Brian Moriarty defends Ebert's dismissal of video games as art:
It took many decades for photography and cinema to earn their places among the Hegelian fine arts of painting, sculpture, poetry and drama, music, dance and architecture. Now, it's natural and tempting for us to expect that games will follow the same pattern. But there's a big difference. Photography and cinema were new technologies. Games are not new. They've been part of our culture for thousands of years. They're much older than the belles arts of the Renaissance, older than the representational art of the Greeks, older than the cave art of prehistory.
By what right do games suddenly demand the status of great art? If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command?
(Van Tino by Gigart for Spoke Art's upcoming Quentin v. Coen show, via Popped Culture)