By Bentley FordPLAY Columnist

I meant to go see a bad movie this weekend, and I intended to pan it. I spend too much time loving movies and wanted to prove that I can also loathe them in equal measure – a pre-req for critical credibility. But karma wouldn’t stand for such self-serving cruelty: My glasses broke, only to vanish later that night. Obviously, I was the agent of neither accident; ’twas but karma. Blinded by its whims, I couldn’t execute my devious plan to indiscriminately pan a movie. I suppose I could have just written the review anyway, as I clearly had already formed my opinion, but I got ethics, guys; I’ve only printed one review of a movie I’ve never seen. (So much for trying to establish critical credibility this week, huh?)

But my newfound desire to ruin my credibility doesn’t end there, as I intend to fritter away this column by asking the ultimate of critical faux pas: Are video games art, worthy of the kind of critical attention film and the other arts receive?

Anybody who has ever lived within earshot of me knows of my sinful and shameless love for video games. For every minute I squander on movies, I waste an hour on video games, and it’s always been that way. In Tetris, I would regularly clear six rows at once before I could even count that high. And having read only four books in my life, I instead developed most of my vocabulary while playing epic RPGs; words like “poniard,” “hauberk,” “wyvern,” and “aegis” will forever plague my essays.

With games having such an impact on kids these days, including a few adults, clearly we cannot discount them as cultural artifacts. They merit as much attention as the literature, film, music and other media – some may call these things “art” – that document and influence the culture that created them. Scholars practicing stuffy theories of cultural optimism will surely turn to games like Grand Theft Auto and Doom to mine them for their cultural significance, as will the post-modern hipsters of the world, swirling their brandy snifters at a cocktail party staged in a club designed to decay.

Video games are also indisputably artful, especially as a visual medium. The architecture of a video game, much like a film, requires many elements that everybody considers art – images, music and the atmosphere they create, specifically. I’ve seen very few films as beautiful as the mysterious and lonesome Shadow of the Colossus, with musical scores as triumphant as Final Fantasy VIII’s, or with atmospheres as icy and arthritic as Resident Evil 4’s. Some games even bother with stories, which are noticeably absent in many movies these days, even some of the good ones. Knights of the Old Republic, for instance, is the best Star Wars tale since The Empire Strikes Back, and not just because I got to play as a Jedi babe with dual lightsabers.

That leaves one question: Does the medium’s inherent interactivity compromise its artistic integrity? Of those aggressively questioning the artistic worth of video games, Roger Ebert has the most clout. He posted this on his Web site more than a year ago, and it’s bothered me ever since: “Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.”

It’d be unfair simply to label Ebert as too old to understand – although he is – or to compare him to the elitists of yesteryear who valued “high culture” and disparaged film – although he certainly does compare. No, the problem lies in Ebert’s misunderstanding of the machinations of a video game. Despite the recent obsession with excessively open-ended gameplay in outings like Oblivion, players can still only do what the authors of the game allow them to do. Ebert seems to be under the impression that the substance of a video game is the product of the player’s decisions. That simply isn’t the case, rendering Ebert’s argument useless in this discussion.

Before concluding, let’s consider the evolution of visual arts: Cave drawing begat the art of painting, and the photography that eventually followed surely furled a few eyebrows, but nobody would question its worthiness as art today. And from the branches of photography and drawing, film and animation fell – today, indisputably forms of art. Clearly, it takes time before technology can become art.

The video game, then, is what comes next; it is the next confounding evolution of art that demands not just interpretation but also exploration. If only the industry had some more competent critics, imaginative developers, and maybe a more lively indie scene to foster original ideas, invite nascent developers, and attract those deplorable hipsters that magically legitimize everything.

Communication sophomore Bentley Ford is the PLAY film columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].