Roger Ebert says games can't be high art, but he has a very specific reason for thinking this: games are interactive, therefore the player can alter the experience. As Ebert puts it, there's no auteurship. It's a response to the games-as-art debate that is more considered than most, which discount the medium entirely because Space Invaders is juvenile and also ate all my quarters that time, stupid game.

Basically, his argument goes that art is created by an artist, and if the player can change the experience then the player assumes some agency and the piece belongs to the artist a little less. I could understand an artist, with a clear idea of what her art means and resistant to any attempt to alter that message, might feel that way. Why a film critic, whose profession is built entirely from the expression of his experiences of art, should take this position boggles my mind. Maybe it's because Ebert hasn't had a worthy counterpoint to his views in a number of years; maybe he's forgotten that the experience of art is always interactive.

I recently saw a film called the Fountain, which I found to be deeply moving. My wife thought it was just ok; others I've talked to found it pretentious and cold. I'll go out on a limb here and say that director Darren Aronofsky (who did not author this movie single-handedly, it's worth pointing out) probably had my reaction in mind when he made the film. How, then, do we account for the variety? Every viewer brings something different to the experience. Different philosophies, different moralities, different memories, all of which form the lens through which they see the world. It's practically a quantum effect -- just by viewing the movie, you change it. You cannot have the same experience as the person sitting next to you in the theatre, because you are different people who will interpret the movie in different ways. You can't even have the same experience watching the same movie twice: you aren't the same person the second time.

All art is interpretive, both in literal ("Was the Fountain a sci-fi film about the flashbacks of a future astronaut, or a contemporary meditation on letting go illustrated by past and future parables?") and thematic terms. The artist can only do so much to create an experience; the recipient must finish the artist's work. Art is created by an artist, yes, but the experience of art is the interplay of minds between artist and viewer. That was why Ebert's two-critic format has worked so well over the years; because the experience is never objective, one man's opinion can never be authoritative.

The video game industry likes to claim that it is the first interactive art form, and it just isn't true. Consider sculpture for a moment: does the artist seek to control the angle from which the viewer experiences the work? Another angle might yield quite a different experience. This isn't simply a difference of interpretation; two viewers are literally seeing different things. Does the artist control the lighting, the setting, the climate control? Can the artist prevent you from viewing the sculpture standing on your head? And more importantly, should she want to?

Auteurship shouldn't be about control. If a novelist became obsessed with controlling a reader's experience, he would have to describe everything in the book in such exacting detail that nothing was left to the imagination. Even then, what would stop the reader from flipping forward and reading the end of the book first? That aforementioned sculptor would have to set up ideal viewing conditions for her work and then snap a picture, but would that have any effect on the viewing conditions of the photo? A film can be fast-forwarded, rewound, paused, and stopped in the middle. No auteur truly controls the recipient's experience; where a piece of art is non-interactive (insofar as anything can be, taking interpretation into account), it is non-interactive to precisely the degree that the recipient is willing to tolerate. Then stop, rewind, back to the video store.

Video games, by their inherent interactivity, do lend more agency to the player in crafting their experience than most art. But this is one of the medium's greatest strengths, not a reason to bar it from the club. That interactivity, whether sweeping or superficial, allows us to internalize and immerse ourselves in an experience in ways we simply can't otherwise. Ebert says that high art should make us "more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical". I don't claim that video games CAN do this. I believe that they have already.

Planescape: Torment is a very complex game, and although no short summary can do it justice, it is about (my interpretation) death and the nature of the self. I am a more thoughtful person for having played this game, and make no mistake: my agency in guiding the story had everything to do with my experience. This game asks of the player, "What can change the nature of a man?" But perhaps more importantly, it asks for an answer. I know more about myself now than I did when I started for answering that question. How rare is the film that truly changes the understanding of oneself?

Art is subjective. I, for instance, don't get a lot out of sculpture. It doesn't speak to me, but I don't have the arrogance to claim that that disqualifies it as art. Many have already pointed out that Ebert seems to be forgetting how similar perception of film was early in the 20th century to that of video games today. Ultimately that doesn't matter, because Ebert doesn't matter. He's a film critic, and his opinion of video games counts for about as much as his taste in poetry or impressionist painting. Art doesn't need a majority vote to be valid.

The next art form to emerge is likely to freak us all the hell out, so I don't blame Ebert for being a little befuddled. Perhaps in the future he'll leave defining art to someone who knows what he's talking about.