The
Roger Ebert event is becoming quite old but since I have been on the road for a while I just have time now to write about it. Mr Ebert is a very popular film critic in the United States. He recently said that games are never going to be as compelling as films. Of course, Mr Ebert may know a lot about film but he probably knows very little about games. In any case, the case here is not making fun of a respectable old guy for dismissing videogames (that's too easy and too silly). Neither we should take this personal and turn this into a war between games and films. The interesting thing here is that Mr Ebert -or any major media critic for that- feels the urge to publicly voice his opinion about games. I mean, he probably had that opinion for a while but he never published it. Videogames have been around for decades but "old" media folks simply ignored them. Mr Ebert has a big share of power in the US and the entertainment industry. As a very famous critic of the most popular and socially recognized entertainment medium, he draws his power from the power of movies. Mr Ebert probably felt, for the first time in his life, that this power is not going to last forever and, in that sense, videogames are becoming a threat to him on a personal level. Of course, films are going to be around for a long long time - probably much longer that Mr Ebert himself. Cultural trends come and go - the age of radio led to the age of television but both media coexisted, coexist and will coexist quite well. The really important thing here is not what Ebert may have said but the fact that his opinion unveiled: videogames are becoming really important on a cultural level and that importance is so big that it cannot longer be ignored. Was it Gandhi that said -and I am quoting from memory, sorry, there's no Google on my SAS flight- "they first ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they insult you, then they fight you and then you win"? In any case, it was something like that. This Sunday morning I fired up Firefox and went through the New York Times web site. There was an article about videogames on the Technology section. This is not surprising now. However, I still smile a bit every time I find articles about games on mainstream media. It's sort of an inside joke. The fact is that I have been posting on this blog for about four years now. As you know, most of my posts are links to articles. Well, there was a time -and I am talking about a matter of 10 to 15 months here, not years- where articles about games only blessed the pages of mainstream media every couple of weeks. Now, I would be surprised if there is a day when I cannot find one. My job as a blogger has switched in the last year from link hunting into link filtering: the number of articles does not stop to increase.rShould we be happy about Ebert's anger and videogames becoming trendy. Well, as gamers of course we should: it is nice that more people share our passion. Of course, if the trend becomes permament then it will become invisible-nothing is permanent but what I mean is that videogames could become part of human culture in the same way that music and literature are. Whatever happens it will be exciting and we should be happy to be alive and experience it first-hand. Nothing is written in stone, except for one thing. In 50, 100 or 200 years a respected videogame critic will publicly disregard the newest cultural form. At that point, she will have to learn to share her toys with the newcomers. And life will go on.