Are games art? It's a question that comes up more and more, as the medium slowly grows out of its awkward, teenage years. EA producer Jim Preston thinks the debate is a meaningless one, as he explains in an incredibly well-thought-out feature on Gamasutra.

Preston takes his time to remind of us the state of art in general, and how art is continuously judged by its relative place in culture: a urinal can be art if Marcel Duchamp says so, and places it in an art gallery. Since it's all a matter of perspective, Preston argues that we shouldn't be bickering with Roger Ebert over whether games can be art, but instead spending our time improving the medium, and awaiting further artistic recognition from the community at large.

Makes sense to us. We'll stop waiting by the mailbox for our invite to the arty party, then.

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We all know that Roger Ebert, despite his five-digit gamerscore and level 70 night elf rogue, doesn't think video games have, as of yet, risen to the level of "art." But that doesn't mean that he doesn't give a fair shake to video-game based movies. In fact, you could say he almost sort of liked Hitman, saying "Agent 47 has great success with this disguise in Hitman, which is a better movie than I thought it might be."

Ebert even goes so far as to give the movie, which earned $21 million in its first five days, 3 out of 4 stars, which is, admittedly, the same score he gave to Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties. (In other news: Why do we still pay attention to a man who gave three stars to Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties?)

Film critic Roger Ebert, who originally sparked a blaze of discussion in late 2005 by labeling video games inferior to art like film and theater, reignited talks last week when he "clarified," so to speak, that games could be art but not "high art." Our own Ludwig Kietzmann chimed in on the debate, but the ferocity of his diction is marginal compared to the exhaustive rebuttal laid out by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal.

Taking Ebert to task paragraph by paragraph, Croal criticizes and calls the film critic out on his apparent ignorance to the subject that he is chastising, much in the way Ebert did himself when he pulled quotes from a Hollywood & Games panel with Clive Barker.

Croal's vitriolic and eloquent response warrants notice and discussion, if only for the sheer detail of his counterargument. If we are going to debate whether one medium has the potential to achieve an artistic maturity now in comparison to one more than three times its senior, this is how we should do it.

Here's a scenario regarding Ebert's opinion giving players a "smorgasbord of choices" proves detrimental to its emotional impact:
imagine a situation where a player's task is to save someone he loves, yet no matter what action he or she takes, that person cannot be saved. In that situation, wouldn't giving an audience multiple choices actually be more emotional as it emphasizes the hopelessness of the situation?

In an editorial published last weekend, film critic Roger Ebert seems to renege somewhat on his previous insistence that video games, a medium he finds to be "inherently inferior to film and literature," cannot be considered a form of art. "Anything can be art," admits Ebert. "Even a can of Campbell's soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it."

The "high art" label is almost as old and heavy as most of the works one would apply it to, and expecting a medium as young as video games (never mind the superior class of film) to hold it up would surely be met with crushing disappointment. While it's not impossible for video games to eventually reach such a lofty status in our culture, Ebert's clarification is far more agreeable than his previous statements. Of course, since we can beat down the status of art with a can of soup before allowing video games (and seemingly any old thing) entry, it's not much of a change. The same problems Ebert has always had with the medium are reflected in the rest of his response to Clive Barker's recent comments on the subject.