“Art has never been made while thinking of art.”
- Niko Stumpo

“I shit on the chest of Fun.”
- Hunter S. Thompson

Leave it to Roger Ebert to make THIS film critic write about video games. I’m sure anyone who would click on an article that has “Ubisoft” in the title has read about Ebert and his decree that video games are not art. There has been ranting, raving, pissing, and moaning to the contrary from everyone under the age of thirty who hasn’t seen the sun since the PS2 came out.

Art, after all, is subjective. What do I think art is? I think art is whatever the hell you think it is. Seriously, after you get past the age of twenty-one, you have better things to do than mull over the sophomore-in-high-school bullshit like “What is art?” Like what you like and act your age. Personally, I like stuff that can wring your emotions and overheat your brain. Or at the very least take you on a ride. Would I call it art? If I like it, does it even fucking matter?

“Art” is the word you use so you can hold the illusion of good taste over someone you feel superior to. Because if you know what “art” is, than you know what “isn’t art.” It’s a tool for snobbery, not an abstract ideal.

But in my years as a film critic even though I have often been hesitant to use the word “art,” I have become well-acquainted with entertainment that are more than willing to hoist the title FOR me. Basically screaming that they are indeed “the thinking person’s film/television show/novel/album/video game/velvet Elvis painting.” And a whole bunch of them are completely insufferable. They don’t come off as life-changing or great. No, they just come off as really fucking smug. I may not know art, but I know a Goddamn poseur when I see one.

Which is why, as I’ve said, I think I’m qualified as a film critic to talk about video games. Or at least one in particular. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Assassin’s Creed.

The glacially paced interactive playground where Lost meets the Crusades, Assassin’s Creed has you play as Althair, who is a twelfth-century assassin in the Holy Land… Kinda. Before you get to assassinate anyone, you’re introduced as some guy named Desmond in 2012, hooked up to a machine in a lab run by a creepily rendered, boner-killing video game version of Kristen Bell. To make a convoluted concept mercifully brief, you’re time-travelling through your own DNA to recover a precious bit of information that will change the world and greatly benefit the DHARMA Initiative, or the Knights Templar, or the Priory of Scion or some OTHER shadowy and ill-formed far-reaching organization like that. It’s not really all that clear. But it WILL be, if you plunk down another sixty bucks in a couple of years for the sequel.

Story aside, you have to navigate through cities in the Crusades era Middle East and climb onto big buildings. From there you can survey your surroundings and pick up via telepathy (or something) little tasks like interrogations or eavesdropping that need doing. You do a certain number of these, you find out who to assassinate and where. Then you do it, then you run back to headquarters, and then you get yanked out of the time-travel gizmo and the Creepy-Bell flirts with you.

Ah, but not so fast. In order to GET to these big cities, you have to ride your horse there. The catch is that in order not to attract the attention of the various soldiers scattered across the countryside, you have to use your “Blend” button, which makes you go really… Really… REEEEEAAAALLLLLY slowly. And those motherfuckers are everywhere. This being a stealth game, you have to keep the “Blend” button down for endless minutes traveling to each city.

And the “Blend” button works in the city as well, for if you press it, you can fold your hands and walk slowly like you’re a praying religious scholar. You know that you are seen by the guards because an annoying beep sounds off. So you have to walk around these huge cities at the pace of a snail trying to navigate slow molasses, or else the guards will spot and attack you. And MAY THE LORD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL if your thumb gets sweaty and slides off the button, ’cause then it’s “beep-beep-beep-beep” until you get it back on there again.

As for the combat, it’s rhythm-based. Yes, rhythm-based. You have to hold the guard trigger down and press an attack button RIGHT BEFORE the other guy attacks, so you can parry and counter-strike. You can’t hack-and-slash, for then you will die very quickly. Ninja Gaiden for the original Xbox is a lot like that, except that THAT one gives you at least the option of hacking and slashing if you want to. You have to be GOD if you want to get far in that game in that way, but you could if you were good enough. You can’t do that with Assassin’s Creed. It’s either their way or the dusty, boring, historically relevant highway. I guess it’s to imitate real sword-fighting, which would be great if real sword-fighting wasn’t BORING AS FUCK TO WATCH!

But a lot of the praise Assassin’s Creed received came from how Althair can leap from rooftop to rooftop while being pursued by enemies in a kind of parkour-type way. But the thing is you have to hold down a couple of buttons and use your analog stick to guide him to where you want him to go. You may not think that the elimination of the “Jump” button is all that big a deal. Hell, it might even strike you as innovative. But what it did for me was give me the impression that I was watching the game as opposed to actually playing it. Christ, I could be reading, for all this game’s concerned which, coincidentally, doesn’t involve a “Jump” button either.

So you have a very pretty game (and it is) that requires meaningless repetitions of the same tasks, while taking a whole lot of the button pressing out of the equation. Combine this with long cut-scenes full of thin characters (with no context, mind you, they’re just there to kill) that have diarrhea of the mouth. So much so to the extent that it makes the much maligned forty minute cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 2 play like terse, rapid-fire Mamet in comparison. You know, for something that has the word “game” in the description, Assassin’s Creed isn’t a whole lot of fun.

But of course it’s not supposed to be fun in the same way Babel isn’t supposed to be fun as a movie. It’s “art.” And by thunder if you can’t appreciate that the mercenary plot and the draggy pace as a sign of something TRULY FUCKING GREAT, then you really don’t deserve it. Anything this boring couldn’t have POSSIBLY been intended as entertainment.

Even looking back just a scant couple of months after the fact, 2007 was a watershed year for video games. Assassin’s Creed tried for historical relevance. Call of Duty 4 tried to be topical. Bioshock is a ten-hour criticism of Ayn Rand. Mass Effect acted, as good science fiction often does, as a present-day allegory about humans trying to make their way in a galaxy that doesn’t want them, in the all-too-familiar hopes of “winning hearts and minds.” 2007 is the year that, aside from the violence and sexual content of years past, video games really weren’t for kids anymore.

The difference though? Those other three games were fun. We all remember how we killed our first Big Daddy or the rush of the tanker level. What are we gonna take from Assassin’s Creed other than that Goddamn beeping?

This could be the first sign of growing pains that every medium has. They aren’t always pretty and can have repercussions that could take generations to correct themselves. Or it could be a sign.

It will be a sign that the wrong kind of people will start playing video games. Not because they love them or want to prove themselves behind a controller. But because it will be what all the cool kids are doing. They will become a status symbol, like copies of Finnegan’s Wake or The Birth of Cool taking up valuable shelf-space in spite of the fact that their owners didn’t bother reading or listening to them. Because just having it on your shelf imparts to anyone who sees it that that you’re just so Goddamn classy… These people will most likely be wearing turtlenecks and wear Old Spice.

I don’t want snooty, turtlenecky fucks playing video games. I don’t want college students having to bullshit their way through term papers on Final Fantasy VII the same way most do on The Great Gatsby. People play them nowadays because they love them. And games like Assassin’s Creed that have all the hype and sales behind them will go a long way towards diluting that almost childlike purity. Video games, for better or worse, are the last bastion of the True Believer, where a fraud has no hopes for immortality.

And though I may not be the hardest of the hardcore gamer, I don’t want to do away with that just yet.

-The opinions expressed by Dr. Royce Clemens in his Doom Dispatch column do not necessarily reflect the views of Geeks of Doom.-