Brian Moriarty Is with Ebert: Video Games Aren't True Art

The war waged between Roger Ebert and the world's gaming public over the "video games as art" claim reached a tenuous ceasefire last July when the ornery, venerable film critic posted the article "Okay, kids, play on my lawn." Though not a retreat from his "Video games can never be art" stance, the article ended with a grace note that satisfied gamers the world over: "I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place."

The gaming collective left the argument at that, embraced the ambitions of Jane McGonigal,, and left Ebert to his movies. Enter Brian Moriarty, veteran game designer and lecturer at the GDC 2011 presentation of An Apology for Roger Ebert, in which Moriarty announced himself as the industry's first defector to Ebert's side.

"Video game products contain plenty of art, but it's product art, which is to say, kitsch art," explains Moriarty about midway through his lecture. His speech up until this point has trudged through the obligatory semantics of the question "What is capital-A Art, anyway?" The answer, he claims, is tougher than the average consumer can handle. We require experts to tell us when something can be considered Art. "Certain people make it their business to exercise taste. These people are called (pinkies up) connoisseurs. Such an expert is Roger Ebert."

And even Ebert doesn't believe many movies are worthy of the Art label, either. They're products of industry, where capitalistic needs take priority over artistic integrity. The same goes for "Broadway musicals, theme parks, casinos, rock stars, major league sports, cable news. All media driven by advertising," Moriarty argues, "devolves into kitsch." And given the enormity of the gaming industry, the same can be said of video games.

"Kitsch art is not bad art," he says. "It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity. And the bigger the audience, the kitschier it's gonna get. Kitsch is a risk-reduction strategy, time-tested and good for business." The opposite of kitsch, or maybe its more refined older brother, is "sublime art."

"Sublime art is fragile," Moriarty gushes. "It lives or dies in the details. There's nothing superfluous or out of place." His definition of sublime art more or less stops there. Moriarty offers up no examples of these mighty and elusive works. Possibly because he would be hard-pressed to find a work of art that didn't pose a financial risk or offer a tangible reward to its creator. Those revered works of literature, the canvases hung in museums, they were not all commissioned au gratis, free from the intentions of the market.

So Moriarty turns to Ebert's predecessor in history's line of crotchety naysayers, Arthur Schopenhauer. A 19th century lecturer at the University of Berlin, Schopenhauer contended that "the essence of the universe is Being: a blind, irrational, unquenchable thirst to exist he called Wille zum Leben, and that everything we perceive is a representation of this Will to Live." And since we "are products of Will," Moriarty explains, "we spend most of our lives trapped in a cycle of striving and boredom." All we can do to flee this cycle is "to contemplate sublime art," he says. "Sublime art is the door to a perspective on reality that transcends Will. It is the still evocation of the inexpressible."

Playing video games, which is "an activity motivated by decisions, striving, goals and competition, a deliberate concentration of the force of will" is a direct contradiction to this idea of transcendence through contemplation. They are inherently designed to never achieve a level of artistic merit above kitsch.

Roger Ebert, it seems, has made an ally.

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