In 2010, the late film critic Roger Ebert announced, “Video games can never be art.” Ebert was only partially right.

Video games may look like a frivolous form of entertainment and not serious art. But consider these questions: What is art? Who is authorized to define art? How do you distinguish art from nonart?

As the late American novelist, Donald Barthelme argued, “Who decides?” And who can deny the fact that video games have now become a dominant forms of media?

As a renowned film critic, Ebert must have believed that film was an esteemed art form that had deeper meanings than shallow video games. Perhaps he did not realize that motion pictures, too, were regarded as a superficial, inferior audio-visual form of entertainment by those in the theater circle and playwrights in the late 19th century when the Lumiere brothers and Edison first introduced the new medium.

Indeed, all new, innovative forms of arts are initially dismissed as trivial and low. In ancient Greece, for example, grandeur tragedies prevailed over comedies that were regarded as shallow and frivolous. In the 18th century, literary critics thought of the novel as a superficial, flippant literary form that only suited female readers. Even modernist works of arts, such as Pablo Picasso’s paintings and James Joyce’s novel, “Ulysses,” were seen as nothing but a joke or capricious verbal play by the stern advocates of 19th century realism.

Yet people tend to dismiss video games as nothing but mindless entertainment. Worse, they think of them as an addiction like narcotics. Of course, there are meaningless, violent video games full of shooting and bloodshed. And there are also addicts who play video games 24-7, day and night. These things lead to people criticizing video games as a harmful form of entertainment that needs to be banned.

Even in literature, however, there are lowbrow works. As for the addiction to video games, one can become addicted to many things including drinking and smoking. In Korea, so many people are addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Yet we do not necessarily call them addicts. Why, then, do we label video gamers as addicts?

Despite people’s hasty generalization, there are undeniably beneficial video games that are as meaningful as literature or cinema. Good video games can offer profound insight and bring about the same kind of intense emotional reactions as books or movies. Some experts even argue that a video game player experiences much more profound emotional impact when a character dies in a game compared to in a movie, because video games are interactive.

Indeed, video games now have similar roles as films and literary works. Professor Nick Bowman at West Virginia University said, “Such an experience gives players a space to challenge how they see the world, just as movies like ‘Schindler’s List’ or novels like ‘Animal Farm,’ did for past audiences.”

We are witnessing the advent of video games, and they are not necessarily an enemy of older mediums such as literature.

Neither are they a threat to literature. Rather, they can be a reliable partner. For example, literature can supply abundant mythologies, legends and folktales to enrich the content of video games. Or video games can adopt literary masterpieces and classic literature such as Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and so on.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen once wrote, “Video games taught me just as much about writing as novels did. The thousands of hours I spent with my head in books were matched by the thousands of hours I spent at my computer. I’m not sure I even recognized the difference.” Then he lamented the situation, “What is particularly sad about this state of affairs is that the literary world and the video games world could greatly benefit each other.”

According to Neely-Cohen, “Grand Theft Auto V” sold almost 27 million copies in 2013, grossing over a billion dollars in its first three days of sales.

If literature collaborates with video games, it would not only replenish but also flourish, as there would be so many best-sellers. Why then be antagonistic to video games?

Literature can also benefit from video games in another way. When a video game made from a famous literary work comes to the market, the book’s sales will dramatically increase. For example, when the video game “Dante’s Inferno” was released in 2010, the sales of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” shot up on Amazon.

Video games may not be literature, per se. Yet if they work together, literature could turn video games into an esteemed form of art while significantly expanding its reach. 

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He can be reached at sukim@snu.ac.kr. -- Ed.