I would like to offer my sincerest thanks to you for recently stating in your column that videogames can never be art. Noting the content drought on many game enthusiast websites, you selflessly decided to peel the crusted top off of the cesspool that is the games-as-art debate, to present us gamers with the opportunity to wallow in our own intellectual feces for a solid week-and-a-half. And with bony fists raised in impotent rage and eyes fixed unflinchingly on our navels, we took up the call.
It's a good thing, too, because I had no idea what to write in my blog space otherwise. For several days before your announcement, I was restless -- waking up in cold sweats every night with a head full of potential list articles to keep my click-through count up. Top four buttons on an NES controller? Top eight videogame novelizations scattered on my bathroom floor? Things were looking grim.
Imagine my relief when "Roger Ebert Said a Thing" (which, on the gamer righteous indignation scale, falls between "Politician Said a Thing" and "Jack Thompson Said a Thing") was the top story on every game news echo chamber website on April 16. Your article presented a welcome challenge for us gamers to flex our argumentative muscles. Which time-tested method of Internet debate would best dismantle your conceits?
Perhaps we could parry your contention that games aren't art by repeatedly and rhetorically demanding to know whether or not this-or-that piece of accepted art is, in fact, art -- the "I am rubber" defense. Or I could slap together a pithy one-sentence rejoinder culminating with a link to the dictionary definition of the word "art," followed immediately by an extended period of furious fist-pumping. I might take the dangerous route and recount a personal moment of emotional release with one of the many games the Internet hive-mind has determined to be an emotionally charged experience. Maybe Final Fantasy VII or Shadow of the Colossus, or even Reel Fishing: Angler's Dream.
Maybe I could disarm you with an anecdote about my own above-average cultural awareness: I recently wrote an analysis of Imagine: Party Babyz and found it to be a scathing indictment of the American party culture's relentless destruction of youthful innocence. How's that? Hit you like a ton of bricks, doesn't it? If I'm willing to recognize nonexistent depth in -- and issue a vapid assessment of the social implications of -- a game, is that game not art? Suck on that logical roundhouse, bitch! Sorry, that was uncalled for. I get really upset when people denigrate my dangerously consumptive masturbatory hobby.
In any case, thank you for granting me and my colleagues a fleeting moment of job security. You know, John Steinbeck (please note the name drop) once said that the American poor see themselves not as an exploited group, but as "temporarily embarrassed capitalist[s]" just waiting for their return to riches. Well, most bloggers are temporarily embarrassed professional writers, and most writers are temporarily embarrassed game developers waiting for a job offer. Like the rest of the Internet, we don't need validation -- we'll settle for attention.