By Andrew SheivachmanThe Daily Northwestern

Famed film critic Roger Ebert once denounced video games as fundamentally inferior to movies and literature, saying that “video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.”

However, in the media world of those who decide what is “cultured, civilized and empathetic,” there appears to be support for the coverage of gaming as an important social and cultural element. Respected journalistic institutions have begun to address video games on a regular basis, albeit with an unclear agenda.

Last weekend, the New York Times ran two lengthy articles about video games. “Land of the Video Game Geek,” penned by Times staff writer Seth Schiesel, was published in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section. It details enormously popular Korean professional gaming leagues, a scene that is weakly represented by the Cyberathlete Professional League in American gaming culture. Schiesel describes a parasitic foreign culture that has seized upon disparate entities in American culture and “melded them into a culture as different from the United States as Korean pajeon are from American pancakes.”

“The Long Zoom,” written by gaming theologian Steven Johnson, ran in the Times Sunday Magazine. The article spotlights Sims creator Will Wright’s new game Spore, which allows a player to grow from a self-designed unicellular organism into a super-advanced, omnipotent race.

Spore, essentially, is an attempt to simulate the universe on your computer screen. Johnson claims that the “defining view” of this generation is the “long zoom” that Spore’s epic gameplay utilizes; according to Johnson, “it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game.”

I’m not really sure what this means, but many New York Times elitists probably do. This outpouring of gaming coverage in the most pretentious and old-fashioned of American media institutions is a wonderful thing for video games. I imagine that the exposure of American intellectuals to gaming, through the publications they have come to trust and value, will allow gaming to be perceived respectably. In time, media coverage of gaming will serve to legitimize video games. But there is something inherently unsettling about the recent string of overly serious articles. While these pieces may serve to promote gaming, they aren’t doing so effectively.

Gaming coverage in magazines has also begun to approach games with gravitas and intelligence, but perhaps a bit too much. The November 2006 issue of Atlantic Monthly, for instance, contains a piece by Jonathan Rauch called “Sex, Lies, and Videogames.” The makers of a groundbreaking video game drama called Fa