Jim Emerson / December 6, 2005

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Roger Ebert recently opened Pandora's Xbox when he wrote that video games have yet to rise to the level of art. We've published a sampling of the comments we've seen on that topic, but I thought I'd take a moment here to point you to what some others have had to say on the matter -- including Steven Spielberg.

Ebert wrote: "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

"I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art."

In a 2004 talk at USC, Spielberg acknowledged the fundamental difference between traditional narrative storytelling and gaming, where the person experiencing the story is also an active participant in it:

"Is the player in charge of the story, or is the programmer in control of the story?" Spielberg asked. "How do you make those two things reconcile with each other? Audiences often don't want to be in control of a story. They want to be lost in your story. They come to hear you be the storyteller, but in gaming it's going to have to be a little bit of both, a little bit of give and take."

The key, Spielberg said, will be how future games not only tell stories, but how they develop characters and create emotional involvement:

"It's important to emphasize story and emotion and character. This is one of the things that games don't do," Spielberg said. "Currently, what games do is they give you the entire story in the run-up to the actual game play from level to level. You get to see a movie, and you're supposed to remember what the stakes are for the characters. But there's no reminder, nothing refreshes who these characters are.

"The next big emotional breakthrough in gaming is being able to tell a story that is consistent throughout the narrative. If the game is 15 levels, it's just like 15 chapters in a story..."

Spielberg added: "I think the real indicator [of gaming's success as an art form] will be when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17."

Although he was joking (I'm sure people have been moved to tears by achieving entry to a higher level), I think Spielberg was really talking about the quality and depth of the emotional (and intellectual and aesthetic) experience. For example, I wouldn't say that a viewer's emotional responses to the Indiana Jones movies, "E.T. -- The Extra Terrestrial," "Jaws," "The Color Purple" and "Schindler's List" are all necessarily equivalent (and, in fact, I'd say "E.T." is, by far, the superior artistic achievement).

A piece in Sunday's New York Times called "The Gamer as Artiste" also poses these questions: "Can games be something more than games? In other words, can they move people emotionally or intellectually in the manner of great art?"

Steven Spielberg last year offered one model for the medium to follow: cinema....

But movies are just one model for games to emulate. Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that they are equally close to dance, as a medium of performance, or architecture, as a medium of creating unique spaces....

"This is an age-old thing going back to Pong," said [author Douglas] Rushkoff, who describes himself as an enthusiastic gamer. "What made Pong so exciting was not its accurate depiction of Ping-Pong or its relationship to reality. It was the ability to move pixels around on the screen, and an appreciation for the way the game designer is working in metaphor. " ...

Eric Zimmerman of gameLab, which created a casual game called "Diner Dash," said that the big companies were afflicted with "cinema envy." The impulse to make people cry, he said, was a "misguided idea of what emotional depiction is." He said, "Games are by nature incredibly emotionally engaging. Look at poker. There's emotional engagement, strategy and a Zen-level involvement. Games are dynamic, participatory systems. That's a level of storytelling that a film can't do."

John Leland, the author of the NYT article, suggests that most games today already create emotional involvement and narrative suspense by making death itself the core metaphor of play:

In a culture that is squeamish about death, games are the first major medium that makes one's own mortality a central element in the experience. In many games, to reach the last level alive is to put the game behind you.

A challenge for game makers, then, is not to make users cry at the death of another, but to find meaning in their own. This is, after all, the one universal human condition. To which games add the one antidote: the ability to press restart.

(One could also argue that many of these games do precisely the opposite: they trivialize death by making it so easy, repeatable, reversible. How about a game that turns itself off for 24 hours if you die? Or that punishes you by becoming unplayable for a while if you kill an innocent character? Hackers would have a blast discovering how to circumvent restrictions like that...)

Leland's piece notes that games have become a $10 billion-a-year industry and quotes a professor at the University of Wisconsin who describes games as "the major cultural activity of the generation 30 or 35 and below, the way movies and literature were for earlier generations."

Movies began to develop their own language and aesthetics (apart from still photography or theater) in the early part of the 20th century. And there have always been those who questioned whether movies -- especially once they became industrial product pieced together by huge teams in "entertainment factories" called studios -- could ever hope to aspire to the level of art.

I confess that the last video game I played was probably the first version of "Myst" -- an immersive, otherworldly mystery that, I think, is worthy of comparison on some levels (though character development is not one of them) to mystery-driven narratives like "Twin Peaks," "Mulholland Drive," "Veronica Mars" or "Lost." The point is not so much to find all the clues and solve the mystery as it is to get wrapped up in another world where your curiosity keeps you engaged in exploring.

Web sites -- like those for "The Blair Witch Project" or "Donnie Darko" -- have already shown how the experience of a movie can be creatively extended into an interactive realm beyond the movie itself. Maybe that's where games are going, too...