dismiss a nascent art form that is already art and maturing rapidly. In the end he comes through as a gentle condescending curmudgeon, smug in his world view and unwilling to come to grips with a sea change in his dotage. Astutely he does come through clearly on one key point, a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale and smothering ramble. He points out that video gamers can ignore him and enjoy their games and their art without consulting him. He's content to be left behind, unwilling to participate. For him, games cannot be art. I agree.