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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5162831" data-attributes="member: 4720">It's not about his age.  It's about his role in the narrative.  That accounts for 99% of the issue, just like it accounts for so many other decisions most people make.  A lot of much younger film critics have the same opinion.  Their purported reasons are contradictory and, frankly, irrelevant.  After all, rationalization comes after reaction and well after experiencing the stimulus, in neural terms.That last, incidentally, is why I can't agree with your definition of art.  You decide if something is art before your brain comes up with the rationalization, so "watch[ing] and analyz[ing] and understand[ing] and reflect[ing]" are all subsequent events... but that's all rather far outside the scope of this discussion.As for the phrase, "on the wrong side of history"... it's a silly phrase, rife with potential misunderstanding, but succinct.  I think we have hit one of those misunderstandings of what it means.  Roughly translated into base and imprecise language, I use it to mean, "when we write the history books, he will be established as incorrect."  Basically, I take it as a given that some day in the near future we will reach a place where the culture at large agrees that video games can be art.  Once the culture at large says so, and there is a canon of video game art, we will no longer have the luxury of claiming Ebert was correct on this, just like painters and writers no longer have the luxury of saying that the critics who insisted movies were not art were correct.  (Man this is actually tough to talk about within forum rules).Basically, he is insisting that the Sun orbits the Earth.  As far as anyone knew for a long time, that was correct.  But they were on the wrong side of history.  As far as most people in the culture know, Ebert may be correct, but a handful of us have played games that pass into the realm of art, and we can conceive of many more.I believe I will live to see a day when there is a canon of high Art video games.  In this regard, the advancement of various kinds of artistic media, history really has been consistently progressive.  We will see the situation play out such that Ebert will be dead wrong on this issue.  The only place his age comes into play is this: Before we get to the point of having a video game canon and consensus on this, Ebert may be just plain dead.  So I don't see any point in rubbing his nose in it.  And I frankly hope he shuts up about the issue, because he'll only undermine his long term credibility by bearing a meaningless standard here.</blockquote>

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