To say that I’m a fan of Roger Ebert is maybe an understatement – I have been following (and mostly agreeing with) his film reviews for as long as I can remember – Siskel and Ebert would come on Sunday afternoons before the Sunday movie matinees on TVO and I’d watch the two of them duke it out in their fake balcony seat. The thing about passionate criticism is that it elevates the entire industry, and I think Roger Ebert, probably more than anyone else, has been a voice in the ear of talented film-makers, encouraging them to reach higher.

He’s been in the news a lot lately because of his cancer and losing his jaw (and speech), and he’s been churning out a series of amazingly thoughtful articles lately about his life and observations that all deserve reading. Nothing, however, seems to set the internet on fire like his comments about video games not being art. This latest article is only one of many he’s written over the years calling out video games as some kind of art impostor.

It’s a ridiculous statement – but I think he knows it. He doesn’t even play video games. Yet every time he antagonizes them everyone in the game field crawl out of the woodwork and start posting defenses of the industry, examining the definition of art, and engage in passionate re-examinations of the game production model.

The truth is that defining anything as art (or not art) is a fool’s errand – the definition is so broad and vague that you can make a case that anything (a urinal for instance) is art and anything else (a Sistine Chapel built on contract by common labourers for instance) is not.

What is clear to anyone who plays them is that video games are more visually and narratively sophisticated than ever before – they evoke emotions and change perspectives and inspire. Movements like the “New Games Journalism” are sprouting up all around to lend legitimacy and real criticism to games as a creative storytelling medium.

I think Roger is wise to the idea that by fanning the flames he’s circuitously pushing the video game industry to stand up for itself. Like Louis Leroy who called out the impressionists for displaying a bunch of unfinished paintings, Ebert’s high-profile anti-game statements are going to go down in history as a catalyzing force that lends legitimacy to the medium.