Carnegie Mellon Explores Games as Art

Roger Ebert is famous in gaming circles for writing that games will never be art in the sense "serious" films and books are. That, according to never-deferential Ebert, is because "video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

Meaning, of course, only that Roger Ebert would have gotten along swimmingly with the early structuralist literary theorist Roland Barthes, but perhaps not so much the later Barthes that crawled (perhaps a tad shellshocked) from the rubble of post-structuralism. According to Later-Barthes, "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Which in case any of that sounds a little too hand-rolled and smokable, is just a dramatic way of saying "get over your whole 'artist as author' schtick, Roger."

Thankfully Roger Ebert is no more an aesthetic authority on the artistic status of video games than Harold Bloom has any serious credibility snobbishly dismissing the literary significance of a populist writer like Stephen King.

And thank goodness as well that the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) are willing to host a symposium on the debate entitled The Art of Play, "exploring games as an expressive medium," between March 31 and April 1.

For two days, attendees will be able to check out and play both independent and commercial games in an arcade hosted by Kokoromi, a Montreal-based group that "creates and promotes experimental gameplay."

About the symposium:

The Art of Play brings together creators and researchers of games from multiple contexts - large AAA productions from major corporations, mid-sized developers completing work-for-hire projects, indies developed by small teams and released for free on the internet or for a small price on one of the many alternative distribution channels, and experimental games produced within an academic context. The aim of this Symposium and Arcade is to survey the games that brought us to this moment with their unique creative vision, and to frame the field moving forward, as game makers finally abandon the question "CAN games be art," and begin to ask ourselves in how many ways they WILL be.

Best of all? It's free and open to the public.

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