***WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ‘BEFORE YOUR EYES’ AND ‘DISCO ELYSIUM’***

Video games as an art form at this point in their existence is certainly an undebatable argument. Back when Roger Ebert made his infamous claim that video games can never be art (then later doubling down), video games were just reaching a point where their artistry was becoming more apparent. I understood where Ebert’s claims were, given the context. Ebert not only reviewed movies, but he also actively took part in the movie making process, notably working with Russ Meyer on a handful of films, one of which being the acclaimed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Ebert didn’t just embrace film as an entertainment medium; he completely was engulfed in the artistry that the film industry had to offer. If anyone could understand “art” within the context of an entertainment medium it would be him. The problem with Ebert’s claim was not that he didn’t understand art, it was that he wasn’t fully familiar with video games. Furthermore, Ebert was overreaching with his claim. He didn’t simply say video games are not art, he said, “Video games can never be art.”

When Ebert doubled down on his claim, he was responding to a TED talk delivered by video game designer and producer Kellee Santiago in 2009 that tried to prove Ebert wrong. Her efforts were admirable, but she really chose her examples poorly. That’s not to say that her examples were not art, they were, but if she was trying to convince someone so detached from the medium as Roger Ebert, she was only shooting herself in the foot with her choices. But this just goes to show that the selection of video games at the time that really shined in the “video games as art” department were few and far between. Off the top of my head the three examples that would’ve worked best in Santiago’s favor would be Final Fantasy VII, Silent Hill 2, and Metal Gear Solid. These games were truly what Ebert was looking for. They expressed strong narratives that drove a focused theme in a deliberate and emotionally resonant way. The characters were multi-dimensional, had interiority, and carried a psychological complexity that reflected the full weight of human experience.

What Ebert was looking for, in terms of art (and honestly, if I were who I am now, I would be on the same page as Ebert), was work that, as he said, “grows better the more it improves or alters nature through a passage through what we might call the artist’s soul.” While you can argue that his definition of art is purely subjective, it is still possible to use that definition and prove him wrong. What I want to counter is his claim that video games are games because they are to be “won” with rules, goals, and challenges, because it is his strongest argument. Prior to 2009, when Ebert doubled down, there were very few games that did not fit this bill. I’m sure if you really crawled within the depths of indie video games at the time you may find one or two, but if they existed, hardly anyone was playing them. If his argument was simply that video games, at that point in time, were not art, he’d have a much more defensible position. Games like The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 would eventually prove him wrong on that front. These games, among many others, are narratively rich, thematically complex, and still very much games by his own definition. But that is almost beside the point now.

Fast forward to today and you will find a plethora of video games that do not have an end goal to be won, rather, they are experiences through interactive mechanics. The trouble here now lies in how Ebert would defend his position. Ebert said, “Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film.” The video game world disagrees. There exists in video games a genre dubbed unofficially, “walking simulators.” Games like Journey, and What Remains of Edith Finch? are essentially interactive visual novels, which Ebert classifies as non-games. We can argue that these are still video games, and Ebert would reject it, and we’d then get into the definition of video games and run a cyclical argument where we’d probably end up at an agree-to-disagree conclusion. But that debate misses the more important question entirely. The reason so many interactive visual novel games feel like mere representations of film and novels is not because they are not games, rather, it is because they aren’t using what makes games unique.

Recently, I completed the video game Mixtape. It took me exactly 3.1 hours to complete, about the length of a long film. Going into the game, I knew fully what I was getting myself into: another “walking simulator.” There’s nothing wrong with these interactive visual novels/interactive movies, as Ebert might have labeled them, but in dealing with a medium like video games and a genre like interactive visual novels, I’m constantly in search of justification for why a particular project was translated into the video game medium rather than just being made into a film. I still don’t agree with Ebert’s claim, but if these interactive novels only incrementally add to the storytelling experience, then I would much rather receive that experience in movie form. When Mixtape makes me slowly trudge around a room to pick up memorabilia pieces in order to gain tiny pieces of background insight into a character to push forward some character development, I can’t help but feel that this could be done much better in film by just adding it in (not lazily I might add). It could be done seamlessly, and it wouldn’t disrupt the pacing by making me pick up the controller to rotate the camera to search for interactive items. In Mixtape, you cannot lose the game. The sections of the story where you control the character would cinematically benefit more from dynamic director-controlled camera angles than the 360 player-controlled rotating camera. Does controlling the character add immersion? Sure, but films can also be immersive with the placement of good film techniques. If a story is to be translated into the video game medium, there should be strong reasoning for doing so outside of it being just a different delivery of the content. Of course, not everyone will agree with that opinion, as it is just one person’s opinion, but I believe it to be a valid one. Mixtape has a strong narrative and themes to match, don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it, I felt the things it wanted me to feel, but I would have enjoyed it just as much, if not more, than if it were a film.

Interactive visual novel video games possess something unique that film, paintings, and novels do not: audience interaction with the material (for the sake of not getting into it, let’s just ignore Choose Your Own Adventure books). And while the argument over whether video games can ever be art has already been won, it’s games that take full advantage of this unique capability that justify translating a narrative into the video game medium. For a narrative to be better within the medium of video games rather than film or a novel, the artwork must be untranslatable to any other medium other than video games. Because I’m sorry to say, I think Ebert’s strongest argument, that when video games lose the challenge, goals, and rules, they cease to be video games and become instead representations of film or novels, is somewhat right. I believe it to be right every time I play a game, and think it’d be better off as a movie, whether the narrative was good or not. The games that cannot be translated into film strengthen the “video games as art” argument.

Before Your Eyes is one of the strongest cases for art that cannot be translated into any other medium because the core mechanic is the main theme of the game. Before Your Eyes is a game wherein the player controls the narrative through their own eye blinks, tracked via webcam. You begin as the protagonist, living life chronologically, through childhood, adolescence, the relationships and core memories, and every blink of your real eyes pulls you forward in time whether you were ready to move on or not. The eye blinking is a motif for how life moves fast at the blink of an eye. The narrative was touching, and I’d be hard pressed to find anyone who did not cry while playing the game. It’s a story told many times over in many different settings and circumstances. What makes the game a cut above its contemporaries is the creatively unique mechanic of having the player blink along with its theme that one comes to fully realize by the end of the game. It’s an “Aha!” break of the fourth wall moment. The most beautiful and meta part of this work of art happens at the end of the game. After playing for a couple of hours, you start to almost train yourself to keep your eyes open longer than usual, but when the ending hits, during an incredibly emotional, heartfelt speech, you’re no longer battling your own ability to not blink, but instead, your own tears. The game is confident in its ability to make the player cry, and instead of advancing forward in time after blinking, it instead continues the speech, and only switches the setting the player finds themselves in. It’s interactive art at its absolute finest.

Many would have a problem with calling Disco Elysium an “interactive visual novel,” and to be fair it probably sits right on the line between RPG and interactive visual novel. What nudges Disco Elysium on that line from the RPG side is that its primary experience is narrative- and dialogue-driven rather than skill-based or challenge-driven. The RPG mechanics serve the story rather than constituting the game. Disco Elysium also utilizes an entirely different meta-tactic. The game centers its theme around existentialism. The player controls the main protagonist Harry Dubois, a cop who, whether intentionally or unintentionally (it’s vague), almost kills himself after a night of drinking himself literally into oblivion. When he awakens only in his underwear, in his trashed hotel room, he discovers that he has experienced nearly total amnesia to the point where he is unable to recollect basic information like his own name, who he is, or the concept of money. As the player and protagonist alike begin to put the pieces together, they discover that they are a cop in the middle of solving a murder mystery of a hanged man. Throughout the game the player can choose what ideologies and personalities Harry is to adopt. For instance, for one player, Harry can lean into adopting communist ideology and serving as a boring cop archetype, and for another player, Harry can lean toward being a fascist superstar cop, all while navigating his amnesia, slowly building a new Harry Dubois. During the course of the game, you piece together that Harry just went through a brutal breakup and had been living a reckless lifestyle for the past couple of years before reaching a tipping point ultimately leading to his suicidal blackout night of drinking. Toward the end of the game, upon finally confronting the murderer, the game introduces a twist: a towering insect-like cryptid who speaks to Harry directly. Harry, in awe, tells the creature his disbelief in its existence, and how incredible it is compared to his low, downtrodden self, to which the creature responds, “I am a relatively median lifeform – while it is you who are total, extreme madness.” It essentially gives Harry the existential moral to the game. The cryptid is a simple creature compared to the complexity of humans. Without humans, the universe would be meaningless, for it is humans that provide meaning to anything and everything. Humans are, as the cryptid says, “[…] a violent and irrepressible miracle.” The reason Harry feels the weight of heartbreak is because he carries the capacity and complexity to feel heartbreak at all. The cryptid leaves Harry with a final instruction: “Turn from ruin. Turn and go forward.” The game sets you on an involuntary philosophical absurdist path. When Harry awakens with amnesia, he has no reason to solve the case. Harry just performs the duties within the circumstances he finds himself in without question. Harry creates for himself a life project by choosing to be a communist boring cop. The player actively participates in Harry’s existentialist venture without knowing. In films, the viewer watches the story unfold and interprets meaning from outside the narrative, but in Disco Elysium, the player is performing the actions, making the decisions, and being told directly from a character within it, the moral of their story.

“If film provides a visual aid to becoming a better person, then video games provide the hands-on experience.”

To return to Roger Ebert’s definition of art, he said that “[…] art grows better through passage through the artist’s soul.” Many games now reflect this. But what video games do, I think, takes Ebert’s requirement, and does something more that films and novels do not commonly do. In video games, the art passes through both the artist’s soul, as well as through the player’s soul interfacing with the art. Film shows you “art’s passage through the artist’s soul,” but video games directly place the player within the art so that the art is not just shown but experienced by the player. Art passes through both the artist and the player since the player is an active participant. It is the player’s eyes doing the blinking and advancing the story, and it is the player’s decisions that rebuild Harry Dubois’ existential project. The player is both the receiver and the instrument of the artful experience. The meaning and themes of art aren’t just presented to the player; they are produced by the player. It is an elevation of art that should be embraced, rather than reduced. Ebert was once quoted saying “[…] if you go to good films, you will become a better person because you will understand human nature better.” If film provides a visual aid to becoming a better person, then video games provide the hands-on experience.