Roger Ebert, you are a sod.

Kellee Santiago, I like your thesis but don't think you ought to be conceding this point.

I'll state right out that I have neither watched Santiago's presentation nor read Ebert's response in full. I've had my own strong opinions about this subject for as long as I've been old enough to formulate ideas about what "art" is. And I'd rather let those ideas do the talking then let my short-term memory drive me into point-by-point rebuttal mode.

The statement in contention is this: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers." Ebert said that. Even Santiago, when defending video games as art, conceded this point. I will offer no such concession.

Citation 1: Space Invaders (Nishikado, Taito, 1978)

I will make an admission here at the risk of destroying my old-school cred: I don't really like Space Invaders. I respect it. I honor it. I even love it. But by jove, I just don't have much fun when I sit down to play it. What, then, makes it so damned important? By my reckoning, Space Invaders represents the moment video games found their way. There were games before it, but nearly all of them were just crude approximations of ideas we'd had before. Space Invaders was something new -- but novelty alone does not qualify something as "art" (if it did, we'd have to fill the Louvre with PedEggs and Slap Chops, and I pray that day never comes). What pushes Space Invaders from toy to art is not its function, but its aesthetic. Nishikado could have thought up the same exact mechanic, but with moving blocks and called it "Target Shooter." But he didn't use blocks. He used aliens. From space. And they weren't just moving around -- they were invading. We had a story. A conflict. A hero. Villains. All of them crude, yes... but they spoke to us.

So clearly, it's art. But is it art worthy of comparison to the Great Artists? Despite a vast time difference, I'd compare Space Invaders to the people, forgotten by history, that first pushed their utilitarian means into the realm of art. The folks who realized that that there newfangled 'writing system' could be used for something other than recording business transactions. The folks who decided that their cave wall could really use some painted hand prints to spruce it up.

Citation 2: God of War (Jaffe et al., SCE Studios, 2005)

Imagine if someone made a movie, and the lead actor was told to 'just go ahead and do whatever you feel like doing,' and the director and cinematographers and production team and whatever was able to capture it so well that you couldn't know everything was being done on the fly -- and managed to do it all in one take. That's sort of what happens in God of War. This game succeeds in looking "cinematic" at pretty much every step of the way.

Citation 3: Ōkami (Kamiya et al., Clover Studio/Capcom, 2006)

I've so far only played the first couple levels of Ōkami, but I've seen enough to issue my verdict. Case in point: when I was looking for a screenshot of this game, I had the hardest time determining which pictures were screenshots and which were hand-painted promotional artwork. Because it's that freaking good. If you were to suggest to a 14th-century Sumi-e painter that we would one day have Sumi-e paintings that moved according to the will of the viewer, you would probably been declared a witch and fed to dragons.

Citation 4: Technic Beat (Tsubouchi, Mikawa, et al.; Arika/Mastiff, 2002)

I picked this game up as a supermarket impulse buy, and among random on-whim purchases go, it's one of the best I've made. Art isn't always about the big-budget spectacles, you know. I've sampled a good chunk of the 'rhythm' genre in my years as a gamer, so when I say that Technic Beat is the most musical game I've ever played, that statement ought to carry some weight. When I sit down to play a game of Technic Beat, I feel more as if I'm dancing than I do when I'm actually moving my feet to play Dance Dance Revolution. It's fluid, it's simple, and the 'game' portion fits in as a natural accompaniment to the music that's playing.

Citation 5: Pokémon Red/Blue (Taijiri et al., Game Freak/Nintendo, 1996)

OK, I can already hear your groans... but before you go rolling your eyes, let me have my say. I'm sure many would call Pokémon out as an example of a game that is commercialized drivel and not art -- but we must not let Nintendo's marketing blitz cloud our view of the work itself. We don't discount as art the works of composers in the employ of the court, do we?

So, anyways. Pokémon. Remember the Age of Discovery? Of course you don't -- that was a long time ago. In this age of push-button knowledge, it's hard to believe there's anything out there left to discover. Indeed, the only people who are discovering 'new' objects are the folks with access to giant telescopes and particle accelerators. But what hasn't left us is the drive to discover new things. Then this Taijiri guy -- a bug collector in his youth -- shows up with a game called Pokémon to help us fill this strange but undeniable subconscious urge. Sure, any author or poet could have come up with a list of fanciful things for us to memorize, but it took the video game medium to actually provide us with the satisfaction of hunting through a world to find them.

Citation 6: Soul Calibur (Yotoriama et al., Namco, 1999)

This game is a work of art, and if you pick it apart, each individual piece you'd end up with would still be a work of art. Despite all the advances in polygon counts and processing power made in the decade since Soul Calibur's release, it still stands as a benchmark of visual awesomeness that most games even today fail to live up to. It's not so much as a 'fighting game' as it is full-contact competitive choreography, and it's loaded up with some of the most beloved and despised characters out there, even though the 'story' plays second-fiddle to the rest of the game.

So far, the games I've brought up can throw down with the greatest of their contemporaries. Clearly, Molyneux and Miyamoto have every right to step on the same pedestal as Warhol, Rowling, or Lucas... but Ebert was talking, I presume, about the all-time Greats. Is there any game out there I'd have the audacity to suggest could contend with Shakespeare and Homer? Well... There is one game I've been saving one for last.

Citation 7: Link's Awakening (Tezuka, Yamamura, et. al; Nintendo, 1993)

I don't mean to sound like a broken record, always raving on and on about how great Link's Awakening was. But it's true!

Before I talk about Link's Awakening specifically, let me discuss a phenomenon that is, among artistic media, unique to video games. It's something I call the "first-person shift" (maybe other critiquey-type folks have a more proper name for it), and it's something readily evident in our language. I want you to think about the last time you played a video game with a single main character protagonist. Now talk about what you did, but force yourself to refer to the character in the third person. "Ratchet used the plasma coil to defeat Giant Clunk." "Sonic found a hidden passage way to the Chaos Emerald." "Q*Bert escaped from Coily on a floating disk." It feels unnatural, doesn't it? Try the converse for a book or a movie -- "I carried the One Ring to Mount Doom," "I returned to Verona to find that Juliet had taken her own life" -- and you sound like a crazy person. We are a tool-using species, and our brains are hard-wired to consider anything under our direct control, be it a bone club or Mario, to be an extension of "I". It's the same primal reason that people who regularly carry a watch or a cell phone feel naked without it.

What does this mean for Link's Awakening? Well, this game is a bit of an odd-ball among the Zelda series. It lacks one notable thing that every other game in the series has: (spoiler alert) a happy ending. Sure, at the end of the game, the hero -- that is to say, you -- beat the bad guy... but at a terrible cost. The game takes place on an island called Koholint. It takes pains to introduce you to every last one of its residents, its nooks and crannies, its natural features. Meanwhile, bit by bit it reveals to you that the only way to defeat the evil that's been plaguing the island is to wipe it clean out of existence. Tough choice, eh? Wouldn't it be nice if this were some hero you had the luxury of watching from a distance? Tough beans. It's not. It's you. You are presented with a choice not explicitly scripted into the game... you can muck about the island hunting octoroks indefinitely, or you can confront the driving evil force behind them and in the process make the whole island disappear. Authors have been putting their characters in tough positions for centuries, but only through the video game medium have they been able to make the audience live through them.

There are certainly more games I could cite here, but I think I've come up with a fairly good cross-section. I probably won't change any minds, but I would contend that anyone who plays through all of these games and can't see at least one of them as a solid work of art simply isn't trying.