Why Ebert Was Right

Earlier this week, film critic Roger Ebert created a small stir in the videogaming community. This minor tussle has actually been brewing for a weeks; it seemed to swirl into form first in his review of the movie Doom, and it progressed further in a following letters column on his site. It wasn't until this week's letters column, however, that he finally gave his opinion some actual body, contending that video games are an "inherently inferior" storytelling medium. He writes, "There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."

Most of the talkback comments on these reports discounted Ebert as an old codger who was making uninformed comments about fields in which he had no expertise. Others overestimated the literary qualities of certain text-heavy RPGs or pointed to elegant, subtle, artful games that had neither the capacity nor the desire to tell stories. And Ebert has even stated that he accepts the medium as capable of such brilliance.