Pixels
The little joys of the art of video games
written by Mike on February 14, 2025

This recent gem from Mr. Ebert was in response to what I can only imagine to be hundreds of hate mails from "most gamers" responding to an earlier statement he made that video games were "inherantly inferior to film & literature." Since then, the Internet has exploded with debate on whether or not video games can truly be considered an art. Ebert contends that video games have to drink at a separate fountain because of the need for player input in order to progress. To his clan of thought, art is not interactive. It is observed. You watch a movie. You read a book. You look at a painting. You refrain from taking the painting off the shelf & cheating on your wife, instead opting to bring a baby cow home as a pet. You make a quote from City Slickers the movie. The Circle of Life is complete! You quote another movie. The Circle of Life begins again!

What Ebert's disgruntled inbox fillers, which is really a dirty euphemism for "telling someone off via electronic mail (in bed)," failed to read is that he differentiated artistic achievement from craftsmanship. He'll buy that a game can be aesthetically pleasing on several levels. It's the interactivity that makes him refer to game developers as craftsmen & not artists. Art, to Ebert, requires full control by the creators. The problem here is that art's a touchy subject. Touchy enough to compel me to rewrite these first few paragraphs about 47 times before I was content with them. I didn't even remember to add jokes until the 12th time, & after the 35th time I took a break to take a shower & rewrite it a 36th time in my head.

I'm not here to argue the artistic merit of video games. I don't care that Roger Ebert thinks Akira Kurosawa could beat Shigeru Miyamoto in a fight because I have to tell Mario not to walk into a turtle's mouth. As far as I'm concerned, arts & crafts go together. You didn't go to art class & then go to craft class later. You didn't get graded an A for art or a C for craft depending on how awesome your popsicle stick building was. I believe anything someone creates can be viewed as art to somebody. Someone who builds cars is going to stand back after a finished job & admire his work of art. In that sense, there's art in every concrete thing that needs to be designed. People who design toothbrushes & tables & shoes... if they love what they do, then they all view the result of their craftsmanship as works of art. Or at least the results that don't get them fired & then sent on fucking insane road trips by over-the-top Kirsten Dunst & then lose an arm wrestling match to Over The Top Kirsten Dunst.

I am an appreciator of things. I see the shoe & the toothbrush & the table, & while I may not truly understand on the same level, I appreciate that someone, somewhere found them beautiful. On the flipside to that coin, not everybody's going to get taken aback by a Monet painting, or be interested in the artistic movie, & instead pay 12 bucks in tickets & popcorn to watch Martin Lawrence dress up like a fat woman. Big Momma's House 2 set a record for the second-highest grossing opening weekend in January, falling short of only the 1997 re-release of Star Wars. What's wrong with America? They're not moved the same way Roger Ebert is moved. That's what.

For years, I've talked fondly & often went long-winded on my experience as a player of video games, only to have people important to me just smile & nod. They never really understood. I can understand that they don't understand, even though it makes me sound like I'm thanking you for your thank you card, but I guess we all wish that someone we love can see something through our own eyes & with the same joy. With all this recent talk about games & art, I've been moved to give it one more quick try.

On more than one occasion, our own Emily drops the familiar subjects & just goes into paragraphs about the things in life she loves, the things that make her life worth living. Her Tracy's faces, as she's borrowed from Woody Allen to dub them. This Valentine's Day, I wanted to write a public love letter to my all time favorite moments of my gaming experience, the moments where I put my controller down for a few seconds & really appreciate what they did there, & love being alive to have witnessed it. These are my little joys. These are the pixels in which I let myself get lost.

A year ago, when I threw together a list of my 20 all-time favorite games, I ranked this as number five, & talked about the game. But I never really got into why I ranked it so high. This was my first really in-depth adventure game. Before that, it was Pitfall, Donkey Kong & Burgertime. You don't really need to know a lot of detail when you're swinging over alligator heads to try & make a giant hamburger for my square-faced girlfriend trapped on top of a building. What drew me so much more into the Black Cauldron was, well...

If you hit F8 you could "look." I made sure to do this on every screen, not so much for hints on what to do next, but just to read what it said. It was like poetry to seven-year-old me. If any of those other games ever tried to do that, it would come out like "There are some more alligators in the water. Maybe you should try that jumping on their heads thing again," or "Holy shit an angry hot dog!" The Black Cauldron was the first & only game of its kind that I'd played up until that point that could go into that much detail, & I absolutely loved it.

This is probably my favorite video game screen of all time. It was the first thing you saw after scaling the wall of a cliff that's one of the tougher parts of the game, so this was always my little prize. It's only made up of 16 different colors, & nothing on even the modern day consoles has made me just lean back in my chair & stare at it like this one always has. I didn't even know the word "graphics" when I was seven. I didn't learn it until two years later when I started getting Nintendo Power magazine. Then I used it as a crazy buzz word in every conversation about a video game for the next five years.

"Hey, I just got Mega Man 5."
"Are the graphics good?"
"Yeah, man. Graphics! It's got awesome graphics & also the graphics."

Stupid. The graphics were the same as the other 4 Mega Mans. Mega Men. Ten to the sixth power men. They're all racially aware & walking down a street in Washington. And some are riding their dogs like hoverboards.

I want to say I'm a Star Wars fan, but it's not true in the sense of the word "fan" that everyone has grown to associate with science fiction. I enjoy the Star Wars movies. All of them. When I went to see Episode III last year, Yoda's fucking shadow came up on the screen for the first time & Karen quietly goes "Yesssss!" in that excited whispering voice. When I die & go to heaven, there's going to be a room I can walk into & relive that moment whenever I feel like it. That's Star Wars to me. I don't know the names of ancillary characters, or species, or planets or spaceship parts, & I don't care. But I get excited about freaking Yoda.

I don't remember a lot about the story of Shadows of the Empire. It's supposed to be like Episode 5 & a Half, & you're this new guy Dash that's never been brought up before ever, & I don't care because I'm too busy flying around Level 1 going "Wooooo I'm on Hoth!" I'm supposed to be tripping giant AT-AT walkers, but I just want to fly around & go exploring on the magical world of ice & snow. It's like having a big, white sheet of paper to draw on!

No, it'll only let me explore a big enough square section before my ship decides to turn itself around as if to say "You're supposed to be shooting things!"

This is a crappy shot of a canyon level that I initially spent about an hour or two wandering around in before I realized what it was exactly that I was supposed to be doing there. I don't even remember now. All I remember is finding a jetpack & flying around again. There's prominent John Williams music on a tolerable loop in the background, & if "the zone" didn't involve being focused on the goal of the task at hand, I'd otherwise be in it. Have you ever gotten lost while driving on, say, a personal errand, & not really care & actually start enjoying yourself? That's how I was with Shadows of the Empire. It was the first game in almost a decade, since the first Zelda, that I could just get lost in, take in my surroundings, & stop caring about saving the galaxy or whatever. It was my anti-speed-run. Come on. I'm in a canyon with a jetpack. You can't expect me to not have a little fun.

Ninja Gaiden is a little different. It was probably the first game to include cut scenes, & thus the first to truly start making the gaming experience feel a little more epic, like a movie. All the great games today have them now, games that would be thrown on other people's posts, were they to write one like this.

People like to skip through cut scenes & get back to playing the game. Stopping & breathing to watch a movie is for sissies, apparently. But I always got annoyed when people did that while I was trying to see what was going on. Ever ride shotgun in a car where the driver has a CD or iPod on but won't ever listen to a full song? My brother does that a lot. He'll get to like the bridge of a song, determine that he's heard enough, & skip around some more. That's what it was like watching some hasty little kid play a game with cut scenes. Then he'll try to summarize while he's playing, & take forever to spit it out, because now he's concentrating on not getting killed.

The ending WHICH I'M ABOUT TO SPOIL FOR YOU RIGHT NOW is what really does it for me in this game. Not a lot of video games have great endings to look forward to, even today. But back in 1989, it was a lot worse. Most of the time, you'd just get a congratulations screen, some quick, stupid dialogue, & if you're lucky, credits.

Ninja Gaiden does everything a cliche "good" movie ending is supposed to. After reluctantly leaving your dying father behind in a temple about to fall apart, you escape with a secret agent girl who ends up with orders to kill you. You tell the jerk boss on the other end of her not cell phone thingy that you get "two payments." One you've already received, the second is him. Then, when the agent asks what the payment you already received was...

If lines like that worked for non-ninjas, I'd be married already.

In Bristol, Virginia, a man of 26 has just inexplicably fractured his arm.

Maybe Roger Ebert hasn't read up very thoroughly on the subject. I'm not saying this because of my obvious bias to the Zelda franchise. Ocarina of Time, for starters, is widely recognized as the holder of the title "greatest game of all time." I've already sung its praises enough on the internet, so save for HySpace, hopefully this will be my Swan Song. Then I can write a novel about a baby spider.

If I sat & thought about it long enough, I could come up with a fairly decent list of just my favorite Zelda moments. But immediately, & without hesitation, there are two that stand out as my absolute favorite moments with a controller in my hand.

The first is any part of the Wind Waker that involves sailing. Inhale this, but do not touch. What you do not smell is ME FLIPPING YOU OFF because I know I'm the only idiot on the entire planet who enjoys the sailing. There's a LOT of it in this game, & if you're in a hurry to get somewhere or do some stupid side quest, it can be a big pain. For me, it's borderline exhilarating.

I blame a lot of my personality on the fact that I was born on the Jersey shore. Yes right on the beach it was awesome Believe it or not, friends, they do build hospitals near oceans. Being born near a beach, I feel, has somehow contributed to me being a very warm weather oriented person, as well as a lover of being in the water. In a video game based on a vast ocean, I get really into the sailing. Like REALLY into it. Ok, not like I'm going to put my pirate's hat on now, but... actually, on second thought, I'm so doing that next time.

You know how when actors in movies are at the beach & they breathe in through their nose deeply & almost exaggeratedly to get a breath of the fresh salt air? I do that when I set sail in the frigging Wind Waker. I lean back in my chair & let out a sign of contentment & hit the R button for no reason other than I'm in a boat that can jump out of the water when I do that.

A lot of people don't like the Wind Waker because of its cartoonish graphics, in contrast to the realistic ones they were expecting. I have fallen in love with the cel-shading style. This is one of the most beautiful games I have ever played, & I'll defend it like a girlfriend.

For years I've enjoyed staring at the night sky. I don't get to see a lot of stars, but the moon on a clear night sky is always something I've held dear. It's one of my favorite things about working early mornings. I get to start my day pressing the C-stick on my neck upward to look at the real life sky in real life. And I find myself doing it at nights in this game as well. These are the kinds of feelings video game developers should be concerned about creating & sparking. This is what it means to be engrossed in the art of a game.

Majora's Mask is the odd sequel to Ocarina of Time whose purpose on the surface is to encourage near-rhymes & to send Link in an adventure in another land to show off new developments in hardware boosting. It's the cute little sister of Ocarina of Time that no one seems to appreciate for some stupid reason. I love this game, but mostly because I loved the experience of playing it through the first time.

The reason why I got out of video gaming was because I went to college. I left all my games home in attempt to try & put a little effort into staying focused. That didn't exactly work, & soon I got addicted to the internet & making websites instead. And now I'm getting paid to tell you about Jon Bon Jovi's new movie. See? Everything really does work out in the end.

For my senior year, I decided to hell with it, & brought my Nintendo 64 with me. It was the only one I had left at the time, & I had just gotten the latest Zelda game for it. Yes, the Wind Waker was due to come out that March, & I was behind.

One of my housemates gave Majora's Mask a shot & absolutely sucked at it. So he finally called me down to get him the past the frigging beginning of the game. This turned to just him watching me play. It became our routine. I'd come back from doing whatever I had to do at the library, go up to my room, & he'd would be across the hall, waiting.

"Zelda?"
"Zelda."

Fight? Fight. Kitchen? Kitchen.

That son of a bitch ended up watching me play through the entire game. Getting all the little side quests done in the "Bombers Notebook," most of which were KILL ALL INFIDELS. And that's part of what made the ending so great. The game showed you what happened to all the people you've gone out of your way to help out. We helped two secret lovers find each other & arrange their marriage, & when I beat the game, it showed a scene from their wedding.

And there's my housemate, crying like a baby. Crying. At a video game.

Are games art? Don't care. But when they make a grown man cry, it's craftsmanship at its finest.