99 Rooms

Yes, Roger Ebert has been writing about film for over 40 years now. He was the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. In 1978 he started a little show with Gene Siskel called Sneak Previews and later a nationally syndicated show called At The Movies. Sadly Gene passed away in 1999 (along with Stanley Kubrick coincidentally. A tough year that was.) and somehow Ebert partnered with the galactically stupid Richard Roeper and continued the show. He stopped when he lost the ability to eat, drink and speak but I think since then has become far more open-minded and even more of a wonderfully expressive writer. I spend hours at his website. He not only reviews films but writes about a great many subjects. Whether I agree or disagree is beside the point because it's always interesting. A few years back he wrote an article claiming games cannot be considered a form of art. Since then he has received thousands of emails from people telling him how wrong he was. A few months ago he wrote another article on it. He didn't say that he was wrong but that he was wrong for expressing that opinion when he has never played a single game.

That is the age old question Julie. There are a lot of definitions of art and I think they include games although I've never seen them mentioned specifically. Here's one from Wikipedia...

"Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the senses, emotions, and/or intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings"

I have been affected both intellectually and emotionally by many games. Just one example would be the game Braid. If you haven't played it Braid is a puzzle game. When you beat a level you get a paragraph of a story. To me, the story was amazing and even though the game gets pretty difficult I was hell bent on being able to read the entire thing. It was moving and very relevant to me. The gameplay is very challenging mentally.

I could come with with a ton of examples like that.

Sorry if I'm dragging this off topic. 99 Rooms sounds interesting but I'm gonna have to wait for my computer to get back to check it out which is kind of ironic considering I'm using a game console to surf the internet at the moment. The question of can games be considered art is interesting to me.

I think video games can be art. I loved the beginning of Kingdom Hearts when it first came out. It was really pretty. That's before you even got to playing the game.

The definition of art from wikipedia sounds about right, RAN.

man, lots of the stuff I've seen in World of warcraft is definitely art.