You didn't think there was actually a game did you?  Oh, no, no, all this hype was about re-releasing these two DeathSpank Grumpy Gamer comics.

I'll be honest, I used the + signs in the title because I know they screw up some RSS feed readers and I'm just that kind of person.  My next post will have lots of & and ? symbols and then we'll move into utf-32.  The Internet is a house of cards ready to come down with one seldom used chinese character.

But onward we march, content in our ignorance...

So, my question is: would you rather be a game designer that is also an artist, or a game designer that is also a programmer?

For the sake of this brain twisting exercise, let's assume that you can't be a game designer+artist+programmer, because that combination just goes against god.  And also, for the sake of argument (and because I like to argue), let's assume if you're an artist or programmer, you have no talent in the other profession, and by no talent I really mean no talent.

I ask this questions because I fall into the second category.  I started programming back when disco was cool.  I started with Basic on a CP/M machine, then moved to Pascal before discovering Z80 assembly language.  I had always heard assembly language was fast, but I was not prepared for the shear speed of it over Basic.  Running my first assembly language program was a religious experience.  My eyes stared wide at the screen as it filled with the @ character in what seemed to be instant.  I literally said "oh my god" and that was the beginning of my 25 year death march known as the game's industry.

I learned C and C++ while working at Lucasfilm to build the SCUMM compiler and later when the SCUMM engine moved to the PC from the Commodore 64 and I have continued to program every day since, recently learning objective-c as I dabble in some iPhone games in my spare time (objective-c is very cool, it took three days of swearing before it clicked).

But the problem is I have no art talent.  None.  Absolutely zero.  When I try and do art, it destroys nearby things that might also be art.  I'm like art anti-matter.  When my art comes in contract with real art, they annihilate each other.  It's hard to tell if my prototypes are any fun because people are always shielding their eyes and gasping when they see my art.  Even my stick figures look crappy.  I know some programmers that draw crappy art that looks cool because it's so crappy.  My art is just crappy.  Clayton Kauzlaric did all the art on Grumpy Gamer, mostly out of pity, I assume.

Some examples of my art:

But I know some artists that feel the exact opposite.  They produce brilliant looking mock-ups of game ideas, but can't program enough to produce even a basic prototype in flash.  They feel the same frustrating that I do.

So which is better?

Roger Ebert is at it again, claiming that not only are games not art, but that they can never be art.

Roger, Roger, Roger.

Over the past year I have gained an immense amount of respect and admiration for Roger Ebert.  I read his blog everyday and it's damn good, some of the best and most insightful writing on the web (or anywhere).  He's gone through some very terrible and personal issues with cancer and hasn't let any of it stop him.  I remember watching Siskel and Ebert back when it was on PBS and credit it as one of the reasons I became so interested in movies and storytelling and almost sending me to film school rather than down the path of making games.

But I didn't go to film school, I decide to make games instead.  Why?  Because games gave me a creative and artistic outlet.  They allowed me to express myself and my ideas and my characters and my stories.

The games I was playing and wanted to make were adventure games and I didn't see much difference in how they told a story from how a movie told a story except they were interactive.  I saw them as an extension of the linar narrative of film.  I saw them as not only a way to tell a story with real characters, real emotions and real ideas, but one where the viewer got to participate in the story.  They got to touch it and twist it and become part of it and make it their own.

I can't imagine anything more artistic than connecting with your audience in that way.  It's unique to the way games tell stories and we've only begun to understand it's artistic potential and power.  Movies will never go away, but neither will games that tell important, interesting and deep stories and we're just getting started.

The problem is Roger has not played the right games, or any games.  Roger is a master at understanding movies and there is no person I respect more than him when it comes to understanding film and it's importance.

But games?  Not so much.

Here is my challenge to Roger:  Why is Monkey Island not art, yet, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie is art?

I will hold the story and characters of Monkey Island up to the Pirates of the Caribbean movie any day.  The story in Monkey Island 1 and 2 is as deep and complex and interesting as that of Pirates of the Caribbean.  The characters are as living and real and developed as you'll find in any film, I'd even argue more so since you can have conversations with them and explore the nooks and crannies of their stories in a way a movie or book cannot.

So, Roger, play Monkey Island.  Really play it.  Don't have someone that has played it tell you about it.  Don't get someone to play it for you.  Don't read about it on Wikipedia.  Play it and let it swallow you and then tell me it's not art.

Update:

Roger replied that he did not think Pirates of the Caribbean was art.

If that is indeed what he thinks, then his argument does make a little more sense to me.  He's not saying that film is art, but that some film is art.  Ok, I can believe, under his standards, that no game has reached the level of art, but to say they never will be art is naive and history will prove as such.

Although, he did say "no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form", so I guess that is his escape from the hammer of the future, but it can not excuse the fact that he's never played or tried to understand games at the same level that he does film.  If he wants to continually bring this issue up, then he should at least become a quais-expert in it first or at lease try to understand it.

And no, watching YouTube videos of games doesn't count because it's not experiencing the one thing that makes a game unique and that is how you interact with it.  This would be like critiquing film by only ever reading scripts and never watching the movie.  There is an entire layer that is missing.

Roger also mentions in his essay "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?"  I would ask: why are you so concerned that they are not?  You're the one that keeps bring this up, not us.

Hard to believe that I've had a blog for six years and for each and everyone of those six action packed years Grumpy Gamer has been 100% court ordered April Fools' joke free.  Bested only by Christmas, April Fool's is my least favorite non-denominational holiday.