Ebert vs. Croal
Essentially, a while back the famous (?) movie critic Roger Ebert (left) said that videogames could never be art. Among the horde of answers he then recently decided to address Clive Barker’s (bottom right), clarifying why Ebert, despite having no insight into the medium, deemed games unworthy of the “art” label, and himself qualified to say so. Later, Newsweek columnist N’Gai Croal (top right) challenged this, and the heat is now on!
Seeing as I believe in games and play as an academic principle a lot more than the average developer does this is quite strange, but for me the “art” question is just semantics. I don’t give a crap about what label people decide to put on digital games, especially when they are old coots like Ebert that couldn’t possibly help improve the medium even if they wanted to. The debate has the side-effects of bringing up some far more interesting points, however, and if nothing else it’s fun to watch the pie-fight when you’re standing far enough away not to get hit.