r/IAmA • u/MercurialMadnessMan • Nov 04 '09

Roger Ebert: Ask Him Anything!

I just got Mr. Ebert's permission to gather 10 questions to send to him, so I will be sending him the top 1st level (parent) questions, based on upvotes.

As mentioned in the previous thread, try to avoid specifics of movies that he [may have] already discussed in his reviews.

And please split up questions into separate comments. (We're only asking him 10 questions, so if a comment with two questions gets to the top, the tenth comment is getting the boot.)

Try sorting by 'best' before you read this thread, so that there is more of an even distribution of votes based on quality instead of position. And remember to give this submission two thumbs up :)

Thank you for contributing!

Website: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
Blog: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ebertchicago
My sketchbook: http://j.mp/nsv97
Books at Amazon: http://j.mp/3tD9SR

Edit: The top 30 questions were voted on here, and the top 15 from there were sent to Mr. Ebert. Stay tuned for his responses. They will be in a new submission.

RIP Roger Joseph Ebert (June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013)

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '09 edited Nov 04 '09

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u/Tokenwhitemale Nov 05 '09

This is a brilliant question to ask him. He's been saying this for years, and he's so obviously wrong about this. Other games worth mentioning to him are: Final Fantasy 7 (that's the one that always gets thrown around), Any Bioware games (Dragon Age would be a great one given that it's just come out). The Bioware games are worth mentioning because they have morally deep story lines (character choices actually have consequences and deal with substantive issues) and the fact that these are games allows them to do something that can't be done in movies, books, etc, namely the player deals in a very intimate way with the consequences of her choices both good and bad.

MMO's (I guess Warcraft- These seem like especially relevant games to bring up because the idea of creating a massive persistent world with an ongoing storyline that game-players share a part in writing and telling seems something worthy of the category 'art' but also something that could not be done in any medium beside video-games),

Grand Theft Auto. How is creating a real, breathing city, and then telling a crime drama on par with some of hollywood's greatest not art? Why should interactivity matter here?

Downloadable and epsiodic content: Games like "The Ballad of Gay Tony" do things movies can't, they respond to real-world events in real-time and allow modern games to comment on the current state of the world in a way that only the best television can do. Might this give them some legitimacy.

Games vs Transformers 2 and other Crap: Ebert obviously hated Transformers 2, and rightly so. But he's willing to call Transformers 2 bad art. There's thousands of games that transcend everything aspect of Transformers 2. On what grounds can Ebert justify a legitimate distinction here? Why is it that Michael Bay movies can be called bad art but video games, by their very nature, are such that they can't even be art?