Revered film critic Roger Ebert’s 2005 indictment of video games as a non-artistic medium caused renewed controversy this past month, with big-name figures like Newsweek journalist N’Gai Croal, author and director Clive Barker and gaming historian Steven Kent weighing in.

“I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful,” Ebert said in response to a gamer’s letter in 2005. “But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art.”

“To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

Ebert’s comments drew an outcry from gamers, responses from game developers, and even mainstream media attention. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Aussie developer John De Margheriti, founder of Micro Forte studio, countered Ebert’s arguments.

“The author of the game has written some grand plotline, has created the races, the pretext of the stories,” said De Margheriti. “He’s constrained you in a series of quests you must do, missions you must complete, objects you have to collect. There is a structure, but it’s a structure that’s interactive.”

Other developers, such as Steve Stamatiadis with Brisbane-based Krome studio, tentatively agreed with Ebert.

“Games can potentially deliver the same stuff as art, changing the way you think about something, but I don’t think games are at that stage yet,” he said in an interview with the West Australian. “About 90 per cent are people running around shooting at something.”

As evidence of games artistic lackings, Ebert claimed that games differed from accepted artistic media in their treatment of control. “Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.”

Because the consumer, rather than the author, move the plot forward, games are not art.

“While viewers to take a participatory role in games, they seldom determine the outcome,” said Steven Kent, author of The Ultimate History of Video Games. “Designers create endings for their games just as authors create endings for their books. That the player may fail to reach that ending does not suggest that the player has somehow altered the outcome any more than the failure of a reader to finish a novel would suggest that the reader has altered the ending of that book.”

Clive Barker, a horror novelist and director, addressed Ebert’s claims directly at the second annual Hollywood and Games Summit in June.

“It’s evident that Ebert had a prejudiced vision of what the medium is, or more importantly, what it can be,” Barker said to an assembled crowd. “We can debate what art is, we can debate it forever. If the experience moves you in some way or another… Even if it moves your bowels… I think it is worthy of some serious study.”

“I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative,” he continued. “In other words, Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a game because it could have had a happy ending.”

Barker’s statements prompted Ebert to revisit the subject and revise his original claims, saying that “anything can be art,” but games cannot be “high art.”

“Do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them?” asked Ebert, reaffirming his stance that art must improve us. “Something may be excellent as itself, and yet be ultimately worthless.”

Ebert also recognized the importance of authorial control: “I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would ‘Romeo and Juliet’ have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings… At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Shakespeare’s or Barker’s, is superior, deeper, more moving, more ‘artistic’? ”

N’Gai Croal with Newsweek attacked Ebert’s claims in his blog Level Up.

In his response to Barker, Ebert defined games as involving “(1) point and shoot in many variations and plotlines, (2) treasure or scavenger hunts, as in Myst, and (3) player control of the outcome. I don’t think these attributes have much to do with art; they have more in common with sports.”

Croal criticizes this brief dismissal of the entire medium of gaming.

“It’s no accident that the one game he cites by name is ‘Myst,’” he said, “because that 13-year-old title — whose reputation is somewhat tattered as befits its stature as one of this emerging medium’s evolutionary dead ends — is probably the last game that he played for any meaningful length of time.”

“If someone went on a jeremiad about the current state of movies, but the last movie they’d seen was the 1994 flick ‘The Specialist,’ I doubt that Ebert would take them seriously,” Croal added.

According to Croal, Ebert’s perspective that art must improve is just one definition. “There are many others who believe in art for art’s sake; in art that provokes, in art that disturbs, art that enrages, and so on.”

Also contrary to Ebert’s comments, Croal said art does not need authorial control or a pre-established meaning.

“What is the ‘inevitable conclusion’ of John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’? Of Jackson Pollock’s ‘One: Number 31, 1950′?” asked Croal. “Not all art works the same way. Just because some videogames have narrative elements does that mean they should be judged by the same criteria as literature and film; it would be just as foolish to judge literature and film by the same criteria as sculpture and ballet.”

The most important question posed by Croal relates to Ebert’s own expertise: film.

“Why, given Ebert’s own passionate affection for a medium just over 100 years old; a medium that was itself accused of many of the same inherent inferiorities as videogames; why would he be so emotionally invested in rendering a final judgment on what interactive entertainment is capable of just 35 years into this medium’s existence?”

“Those of us who care about the possibilities inherent in this medium will have to rely upon ourselves and one another to keep doing the heavy lifting necessary to suss out where the art of videogames lies,” said Croal. “To determine how the craft can enhance that art; and to continue the fight to push this young medium from squalling infancy into graceful adulthood.”

If games do have potential as a medium of artistic expression, it would be foolish to dismiss them as mere vehicles of entertainment and escapism.