Auteur theory is a film-school thing. It says that the end product of the filmmaking process reflects the director's intent and vision, and not anybody else's. Whether the theory is descriptive — this is how it happens whether we like it or not — or prescriptive — directors should make films this way otherwise they're hacks — depends on who you ask.

"Auteur" is the French word for "author," which is just being snooty. The competing theory is Schreiber theory, which says that it's the screenwriter, not the director, whose vision the film reflects. Schreiber is the German word for "author," which is somehow even more snooty.

Conceded. Happily. I am an empty cup, as the saying goes. But for the record, I meant "dance" in the sense of making aesthetically pleasing movements and poses with the body. Not, like, the Electric Slide or whatever.

Oh, no, that's not what I meant at all. I just meant that the only Choose Your Own Adventure books I've ever seen are the ones I had when I was a kid. They were most definitely intended to be toys. There was no apparent artistic intent there. But could somebody write a book in that style with the intent of making art? Sure, I imagine that's possible. That's all I meant.

Okay, this is me trying really hard not to sound like a broken record.

Are you guys aware of "The Artist is Present?" It's a show that's going on at MoMA right now; it's been in the news. Among other things, Marina Abramović, the artist, is sitting quietly in a chair, facing an unoccupied chair, during the time that the museum's open to the public. That's it. She's just sitting.

Is this art? By the definition I threw out there — and Shadow's and Dorkman's as well, I think — it's definitely art. Because of why she's doing it. If I sit quietly in a chair at the dentist's office* it's not art, because I'm only doing it out of necessity. But she's doing it for reasons I won't bother to summarize here but that boil down to "for the art."

Art can be successful or unsuccessful. It can be good or bad. It can be sublime — thanks, Dorkman — or it can be pedestrian. It can be brilliant or stupid or anywhere in between. But it can never be accidental. It can never be a side-effect of something else.

* This will never happen, by the way. Dentists' offices freak me the fuck out. My version of sitting quietly in the waiting room is either borderline-hyperventilating or being so high on benzos that I can barely metabolize oxygen.

Sigh. Okay, I can go along with that if that's the consensus. But if that's how we're going to define "art," then I wonder why we bother having "art" as a separate word. It sounds like that definition is just a vague-ing up of existing concepts like "beauty" or whatever.

So if we've defined the question down to "can video games be nice?" then the answer is obviously yes. But suddenly it's not a very interesting question.

A sunset can invoke emotions/states/aesthetic merits too. But a sunset isn't something that somebody made for the purpose of being beautiful or whatever. So it's not art.

A video game isn't something somebody made for the purpose of being beautiful or whatever. Unless it is, in which case I question whether it should be called a game at all. But now I'm just repeating myself, so I'll bow out of this one unless I think of something new and non-boring to say.

See, I think that's where our concepts of "art" fail us. The word "art" has this value connotation to it. Like that shit you buy at the craft fair isn't art, but the Mona Lisa is fucking art. But that's bollocks. There can be good art or bad art, or there can be a single piece of art that two different people fervently believe is good and bad, respectively. Calling something "art" isn't a value judgment, even though we use the word that way colloquially. Saying that video games aren't "art" isn't a slam. It's the same as saying that video games aren't pastry. Because pastry, like art, is a thing, and video games don't meet the definition of what that thing is. Is that chair purple? No, it's green. Well, then it's not fucking purple, and no amount of arguing can change that.

Art and games — video or otherwise — are two different things. A game cannot be art, and art cannot be a game.

Now, the technology that permits video games — computer graphics, all that shit — can certainly be used to create art. Hell, human feces and a blank concrete wall can be used to create art. It might not be good art, but it can certainly be art.

But if you're using a computer to create art, then you're not making a game. And if you're making a game, then that game cannot be an artwork, because it's a game instead.

But for like then three-billionth time, if we change our definition of "art," then all bets are off. Shadow's definition — which I have no problem with — is "a deliberate arrangement of elements to invoke a sense of," and then he named some emotions or mental states. We can quibble about what that list of emotions or mental states should be, but that's just working on the details. The crucial word in that definition is "to invoke." Art is that which is done for the purpose of being art. I know that's circular, but if we go with my definition it becomes "for the purpose of being evaluated on aesthetic merits" and if we go with Shadow's it's "for the purpose of invoking" whatever emotion or state we mean. A game isn't created with that sense of purpose; it has a different — and equally valid! — sense of purpose. But it's not art. It's amusement, or whatever you want to call it. It's a game.

I already have. Well. I didn't formulate it. I paraphrased it from the Dictionary application on my laptop. Art is any deliberate application of skill and creativity where the end product is intended by the creator to be judged primarily on its aesthetic merits. I won't defend that definition, 'cause I've already confessed that I don't know what art is. But that's what that dictionary told me, so that's what I went with. I'm happy to hear other definitions, 'cause I'm sure a better one can be come-up-with. I just gave up on that after struggling briefly to find a definition that was useful in deciding what wasn't art. Cause (cue Syndrome voice) if everything's art, then nothing is.

I'm sure that's true. Remember, I'm not a total idiot when it comes to games. I did play Call of Duty last year, and I remember well the part where your helo gets knocked out of the sky by the nuclear explosion, and what comes after. Totally gripping, totally engaging, totally … erm, "beautiful" is the wrong word entirely, but it did have aesthetic merit. It's just that that game wasn't (as far as I know) created with the intent that it be judged primarily on aesthetics.

Oh, that's just silly, brother. Of course there's a line to be drawn between these things. Otherwise we wouldn't bother having different words for them. Are there grey areas in between? Of course! But that doesn't mean the distinction between "fun" and "beautiful" doesn't exist. Something can be fun without having aesthetic merit at all; I think it's fair to say that the old-school Donkey Kong game wasn't easy on the eyes. And anybody who's taken an art-appreciation class from a bad teacher knows full well that you can have beauty without any fun at all.

I can totally go along with that. But again, there's the question of intent there. If you're (pulling an example out of my ear here) beating up a bunch of muggers in an alley someplace, you can do it in a graceful, elegant, visually pleasing way, but it's not art. Because you're not doing it just to be graceful or beautiful. You're doing it to whup ass.

…and also not what I was saying…

How do we judge good movies from bad movies? I know, I know, we all have our own taste, but in the broadest terms, how do we judge? A good movie is skillfully told, or beautifully photographed, or well performed, or … whatever. All the things good movies are. Bad movies lack the qualities good movies have. There's a set of criteria on which movies are usually judged, and those criteria are, at heart, aesthetic.

Video games are meant to be a challenge of skill, or an amusement, or things of that nature. They're intended to be judged on those merits for the most part. Are there exceptions? Sure. But we're generalizing here. Like I said, a "video game" that is meant primarily to be judged in aesthetic terms and not in terms of challenge or gameplay or fun or whatever maybe shouldn't be called a "video game," but rather something else.

Which was my whole point: That's the textbook definition of the logical fallacy of begging the question. You're (in this case, they are) taking the proposition under debate and turning it into an assumption, then drawing a conclusion from it. That doesn't tell us anything; it's just an assertion.

Look, we're still dancing around definitions. I don't like my working definition of "art" any more than you do, man. So help me out here. Give me a definition of "art" that can be used to declare that somebody is not art. If it's not totally nutso, I'll run with it and we'll see where we end up.

Yeah, I remember that one. It was, at best, an extremely poorly constructed joke.

I think you're right, in that that would have achieved his goal better than what he did. But I think his goal was kinda stupid. Too many people think satire is the end of a conversation. It shouldn't be. It should be the beginning of one. Stuff like that is sometimes called "provocative" because it's meant to provoke. "Ha ha, you dumb" isn't satire. It's just gloating. And yeah, Ebert sometimes does get pretty gloaty.

But then he turns around and writes something like his not-that-long-ago article on what it's like to be unable to eat or drink. I can't dig up a link right now 'cause I have to get back to work, but it's a really, really great read.

For what it's worth, I don't necessarily think criticizing somebody's Twitter for not being thoughtful enough is a very safe rock on which to build your nest. That said, you've written an impressive piece of rebuttalry here, and I salute you for it. I don't actually agree with much of it, but that's cool. Smart people can talk, disagree and then get on with their lives. It's the people of small mind, in my experience, that tend to grab on to a point of contention with the tenacity of a bulldog and lock their jaws around it, never letting go until either the person they disagree with, or their relationship with that person, is dead.

Those people are jerks.

Anyway. Getting back to art: Is there any class of human endeavor that we can declare, ex cathedra, not to be art? Or is it possible for anything humans do to be art, if it's done in the right way?

ON PREVIEW: Oh goddammit. You went and wrote more. Okay:

It's not. But Pac-Man wasn't created with the intent that it should be installed in a museum and judged on its aesthetic merits. It was made to be played. Hence, not art by the definition I've already asked you to replace for us.

Depends on what the guy's intent was when he added the stick. Was his intent that it be a participatory artwork, or was his intent that it be a game? That's where the line is drawn in the definition I've already said I'm happy to drop in favor of a better one.

I'm confused and afraid.

No excuse!

This is me responding before reading Ebert's article.

I don't know what the hell "art" means. So I consulted a dictionary. The first definition says, in a nutshell, that art is any deliberate application of skill and imagination to create something which is meant to be evaluated primarily on aesthetic terms. As good a working definition as any, I guess.

The definition of "aesthetic" is pretty clear: of or concerning beauty or the appreciation of beauty. Judging whether something is fun to play is not an aesthetic evaluation. It's another kind of evaluation.

So no. Video games, by virtue of the fact that they're primarily meant to be fun, cannot be art. Because art is primarily meant to be beautiful. Different goals.

Find me a video game that isn't meant to be fun and I'll call it the exception that proves the rule. Video games are aren't designed with some close cousin of "fun" in mind are exceptional specifically because they're unusual. If video games evolve to the point where saying they're usually meant to be fun is an unreasonable generalization, then video games can certainly be art. Because the nature of video games will have changed.

Can video games have artistic merit? Sure. Everything humans do can be evaluated aesthetically, and frankly I think things should be more often. But the subject of the debate is whether video games can be art, the noun, and until and unless the commonly accepted notion of "video game" changes, I say no.

Now, this is me responding after reading Ebert's article:

Okay, Roger was far less simplistic than I was. He rejected the notion of working from objective definitions and instead spoke subjectively about what "art" means to him. That's why he's the genius and I'm a guy with a laptop.

But I still think there's something to be said for the question of intent. What is the creator's (or creators') intent when they made Run Around With A Gun VII or whatever? Were they merely trying to amuse? Were they trying to Make A Big Point? Were they trying to seem profound without actually taking a stance on anything? None of these are, in my opinion, art. Ars gratia artis, and all that. Art is that which is done solely for its own sake.

What we now call "video games" but would be better described as "interactive audio-visual computer programs" are indeed a medium. It might well be possible to create not just art — which I'm sure has been done — but successful art in that medium. I can't name a successful work of art in the interactive-audio-whatever-I-said medium, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist. In fact let's say, for sake of argument, that at least one does.

Is it a video game?

And just like that, we're back to definitions. Games are meant primarily to be fun; art is meant primarily to be beautiful. It's silly to assert that one is inherently more noble or worthy than the other. They're just different classes of human endeavor.

So no. I still come down on the side of video games never being art. But on the other hand, art can never be a video game. So there's that.

Cause I missed it last night: I wasn't talking about Ender's Game, Dorkman. I like that book, but I think I get what people don't like about it, so that's cool.

Back on topic, though: I think the phrase "I wanted something different" goes a long way here. I'm right on the very edge of wanting something different from this movie myself, pulled back only because what I got, while deeply flawed, had other virtues that I enjoyed and respected.

Brian, it sounds to me like you wanted something different so badly that you couldn't enjoy what you were given. And that's cool. There's no right or wrong here, just degrees of preference.

Tough. Unlike dear Brian, I know better than to hoist my totems on a plinth for the amusement of the crowd.

(Plus, I think I pretty much gave away enough clues for a motivated soul to figure out.)

If I promise to put on some pants, can we have a group hug?