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Video games can’t be art? Why Ebert is wrong and should gamers care?

Back in 2005, famed film critic Roger Ebert posited that ‘video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful”, but “the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art’, or, as many online at the time boiled it down, ‘Roger Ebert hates video games’.  Numerous video game fans replied to that column, and to this day I’ve seen references to his ‘hatred’ crop up from time to time.  This is usually when he pans a movie that a gamer liked, with…

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District 9 Director Neill Blomkamp’s TEDxVancouver video

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a foundation known for its conferences devoted to what it calls ‘ideas worth spreading’. Along with the regular TED event, held in Long Beach CA, and the TED Global conferences (held in different cities each year), there are now independently organized TEDx events happening around the globe. In November 2009 TEDxVancouver took place at the Electronic Arts Burnaby campus. The event’s theme was ‘Forever Young’, and one of the invited speakers was Neill Blomkamp, South African born Canadian, and Vancouver Film School trained, director of…

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