I've shouted this from the mountaintops, yet nobody seemed to listen.

I tried my damnedest to drive this fucking point home, yet it fell on deaf ears.

I try to beat this drum whenever the stupid, pointless, masturbatory "Games as Art debate" comes up, but everyone seemed too busy with the topic to get it.

Roger Ebert loved a videogame. No, it wasn't Doom or Mario; the idea that Ebert is just some senile old that doesn't understand us and yells angrily at those "Electronic Games" is just not accurate. He's a smarter dude than that, despite the fact that we can't see eye to eye.

And it wasn't just some pointless game; it was a game so obscure and artsy fartsy that it would make the most diehard Shadow of the Colossus fan get a twelve foot erection and die instantly.

The year was 1994. The magazine was Wired. The game was "The Cosmology of Kyoto".



Cosmology of Kyoto
By Roger Ebert

"The Cosmology of Kyoto CD-ROM comes with a bare minimum of instructions, informing me in a few words how to move within the images. No goal is established and no points are scored; the game never informs me what the object is, although it discreetly tracks the levels of karma and cash I have attained and keeps an inventory of my possessions. The disc comes packaged with a large fold-out map showing the streets and principal buildings of Kyoto - circa 900, when, as Heiankyo, it was the capital of Japan. I begin to wander the streets.

The richness is almost overwhelming; there is the sense that the resources of this game are limitless and that no two players would have the same experience. I have been exploring the ancient city in spare moments for two weeks now, and doubt that I have even begun to scratch the surface. This is the most beguiling computer game I have encountered, a seamless blend of information, adventure, humor, and imagination - the gruesome side-by-side with the divine.

In this medieval Kyoto, people exist alongside ghosts, demons, and goblins. On my travels I have met - and interacted with - a dog eating entrails, long-winded old farts, tradespeople (who offered me medicines, dried fish, cloth, rice cakes, amulets, and a chance to lose money on a cock fight), a monk leading a prayer meeting, kids playing ball in the streets (one is beheaded by a passerby), a friendly guide dog, a maiden with an obscenely phallic tongue, and a gambler who taught me a dice game.

The graphics are hauntingly effective, using a wide-screen landscape format. The individual characters are drawn with vivid facial characteristics, a cross between the cartoons of medieval Japanese art and the exaggerations of modern Japanimation. The speaking voices are filled with personality, often taunting, teasing, or sexy. There is the sense, illusory but seductive, that one could wander this world indefinitely.

This is a wonderful game."

And he's right. It IS a wonderful game. But it makes you wonder what went wrong, what happened to make him so jaded. Where did he get disappointed? When did he change his mind? When one contemplates this, a narrative not unlike the story of Ebenezer Scrooge begins to take shape: imagine a once robust and young Ebert playing Pac Man in the zest of life slowly aging, becoming bitter and then finally yelling to the world his own bah humbug: "Games aren't art"

Well, it doesn't matter. What matters is that people know this history, that people are aware that this rash, embittered man loved a game once, enough to call it rich, overwhelming and wonderful. Remember, my friends, so that next time this man tries to take us and the games we love down a peg we can just smile, utter three words and become untouchable.

You don't try to argue with the devil, boys and girls. You beat him at his own game.