Last week, I followed a link from Fimoculous to Wired’s GameLife, where blogger Chris Baker attempted to quell the anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the game community by posting a game review written by Ebert for the magazine. If you just read that sentence and immediately asked yourself, “What anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the video game community?” … well, let me back up a bit.

In 2005, Ebert fired the first of several shots in what appears to have been an accidental battle, by admitting to never having played the video game that inspired the movie Doom. A reader named Vikram Keskar wrote in with an extremely well-articulated letter of protest:

Doom works as a tribute because it fails so utterly as a movie. There is a reason so many video game-based movies suck: They are fundamentally different forms of representation. Thus by being faithful to the game, the movie pisses off the critic and pleases the gamer.

…to which Ebert rather flippantly responded:

Seen as a moviegoing experience, [Doom] was not a good one. There are specialist sites on the Web devoted to video games, and they review movies on their terms. I review them on mine. As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games.

This initiated about 18 months worth of back-and-forth between Ebert (who spent several months during that stretch recovering from cancer-related surgery) and the game community, which Ebert re-ignited with this column two weeks ago. “Of course, I was asking for it,” Ebert admitted. “Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell’s soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it…Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”

As far as I can tell, no one on Ebert’s opposition has made a compelling case for why games *should* be considered art, or why any gamer would care if a film critic thinks video games qualify as art; it seems like the general gamer opinion was, to quote a comment from GameLife, “Ebert is just a miserable, old troll who should just continue to kick it under his bridge in Hollywood.” So Baker’s post (which is sympathetic to Ebert’s argument) was designed to provide evidence to debate that point: “Roger Ebert, does, in fact, know about video games. So there.”

As I said at the start of this post, I read all of this last week and didn’t feel compelled to blog about it then. So why dredge it up now? I was reminded of this whole debate by this post on the FILMMAKER Blog, about something called Mutable Cinema (see screenshot above). Michal Zebede explains:

Mutable Cinema is an interactive movie installation which allows people to personalize and create their own viewing experience. An audience watches as a player edits movie clips in real time and generate new narrative sequences from a database of pre-formatted audio/visual content. The player interacts with the Mutable Cinema Interactive Engine by choosing clips to play on the big screen, organizing them, and selecting different point of views. Since this action takes place in real time, the player sometimes struggles and scrambles to keep up, just barely assembling a meaningful story.

So it’s a movie played like a game, but one which still produces a performance for an audience, which in turn sounds something like a cross between film and theater. I think I actually agree with Ebert’s basic argument, insofar as that within the actual experience of gameplay, the competitive performance and technique of the game player usually trumps the artistic intentions of the game maker, although I strongly disagree with the critic’s contention that fine art is defined by “inevitable conclusions.” But I do wonder where Ebert would place something like Mutable Cinema on the fine art scale. Would it be art for every audience member except for the “player”, for whom it would be a game? Would attending a Mutable Cinema event be more equivalent to watching Wimbledon than to seeing a movie? Does the very concept of interactive film playing blow the game vs. art problem to pieces?