Nick Gillespie: Are Video Games Art?

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"Video games can never be art," thundered movie critic Roger Ebert in 2010. Responding to a provocative TED Talk that argued the opposite, Ebert dismissed the examples mentioned in the presentation, sniffing that they "do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic." Nick Gillespie says that "gamers"—those who make games, those who play them, and those who consider them as something more than a "pathetic" form of passing the time—deserve validation just like devotees of all other forms of creative expression. He writes that this validation takes two basic forms: the first is political and legal, and the second is cultural and aesthetic.