Last week, I followed a link from Fimoculous to Wired’s GameLife, where blogger Chris Baker attempted to quell the anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the game community by posting a game review written by Ebert for the magazine. If you just read that sentence and immediately asked yourself, “What anti-Roger Ebert sentiment in the video game community?” … well, let me back up a bit.
In 2005, Ebert fired the first of several shots in what appears to have been an accidental battle, by admitting to never having played the video game that inspired the movie Doom. A reader named Vikram Keskar wrote in with an extremely well-articulated letter of protest:
Doom works as a tribute because it fails so utterly as a movie. There is a reason so many video game-based movies suck: They are fundamentally different forms of representation. Thus by being faithful to the game, the movie pisses off the critic and pleases the gamer.
…to which Ebert rather flippantly responded:
Seen as a moviegoing experience, [Doom] was not a good one. There are specialist sites on the Web devoted to video games, and they review movies on their terms. I review them on mine. As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games.
(more…)
Originally posted on:
Spoutblog