Fullofkittens wrote:

...but pretty games like Shadow of The Colossus are a red herring.

Check this out:
A good story is a necessity for a novel, it doesn't hurt a movie, and it doesn't help a song at all. Attractive visuals are a necessity for a painting, important for a movie, don't hurt a music video, and don't help a novel at all. Any art form is going to have something that's critical to its impact, some other things that are nice, some things that don't hurt, and some things that don't count.

For videogames, the thing that they need is immersion. A good videogame is something that you can play and totally forget what you're doing and become one with the little falling blocks. Good graphics and sound are nice. A good story doesn't hurt. Character development doesn't count.

In my opinion, Shadow Of The Colossus wildly succeeds at being an interactive painting but fails as a video game because it's not very immersive. The Colossi look so amazing that it takes you out of the game. They keep stopping the action to show you how great everything looks. Resident Evil 4 is a much better video game because if a guy in the video game comes at you with a chainsaw, you physically jump back. You are immersed in the game. God Hand and DMC3 are more artsy than SoTC, too, because in those games you start to understand the physical space that "you" are in. A guy goes offscreen and you want to do a dash attack and hit him and then bounce back and gun two guys down? You know right where he is despite the fact that, actually, he isn't anywhere. The game has created in you the potential to concentrate on this fictitious and arbitrary space and accept it.

To me, that's where games get really artiferous: where they allow you to disregard the outside world and accept the game as an alternate reality while you're playing.

Ebert's comparison of video games to movies as an art form are silly because movies and video games don't really share artistic goals... except the goal that all arts share, which is to allow people to get out of their own reality for a minute and consider another. Video games have just as much potential for this as any other art form; they don't share some characteristics with movies because they don't need them.