Regarding one sentence of Mr. Ebert's grudging capitulation.

There was no agreement among the thousands of posters about even one current game that was an unassailable masterpiece.

- The grudging capitulation in question.

Well, no. The medium's only sixty years old, and it's only been consumable by a large audience for about twenty-five. Due to obvious technological limitations, games capable of carrying as much information as even a short book or movie have only been widely available, in first-world countries, for about fifteen of those years.

I just looked it up, and Birth of a Nation came out in 1914, slightly less than twenty years after the first movie theater opened. My recollections from my single film class suggest to me that it couldn't have been regarded as a masterpiece until the thirties or forties, because no movie was - it didn't occur to people that movies could be masterpieces. They weren't art.

And it gets even dicier if we're talking about the aesthetics of gameplay, rather than art or storytelling. Gameplay is an art with literally no precedent. We keep bringing up visuals and storytelling in these conversations because we haven't yet developed the critical vocabulary necessary to talk about gameplay. How can we say what a masterpiece is going to look like when we still don't even know what beautiful looks like? There are games with literally awful gameplay that we nonetheless consider classics - the Zelda controls are an obvious menace to human sanity and wrists. Yet they've become a standard because those games are compelling in other ways, and also because, if not reasonable in terms of the human nervous system, they are reasonable in terms of a grid and buttons.

We're still at the point at which, for the most part, our relationship to the technology is dictating our relationship to the medium. I'm not sure we're going to be able to have a real conversation about this until that stops. I suspect that this'll happen either when the tools to make games become accessible to non-programmers, or everyone's a programmer. Also, that it'll happen one genre at a time, probably with strongly narrative games like RPGs coming first, and almost certainly with some free browser-based game being the first to get the public gold star. It'll be something primarily solitary rather than something primarily participatory, because we're fundamentally unwilling to view participatory things as being art.

(I've wondered if this is part of the motivation for the people on the fandom side who are willing to believe that fanfiction isn't art. I think that they feel that there's something illegitimate about the culture that produces fanfiction, which renders it somehow different from works that, while conceptually similar, we assume to have been produced in solitude - The Divine Comedy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Hamlet itself.

If my theory holds, there are probably rap fans out there right now saying, "well, no, I don't really consider it art...")

Though gameplay design will probably have to grow a lot before we reach this point, I suspect that it will never be widely appreciated as an art in itself, because there's a utilitarian element to it which makes it seem more basic than it is. It's like how almost no one cares about how typefaces are made, or how buildings are designed.

Going back to masterpieces - I don't really think that I would count my two little gods, Chrono Trigger and Earthbound. Chrono Trigger aims fairly high, in the sense that its developers knew the rules, knew what everyone else had done, and went and did it better. Also, they knew how to tell a story. My vague personal sense of a masterpiece, though, is one of something that pushes harder - it's not enough just to tell your story really, really well. I'll provisionally define my masterpiece as a work that does something new, does something critical, does something cruel, and does it all in a way that has some sort of beauty.

And I do apply the "critical" and "cruel" part of the standard to music and paintings. It is possible to be critical merely by existing in a certain way; this is how non-violent protest works. It is also what draws jerks to veganism and the priesthood.

Earthbound pushes hard, especially for something that was developed for the SNES and not the PC. Its developers also knew all the rules, and they broke them in exactly the ways that hurt the most. Evil Facebook game designers could still look to it for lessons on how to mess with their users' heads. In a lot of ways the game's a criticism of both the RPG genre and its players.

It's also, however, off its balance in a lot of ways - the tone's very uneven, and while you can certainly argue that the level-grinding and tedious quests it requires are part of a message, it's not exactly an experience that's either useful or pleasant. It does new, critical, and cruel things, but they don't cohere. It has no grace. It's something fascinating, but that's in spite of itself.

I don't actually play a lot, though, and can't really think of anything else I'd put in the running. Passage is good, but not that good. Cave Story I'd rank somewhere below Chrono Trigger. What I've played of the Zelda and Dragon Quest franchises can go jump off a cliff because they don't care about gameplay at all, and Final Fantasy is too ridiculous to contemplate. Do not even talk to me about Final Fantasy.

So, suggestions: When cultural shift gets far enough that masterpiece status becomes officially available to video games - I imagine this as a process involving the creation of a federal bureau and a hierarchy of rubber stamps - what do you think will make the cut?

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Random note: Did you know that Moto Hagio did the art for Illusion of Gaia? She did! I was looking at the rest of the game's credits just now, and the writer was Mariko Ōhara, a science fiction novelist who apparently likes Cordwainer Smith and wrote Kirk/Spock fanfic in 70s. This is obviously excellent. I really liked that game as a kid; suddenly I want to go watch speedruns on YouTube. (It has Zelda-style gameplay, so I never actually got far in it.)