Oh The Price He Will Pay

Who would have thought Doom (2005) could create such a stir? [The movie not the game] Though the game does have something to do with it. [The stir not the movie].

For weeks now, Ebert has had to battle jeering comments from gamers across the states after he wrote a review of Doom the movie. In his review, and responses, he basically down plays the importance of videogames as a medium. His reasons? Games are inferior. They have no authorship like a movie or book and therefore how can they be art?

When I started to write this commentary, it was going to debate what is and is not art. But then I thought, that is far too long of a conversation. Then I thought I’ll attack Ebert’s notion of authorship because he should know that even in the film world, “authorship” is heavily debated as to whether or not it exists. So instead I agreed with him.

Ebert's original review of the film really had nothing too upsetting to say about games as a medium, save for the fact that he will never play the game. But in his first response to Josh Fishburn in Denver, Ebert simply states this:

“I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.”

It was something I took to mean that he has no knowledge of games, no want to spend time playing games and because of this, they are a waste of time. [The irony here being that games, specifically Doom, gave him a job to do that week so I honestly can’t see his pocket book complaining]. But alas, he is right. There is no one out there talking about games on par to movies. We don’t have the history books and film do, therefore how can we discuss them on an equal level? We can’t. But this too is changing. The gamers who have written in to complain also fail to realize the history from which Ebert speaks. What Ebert fails to realize is that academic film criticism is only 30 years old in a 100 year old industry. Gaming as an industry has only been around for 40 years. I, along with several of my fellow gamers, am literally trying to change that. We are at this moment in grad school pursuing all that Spielberg, Ozu, and countless others did. But unlike those others, we have no set curriculum. Why? Because games are in an infantile stage. But in comparison, moving much faster along the education track than did its medium predecessor, film, because people like Ebert keep it from happening. [Also comparable to why film curriculum was hard to come by until the 70’s.]

The second and more painful response to a disgruntled reader [Andrew Davis St. Cloud Minn.] can be found here and all I can retort is this:

Here is the important part, and listen up, gamers, because this is where you come in.

There are a lot of people out there who are like Ebert. And you are NOT going to change his mind. And do you know why? Because he just doesn’t want to believe it. He CAN'T believe it. He’s too afraid to believe it. He knows what we know. In 30 years, there’s going to be people like him doing what he’s doing only for games. And it’s probably going to be bigger [because it already is as big] than Hollywood. Which means he’s not going to be the most important media critic out there.

So I say kudos to those who wrote in, but even more kudos to the gamer whose going to take his job.