You Troll'n. Aren't you?

You realize this would be one of the greatest and longest trolls in teh interenets history.

A differing opinion does not a fool make.

I'm sure you realize this, but you're making it very easy to dismiss the criticism simply as a form you don't personally enjoy. Would a comic book adapted from Huckleberry Finn be better than the book? What about a film?

Maybe you should try making the case by comparing one video game with another.

Roger,

I think timing is a big issue here, as you mentioned above. If this poll had taken place in 1978, the result would have been much different. My whole family are readers, and for all the usual reasons. We used/use reading to learn, to escape, and to build vocabulary. History has always been a favorite, passed on by my late mother, who couldn't get enough of American History.

At 53, I probably don't read as much as I did at times in the past, but my feeling is that is cyclical.

A follower,

@markbrooksva

There are video games -- like Super Mario Brothers, DOOM, and Grand Theft Auto -- that are just as important to modern American culture as Twain's novels were to their time period. Pop culture is a rapidly-shifting beast, and while video games certainly haven't had time to develop the same level of cultural influence as Huckleberry Finn (although with games like Mario, the gap is narrowing), they definitely have comparable immediate influence. And it's interesting that you bring up Finn's significance to anti-censorship advocates, because games like Grand Theft Auto, DOOM, Mortal Kombat, etc. have elicited similar outcry from many of the same people that protest Finn.

I think such polls carry about the same amount of validity as you attach to Best Ten lists. I abstained because, frankly, why choose? I do believe video games can be art (and that, in fact, many already are), but of course I would sacrifice them all for the works of Shakespeare. Hell, I'd sacrifice them all for just King Lear or Romeo and Juliet. Even Twelfth Night.

Would you sacrifice Twitter, Roger? Or cell phones?

Oh my. Would you sacrifice the movies? Or even just the complete works of Scorsese? Bergman? Godard?

I'm not being cheeky either. Just thinking about it kind of twists my guts up.

I voted in the poll. I started following the debate because I play and enjoy video games. I think they *can* be art--but aren't necessarily. But I voted in the poll because I love Huckleberry Finn. It's easily my favorite book. A treasure of literature and America. And I think anyone who would value a video game over it either needs to read it, re-read it, or is a damn fool.

In fact, I'm going to re-read it again now. I think you just made my summer!

As much as I love video games, I would trade all of them in a heartbeat for the works of Shakespeare. No question and I would love to see the results of that poll. I don't mean to take away from Huck Finn, and I would choose Huck Finn over about 95% of all video games, but there are some open ended games where you create your own story, I had to take into account the 5 years of playing World Of Warcraft every day into the video game choice-Huck Finn I could read 20 times, but not every day for 5 years.

Hi Rog. Missed you.

Sorry, I missed the twitter poll (I was sorting some stuff out for the better. All done.), but I took the web poll earlier today and for the reasons you so eloquently point out, Huckleberry Finn seemed to me too, the obvious choice.

As far as video games are concerned, I'd rather read a bad book, than play "a great video game".

I hope that this pestilential waste of time not only vanishes from your shores, but doesn't make it onto ours.

Indian Idiot (H.W.)

Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives.

For the record, I have never encountered a video game I value more than great literature, though there are quite a few things I esteem more highly than Huckleberry Finn, which proves only that in the highly subjective world of personal literary tastes, you and I are different people.

However, your phrasing here is interesting to me. 'Sooner or later, they will understand... or they will not.'

I suspect most people on the other side of the Video Game debate with you could say the same for you. Sooner or later, you will comprehend the aesthetics of video games as a separate medium of art, or you will not, and the journey either way will I hope be rewarding for you.

Video games are an 'active' art form -- the experience is shaped by the interactions one has with the game -- much as reading is active. One's imagination creates a unique vision for each new reader. I've wondered if your difficulty in accepting the aesthetics of video games comes from your most celebrated work coming from a passive medium -- namely film. One experiences film and responds to film, but that response does not change the film. Unlike a book or an audio play, one does not create their own vision of what is happening -- one receives the Director's vision (along with the actors and editors and all the rest) directly. Unlike a live stage performance, the movie doesn't change based upon how an audience reacts on a given night. This does not diminish the art of film, but one must consider different criteria and aesthetic principles as they examine it.

Video games suffer from a lack of scholarship -- most notably in identifying the aesthetic principles one can use as a basis for artistic theory. Obviously those aesthetics would have visual and audio elements, but questions of gameplay, of mechanics, of balance, of story -- linear or open -- aren't yet well defined or codified in terms of artistic discussion. I've wondered for some months if that's where the blind spots come from -- if the reason some can't accept video games as artistic expression is our lack of decent terminology and criteria to describe and discuss it. If so, then it's all a question of time -- time for theory and time for scholarship and time for debate. Obviously, this is part of that debate.

Still, I wonder if there will ever be a point where you has a transformative moment in a video game -- an experience you couldn't have had in reading or watching a movie -- that will cause you to think "oh. Oh, I get it. Wow." I hope you does -- not because I need to 'win,' but because that kind of transformative moment is rare and wonderful, and is exactly what art in any medium can give us, and I like you and would like you to have it.

I would, however, note that if your intention is to discuss reading and Huckleberry Finn instead of video games, you're not likely to accomplish it by comparing the two. That invites comment on the comparison, not merely one of the two.

Mr. Ebert, I follow you on Twitter (I'm @seldomspoken), and your blogs and tweets are some of the smartest I've read. You are the critic I trust the most. While not 100% always agreeing with your opinion, I certainly value it.

I myself was an avid gamer in my younger days, but now am planning to major in some form of english (teacher or journalism) when I go to college next year. I still game occasionally, from time to time. As much as games mean to me, I would definitely value Huck Finn over the game. Having just read it in AP English this year, and discussing it in the in depth discussions we did, I've come to realize the impact a novel can have. On this occasion, I do happen to agree with you (I however, don't agree with your review of Kick-ass, but that's just me).
Just letting you know that us young adults aren't all just obsessed with video games, and there can be a medium between the two. I have learned some amazing things from games, just as I've learned them from books. One game I would call "art" is Bioshock, a game borrowing heavily from the philosophy of Ayn Rand (whom I love). I'll stop rambling, though.

I was just wondering: do you see comic books as art too? Also, what are your thought on this new 3D craze? Thanks for your time, and I look forward to reading more of what you have to say. You're an idol of mine, don't let others tell you that you just "don't get it."

Seeing as it took 200 years for the German Romantics to elevate Shakespeare from thoughtless popular culture to the status of Art, I'm not sure we can make that comparison yet. Seriously, you're arguing for genres that are 100s of years old against a nascent form. It took novels longer than video games have been in existence to transcend being considered 'bourgeois women's entertainment,' i.e., not a real genre compared to poetry or classical theater.

Both Shakespeare and the novel were, in a sense, the video games of the 17th century.

As a writer, reader, and gamer, I recognize that games are already delivering narrative possibilities not available in the other arts. To think what they will be like in 125 years is scary beautiful. And that's coming from someone who reads infinitely more than he games.

And yeah, I think I've reached the stage in my life where can probably say safely I'm not going to read Huck Finn (not a big fan of 19th century realism), but I will continue to play games, so I'm a fool.

The main issue here is that the way art is transmitted is highly relevant to how it is received. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are reading books. Instead, they are consuming their artistic value through video games. So, while Finn might be a great novel, its presentation dates it. It simply is not as accessible to some people (especially younger people) as entertainment. So, they are more likely to attach more to a game, therefore considering it greater than Twain's masterpiece.

The other problem was that you did gives video games the advantage here. To some people, the themes of Finn are not relevant to them. However, video games have covered every theme under the sun, so people are going to find one game that speaks to them and claim it is valued over a single book.

Of course, the question of quality definitely comes into play here. On that issue, I just have to say; the criteria of making a great video game are vastly different than the criteria of making a great novel. Therefore, it is like comparing apples to oranges. However, to me you can boil it down to comparing artistic prowess. For me, something is contains a high level of artistry when it has the ability to both connect with and immerse the person experiencing it. Now, I've read Huck Finn and it is fantastic, but I have also played amazing games that have greatly immersed me in their worlds. Uh oh, which one do I choose?

The answer is a point a brought up earlier. It all has to do with which story resonates with my personal mindset/emotions more. It's a matter of personal preference. I guess this is a long winded way of saying Art is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are certain criteria for quality art, but in the end it's how it resonates with you that is going to determine how much you like it. And, since you asked your Huck Finn question in today's day and age - you have to realize that people are going to resonate more with video games. It's just the way thew world is right now. For better or for worse.

I was watching a game show today, and not only was a woman on it unable to come up with the name of the man responsible for the creation of Tom Sawyer, but she also failed to name Shakespeare as the creator of Prince Hamlet. That's not indicative of an epidemic, but it's still kind of sad.

Here's hoping that Twain's autobiography blows some minds.

Ebert: An alarming number of Americans have no idea who we fought our revolutionary war against.

I tried playing "Huck Finn: The Game", Roger, I really did. There were just too many cutscenes.

In a book, I can read about a boy attending his own fraudulent funeral. In a game, I can see how my friends would mourn an avatar of me and witness it firsthand. Both if these experiences teach me something profound and personal and universal -- what do you gain by setting them into arbitrary and meaningless contention against one another?

Why would we ever, in our short lives, value a solitary reading experience over any experience shared in real time with loved ones, no matter how banal. Happy Birthday is a terrible song, but you'd be a fool to prefer listening to Beethoven on your iPod over hearing tour wife sing that terrible song to you.

Huckleberry Finn doesn't feel directly relevant to the everyday lives of anyone born into a world where race ranks far down on any list of the major world issues of 2010. And you're comparing a book written over a century ago, about themes of that day, to an entertainment technology that most everyone under 30 has grown up with. I'm surprised the results weren't more skewed towards video games.

Where would you stand in the poll "Which do you value more, Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto K 467, or a great movie?"

I presume you pick a great movie, opening yourself to the expressed dismay of a music lover who passionately makes the case for this masterpiece of the classical form
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reJlRZ-fP10

Ebert: I don't think racism ranks very far down on the list.

Although I voted in the Internet poll - and for Huckleberry Finn, being ancient at the age of 30 and all (and a follower of Mr. Ebert on Twitter) - I think Internet polls better reflect the viral media sharing behaviors of Net-literate young adults than an actual reflection of the population at large.

A fairly obvious observation, I know, but a factor that will turn up the volume on future polls about Presidential races and other popularity contests. Since I study this as part of my Masters degree thesis, this particular poll has been an interesting study in the realm of Internet polling.

Every generation sees the values of those after it as foolish and juvenile. Isn't every person of a certain age burdened by nostalgia and the notion that "things were better back then"?

As well, if I'd have voted, I'd have chosen a video game over Huck Finn strictly because the "greatest American novel" means about as much to me as the "greatest American termite." Weren't there any novels of broader national appeal to which you could have dedicated your paean?

Ebert: Huck was brought up by my reader. The thought that he is not of broad national appeal causes me to despair.

What novel would you suggest?

I agree with your assessments with my every instinct, despite my relative ignorance of the complex video games loved by younger generations. I just never got much beyond Froggie on the Sinclair ZX, and Mario and Tetris on Gameboy, now about 20 years ago. So does US radio send out to the world Huck Finn as read by some lucky young actor which millions of us would love to listen to? So organize it, Roger. You know the talent.

Ebert: There is actually a free downloadable audio book, read by an actor who sounds like he could possibly be 13 or 14, which is correct:

http://j.mp/ck6c3g

Happy to see your comments, old Cape Town friend.

I appreciate and I am open-minded to video games AND Huck Finn, Ebert. Who's the fool?

Some posters will be angry over your comment about "evolving" from foolishness. I'm not. Neither would Mark Twain, I think:

"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."

Ah well, kids don't act like they used to, right? I'm sure your entire generation would value Huck Finn over the Beatles back in 1962. Or kids would value Huck Finn over Star Wars back in 1978.

I feel you didn't berate your poll enough. Lemme add another barb:

My father is a farmer who reads Shakespeare in his spare time. I imagine his choice would be reading Huck Finn around one million times over before he plays a video game.

He also reads the local Saskatchewan newspaper instead of reading the "blog"* from some man who used to be on tv who lives in Chicago.

I love your reviews and your blogs are fascinating and I even agree that kids are foolish and will eventually outgrow the video games and value the infinite knowledge, wonder and entertainment provide. It breaks my young, foolish heart to disagree with your stupid, stupid, stupid poll so vehemently.

*I highly doubt my father even knows what an air quote is or how to do it, let alone participate in a vote communicated to the masses by Twitter. Know your audience, dummy.

I cannot deny that there have been several video games have effected me greatly. I also cannot deny that, in terms of emotional resonance and artistic integrity, I much prefer movies and books to video games. The reason, I think, that video games are not, on average, true art yet is due to a lack of ambition within the field.

While there are plenty of junk movies that come out each year, there are also a large number of ambitious, well-meaning, and truly artistic works that also find audiences. Game designers, on average, don't have as much integrity. Maybe that's why there isn't a major televised video game awards ceremony like the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, or Tonys.

Thanks for the passage from Huck. I am ordering it straight away from Amazon.UK. Of course I read it as a child (without appreciating its nuances), but have forgotten everything, including his use of american vernacular. When I was in 1st grade, I read 360 books from the Dick and Jane variety to the "extremely difficult" Black Beauty which I was forced to read aloud to my father. Any pause or stammer over a word elicited a "What does that mean?" which meant I had to reach for the nearby Oxford dictionary to "look it up" and learn a new word. Despite the torture, I am still an active and relatively quick reader and feel that a love for reading becomes a love for learning and should be a major priority for any parent. As Missourians, we made the trek over to Hannibal to inspect the white picket fence, Injun Joe's cave and the mighty Mississippi and those memories remain.

I voted for video games because I've never read Huck Finn! I probably should one day, Mark Twain is a great writer.

I would have picked Harry Potter over any video game though. I still remember that day. I was sitting in the living room, super bored, and my mom came home and put Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in my hands. It was like a light bulb clicked on in my head and I was irreversibly on the path to loving reading.

Ebert, I respect you and your work a lot - you're one of the people who partially inspired me to start writing about film, actually. But, you've really got to get over this self-imposed stigma you seem to have about video-games - it's monotonous and hindering, it's unapologetically biased, and more than a little unfair to both video-games and cinema, or literature, or whatever the comparison you're making might be.

This becomes most cloying in the last two paragraphs, where you just out-and-out call anyone who did prefer a video-game to Huckleberry Finn a "fool," or at a foolish stage that you hope they'll soon pass through. This is a pretty remarkably shallow thing to say - I mean, among other things, I love Twain, myself. But, Huckleberry Finn isn't personally my favorite of his works - and, if it were a choice between that particular novel and something like, say, 1994's Sonic CD (which is a wonderful, almost artful blend of pretty deftly orchestrated New Jack Swing music, kaleidoscopic imagery and intentionally Surrealist environments and the only good thing to ever come out of that ill-fated add-on), I would certainly take the latter. A fool I might well be, but I take a great care to know what I'm enjoying and why.

"The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions."

I think this illustrates the biggest problem with your attitude towards games: a lack of imagination about where the medium is headed. Video games are the only entertainment or educational medium where there exists the possibility of making you feel as if you are literally walking in the shoes of a person from another time and place, and interacting with other people in that time and place. There are already hints of that feeling to be found in some of the best games.

It's not even been 20 years since we started seeing even crude 3-dimensional renderings of human beings in realtime games, and look how far it has come. Books and films have a bit of an advantage is creating a human experience for you: they rely on your powerful imagination or filmed footage of real human beings. Video games have a lot more work to do in presenting a fully interactive human character formed from scratch, and it's not quite there yet. There is no doubt in my mind that the best film CGI you see today, the best video games on the market right now, and the most cutting-edge human interface research are pointing to a future in which a "video game" (which will be a loosely applied term by then) will be able to provide you with a more powerful and transformative experience than a film possibly could.

The way you talk about reading books reminds me of David Lynch extolling the virtues of Transcendental Meditation.

"I wanted to form this foundation for enlightenment for the individual and student," Lynch said. "That's what education should be: to develop the full potential of the individual and peace on earth. Peace on earth isn't pie in the sky anymore. Real peace is not the absence of war, it's the absence of negativity."

Whether you are transcending and meditating on the void or sitting down and reading Huck Finn, either way you are suckered into sitting and relaxing and wasting your time for hours on end because elitists have told you it's a better way to improve yourself than playing video games. How are you improved in any way after reading Huck Finn, as opposed to reading a plot summary of the book? I could read that beautiful description of a storm over and over and pontificate about how musical it sounds but it does NOTHING to improve me except in ways that you imagine in your head to justify the huge amount of your life that you've wasted reading books.

Ebert: Plot summary? A book is not about what it is about. It's about how it's about it.

I suppose this sounds "elitist," but here goes: Based on your comment, you have never learned to read.

Beautiful. I wonder if Twain feared his manuscript's being rejected because of the way it was written. Imagine the faith he had to have in his own words, his own art.

I'm a P.T. Barnum reading pusher. I give away books to kids. I make them custom books--some that feature spelling words to be tested soon, others that feature the kid as a superhero. A new tactic is to ask what video games a kid likes and then find a book with a matching theme. I found a kid addicted to a game called Runes. I bought him a beautifully illustrated Book of Runes, and the runes tiles. He had no idea there was a history there. Now he's reading other things. Librarians know to push graphic novels on the "at risk of never reading" types. My new idea is to write urban fables with a touch of street vernacular. I'm glad to be reminded of Huck Finn. It started with him.

You title your entry with the clear results that video games were the overwhelming winner over Huck Finn and you even begin by opposing the idea that the results were swayed by a rabid rush of video gaming voters. You even go so far as to say that you believe the results are probably indicative of the overall population...And that the actual gap may even be greater. So you start off doing a fine job of playing Mr. Reasonable before you dive into trying to explain why the majority is wrong...Again. Let's compare your opening line from your last journal entry on this topic to the second to last sentence from this one:

July 1: "I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen."

July 6: "Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game..."

It took you a whopping 5 days to declare a book more valuable than something you have admittedly never experienced.

Here's the bottom line. When it comes to a topic of pure opinion that there will never be a clear right or wrong answer to there are two options: Either declare your opinions correct and yourself enlightened while others are fools (or as yet unenlightened) or go with the option that the majority sides with. You are obviously going with the former and are certainly entitled to your opinions. But since you can never prove without doubt that Huck Finn is more valuable than video games and since the majority of living people disagree I can confidently say that you are wrong...At least to the degree that if this was an election you would not be taking office and if this was a trial your peers would lock you up.

Pavlovian biting reflexes everywhere!

I have thought about this many times (with different themes and subjects, but the same, you know).
People prefer TV, silly movies, shallow talk, games, etc.
Easy distractions that does not make them, how to put it.... think to much or too hard.
A friend told me once: "I don't want to think when I watch a movie, all I want is to have fun".
I responded: But that, for me, is boring! I have to think. I want it to be complicated, to be a challenge. That is fun.
So I guess that is the difference in the two groups of people, and why one is bigger than the other.
And the value of both things, the game and the book, speak by itself in your link: You can download, free, the book we so highly value, but just try to download a hit video game for free on the web and see what happens.
So "value" probably means "money" for most people.

Given the choice between "any great novel" and "any great video game" you'd get an unsurprising win for novels, I think. A medium spanning multiple centuries versus a medium with only 30 years of meaningful history is just more likely on the odds to score a hit.

Consider the same poll posited to a 1930 audience where they're asked to choose between "any great novel" and "any great film"; you'd, I can only assume, have a home run for the written word. But in 2010 the margin would be slimmer.

What I can't grasp yet is how the FACT you are having this debate at all does not motivate you to concede you are wrong. Can you imagine any book - ANY BOOK, with the probably exception of religious texts - that you could publicly denounce as "not art" and get this kind of a backlash? Can you produce any written text whose public denunciation would procure such a savage and emotional defence?

I mean, you're entitled to an opinion, and I'm glad you have bad ones as well as good ones because a passionately argued bad idea is usually more interesting than an apathetically held good one, but for good or ill you're a gatekeeper of culture, and the more the mainstream admits to the possibility of culture in interactive media, the faster people will be inspired to create it.

I read Huck Finn for the first time last year, and most likely due to my high expectations (I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting, but certainly not the children's adventure story that is still Huck Finn's essence) I had trouble really getting into the novel. There are absolutely some extraordinary passages (the blood feud particularly stands out), but it seems fundamentally confused about what it wants to be, and everything falls apart when Tom Sawyer comes back.

I think George Saunders put it best in "The United States of Huck" (published both in his collected essays, "The Braindead Megaphone" and as an introduction to many introductions to the book), I can't find the full text but he compared the book to running headlong into a shack that restricted exactly where American literature could go. Running into the shack is greatly damaging, Saunders notes the inconsistent tone, the somewhat racist language and the book's terrible ending, but ends the essay that left in its wake is indeed that broken shack.

kind of an artificial contest dontcha think mr. ebert?

if you had to choose between huck finn or every comic book ever published, which would you choose?

or huck finn or every tv show ever made?

or...

huck finn or every movie ever made?

there's a lot of works that fall far short of huck finn, shakespeare, the collected books of the bible, tolstoy, dostoevsky, cervantes ?....

would you honestly say that you would choose any movie over the greatest literature of the world?

actually, we can take it further - an argument can be made that even literature itself is superfluous and there are more important things, REAL things that ought to be attended to:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/

so are we who love literature merely a more advanced kind of fool with the added bonus of pretention?

shall we burn art at the pyre for the sake of gettin' on with "real life" too?

isn't someone wasting their lives by pursuing screenwriting rather than studying to be a doctor and doing REAL good in the world?

everything is less important than something else - certainly subjectively, possibly objectively... but the world is big enough so that we don't have to be burning everything that doesn't surpass a certain level of significance.

no game imo is as important as huck finn.

imo, no tv show is either.

imo, arguably no movie is either.

so what?

they are all worthwhile in their own right. and there's plenty of room for different people, different times, different moods.

jin

Ebert: In the entry, I explained why Huckleberry Finn happened to be the example.

You may be just trying to open up a discussion about reading, on the subject of which I would agree with you, but let's face it: you're also still picking a fight over the video game thing by implying that those who didn't vote the way you would have liked are at a 'foolish stage.'

I voted for Huck Finn for the reasons you describe...well, ok, for the reason that I'm a great fan of Twain's prose...only without the patronizing jab at others who think differently. I voted for Huck Finn, but only because too many Video Games are mindless and not enough aspire to be anything more, and of those who do none have quite reached that level...yet.

'Yet', of course, being the key word there.

I've been studying Japanese for some months now, history and language. When the Japanese found that the novel was a respected medium in the West during their opening to the world, around the mid-19th century, they were shocked. Japan had novels, but by the Tokugawa era the medium was widely considered mostly fit for tawdry and forgettable stories, not for serious writers. They thought it bizarre anyone could see it as an art form. 'Show me a man who would value a novel over the Analects of Confucius, and I'll show you a fool', sayeth the mid-19th century Japanese Ebert.

Give it time and gaming will produce its Mark Twains and its Kubricks and its Dostoevskys. It will produce things to stir the soul like any other medium, though in its own way, just like every medium does so in its own way. And if you don't understand why by now, if you're still trapped thinking about scoring points and the like, in which a game is no more than a glorified pinball machine, then after so many thousands of heartfelt testimonials against your viewpoint, what else can be done to convince you short of what you obviously will not do?

I encourage more people to read. But I also cheerfully encourage them to broaden their horizons and watch the best movies, see the best plays, view the best paintings and play the best games. Art would be a drab thing indeed if every expression of it were dismissed under various pretexts without even being given a chance.

I'm reminded of an excellent Wondermark cartoon:

http://wondermark.com/442/

Sorry for double commenting, but - have you not also considered the role of literacy? Huckleberry Finn is one of a great number of gateways into a wonderful and fulfilling relationship with the written word, but that relationship is and must be a historical artefact. The passing of time will only slowly erode the quality and power of great novels - and then only through an increasing detachment from the culture that spawned them - but it's but one artistic literacy among many that humanity has journeyed through.

Who today can draw the cultural and spiritual meanings from the traditional art of indigenous Australians that we think may have been drawn from them before the arrival of European settlers? How many people can really get the forms of comedia del arte? Observe how the language of heraldry has moved from a key political skill to a historical curiosity by the passing of centuries.

This is a world of information literacy. This is a world where absorbing the cultural zeitgeist and meaningfully interact with the people who live around us means multitasking, means prioritising and critiquing information streams, means understanding how the same information can be presented through different interfaces and how those interfaces change the presentation of that information.

Videogames, and interactive media, are uniquely able among our entertainment media to actively develop those literacies. And by extension, that makes them uniquely able to tell a wide range of stories relevant to who we are today and what we stand for. Just as a written novel, for all its power, might be utterly unable to convey anything to a pre-literate society, you're looking at videogames in a period where they're only just emerging from that pre-literacy, through the goggles of someone who is themselves pre-literate.

Says the illiterate master painter: "I confess I can't read, but words aren't pictures, and thus no matter what these scrawlings on the page represent to a literate reader, they'll never be as valid a medium as painting, with which I have a long and much-loved experience."

While I do believe it is a mistake to undervalue books, I believe it is just as great a mistake to compare 'video games' as a whole, to great novels.

I am a concept artist for video games, and from working on them myself, seeing all the thought and energy that goes into them, and all the conceptual points and lessons, I think it is an unfair comparison. Video games have so many elements that are too overlooked, and under appreciated in some instances, just as much by their own players as critics of them.

"The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions."

Unlike books and movies, video games have the element of actual interaction. Literally putting the player in the shoes of a character, rather than reading about them passively, the player has the ability to live the actions of a character, feel the frustration when they try to solve a puzzle, the fear when they are about to be hurt or fall, or fight. Even now in games you can feel vibration from the controller when the character you're playing falls or gets hurt or what have you, you can even place yourself, your REAL self, in a game with a camera.
True, you grow fond of book characters, you care what happens to them, you project yourself into them, and that is a book's purpose. But, you can't CHANGE what happens to them, you don't have an element of control, and that control is what gives a video game the ability to prove a very real and beautiful point that is just as conceptually valid as any lesson learned from a book.

The story-telling is there, in books and games, but games have a level of interaction that you cannot rightly compare to a book. Especially a great classic. Video games have not been thought of this way long enough to be comparable to the likes of 'Huck Finn', but books have been around for CENTURIES.

They are just two separate mediums for story-telling. Each as effective as the other when executed properly. To say someone is at a 'foolish stage' because they would choose one medium over the other is a very subjective thing to say in itself. I would personally choose many great paintings over 'Huck Finn', without considering the fact that they are separate mediums and thus incomparable, and I doubt many artists would disagree considering the priceless and historical works that exist out there, but I'm sure many writers would.

I'm an institutionalized reader. I'm working on my Masters in Fiction at the University of North Texas. I was also a finalist for this year's Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Poetry prize.

I believe in literature and I've devoted my life to studying it, discussing it and creating it.

I still chose games. Why? Because I believe that, much like the original oral tradition that brought us books, the world hasn't always been about text--nor will it always be about text.

There was a time--not that long ago--when most of the world couldn't read if they wanted to--when writing was reserved mostly for the preservation of knowledge (usually religious knowledge). Some of the greatest works in history were not textual, but oral.

The reason we have to have beautiful descriptions of thunderstorms is because nothing can echo the majesty of being among raindrops, ozone, flashes in darkness. However, visceral a description of a thing might be--it is still dependent on imagination.

Certainly imagination is an important tool to cultivate--but when you can step into the role of a man standing in the rain, listen to the drops falling via surround sound, push through the trees in darkness--your path only visible when lightning crackles around you...well, that seems like it could be just as powerful as a nice paragraph of description.

It's the ability to create duende that makes games resonate with me. A true connection to a world we can never experience through our own eyes and not the translated imagination. It makes every gamer a poet--creating his/her own narrative with each step.

It's the evolution of story telling that, I imagine anyway, many writers would have loved 200 years ago. It's the type of stuff that we'd have dreamed of then and we have now. It is a new miracle and some in our culture, through fear (or perhaps through the recognition that they'll not be around to see it when it evolves to its better forms) can't wait to point at visionaries and pioneers of a new art form and call them fools.

It's easier I imagine.

The last novel length literary book I read was years ago. Great movies have at least the advantage of needing less time but an image is less nourishing than good words. After all, first was the word, not the image.

I wonder how you would weigh an education comprising a tonne of great movies with a selection of great literature?

After your last year's article I had comfortably read tiny Gatsby,(with it's beautifully pessimistic closure), maybe 58 pages of HF but Suttree remained unavailable, not that I would have managed with it. Stephen King's book which you suggested I did read A-Z. I'm keen to read John Bunyan's book, and keeping King James' New Testament close by for it's electrifying simpicity and power. After all, it's comforting to have good books around, even unread.

I think the main issue I see with that poll is that it leaves "a great video game" entirely up the imagination of the voter. Some standard gamer might envision the latest version of Halo, while some idealistic young developer might imagine some grand yet-to-come masterpiece unlike anything the world has ever seen. To anyone imagining any game currently in existence, yes, I would say that valuing the game over Huck Finn is foolishness, but to the imaginative fan of games as art I think it's impossible to judge their hypothetical vision against the works of the past. It could be equivalent to saying "Would you value any book/movie/painting/song not yet made over Huck Finn?" We can never know if some new work will come along and completely outshine it.

Just out of curiosity, would you personally vote the same if the subject of the poll were swapped? Would you value Huck Finn more than "a great movie", or a great poem, or a great painting?

I personally feel that stories in general are the most powerful and useful works of art. Useful, I mean, in that they can best teach lessons and be applied to one's life. I don't know if I can ever decide on a medium that suits storytelling best. Books are very personal. I think they best excite the animation and allow for contemplation. As an artist and a very visual thinker, I think that things like movies and graphic novels resonate more with me.

Thanks for conceiving and conducting the survey. I ask gamers who've never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to consider: reading it will take a tiny fraction of the time it takes to master a new video game.

There are so many good passages in the book! The one that most made me cry laughing was poor, pathetic Emmeline Grangerford's "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd." For my money it is the best worst poem yet written.

Completely right Ebert. I'd like to thank you for helping me discover the joy of reading... I'm 24 and throughout childhood and college I was first and foremost a gamer (film buff close second). Like most of my peers, never a reader unless it was for school.

Yet I'm pretty pretentious, so when I noticed you making several references to Cormac McCarthy and his Suttree being a masterpiece, I had to check it out. I read it...at first slowly, then voraciously when I realized you were right... I was on that boat with Suttree. I was there during the burial of an abandoned son, I was there when a poignant romance turned horribly violent and I was there when it was all over. In a weird way I became Suttree. As he experienced a range of life's elements, so did I. And I'm definitely a better, more thoughtful, more entertaining person than I was before it. Since then, I've finished most of McCarthy's other works ( Blood Meridian, my favorite, continuously haunting me to this day )along with many others by many other authors. Some famous works (1984, Walden)which explore our modern humanity, and some much less famous works which put the reader into less-traveled intersections(She's Not There). Not all writers are McCarthy of course (and not all of McCarthy's books are Suttree), yet every single book that I’ve taken the time to read has given me an infinitely more satisfying, more immersive, more of a trip-out and memorable experience than any game I've played in years.

I tell gamers that if they're looking for the next big thing, forget games, they're weak sauce compared to books. Bioshock's a diluted, cheap high compared to 1984... put down the remote and pick up McCarthy. Seriously, this is the good stuff. I know, I've played a lot of games.

Well, not since Suttree...

Ebert: I can't even begin to say how happy this post makes me.

Like a deaf man sacrificing all the world's music for the Mona Lisa.

Being that I was one of the readers who was critical of your view of video-games, you may find it surprising that I agree that novels are more valuable than any video-game. Literature is a personal, quiet, and entirely engaging art form. Paintings and other imagery are instant and much can be inquired from them. They are very subjective and it is true that an image is worth a thousand words. Video-games are art to be controlled, triumphed over, and experienced in multiple ways. Each art form has its use. Novels are invaluable in what they can do for a person, especially a growing child. Images can unite people and convey a message across barriers of any kind. Video-games, while in the fetal stage at the moment, may have their own special kind of value in the future. For now, I believe they are to be enjoyed for what they offer, and if you can be changed or inspired by their soundtracks, characters, imagery, and/or challenges, great! What I sense on the horizon and what I hope I don't see, though, is you and others coming to the conclusion that novels are something you enjoy after you've grown up and gotten past shallow things like video-games. Analogous to this idea is the idea that you appreciate Mozart once you've grown up enough to be done with Metallica. Anyone with this way of thinking is sadly mistaken and isn't being very open-minded. I enjoy novels, video-games, Mozart and Metallica all at the same time, and I don't need to be shallow or sophisticated for any of it. I suppose the point of this rant typed through one blood-shot eye at 4am is to ask for people not to be so high-and-mighty and judgmental of the tastes of others.

So the way I'm understanding this basically is that like Hemingway you believe Huck Finn to be the basis of American storytelling. This would safely assume that you would take Huck Finn over any great film, right?

As you said this was more about Huck Finn than it was about video games, just trying to better understand.

YES BUT ROGER HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THIS VIDEO GAME [__________] THAT MIGHT YET CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT ALL THIS

Sir,

I wish I had someone like you around me, while I was growing up; someone who could instill into me the love of reading at an early age. I'm sure I would have been a better man than I am now. I started reading books pretty late (actually just a couple of years back -- I'm 25). And when I did start: Man! Was I overwhelmed or what! There is this amazing world which is beautiful, vast and full of devices which have the potential to reach into our entire gamut of emotions.... and I missed it. Anyways, regret never helped anyone, did it?

I hope to start with Huckleberry Finn soon.

It is always enjoyable to read your blogs about any issue, as I consider you one of the premier writers on the internet.It is also enthralling to read about your passion about this novel. I do however take a slight exception to the quote about people who prefer video games to Huck Finn. I must admit I am not an avid reader by any means, however, I do think it is slightly pretentious to label people "fools" simply because they prefer a video game. When I want fiction, I watch tv or a movie or play a video game.Heck, the old,old Nintendo 64 game "Legend of Zelda:Ocarina of time" was one of the greatest,most immersing, entertainment experiences I have ever had, I am presuming the equivalent of your experience with this novel(although I do agree that video games are not art, but lets let sleeping dogs lie!)!When I read, I only tend to read biographies etc, very rarely , if ever, do I actually read fiction. I do not consider myself a fool!
However, as I said before, this is a wonderful write-up of what sounds like a classic novel!

Oh, but this. This here. This is a video game.

This debate over the heart of literature, of knowledge, of what it is to think and be a citizen. This here.

This is a video game, dear Roger Ebert.

We are playing.

A serious question: would you sacrifice a stranger to preserve Huckleberry Finn for future generations?

Ebert: No, I don't think I could.

I will admit I find that poll depressing, but only because so many people were willing to pick a generic great video game over Huck Finn. There is no denying that Huck Finn is a great novel, one of the best I've ever read (even if some parts of the end could be a little better). However, I think it would be interesting to rephrase your poll and see where that intellectual exercise leads us. What if we were comparing Huck Finn to another great book such as Don Quixote, and the question was if you could only save one of the these two books, which would it be? For me, it would be Don Quixote. Why? Because Don Quixote's theme, a man's whose idealism and imagination render him insane in the world's eye, speaks to me personally on a much greater level than Huck Finn does. Let us extend this exercise further now. What if we were comparing Huck Finn to a great movie, something like Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Apocalypse Now, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Dark City, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would probably pick saving all of these films over Huck Finn, once again because these films are personally meaningful to me in a way that Huck Finn is not. Speak to me not of Huck Finn's historical significance. We're not talking about going back in time to destroy Huck Finn, and, as a result, all of the things it inspired. We are merely talking about its ceasing to exist from this point on, and, as a result, historical importance ceases to matter in the equation as far as my decision of what to save. All that matters is what the art means to me. Historically, I acknowledge Citizen Kane as a film of paramount importance, but if we're only considering how much I personally like it, it wouldn't even make my top 250. Let us end this analysis by returning to Huck Finn vs a video game. I mostly agree with you that Huck Finn deserves to be saved over MOST video games, 99% most likely. Hell, Huck Finn deserves to be saved over 99% of novels or films. However, the reason why the original statement of the poll was meaningless, and why people voting for the video game was so depressing, was the fact that a specific video game wasn't specified. If a game was specified, people could make an honest choice in the poll, namely, whether they would save Huck Finn, or that specific video game. There are several video games, such as Xenogears and Planescape: Torment, that I would save over Huck Finn because as works of art they affected and touched me personally more than Huck Finn ever did. Most games would easily lose to Huck Finn, but not these and a select other few. Depending on what game it was, I suspect that many people would have a game or two they would save over Huck Finn, just as they would have a movie or two. There would be no agreement among people over which games or films or books deserved to be saved over Huck Finn because ultimately this is a personal decision dependent on who you are as a person. I suspect that for you, Ebert, even if you were to play some video games, you would be unlikely to ever find you would choose to save over Huck Finn. Still, it's worth remembering that many of us who have played video games have those few special games that for us would be worthy of that sacrifice. I suspect that there are a few films you would be sorely tempted to save over Huck Finn. The next time you can't understand where gamers are coming from, think of those films, and their decision might start making just a little more sense.

One word: 4Chan

I am a "gamer" and I am a concerned citizen. I'm concerned by the fact that literacy is failing with other young people. Mcluhan had it right when he said the medium is the message. The gradual move towards interactive and visual media has simultaneously dwindled attention spans and literacy amongst the majority of the population.

I'd argue that there is a specific value to be had in reading simply because of the way we consume the medium. The patience, the focus, and the imagination involved in reading a book is a sort of exercise a lot of people don't get with television, film, and video games.

A game is like a piece of cake, delicious and easily consumable. But a book is something else, like sweet piece of a fruit, or even just a moment in nature. It's healthy for the mind and often just as pleasurable. Sometimes its better to consume the less easily consumable.

I'm 18, and I've read Huck Finn. I think it's a great piece of literary art. I've also played quite a few games which think are great pieces of art, some of which (such as Bioshock, which is reminiscent of the Metropolis) I would rate higher than Huck Finn. Books, film, photography, painting are all forms of art, and since games are as visually appealing and getting to the same level of storytelling as film, they should be added as another medium of art.

Get over your obsession with video games not being art. Seriously. Not reading a book doesn't make you a fool either.

People can choose to do as they please and take in whatever art they choose to. Not reading a book doesn't make you a fool. It's just that simple.

I doubt reading Huck Finn would be one of the greatest experiences in my life. It's just a book. That's all it is, a piece of art. Hours reading words on print. That's it.

Ebert: Yep. That's it.

Roger, look at the question from the point of view of someone who believes video games can achieve art.

The analogous question posed to you: would you value "a great movie" over Huckleberry Finn? Seen that way, it should be no surprise that people would vote 70/30 in favor of video games. They have the freedom to choose the best video game they can possibly think of; it doesn't even have to exist yet.

Show me a man who would call such a man a fool, and I will show you a man who lacks imagination.

But I wholeheartedly support your stance on reading, that most vital gateway to civilization we have at our disposal.

I think the reason all of these different things can be considered art, that is novels, movies, paintings, photography etc., is because all of the great art has this one thing in common, with what director Mike Figgis described as maintaining a cool detachment, yet with such intensity of emotion. What I like is the way all of them have their own way of doing that. It's the same, yet they all have a kind of flavor, which makes me want to keep seeking it out to see how vast is this richness in our minds. The genius' like Hemingway and Shakespeare, I think make the blood flow around in my brain a lot kind of like waves in an ocean flowing around in my skull; I guess this just means it is cerebral; so I guess the cerebral state might also have a bit of morbidity to it, to me, because of the thought of blood.

When I first got a job, when I was 16, I went to a nearby used book shop and spent all my money on movies or books. One day, I think on my last paycheck, I got a black garbage bag and filled it up with authors in the classical section of the store (I think it was called), and I don't think I've read any of them, but I still have about all of them. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is one of the ones I bought and still have: and I will read.

I chose the book over the game because books give you a feeling, probably even if it's not a great book--or I guess you said it better, a sense of time and place: to which I would add comes with a certain FEELING, and that feeling is tranquility.

Mistake, I meant I haven't read any of the books I bought at that store, except two Hemingway books: The Old Man and the Sea, and Farewell to Arms.

Mr. Ebert; you are, and always will be, the classiest guy in the room.

If you go to Mike Figgis myspace page, he lists his influences, which would be of the great artist class (maintaining a cool detachment, yet with such emotional intensity)

As we are talking about novelists, it's very important that everyone GO READ THESE NOVELISTS (listed below)

Musicians:

Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Bill Evans, Bach, Beethoven, Charles Ives, Eric Dolphy, Frank Zappa, Lennon, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lonnie Johnson Nina Simone, Peter King,

Novelists:

Joseph Heller, Hemingway, Fred Exley, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Ed Mcbain, Elizabeth Bowen, Mickey Spillane, George Bataille, Donna Tartt, Anthoney Powell, John Berger,

Painting/drawing, and then photographers:

Ad Reinhardt, Magritte, Rodin (drawings), Hokusai, Gerhard Richter, Eliot Erwit, Araki, Avedon, Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, Lee Miller, Thomas Ruff, Jeanloup Sieff.

Here's your shortcut people. Save yourself some time and get started on what's great. He also lists film makers, here, which probably has a lot to do with technique:

Godard, Polanski, Cassavetes, Altman, Bergman, Bunuel, Bonnie and Clyde, Lynch, Harmony Korine

Over the past two or three years I've become a fan of films of all times, genres, and countries. I've always been aware of your reviews, but after stumbling across your website I have enjoyed cross-checking your opinions of films with my own as if to be having discussions about them. I also find your blog entries very interesting, and after reading one where you talked about making more of a point to find time for "real" reading, I have done the same. I have always enjoyed reading, but I do not consistently do it enough. I just want to say that you have inspired me to take up the hobby once again. Lately my reading list has focused on classical authors such as Shakespeare and Kafka. I'm actually from Missouri, but I've never read any of Twain. Upon your recommendation, I will surely make a point to do so.

I haven't really followed this discussion, but I'll say one thing.

I have played some games that gave me experiences as worthy of admiration and awe as any movie out there. While I do agree that video games can't be ART in the traditional sense of the word, as you say Roger, I do want to state that they can be truly awe-inspiring experiences, and an experience could be one way to describe art. For example I believe artful photographs resembles a feeling of their subject, a way for the mind to flee into another world and see a difference between our situation and the subjects situation. This phenomena is entirely possible within a video game.

Dagnabbit Roger...

For a guy who proudly and unabashedly displays his Left-leaning beliefs and egalitarian principles you and the Huck-Finn-or-Die crowd are truly some of the worst kinds of cultural elitists.

There was a time when people said that comic books couldn't be art, or even a time when it was said that motion pictures couldn't be art. At other times some scoffed at abstract art and before that impressionistic art. Yet today there is no question that all of that and more is art.

The more you try to clamp down video games as NOT art the more the definition of art oozes out of your fingers.

Finally, the poll is neither substantive nor conclusive no matter which way you slant it.

The Adventures of Huck Finn is a fine book, a wonderful book and I doubt anyone who voted for a video game - unless they are a misanthrope or a troglodyte - would disagree.

The difference is not a matter of tastes. The difference is a matter of experience. Reading a book is a passive experience; we're reading someone else's story (and that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that). Video games are interactive, they are someone else's story but there is that added element of living that story. Neither books nor film can do this on the same level as video games, not even Mark Twain's book.

I'd have to argue with Hemingway and say that great American Literature stems from Moby Dick. I'm glad to see the video games debate finally over for now in this blog.

I've put off reading Twain to my children (almost 7, just 4), because I'm not certain how to deal with the racism and because we are reading German stories to them right now, not English-language. Rather than download the stories to my e-reader, I think I'll pick the books up this summer in the US and see how reading a chapter at a time goes.

Well, interesting though Huckleberry Finn looks, I've not read it. I chose video games in your survey because my absolute favourite game will obviously beat a book I have no strong feelings about. If I had to decide between my favourite book or favourite game? That would actually be a meaningful question (in which case I wouldn't participate in the survey; I need both).

Dear Mr. Ebert,

I agree with much of what you have written here. My mother is a big reader and made sure to expose her children to a variety of quality books. I remember reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was eight.

However, the mere mention of video games on your part does little to advance the argument or begin the discussion, especially when taking into account your complete ignorance on the matter of video games.

I'm not a gamer by ANY stretch of the imagination. I can count on one hand how many I've played. But I must say that some were quite enjoyable and from time to time, I'll still pop one in.

Also, I have read Huckleberry Finn and I understand Twain's impact on the American literary landscape. Still, on most days I would pick Max Payne or Halo over Finn. Why? Maybe it's because there is a greater social component associated with videos games as opposed to reading. At least this is the case with most of the people I know. It may well be the case with most people. That would help to explain why games edged out Finn in your pole.

I'm not suggesting that you go play some games so that you'll know what the heck you're talking about. No, you're needed for far more important things. But you could at least afford yourself some insight into the nature of games beyond the stereotypical image of an empty-eyed youngster sitting in front of a console for hours on end blowing people's heads off.

This would strengthen your discussion on reading, a discussion that would be most beneficial, whether directly or indirectly, to all those empty-eyed youngsters.

I've spent a good chunk of my life either reading or playing video games, and this survey was a no-brainer: Huckleberry Finn all the way. Great video games are not unique or irrepetible. Much like medieval chivalric romances, or Hollywood blockbusters, great video games have been sterilized, serialized and exploited beyond nostalgia.

This poll was also completely Ebert-centric. How about an equivalent, non biased question? A great movie of the past 30 years or "The Future Eve" by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (written during the exact same period as Huck Finn, unlike it but equally valuable)? For me, again no doubt, the novel. But, yah, the average internets denizen doesn't read 19th century literature. To seriously level the playing field you need to ask: A great blockbuster movie or a great video game? Now it's game on.

All that said, if Mark Twain had been born recently and grown up with internet access he would be involved with video games.

As someone who enjoys a great video game and also enjoyed Huckleberry Finn I can say I'm not surprised at all by the results, in fact I am surprised it was not skewed more towards a great game. I think you have to look at the way both mediums are presented in our time.

A video game is presented almost like a Van Damme movie, lots of explosions, shootings, fist fights, etc. Much like a modern tv show or any low brow action flick. You sit on the couch, or hop online, sometimes with your buddies and blow stuff up is basically what it amounts to. Not all games are like this of course, but I'm sure peoples favorite games have been presented enough times here that I can refrain from mentioning what I think are good games.

Huckleberry Finn however is presented to the "youth" in a cold dimly lit classroom at 7 a.m. (which is more like a modern prison after the paranoia over school shootings). Also, it may sound very silly but the stigma still exists that if you read or have any desire for learning than you are a loser in some fashion.

Not surprised by the results. Damn, now I really want to read Huck Finn again......

I voted for Huck Finn, but if the book in question had been one of the third-rate potboilers my mother continuously reads, I would be a fool not to choose a great video game instead. I remember reading Huckleberry Finn back in school, but I can't recall if I even read the whole book due to my general reticence to reading required books back in school. I like what I remember of it, but I’m probably more familiar now with various film and TV adaptations of the of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, my oldest memories of the characters probably coming from serialized tales on the TV show “The Banana Splits”. It’s probably a good time to read Mark Twain’s works now, while I have a bit more spare time thanks to the economy. First, I’ll have to finish the other two books of Neal Stephenson’s massive “Baroque Cycle”, which I never got around to starting until this year, spurned by re-reading some of his earlier books after I re-read the half dozen or so William Gibson books on my shelves and after I finally read Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” after seeing Akira Kurosawa’s film adaptation of it on TCM this year.

You recently mentioned the ‘Modern Reader’s Library’ poll results from a while back on your twitpic. I’ve recently learned of the existence of two other potentially interesting book series: the ‘Library of America’ and the ‘Everyman’s Library’. I can’t comment on the quality of their editions since I have yet to read any of them, but the general idea is a good one for publisher’s wishing to push things other than generic potboilers. While I probably wouldn’t enjoy every title either of those publishers has released, it is nice to see that publishers (via clever marketing) have come up with ways to introduce people to ready-made lists of (theoretically) classics of literature. For a public that probably doesn’t read enough these days, it’s a start. I would never suggest that anyone stick merely to the ‘suggested reading’ lists, anymore than I would tell them to only watch films that have been vetted by various lists to ‘must-see’ status (movie fans know how disappointing some choices among Oscar Best Picture winners and the AFI lists can be), but they do provide a good jumping off point. I also recently learned of the 50 volume Harvard Classics ‘5 foot shelf’ and their lesser known 20 volume ‘Shelf of Fiction’. Those are others I intend to get around to reading, to provide some of the education I missed by not attending college to get the degree in Asian Studies/Japanese Language that I had once intended to pursue before economic realities and some (partially laziness-induced) weak grades interfered. It seems the Harvard Classics collection was started to get a source of suggested reading materials into the hands of people who didn’t get to go to college. I meant to comment in your ‘How Fast Are We Becoming Stupid’ and ‘Books Do Furnish a Life’ posts, but never got around to it, so I’ll address some of those points here – if I am indeed becoming stupider, it is probably in part because I have become lazier in recent years, something that spending a little less time on the internet and a little more time reading books and trying to write out my thoughts on films should hopefully help to correct for me in some measure. I’m definitely not as well-read as I’d like to be and that includes Bordwell’s film books that I need to get around to as well as literature.

I definitely don’t have the money for the mahogany shelves or anything fancy, but I do think I should probably invest in a few more bookcases and start building up a more substantial library when I find employment again and have some money. Both being at over a thousand titles, my DVD and CD collections far exceed my book collection, but the former is a drug of choice to be expected from a movie addict. The more disheartening thing for me is that I only have about 60 Criterion DVD titles so far out of the 500 or so which haven’t been discontinued yet (though I also own some of the old Criterion laserdiscs from my LD collecting days). I was pondering the library-building question the other day in the typical lottery winning scenario fashion and asked my father what would be one of the things he’d definitely want to have on his shelves and was slightly disappointed that he didn’t agree with my suggestion about the necessary inclusion of the OED. No matter how smart a person is, or thinks that they are, you will in the course of reading extensively come upon words for which you don’t know the meaning. In such a case, wouldn’t it be best to have a copy of the most extensive English language dictionary -- one that covers the changing meanings of a word throughout our language’s history -- in your library? It is one thing to check books off a list and say you’ve read them by skimming your eyes over the words; it is another matter entirely to have actually comprehended that which you have read. I think that this argument also goes in favor of what you previously mentioned in the ‘Books Do Furnish a Life’ discussion about reasons for having a large library even if you haven’t read all the books. It’s never a bad idea to have access to a large number of books on a variety of subjects. When, in the course of your reading, you come into contact with an idea which is new to you, it’s a good idea to have a wide array of books at your disposal to do further research if needed (reading Neal Stephenson’s speculative fiction novel “Quicksilver” made me want to research more on some of the history, math and science topics mentioned in his story set back in the days of Isaac Newton & Leibniz). Among arguments for building your own home library, I’ll always remember a scene from Doctor Who (new series, season 2 episode “Tooth and Claw”) where the others complain that they are trapped in a room without any weapons and The Doctor replies “You want weapons? We’re in a library -- best weapons in the world. This room is the greatest arsenal we could have.”

As a fan of film noir, I was pleased to see that titles in the aforementioned ‘Library of America’ collection include novels by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose works were often adapted into films, but whose books I haven’t yet read. It’s nice to see that publishers are keeping older genre novels and short stories in print, though apparently some publisher’s out there have been doing shoddy proofreading work, including some of the reprinted books out there of Lord Dunsany’s work, which reportedly contain errors that change the meaning of certain passages to the exact opposite by the changing of one word. I’ve become a fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work in the last 5 years and, via him, weird tales in general and found that his literary influences have directed me to dipping my toes in the waters of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen, among others. I’d be tempted to suggest that (thanks in part to his Anglophile tendencies) “Lovecraft is the gateway drug to English fantasy literature”, and anyone reading this can feel free to quote me on that. I finally read Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter this year and was surprised and upset that it’s not more well-known even to this day. Due to the limited availability of some of the weird tale and fantasy writers’ older works, I have had to resort to the ‘Gutenberg fallback plan’ and found myself not caring much for reading novels, short stories or poetry off of a computer screen. It really isn’t the same as curling up with a book on a couch or chair. As a result of my own experience with the technological ‘upgrade’ from print to digital reading, I agree that this idea of colleges dumping books off of the shelves to install e-reader alternatives is patently absurd.

One last thing, regarding a problem of videogames, which I’ve read other gamers complain about: There is an annoying and increasing tendency in modern game design to add in side goals to unlock (often) pointless items and characters, which in many cases you’ll never use. These exists only to add artificial ‘replay value’ to a game which they’ve already gotten you to pay money for. To the game designers of today, it’s not enough to have your money, they also want your undying devotion to playing their game to the exclusion of all else. Al the time spent trying to unlock numerous ‘hidden’ characters and useless vehicles -- which usually aren’t as good as the earlier ones you unlocked – in Mario Kart just takes more time away from reading books you haven’t yet read or seeing films you haven’t yet seen. That’s an annoying trait you’ll find even in a great videogame.

Excellent post again.

"It makes us less boring, and less bore-able."

There is nothing more boring than a bored person.

I wonder if there's a national component to the particular choice of Huckleberry Finn. I'm Canadian; Huck Finn means nothing to me. While I can appreciate the universal human aspects of it - including empathy for the Other, recognition of the Other's humanity - it doesn't have the immediacy or the resonance for me as it might for someone who grew up in a country that is still wracked by the fallout of the slavery the book depicts.

I find Twain's prose awkward and dull, and the novel as a whole an excruciating read. When I think of authors whose prose - whose ground-level diction, as opposed to overall storytelling - sings to me the way Twain's does to you, I immediately think of R. Scott Bakker. Bakker is a modern Canadian author. The three or four fellow-Canadians to whom I've recommended him have all adored him; the three or four Americans I've spoken to who've read him have all found him, well, the same awkward and dull as I find Twain.

I would like to share two excerpts from The Warrior-Prophet, the second book in his great trilogy The Prince of Nothing. The first:

She knew him. When Achamian thought back, it seemed that she'd always known him. He'd even thought her a witch when they met for the first time, not only because of the ever-so-faint Mark of the charmed whore's shell that she used as a contraceptive, but because she guessed he was a sorcerer before he uttered scarcely five words. From the very beginning, she seemed to have a talent for him. For Drusas Achamian.

It was strange to be known - truly known. To be awaited rather than anticipated. To be accepted instead of believed. To be half another's elaborate habits. To see oneself continually foreshadowed in another's eyes.

And it was strange to know. Sometimes she laughed so hard she belched. And when disappointed, her eyes dimmed like candles starved of air. She liked the feel of knives between her toes. She loved to hold her hand slack and motionless while his cock hardened beneath. "I do nothing," she would whisper, "and yet you rise to me." She was frightened of horses. She fondled her left armpit when deep in thought. She did not hide her face when she cried. And she could say things of such beauty that sometimes Achamian thought his heart might stop for having listened.

I've never read a portrayal of deep adoration that moved me like this one does. I love that it includes awkward, indelicate traits ("she laughed so hard she belched"). And that phrase, "To be half another's elaborate habits," has always stuck with me.

The other, if you'll bear with me for a few lines more - a sorcerous game of cat-and-mouse in an ancient library:

They were closer now. Lights smeared the ceiling over the black shelves facing him.

He backed into the small alcove where he'd snoozed, then began uttering a series of Wards, short strings of impossible thoughts. Light flashed from his lips. Luminescence sheeted the air before him, like the glair of sunlight across mist.

Dark muttering from somewhere amid the teetering queues - skulking, insinuating words, like vermin gnawing at the walls of the world.

Then fierce light transforming, for a heartbeat, the shelves before him into a dawn horizon ... Explosion. A geyser of ash and fire.

[...]

Dazzling geometries leapt through the smoke, lines and parabolas of razor light, punching through wood and papyrus, shearing through stone. The Scarlet Schoolman screamed, tried to run. Achamian boiled him in his skin.

[...]

He struck back with Inference and Abstraction. He was a Mandate Schoolman, a Gnostic Sorcerer-of-the-Rank, a War-Cant Master. He was as a mask held before the sun. And his voice slapped the distances into char and ruin.

It is possible that your poll is more reflective of the way that people think in today's society rather than a condemnation of literature versus video gaming. For those of us who grew up in the next-to-last generation, in which computers were just beginning to appear, the idea of reading books and escaping into other worlds through the use of words and imagination was not unusual. How often would someone like myself spend a summer's day reading a book under the shade of a tree or in a park. Books were our escape vehicle from the world around us, just as video games today have become the escape vehicle that many of the younger generation have adopted.

The only difference is that with a book, you can put it in your pocket, carry it with you somewhere and access it at any time, things that you generally cannot do with a video game. Books don't come equipped with DRM (unless you're using a Kindle), and it's very easy to share a book with another person. And with a book, it becomes a more personal voyage into those worlds, the mental image unencumbered by the limitations of the video screen or the creator's vision. Playing the role of John Carter in my mind is vastly preferable to playing it in a video game, as my mental images of Dejah Thoris or the Martians may be different from the images I'd see on a computer screen.

Eventually technology will reach a point where we'll be able to immerse ourselves in a game with full sensory surrounding us, but will that ever take the place of the simple closing of one's eyes and fighting alongside King Arthur or Robin Hood, or sailing the seas with Cap'n Ahab? Only time will tell.

Games often contain books to read. In a lot of RPG games one of the more fun things to do is pick up the books you find and read more background information or stories based in the gaming world.

Now, it would be perfectly possible to create a game that contains huckleberry finn with a thousand other classics. At which point saving that game would make more sense.

In any case, you do not like video games and I do. So let's change the question: what would you save? Finn or "a great movie"? Finn or all movies?

Video games are certainly fun, but I have to agree with Ebert. Good literature far outweighs good video games.

I think that most of the people responding "A video game" were really just protesting against the poll itself. Your goal seemed to be to use it as a point for your video-games-aren't-art argument. Basically, people voted for video games because there wasn't an option which read "This question ignores the fundamental truth that art is difficult to compare within a single artform, much less across artforms, much *much* less a single work of art with an entire other genre, so out of protest for the lack of choice, I must abstain."

Given your obvious fondness for Huck Finn, riddle me this: Which of these would you value more,
1. A great film
2. Huckleberry Finn
If you answered Huck Finn, does that mean that films aren't art? Have you wasted your life as a film critic when you should have been a literary critic instead?

Alternately, if you answered film, does that mean that literature isn't really art?

What about a great painting? A great song? A great dance performance? A great photograph?

No, because you just can't compare art like that. It's the epitome of subjectivity.

So it's not really that people would value a great video game *more* than Huck Finn, just that they wanted to spite you for asking a poorly worded question.

"I'm suggesting that some are still at a foolish stage, and have the freedom to evolve out of it. Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. "

I'm 26 and a voracious reader but also a lover of video games. While I would value my favorite book over my favorite video game, I also wouldn't condemn anyone who didn't. Not to mention specifically favoring Huck Finn over their favorite game (you did word the poll as "a great video game" not just any arbitrary game). That is foolish to say that everyone should value your favorite book or any arbitrary work of great literature that may or may not specifically resonate with them over a wonderful game that does resonate with them. And I'm disappointed to see you bring this up again in the context of video games. While I am a voracious reader would I give up my favorite book for my favorite play? Maybe, I don't know. I've had, arguably, more powerful experiences in the theatre than I have with inky paper between my fingers. But they're both powerful arts in my life and if pressed i might side with the theater. Trying to objectively qualify art and pass judgment about those whose sentiment don't lie with your own seems like the truly foolish thing to do.

I know you are right. And yet I find myself playing video games instead. Ungh.

I don't know how someone could seriously choose a video game over one of the greatest novels ever written. With a video game, there may or may not be some creativity, but most of the time everything is presented for you. With a novel, you the reader, are open to one, interpret the novel, and two, imagine what it looks or feels like. You create your own vision.

That's probably why novels will always make better film adaptations than a video game, though I'm still waiting for the day when a good video game-based film comes out.

Greetings, Roger.

Two years ago I googled for film critics' favourite novels of all-time. Your list included Huck Finn and The Golden Bowl and I remember that you also included Hemingway's quote. I read the two novels the week after that day. I've always wanted to read these two books, and when I found your list, I thought "Yea .. but I just can't find 'em." ( Along with Our Mutual Friend, which I believe was also in your list )

A week later I found the two books caressing each other in oblivion, stacked under the dying spider web of our god forsaken library, in an old metal closet for one-edition books.
Anyway, both books deserved every excruciating moment of desire and every word was worthy of ages of waiting.

What I'm trying to say here isn't a spiritual allusion - although it is - to your list and me finding those two books, no, I also found One Hundred Years of Solitude and other internationally "famous" novels, but they were already found and read with the utmost pleasure. The point here is Huck Finn, to me, is a masterpiece for a few people, at least that's how I see it, and that's how your poll manifested a flagrant result.

I wasn't surprised by the result; I even expected it to be higher for videogames, I mean come on, Roger, what did you expect from teenagers in 2010? No one gives a damn about Twain's realism and adroitness in prose. They prefer to play a stormy episode of some "epic" game on Twain's evocation and depiction of a thunderstorm. Twain, as I read, was a pessimist, he kinda detested human nature, but without his writings, Shakespeare's, Dickens' and other, we wouldn't have had videogames, for they need "plot" for their creation, I presume.

Thank you for bringing Huck Finn here. You evoked a memory of endless flashes of human sceneries in those pages, and hell, I never touched a game controller during that period of time.

Note : I love videogames. Two weeks ago, I played for five hours the same game, and without a shame, I didn't regret it, I even loved it, but no, my addiction for Cinema is impenetrable if you will.

"Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives."
I love that. It's true...
I'm 15, used to be a gamer, but then i came to the realization that it's a waste of time, it's superficially entertaining and nothing is gained from it. My friends (who are gamers) describe movie-watching as: "Walking into a room and staring at a screen for two hours." If that's true then video games are: "Sitting in a room and mindlessly pressing buttons for hours and hours". I think gamers themselves even get incredibly fatigued. The success of video games, claim my friends, is the exhilaration and accomplishment after completing the video game. So... it's frisson. Like you said. Nothing after. Gamers claim interaction has made video games superior to films or novels but in fact it makes games dreary, repetitive and useless. Frisson. It's for short attention spans. Eh, my opinion...

Video games pale in comparison to the mental imagery reading a great novel evokes.

To heck with both the novel and the video game: I'd rather see kids out DOING Huck Finn-like activities than having their nose in a book or eyes glued to a TV. In Steven Mintz' recent book Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood,he argues: "Our challenge is to reverse the process of age segmentation, to provide the young with challenging alternatives to a world of malls, instant messaging, music videos, and play dates. Huck Finn was an abused child whose father, the town drunk, beat him for going to school and learning to read. Who would envy Huck's battered childhood? Yet he enjoyed something too many children are denied and which adults can provide: opportunities to undertake odysseys of self-discovery outside the goal-driven, overstructured realities of contemporary childhood."

Amen.

Roger:

I don't understand why you re subjecting yourself to such a bashing over these video games. Gamers simply DO NOT get it.

I was just commenting over at your Dan Schneider thread about how I feel less than 10% of the people who bash him there even read all the quotes from his essays that you posted yet are making absurd claims. The same is true here. Clearly there is a disconnect.

The urge to play a video game is simply different than that to watch a film or read a novel, much less great films or novels. This is not even mixing apples and oranges but termites and Japanese shopping mall designs.

Roger, most people, for the worst, simply do not care about quality in life, be it at their jobs or at the movies. You and I are dinosaurs in that regard. Today, young people are amebas who swallow things without tasting them. They are rote, reflexive and without passion.

Stop subjecting yourself to such ridicule, on your blog and countless others.

Roger, I grew up playing video games, and have now grown right out of them. I could not agree more about the difference in value of a work of great literature and a great video game. No doubt art can go into the creation of a video game -- great writing, great storytelling, great design -- but the whole itself seems to me something less than the parts. My education came from books, which opened up worlds and ways of thinking in a way I feel very lucky to have experienced. I've played some cool games, but they have not changed my life.

After I finished reading your latest blog update I felt the urge to finally, after lurking for perhaps a year, contribute something. I've been sitting here thinking about it for a while, and what troubles me is that I'm still not sure exactly what I want to contribute. I want to say _something_, but I don't know what. Or perhaps more worryingly (given the subject of this update), I don't know how to express what I want to say.

I greatly enjoy video games, and I greatly enjoy reading. I suspect I always will. However, I'm uneasy with this comparison of literature and video games. Despite their similarities (contested as those might be) I think the reason that there is so much debate seemingly without end is because a fruitful comparison is not possible. To do so feels like to commit some kind of Rylean category error.

Take the last line (which is what set me off): "Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives."

This just seems like the wrong thing to say. I can't make sense of it. It seems to express something coherent, but when you think about it, it requires there to be a concept of value that applies to two completely different things. It's like saying the colour red is more to be valued than gills. Sentences of that type can be parsed by us, but what they express doesn't make sense if the comparison is between two things that aren't of the same order.

Now it is possible to argue that I'm wrong and that video games and literature are of the same order. I would need some convincing arguments for that. The opinion that they're both art (to call back to that recent discussion) is not enough. It doesn't make any more sense to me to say that the works of Shakespeare are to be valued more than Picasso's Guernica. It would have to be art of the same type. "Paradise Lost is to be valued more than the Twilight books" makes sense. I think history however prevents this from being the case. The history of literature spans hundreds of years (thousands if you include story telling), giving specific works of literature the opportunity to shape our culture, our history, our thought (in the cultural sense, not in the cognitive sense; video games contribute significantly to our cognitive development, just not in the way that literature does), our memes. Video games have been around significantly shorter, and while they have that last one down pat, there are no video games that have started revolutions, fatwas, holy wars. There is no literature that is interactive to the level of a computer game. With the exclusion of text adventures there are no modern video games that make you imagine scenes that aren't actually there. There is no video game that makes you think about philosophical issues in the way that books do (yes, not even Planescape: Torment).

I'm not sure if this is what I wanted to say, but this is what came out, and it'll have to do. There is more to be said I'm sure, but I'm not sure if debate is the answer here.

You shouldn't have said "a great video game" (i.e., an unspecified, possibly imaginary video game) versus a specified novel. A "great video game" could be whatever people want it to be; because imaginary, or tailored to whatever the voter's individual tastes are, it has no flaws, whereas Huck Finn is a particular book with a particular set of pluses and minuses. It's just like in political polling, when an "Unspecified Democrat/Republican Candidate" always beats any particular person. People always value an unspecified thing over a particular thing. It skews the poll.

Is this blogpost an excuse to start talking about our love of reading, books that have influenced us, and what we're currently reading? I'll treat it as such :)

I've always enjoyed reading, and to some extent I think it's genetic. Everyone on both sides of my family enjoy reading, especially my parents. I can't say I was introduced to any of the great acclaimed authors at a young age, such as you've mentioned reading Huck Finn at 7 or a teacher introducing you to Dickens (I've never read any Dickens, truth be told). I think my reading habits up until junior high school (when I became a bibliovore) were rather normal by any standard, and most of what I read had a finite impact that only lasted for that part of my life.

A couple exceptions: at some point when I was young, like 7 or 8 or 9, I guess, I was flipping through an encyclopedia for kids, and there was an entry for Archaeopteryx, the first dinosaur with feathers (and ancestor of all modern day bird species). I can remember sounding out the word 'archaeopteryx' until I could repeat it in one fluid word (although I spent years thinking the first 'e' was pronounced as its own syllable). It was such a fascinating and weird idea, that animals could change into other animals. As a kid I didn't fully grasp the idea of evolution, the sheer time involved and concepts like fitness or adaptation, but the seed of the idea was planted in my mind and it never went away. I went on to major in cinema, taking only the required science classes to meet my general ed needs, but in the past couple years that seed has finally bloomed and I've started reading several books on evolution.

That's actually my current reading list, a few of Dawkins' books. I've already gotten through Climbing Mount Improbable and River Out of Eden, and after I finish Extended Phenotype today I'll start on Blind Watchmaker. (I've found Phenotype to be, in large part, too technical and apparently directed towards Dawkins' fellow scientists; it's not as easy a read at Improbable, The Selfish Gene or Unweaving the Rainbow were). Though after I finish Watchmaker I'll swing to the other end of the spectrum and work my way through a series of Norse sagas.

A much more immediate impact was felt when I read Erik Christian Haugaard's The Samurai's Tale. From that one book I was introduced to an enthralling romantic vision of feudal Japan and the era of the samurai. I imagine it was like when young boys before me read about Camelot or the Wild West, this completely foreign but idealistic time and place full of adventure and honor and larger than life heroes. My lifelong interest in Japan came out of reading that book, even if modern day Japan is nothing like its feudal era.

I can remember several other books that grabbed my attention when I read them, but not to the extent of that encyclopedia entry or Samurai's Tale. And then during my college years I didn't read as much as I had up through high school, mostly because since I was majoring in cinema I was more devoted to watching as many films as I could and learning about that. It wasn't until a couple years ago that I got back into reading extensively. I've been in the army for 3 1/2 years, and one of the few tangible benefits of it has been that when I was deployed I had little else to do in my free time, so I rediscovered my love of reading.

And I read a lot during the deployment. Not all of it was good (I read one Vince Flynn novel that seemed like a Jack Bauer/Marty Stu fanfic), but the good outweighed the bad by far. It was during that year that I read Neuromancer, and I was so excited to realize that there was a new writer whose work I had never taken in, plus an entire genre (cyberpunk) to explore as well.

I also read a bunch of CS Lewis, a random selection of Elmore Leonard (though none of his books have really grabbed me), a ton of Lovecraft, some Shakespeare and Vonnegut and Hammett, the entire output (until that point) of a crime/comic writer named Tim Dorsey and a metaphorical metric-ton of Silver Age comics, among other things. And after I got back to America I kept reading, finding books like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Scott Westerfeld's So Yesterday and almost all of Raymond Chandler's novels and short stories (I just have The Simple Art of Murder left) that truly grabbed me and didn't just sit dead on the page.

And I still have a ton of Hemingway sitting on my to-read shelf, none of which I have touched yet. Plus The Great Gatsby, A Confederacy of Dunces, East of Eden, The Once and Future King and a number of other books considered universal classics, mixed in with fiction and non-fiction; crime and fantasy and biography and more Silver Age comics and manga and science books and historical fiction and more Shakespeare and... and... and...

According to my 'Bookshelf' list on Goodreads.com (which I recommend if you've never been there), I have 192 books sitting here in my barracks room that I have yet to read. And I'll keep adding more as time goes on and maybe I'll never read all the books I buy, even if I live to 90 or 100. But that's fine. Just knowing the roads are there to walk down is beautiful in its own way. I've never understood how people can get tired of living, or worse, sink into a rut of "the usual," when there's so much out there to see and learn and take in, even if you just limit yourself to the printed word. Self-imposed illiteracy is a crime against life.

Dear Mr. Ebert,

Unfortunately, there is a small sidenote I have to make before getting to what I really want to talk about. In my opinion, ending your post with yet again a statement that you think Huckleberry Finn should be preferred by people who have moved beyond a foolish state of mind. Your wording may be aiming to hide it, but in the end, you clearly say that any reasonable person must understand Huckleberry Finn's superiority. I am sorry, but this does not really sound as if you are willing to really let go of the issue.

Anyhow, I think that you are indeed correct about the importance of reading. However, I think you should make a small adjustment to your assessment of civilization via books: Such a civilization will probably not work if all the books offered to the child are of a type that teaches and justifies uncivilized behavior. Books can teach us a lot about human feelings and experiences, and they often do this by sharing, I think. Therefore, if you exposed the child only to books that were full with a fear of people with a different skin color, listing their evil deeds, their menacing atmosphere, their deceitfulness, and what not, will not the child also adopt that uncivilized idea that only people of its own skin color are actually human and the rest just spawn from hell?

Or in other words, is it not so that just as books have the power to do great good for us, they also have the power to do just as much harm given the "right" intentions behind their creation and distribution?

I don't know, in my eyes, it is a little bit like food - you know, while it is necessary for us to be healthy, once it gets one-sided, our health deteriorates. Eating only fat is just as unhealthy (although in a different way) then never eating any kind of fat. Likewise, it takes a diversity of books to provide the rich stimuli for the mind to really develop in all directions. One-sided reading would probably at best leave a blind spot but at its worst cause misdirection and confusion.

Returning to Huckleberry Finn, when assessing the results of the poll, you are actually missing an important aspect you hinted at in this post yourself: You did not specify the interaction between the item taken with you. What if people who have already sealed Huckleberry Finn in their hearts decide that they do not need to take it with them externally as their mind's eye can re-read it in their hearts? Or do you not believe that we can seal art we really appreciate in our hearts?

Personally, I think if something really moves us and affects us, it seems only logical that it will leave a trace in our hearts. And the greater its impact, the clearer its image. Or the other way around - if it does not leave any image in our heart, I am doubtful whether it really moved us in the first place.

Yours,
Deathworks

I love reading and video games equally: I chose not to choose. I have never read Huckleberry Finn likely because I never was made to, and I always preferred reading non-fiction to fiction anyway.

I'll read Huckleberry Finn this weekend, just to see what all the fuss is about.

And wasn't there a time when when the popular conception of movies was that they were a shallow art form beneath theater and literature? This is the same old argument, and a shockingly cynical point of view from you. Even if games have never been true 'art' yet (I disagree, but that's not even the point), that certainly doesn't mean they're inherently incapable of it. Why, I ask, do we have to pick and choose which art forms to appreciate? One of the great things of being a human being with capacity for intellectual thought is appreciating as many different things as you possibly can.

Even when you say you are leaving the video game discussion behind, you still keepdigging at those who prefer video games over literature by saying they are in a "foolish stage in their lives." Let it go.

I'm 25. I'm a voracious reader. I also am an extensive player of video games. If I were to choose which one I would rather have in my life, it would be books, but that's the entire gamut of books, not just Huck Finn. Including graphic novels, sci-fi/fantasy, and all that jazz. A few years ago though, I think I would have chosen video games. They were a bigger part of my life, I enjoyed them more, more of my friends were playing (community aspect), and I thought the games were better.

As I get older, my tastes will probably slant more towards books and literature as I (presumably) play less video games as life's pressures envelop me. But does this mean I was and still am living in a "foolish stage of life?" No, of course not. As I get older, I'm not less foolish - I'm just disinclined to play as much. My reflexes will get worse. Less and less friends will be gamers. I have not entered some amazing new stage full of wisdom because I prefer Huck Finn over video games - it is a new stage in life where video games no longer fulfill the same role they once did.

If you want to leave the video game discussion behind, do so...and stop bringing up little jabs to those of us who love them. You can't understand it, nor will you be able to. So leave the video game discussion behind you so you can get on to what you do best.

Dear Roger, I am a gamer. I love my video games. Not all games mind you, in fact I suspect the percentage of games I do love among those I have tried roughly equals the percentage of films you do out of all the ones you have seen. But those I do love, I love with all my heart. I remember the stories, and the music and the animation but most of all I remember getting lost in a world and being moved by it.
Perhaps before you asked us, the people who love games, the question, you should have asked yourself which one you value more, Huck Finn, or a great movie. Perhaps you should have put your own passion to the test before putting ours. Perhaps you should not have made things easy for yourself by naming pitting one of the greatest works of human imagination against a random, no name video game. Perhaps you should not have had the poll at all, when whatever the result, you would have gone ahead and called those polling in favor of video games "fools" or "at a foolish stage in their lives". Perhaps Mr Ebert, you should have applied your own philosophy of not comparing movies of different genres, and refrained from comparing such widely different art forms.
But then again, you have already added your disclaimers, haven't you? You have told us that the results signify nothing. Strange that you would expend such time and energy doing something that you knew would result in nothing, when that is the very reason why you claim you don't play video games. Just think of the minutes, or even hours you could have saved, time you otherwise spent writing two blogs, going through the comments, setting twitter polls etc. Time you could have spent blogging about movies or politics or any of the hundred thousand things you actually have an informed opinion about.
You talk about what books can do for us, and I agree with everything you say. Unfortunately you cannot say what video games can do for us. You have never felt it. And please don't make the fatal mistake of assuming that the two worlds are mutually exclusive. As a gamer, let me tell you that all those things reading does, video games do too. They DO "allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded.". Are all gamers like that? Of course not. But then again, not everyone who picks up a book is like that either.
We face a lot of derision for our hobby Mr. Ebert. Derision almost exclusively from people who have no knowledge about video games. Derision based on theory, and ideas and facts that are half baked and half true. Such criticism is not constructive criticism. It does no favors to people who love video games, nor does it help those who don't, except perhaps by massaging their egos a little. After all "noted film critic Roger Ebert hates games and gamers, and so do I" makes some people feel pretty smug, but it doesn't really enrich their lives in any way. You claim your last post was all you had to say about video games, in a post which had video games on the title and more than half of which was again about games. Anyway, let's hope you stick to your word. Leave games be Mr. Ebert. You are not too old to "get it", its just that you are too scared of having your uninformed ideas invalidated.
OK maybe that was too harsh. You don't deserve that. You have given us countless hours of joy, and you have made me appreciate movies in a completely new light. You have made me understand what good movies are, and I will be grateful to you for that. Just don't talk about video games will you?
And yes, I do read. I love to read. I suspect most who come here do. Why just Huck Finn? I can't imagine a world without Hamlet. Or David Copperfield. Or even Treasure Island and Jeeves. Or the works of Tagore (excuse the Bengali in me here). Which is why for people like us, who truly love video games and books, that poll was impossible.

I have never read Huckleberry Finn (shame on me!) but I plan to do it... someday.
Books allow us to create a whole world in our minds. Movies and video games show us that world visually, and even though it's great, it's not the same. I, too, would change a video game for a nice book.
By the way, I don't understand Mark Twain's game.

I found this reaction to Huck Finn on it's Wikipedia page:

"The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people."

This from a presumably well read, intelligent, civilized, evolved group of people.

Ebert: Yes, in 1886, which is when they wrote that.

Roger, let it go. Please...just move on with you life. On the way, look up and study a thing called "cognitive dissonance."

I'll have to read the whole article later, but I have to drop this:
Video games USED to be an art. Video games are now about pretty graphics and realism. The imagination of games like GEX and Rayman is pretty much dead. I won't be surprised if video games would go extinct soon.

As a recent high school graduate, I completely agree that the youth is less well-read than we should be. I worked at a library for a year and a half and read (present tense) about a book a week. It disappoints me that people who are considered avid readers are the people who read Fight Club over and over again.

I agree that the poll is nebulous (a specific game which has been lauded critically would have been a more apples-to-apples comparison), but it goes further than that. At least for my generation (I'm in my mid-20's), the appeal and versatility and level of investment in interactive media such as video games is of far greater importance than for generations before me, where this type of media ranged from limited to non-existant in availability.

I don't think anyone means to take away from the greatness of Huckleberry Finn or Mark Twain. Instead, the poll reflects not only the type of readership that's interested enough in the topic to vote, but also to the changing relationship between the consumer and the medium.

Well another gret piece, Mr.Ebert from a transplanted chicagoan here in San Antonio.

I'm a 20 year Air Force Veteran, and I know for a fact that my love of reading got me where i am today-no two ways about it.

As an inner city kid (Old-Town) my twin brother and I would read book after book during the summer growing up, it kept us out of trouble when we weren't out playing our year round sports, as one can in chicago

I still remember that i cried in anger and sorrow when my father threw out my "little house on the prairie" books when i was around 10 years old- i felt i had lost some favorites friends forever.

Well God bless you and yours sir,

Armando Sanchez
San Antonio, Tx

Speaking of games and literature, Yann Martel's new book is horrifyingly related to both. Anyhow.

Huckleberry Finn is a poor choice for this endeavor. It ends in a sorry mishmash, and Twain was hurried when he wrote it. Huckleberry Finn is 3/4s great book, 1/4 mush.

I think the biggest problem here us that a great book requires so much more of an investment from the reader than a great game does from the player. I do both, and enjoy both (read and game, that is.). And yes, there is a massive sense of accomplishment from saving the princess, or deciphering a complex task in many of the great games (The most recent Ratchet and Clank, for example, had time puzzles that were endlessley entertaining, and intellectually difficult.). But nothing in a game has ever approached the kind of emotional, intellectual, and plain energetic investment that say, Moby Dick, or Les Miserables did. Weeks of poring through dense, complicated, and beautiful prose to be guided on a journey (and the best games guide you on your journey too) that is incomprehensibly foreign yes rendered, with the skill of a fine author, approachably engaging.

I vote books. And I'm not that old, not that stodgy. Well, I do wear a bowtie on purpose, unironically, to work. So make of that what you will.

Roger, I didn't vote in your poll; I do not twit.

However, had I voted, I would have voted for Huck.

I'm reminded of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. Calvin & Hobbes are sitting on the living room floor, reading from a book. Calvin says, "It says here that Marx said that 'Religion is the opiate of the masses.' What do you think that means?" Hobbes disavows any knowledge.

In the last panel, the television thinks to itself, "It means that Marx hadn't seen anything yet."

If television is the new opiate of the masses, then video games might be the cocaine of the masses. And I say that as someone who has played video games...

I appreciate your comments. Having a Masters in English Literature and having grown up a video gamer, I think I can see both sides. I love literature, and it's accepted today as an art. But back when novels were first emerging on the scene, they were vilified as being trashy and worthless. Society has shifted a long way since then, and it's interesting to think what changes might occur in the next fifty or hundred years. I have yet to play a video game that I would classify as art, but then again, I don't have the advantage of hindsight.

As to your poll, my personal vote would be in favor of Huck in a heartbeat. I actually wrote my thesis on film adaptations of Twain's novel. Even after watching around 14 different adaptations in less than a year, I'm still drawn to the book. (The movie adaptations . . . not so much.) What's more remarkable is the fact that Twain wrote it with the intent of cashing in on the popularity of Tom Sawyer. I don't think he entirely understood just what he had created when he wrote it, and I don't think many people understand and appreciate what he did. Beyond the influence Huck had on American literature as a whole, I would argue he continues to play a huge part in the way popular culture has shifted. In many ways, Huck Finn was the first YA novel, a coming of age story told by a boy as he's actually coming of age, rather than as an adult looking back fondly as the follies of his youth. Without Huck, maybe there would have been no Hogwarts. Just food for thought . . .

And for any interested on reading the thesis (captivating as it might be), you can find it online here:

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd765.pdf

Funny, the book I continuously re-read in university was your own Great Movies vol. 1. Not to be overly flattering, just a fact. I folded it open so many times, the spine broke. Have I done injustice to Twain and Shakespeare and Pauline Kael?

I must unfortunately confess ignorance as to Huck Finn but I agree with your overall premise and the choice between a video game and a favorite piece of literature such as A Christmas Carol, To Kill a Mocking Bird, or Farenheit 411 would be easy.

Sam E.

Right on Ebert. Video games vs Books no contest. There are many studies showing that distractibility is increased and attention is reduced by excessive video game use.

Okay, there is no way the man who wrote "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" would prioritize designing video games over writing. The "Mark Twain Memory Game" was a way for Twain to make money. (It failed to do so, by the way.)

This is like saying Michelangelo would have illustrated for Disney instead of painting the Sistine Chapel.

(And Twain is in his league.)

Reading competence has fallen because of video games!!!

Heh, I jest. I’m a gamer myself and weighed in on the possibility of games as art. I do however think the unprecedented availability of visual media has contributed a great deal to low reading competency levels, television most specifically. I’m not saying television is intrinsically evil or devoid of valuable content, but the ease of coming home from work/school, sitting on the couch and with a remote and turning on the tv I can easily lose an hour or two (or at least I could have before having a daughter :) .) Surfing the internet, playing with my phone, and yes playing video games can equally steal vast amounts of time. Because of the instant gratification of sitcom tv or special effects ridden films, my patience for reading can wane. I have to make time to sit down and read –be it fiction or nonfiction- or else I will not approach my book shelves. The odd thing is nothing engages and engrosses me like a good written work of fiction, and nothing makes me feel more accomplished and confident than educating myself by reading a careful work of nonfiction. Yet once these books are finished my first instinct is back towards the tv. I imagine many folks share my problem, and many school aged kids as well. They may enjoy reading but it’s not their first instinct. I know how much I love my time with written works, and have to overcome the inclination to visual media. I’m always glad when I do, and yet it seems like the same battle every time I think of picking up a book.
As a result I’ve decided to read through some classic works of fiction that I had never read before but am familiar with due to visual media. Most recently read Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. What a fun tale and far more involved than any filmed version I had seen -with a surprisingly somber conclusion. Although I have read Huck Finn, perhaps I should return to Twain. That’s never a waste of time.

Having never read Huck Finn, I had to vote based on what I know, and what I know is video games. It's on my to do list, and I'll get around to it eventually. I have heard, that it's the greatest work of American literature...until Tom Sawyer shows up. At that point, you can close the book and not miss anything of importance. Well, if this poll did anything, it's reminded me that I've got to read the book, and that's probably a good thing.

What a great read Huckleberry Finn is! I recently decided to spend the summer getting back into more deliberate reading. I started with Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Good morning, Mr. Ebert:

Some of the ideas I am expressing below I have transferred from my contribution to your "Frisson" blog; therefore, I apologize in advance for any irksome reiterations.

Your latest blog again confronts a disconcerting societal dilemma, namely the apparent decline in literary pursuits. Although we can reasonably take heart that many people are literate and are are still avidly reading, how can we determine that their subject matter is mentally stimulating, meaningful, and "nutritious"?

In my opinion, many middle- and high-school English instructors shoulder the blame for literary apathy. Instead of encouraging students to make original, relevant observations in their readings, these instructors coerce students to ingest and retain the observations of others. Why bother discovering what has already been discovered? No need to ponder where the symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony reside. A handy synopsis of all that "annoying" stuff exists, whether it's in Cliff Notes, Wikipedia, or some other "pre-pondered","pre-packaged', and shrink-wrapped literary source. Instead of ebulliently presenting literature as an enticing smorgasbord, these instructors sullenly treat it like brussel sprouts - you probably won't like it, but it's good for you, so eat it! Let's face it; since most individuals' familiarity with literature stems from the necessity to pass an English course, this mechanical approach does them a grave disservice.

The relative scarcity of mental discipline, time to assimilate data, and positive reinforcement for what has been learned are also culpable. The third criterion may be the most crucial. Even in our accelerated technological society, many of us could still evoke the discipline and time to read fine literature. However, we can seldom find the motivation or incentive to do so. Self-improvement usually won't suffice. Unless you belong to a book club or you associate with a bunch of bibliophiles, with whom are you going to share what you learned from books?:

Example: "Hey, I just read this great novel about a guy who time-travels to Arthurian England and starts to transform their medieval culture." "How interesting...oops, excuse me, I have a train to catch!"

Are "true" bibliophiles (i.e. readers of "good" literature) inexorably becoming extinct? Perhaps not, they may exist in small enclaves increasingly similar to Granger's post-apocalyptic motley gang in "Farenheit 451". In the meantime, instant gratification from the Internet and other "non-literary" sources raise an irresistible sirenian clamor for our attention.

To prevent further literary atrophy, I feel the solution is to make literature pulsate with contemporary relevance and wonder, not only at the college level, but also from the earlist pre-teen classes. For even younger students, I would recommend those condensed, illustrated versions of literary classics to jump-start their reading appreciation and comprehension. For older students, perhaps even incorporating cinematic versions of famous literature in tandem with their readings can help - especially in comparing and contrasting. Dare I say it, perhaps if some enterprising video game designer crafts a game based on a literary work, it may impel even those wwith attention deficits to read eventually

Most importantly, academia and society must promote literary value. When I was fulfilling my English major at Tufts University from 1981-1985, I encountered a fair amount of disdain from classmated because I was not engaged in a remuneratively lucrative study like pre-med or pre-law. I shrugged off their dismissive comments and gradually learned that syntactical, grammatical, and literary expression is invaluable in any field, especially law. I proved that when I graduated from Boston's Suffolk Law School in 2005 and passed the Massachusetts Bar in 2006.

We can still reverse this anti-intellectual erosion.

Perhaps we should have a video game about Huck Finn. It would need just a bit of minor tweaking, but Huck and Jim battling the alien zombie apocalypse would be well within the spirit of the novel.

I'd argue that the results of your poll were skewed by people who didn't like how it was worded in the first place, and so voted for the video game. It seemed like you set it up for an outcome that would support your original argument that video games can never be art, even though that's not what happened.

I think it would have been better to ask if one would value a great video game over a great piece of literature, and follow it up with multiple choice questions that explored why someone answered the way they did. It would also be interesting to see a poll wherein people were asked what they valued more, a great film or Huckleberry Finn.

For the record, I voted for Finn, and I also play video games and believe that a select few can be defined as art (Bioshock comes to mind). I don't think there are any games that currently can be compared to masterpieces of literature, but then I dare say there's few films that rise to that level as well, in comparison to the vast body of work in that medium.

I'd also argue that the majority of video games are just entertainment with little to no artistic merit -much like many movies and TV shows. I think that games can rise to be considered art when they take advantage of the interactive environment to present a story and expose the player to experiences similar to that found in great films and yes, even literature. The medium itself has only begun to explore this possibility, so I think it's a little early in the game to make final pronouncements about video games as art.

Can't we compromise on a Huck Finn video game?

I'm neither surprised nor particularly appalled by this poll. Of course people don't want to read Huckleberry Finn. I loved the book, but when I see that title, I don't see the marvelous novel Mark Twain wrote; I see bored school kids having literature crammed down their throats like multiplication tables.

Our educational system is designed to extract every ounce of pleasure and vitality from literature. Is it any wonder that the products of this system grow up to flock to video games instead of books?

Ebert: That's related to the current controversy about teaching texts by close analysis. You'll never encourage reading that way. My advice: Unless you're forced to for a grade, never finish a book you're not actually enjoying.

Despite being a lifelong gamer, I voted for Huck Finn without hesitation. I simply could not think of a game that I could compare to it without any doubts, but I Think if the poll was a specific game versus the novel, I think I could have voted for a game. As you explain, it is a very abstract poll.

I'm sure that anyway you could have phrased the poll, however, I would almost always vote for books. Being well read is incredibly important, and I tend to feel as much interaction with a book as I do with video games. Fifty years from now we may have a greater pool of video games that could be claimed to improved our culture and intellects, but at this point you would have to be a fool to trade the loss of Shakespeare for some Xbox games.

Even though the results of this poll do not surprise me, I'm still saddened by them.

I do like the fun escapism of video games, but I also hate them, because they make my imagination sluggish and lazy.

Anyway, thank you Roger for introducing me to this book. I've always been aware of Mark Twain, and of his works like Huckleberry Finn, but have never experienced any of them. The description of the storm you cited was a delight to read.

I'm going to take a break from killing zombies tonight and shut off my computer. That massive tome of collected works of Hemingway in my library has way too much dust on it.

I am a dedicated gamer, yet I never felt compelled to comment on either of your previous blogs on the subject of games. Perhaps that means that I feel more strongly about reading and literature than gaming, but I would say that until now I did not feel as if I had anything worth contributing to the discussion. As a child I read more than was perhaps healthy. My parents would have to make sure I was truly sleeping and not reading under the covers with a flashlight. I read Mark Twain and Douglas Adams and many other fine authors. And yet, as soon as I was able to save enough money, delivering papers in my small town, I bought a gaming system. Did that mean I loved books any less? Certainly not. And in the decade-plus since then, as my love for games has grown, my love for literature has not waned. For me, they are deeply interconnected. My favorite games contain a story as deep and rich as my favorite novels, a world that is as real as any other place I have never visited. Yet with (most) novels, I can only watch the actions of others, no matter how deeply invested I become in their results. In my favorite games it is (in part) my own actions that help mold the world. I do not believe that caring for something you can feel you lived through or helped create is foolish, or a passing stage.

Hello Roger

While I do agree with your assessment on reading, I am still not entirely convinced by your assessment of the poll. The problem, as with many internet polls, is that it is not a true random sample. People who vote in them are often only doing so because they really care about the issue or they are trying to deliberately skew the results. I have no doubt a majority of the voters in this case said: "Hey, its that Ebert guy who hates games. Let's show him what we think of his precious Huckleberry Finn."

On a separate note, let me ask you a similar question. Would you sacrifice, say, every single Charlie Chaplin film to preserve Huckleberry Finn? Or Citizen Kane?

With all due respect, the poll was badly designed. It forced one to choose between a specific book (HUCK FINN) and an abstract video game. Having never cottoned to Huck Finn like you did, it was an easy call to make. Might have been tougher if I had to give up LotR or ALL THE KING'S MEN, for example.

By the way, where do text-adventures fit in this whole book versus video game rubric you've set up? Say, the works of Infocom. Written by real writers (if you consider Douglas Adams such), and they're as much about the love of reading as any book. Just curious.

Ebert: I explained why the poll was written that way.

You said it yourself:

"It allows us to become more humane and open-minded...it encourages us to think in a way that...is more fanciful, creative, poetic and expressive."

What better reason for certain elements to attempt to make reading irrelevant?

There are a lot of people who stand to profit, in both money and power, if people are less humane, more closed-minded, and far less creative than they are now (which is hard to imagine sometimes).

What better reason for Fox News Chicago to "go undercover" to try and prove that libraries are a waste of resources? Do these people ever listen to themselves?

I mean, Idiocracy was a flawed movie, but the underlying message was just chilling.

Obviously this was a silly exercise, but it did give me an idea for another poll... "Which would you value more: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain or a great film?"

Or going more specific... "Which would you value more: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain or Citizen Kane by Orson Welles?"

Oh, Shakespeare? Now you're talking. I am 45. I don't enjoy video games, though I enjoy watching my kids play Little Big Planet, and the mystery hidden puzzles on the computer. I see the value in them.

But I have always been a voracious reader. There are probably a number of books I'd trade for all video games for all time. It's just that, despite your worthy defense of it, Huck Finn wouldn't be one of them.

it's the question Ebert it's the question!

would i rather read a book or play a video game, well the book wins hands down!

now..would i rather read Huck Finn or play a video game, well now ur just toying with me. i'd rather be at work for 8 hours than read huck finn!

so i wonder how many others you lost (in the poll) to video games by limiting their choice to huckleberry finn, which sounds more like an english assignment than a leisurely read..

Ebert: It's not leisurely .

As much as I love video games they would be nothing without such great works of literature. However, the video games I play are more of an extension of story telling.

Some blowhard I respect, refused to even try one of my beloved artforms(yep, ART). He didn't have the time, he told me. I am not as well read as he, but I share his sentiment. I don't have the time to waste, there is just too many films and videogames to enjoy.

I think it's interesting that we're often comparing video games to movies and books. I feel that they're closer to music than either of those two mediums. Books or movies that do not tell some sort of story are not often considered great art. (There are exceptions)

Yet music does not have to "tell a story" to be considered great. Yes, lyrics can make a song more memorable, but no one would argue that the works of Bach and Beethoven are not great. Just through the minute, basic elements, music is able to convey emotion. Games can sometimes do the same thing, without a story of meaning or consequence. Most of the "story" elements of a video game are found in cutscenes that are unconnected to the actual gameplay, so I don't consider them to be part of the discussion. If games were to ever be discussed as "art", the importance lies in the interactivity with the player, not JUST the story it conveys. (Which, might I add, can be often better than some movies)

Very rarely though, do you find games where the gameplay works with the story to make you feel some powerful emotions. However, it does happen. I don't know if that's "art", but then again, I never made claims that games were ever art. Games often evoke strong emotions from me, sometimes moreso than music or movies, but I suppose it's all perspective. I just do what I enjoy, whether it's reading Huck Finn or playing a game. No need to really argue for the "legitimacy" of either.

So, anyone who likes games more than books is in a foolish part of their life? And if they agree with you they will be much happier? Sounds like old conservatives talking about young liberals.

I didn't care much for Huckleberry Finn. I didn't hate it, just... didn't much care. It didn't move me. Was I too young? Too distant in my daily life from the problems it addresses? Simply not prepared on that particular day or week to appreciate prose in a dialect so unlike my own? Perhaps. Or perhaps the book is simply not to my taste.

One of the hard-won lessons of my life is that not everyone loves the things I love.

You're right about the state of reading in our country. My father dropped out of high school in 1950 and he is much better read than all of my college graduate friends. The man is always reading a book and not grisham/patterson fluff. Twain, Hemingway, and Wouk are his favorite authors.

His example turned me into a bibliophile. I hit the Barnes and Noble and used bookstore near my office a couple of times per week. Have you noticed that women outnumber men at least 10-1 in bookstores? If I were still in my 20s and unmarried, I'd put down my video game controller and head to the bookstore to pick up a book and strike up a conversation with an attractive and literate woman.

Incidentally, I can't be the only one, at this point, who is wondering if this refusal to drop the video game thing is all just some extended gag to see just how many replies you can get out of the topic. It's not even a stand-up, drag-out fight between equals putting forth equally valid arguments. It has been more like dozens of essay-length dissertations on the flaws in your logic followed by you taking a cheap shot in your twitter or declaring off-handedly, with patronizing tone turned to max, that, while those who disagree with you are of course uncultured fools, you take heart that they don't have to be that way and will someday realize the same thing you have about the games they've played and you haven't.

The problem with the poll is that 'a great video game' is by definition 'great'. Objectively great. I would rather watch a great movie than read (or in my case re-read) Huck Finn. That doesn't mean that I think movies are a superior artform. I would rather play a great video game than re-read Huck Finn because I enjoy video games and I really really enjoy great ones. In fact, I have a pretty limited amount of video games and I tend to only buy ones that are rated 8/10 or higher amongst the gaming critical community.

I'd even replace Huck Finn with a book I enjoyed far more, Albert Camus' The Stranger. Sure, The Stranger is one of my three favourite novels and I love re-reading it but an abstract, definitively great video game is going to provide a great experience.

I suppose the more accurate poll question would be; "What would you value more - a great book or a great video game?"

Anyway I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever commented on your blog so I must say I'm a huge fan and I hope someday to be Australia's Roger Ebert.

This seems like a continued attempt to rationalize a somewhat indefensible position regarding video games and art. The debate has simply become more covert.

I am actually surprised that Huck Finn lost out to Video Games but it would probably have won if it had been put against "most" video games and not all. I would happily scrap "most" Mills & Boon romance novels for a column by Glen Greenwald but i would want at least a couple to remain as an example of the artform, even though i loathe that form.

Art is subjective, something appreciated internally. RE can say that something isn't art to him but saying it isn't art is clearly over-reaching as he does not speak for all. It may well be that video games will never be art for Roger because he will never appreciate any. That is a lacking in him.

Out of curiosity, would you take a great film over Huckleberry Finn?

I read somewhere about how important it is to read good books in order to become a better writer.
63.1% prefer video games. I know it was not a scientific study, but I hope it's not a trend. After all, to have good books to read, you need good writers.

Mr Ebert I'm in all honesty rather insulted by your accusation that people who prefer any videogame over Huck Finn are either "born fools" or "at a foolish stage". I'm 18 years old and come from Scotland so I may be moderatly bias in this seeing as how I come from a generation where playing videogames is something which is as normal or even, sadly, more normal than reading a book and that I've never felt a strong attachment to Huck Finn.

But at the same time I am someone who does enjoy reading books, not of the Harry Potter (which, whilst entertaining is a children's book) or Twilight (Which is poorly written dribel)variety but good books, Orwell, Shakespeare, Swift, Hemingway and the such, however I also enjoy videogames nearly as much, and on occasion equally if not more so than them.

I'm not trying to say that all games are better than or equal to books. If anything it's maybe only about 1% of videogames ever releassed, most games up until roughly 10 years ago were unable to have engaging story and had to settle for rudimentary "The princess has been kidnapped, save her! Score points!", and whilst I find games like that entertaining I'm not going to sit here and say they're better than a book (most books, certain authors I'd say are far worse than even a rudimentary story like that (A certain Mr Brown who enjoys writing silly puzzle books disguised as horrible, cliched stories comes to mind)

However there are good games out there, they're insanely hard to find yes, but they are out there. I'm not going to name them because what is and isn't a good emotional story is completely subjective. However they do exist.

I'm rambling and making absolutely no sense so I shall finish up my rambling comment here by just saying that this is my first time ever commenting on one of your blogs due to feeling inferior to the wonderful comments that are normally posted here (also knowing that you read these comments terrifies me a tad, as I have much respect for your writing) and that I hope this debate does continue, hopefully without you or others getting grossly insulted.

I agree with Pants McCracky.

(By the way, I can now say that I have said the phrase: "I agree with Pants McCracky.")

I voted for video games because I felt that I have almost no connection to Huckleberry Finn. I just remember Huck Finn as the book in 7th grade that I had to read and write papers on and hated every minute of it.

On the other hand, there have been a few quality video games that have touched me on a personal level.

So when you asked which one that I, personally, "value" the most: I chose video games.

As much as I'd hate to admit it, books are still related to school for me, and, therefore, work. Video games are more like sports to me, and, therefore, play. It's two different worlds.

Why put Mark Twain up against games? Why not stack him against movies. It's clearly a one-or-the-other proposition, and if anything other than Twain loses, then it's got to be indicative of the fall of civilization.

I loved Huck Finn, but the last time I read it nothing new had happened. It's got kind of limited replay value.

I voted for "a great video game." To me, a great game is something fairly open-ended, whether it's a first-person shooter that you can play online with an ever-changing array of opponents, or it's a non-linear story with interesting side quests or subplots that encourage you to play the game through again, or even just being able to find alternate routes to the finish line. And, truth be told, I didn't have the same type of connection to Huckleberry Finn as I did, say, Psychonauts for the Playstation 2.

I'd have surrendered the great video game gladly, though, in favor of The Great Gatsby. I'm a sap for F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Roaring 20's, in general. I'd probably trade all the gaming stuff I have for a collection of his short stories, as well. One man's junk, another man's treasure, blah blah blah.

I don't see books, in general, as superior to video games, or vice-versa. I see two different solutions to a temporary escape. Two different chances to lose yourself in a fantastic world, watching fantastic people interacting, and possibly doing fantastic things yourself. That's ultimately what I look for of entertainment, in general.

When you say that you do not know what motivated or underscored the answer you got -that it was preamble for you to discuss the great novel "Huckleberry Finn"- I think that question does bear examination. I voted the way I voted out of recognition that I had never read "Huckleberry Finn". I suspect a great number of people who came of age, as I did, in the 1970's and early 80's, haven't read that book.

When thinking of the American classics and influential writings that should transport us and infuse us, I don't know of many. This is because in my public high school I was not required to read anything. My English teacher started us out reading "Romeo & Juliet" but later said that was too hard and we should watch the movie, instead. This was the Franco Zeffirelli version from 1968. And, yes, I think that watching a production of the play is superior to reading it, it underscored the approach of my teachers at that time.

We did NOT read any Hemmingway. We did not read "1984". We did not read "Moby Dick", "Grapes of Wrath", or "To Kill A Mockingbird". I did have one teacher who introduced me to "Great Expectations" (a very dry, dull read) and another who had us read "Animal Farm". But in the end, we rarely had the greats presented to us, optionally or otherwise.

As you say, your survey was intended as a gateway for you to pontificate upon the seminal work of Mark Twain.

I suggest that the deeper subject -that of both personal and educational failure- should be addressed. Perhaps this is something you would address in a future blog entry.

None of this is to say that I have no appreciation for literature or reading. I read, and enjoyed, "The Consolation of Philosophy". "The Lord of the Rings" and "Watership Down" are stories I can nearly recite from memory. The early 20th-century short stories of H.P. Lovecraft astounded me. Ray Bradbury created the stories I grew up on. There is great value in all of these.

I would suggest that our schools need to reinforce the classics as well as pushing forward into new areas such as those I mention.

What are your thoughts?

Yours,
David J Rust

Ebert: That's related to the current controversy about teaching texts by close analysis. You'll never encourage reading that way. My advice: Unless you're forced to for a grade, never finish a book you're not actually enjoying.

I'd actually disagree on both counts, Roger. As someone who recently completed high school, I think that the close reading I did in my H.S. English courses was instrumental to my greater appreciation of reading. Especially for kids today, for whom so many moments are fleeting, the ability to concentrate intensely on shorter passages vastly deepens one's appreciation of the text. In fact, when you quote the Huck Finn passage in your article and encourage us to read it three times, that's close reading! Furthermore, you seem to think (and I would agree) that the close reading of the passage enhances one's appreciation of Huck Finn!

As for the advice about not finishing a book you're not enjoying, I believe there are exceptions. For example, novels like Infinite Jest or any of Faulkner's works are daunting and in many ways can be unenjoyable at first. But it's so, so worth keeping at it.

Analogously, say someone turned off Days of Heaven partway through because they were bored by its relative lack of dialogue. Wouldn't you encourage them to return to the film, paying attention to the photography, the "painterly images and evocative score"?

I refused to vote because it's like picking between television and everybody's mom's pancake breakfast meal.

I understand the critique that Ebert's got against video games and it's valid to point out that a) we have yet to see the video game that defines American Life as we know it (the Sims if it had a true message?) and b) it's hard to know if a game will ever provide the mostly universal experience that it feels like Ebert's attaching to Huck Finn and classic literature. Of course, not everybody who reads Huck Finn gets it or likes it. Similarly, lot's of others who play a video game aren't going to take it to the level of art. A game, like any piece of art, doesn't guarantee ecstacy/mediation/revelation. Lot's of folks will suck at it or fail to grasp the message and mediated emotion and themes. And that's assuming the game even has one! Pac-man is a classic game by most accounts and I would be hard-pressed to find a "life changing" element in it. But like the Looney Tunes, it's art/entertainment/struggle/comedy.

I hope Ebert's trolling will inspire somebody to give us more than cartoons. Change our lives already, will you? Teach us something.

Hi Roger,

I'm sure you and many of your readers have read the fine essay by Mario Vargas Llosa entitled "Why Literature? The premature obituary of the book," but I'd like to share it with those who have not. Llosa expresses many of the same sentiments that you write about here. The link: http://www.uwec.edu/pnotesbd/Llosa_article.htm

Huckleberry Finn is a great book (yes, I've read it), but I'm sure it would have altered your poll significantly if you had chosen something more contemporary (say, the Harry Potter books, or maybe Stephen King) to go up against video games. A lot of people see Mark Twain and think, "assigned homework."
And it's unfair to bring up people like your grandmother and her voracious reading. People generations ago had very few entertainment choices; primarily, they had reading. If she was born today, she might not even pick up a book (except for that homework assignment, Huckleberry Finn).
And, as a film critic, you are surely aware that at the dawn of Hollywood, movies were looked down on, as well. They were considered inferior to "the stage" and to books.
Having said all that, I too would pick a great book over video games.
More to the point, now I need a beer.

I am one of your Twitter followers who abstained from voting because it was a silly question, regardless of your reasoning for phrasing it that way. It's not really a question a person should be able to answer truthfully, because no one really knows the future of games or what a "great" video game really entails. I guess it's a meaningful question if you don't value video games at all, but for others it becomes unanswerable, because many, many people can appreciate and value both books and games as art.

I don't have much to say either way about Huckleberry Finn, but I still understand its value. I read it as a child in the 1990s and enjoyed it well enough, liked the story, but that was about it. I should go back to it--I'd probably appreciate it more now. I did a lot of reading as a kid, but I was nuts about Robinson Crusoe (a book I'm told is almost uniformly decried as poorly-written) at the time, so I wouldn't really trust my childhood taste in books.

I think the ultimate flaw in the poll is that it presents a false dichotomy. Why should I choose? Why must I choose?

The implication of the poll is that time spent playing video games is wasted time, time that the player could and/or should be spending reading "Huck Finn." And that comes from your assumption that video games are inherently inferior.

But I get different things out of gaming and reading. I value the experience of playing a great game in a different way than I value the experience of reading a great novel, in the same way that reading "Huck Finn" and watching "Citizen Kane" are experiences that stimulate different parts of my brain. I don't like the idea of being forced to choose one kind of experience or one kind of art (and yes, I come down on the "video games are art" side of the debate) that is "better" or "more valuable" because I value variety above all. If I'm forced to choose between Huck Finn and even one specific great video game, why not force me to choose between watching "Citizen Kane" and listening to Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony? Or between attending a production of "The Tempest" and visiting a great art museum?

It's a false choice because I can - and do - make time for all of these things, because I value the richness, breadth and depth of experience that each brings to my life.

Maybe you just had a bunch of economists voting in your poll, who know that you could buy three copies of Huckleberry Finn with the same money it takes to buy one "great video game."

Also, I vote Moby-Dick over Huck Finn as "The Great American Novel," and eagerly await the day it's made into a video game. Sailing your ship around, harpooning whales, yelling "From hell's heart I stab at thee!" Its gonna be great (though not as good as the book, obviously).

This "choice" was always meaningless and artificial. You can choose both and people do so every day. I'm guessing it could be hard to believe for you, but there are so many people, young and older alike, out there who enjoy playing good video games while also reading amazing books all the time. I'm part of a large online community of Tolkien lovers, and there's as much intelligent and thoughtful discussion of books (not just fantasy, all the genres, modern and classics) as there is of video games. It was never "either-or" for most people out there and while there are extremes, you need to stop underestimating people when it comes to their choices, Roger.

I suspect the question is one of "value". It can mean different things to different people.

In terms of influence and historical value, Huckleberry Finn may well outrank any video game yet made. But in terms of here-and-now value, it's going to be well behind for most people under 35.

I read it as a kid, plus saw numerous tv and movie adaptions over the years. I enjoyed it, though I can't say it made a huge impression on me. Since I was not racist as a kid, and went in assuming that Jim was an equal, the whole racism angle went mostly over my head.

As you say, it may well have influenced many other novels I've loved, or movies or even games I've loved. But as it's an unseen influence I'd naturally value those items over the earlier influence.

So, while I've heard of the "value" of Huckleberry Finn, and I'm in no position to doubt it. If given the choice right now,I'd go for a good game (or movie) every time.

It's a little like asking which has more value, Le voyage dans la lune, Hidden Fortress or Star Wars. While Star Wars may not have existed without the first two, for most people living today, it's Star Wars that will have more value to them, and will have had more impact on their lives and provide more fond memories.

I think one aspect which hasn't been brought up during this several months long debate, to the best of my knowledge, is that Art, as I understand it, is something Passive (I don't know how to Italicize online). Not to suggest that you do not experience art, but it is something that exists without your involvement, or even your being aware of its existence.

Video games, however, are something that requires a user--they do not really exist without one, because if a user does not turn it on, and begin playing levels, the story never unfolds, choices are never made. It is not fully realized, in other words, without a user. Even those who say that Video games requires choices to be made and have a real beauty to them, cannot argue that if they don't unwrap Grand Theft Auto, the art doesn't exist. Obviously this is a general point--just because I haven't played GTA (though i have for hours) doesn't mean someone else somewhere has. But whether or not I have watched a movie, or if it is ever shown, it is fully formed.

I think that you can't make the claim about movies, painting, writing, or even performance art that it requires active involvement.

And many folks have argued that you have to make choices, that they're malleable, but I agree with Ebert--if it's malleable, doesn't that invalidate the choices that the ARTIST made for you to experience? Let's look at a movie. Not all movies are art--though some, inarguably, are. None of them, however, are malleable. Neither is literature, sculpture, etc. I think the hang up is that there can be beauty and emotion in video games. Just because a video game can be beautiful and moving does not mean it is art. Much of art is not beautiful.

Another thing that makes me nervous about saying video games are (or can be) art, is that they do not have a creative vision being driven by one, or a small group of individuals. They are made by thousands of people often working separately from others. This is a dangerous point to bring up, however, because movies are made with thousands of people, and thousands (or hundreds) of people were a part of Warhol's factory. I would submit, however, that movies as art, and Warhol's factory, just to name two examples, generally have a creative driving force behind them.

All that being said, who knows what the future holds?

Roger,

I find your discussion of literature far more stimulating than your comparison of it to video games, which is something of a fruitless activity, especially on the Internet. I'd love to see a blog about some of your favorite novels, particularly because you obviously have an appreciation for a wonderful turn of phrase.

It would be hard to pick one favorite novel, but if I had to pick one based on writing alone (not taking plot into account), it would be "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," by Douglas Adams. I have never read another author who commands such control of the English language.

I think the result of the poll may have more to do with the demographic that the internet pulls in, more so than the general public's opinion.

This is makin me angry. Give me a good reason why my comment wasnt published with the others? As a long and faithful fan of yours it feels a bit awkward.

Ebert: But it was. I don't always publish comments in the order received.

I understand why someone would choose a great video game over a great novel. Video games give the player are not a passive pursuit like reading a novel is. Once a person becomes a proficient reader there is generally little difficulty involved in finishing a novel; works in the vein of Finnegan's Wake being exceptions to the rule. Video games provide a superior sense of accomplishment when finished, especially if it took you several lives and continues to complete a level/mission.

Mr. Ebert, as a gamer and a reader, as a long-time fan of your own work, please just let it go? You could be using your words so much more meaningfully to better ends. Please, please, please; you said you were foolish to bring up games in the first place. Look, I'm not one to judge on that matter. I do think, however, that it is deliberate and misguided to continue what is very clearly a fruitless discussion. This is barren ground and I hate coming here and seeing THIS as the topic of the day, again. You are a man with a distinct touch of genius, you have done great things and if we're all lucky you'll continue to do so. So, to ask politely, please stop wasting your time on an argument that is of absolutely no consequence, which you cannot win, which the various participants in don't even approach on similar grounds. This is a waste of time. I may be selfish in doing so but I beg you to use your time wisely, for my benefit.

Hello Roger,
I'm a college professor of writing in English, have a master's degree in Literature, and love to play video games of all sorts, mostly MMORPGs. My love of World of Warcraft, just for example, stems directly from my love of reading science fiction and fantasy novels, especially Lord of the Rings, which I still read regularly and would claim without hesitation as a better set of novels than Twain's entire catalog, though I've never gone in much for American Lit (I *have* read them, though).

I love WoW for its literariness. The creators of the game have generated an entire history and art history of their fictional world, and my avatar can visit the library or gallery, to admire these works if she feels so inclined. The "quests" available to me remind me of those in the books I loved as a child, and my time playing reminds me of being young.

Having said all of that, I would not call WoW, or any video game I've ever played, "Art." It's easier for me to say this now than, say, a year ago, because my computer is currently on the fritz, and I have not played my beloved WoW in several weeks, and I've been spending the time I would normally spend playing in reading instead. Lately, I've read mostly Margaret Atwood novels, since she is my favorite author, and it's been a glorious reminder of the wonders of literature. Video games may give me pleasant feelings, but literature shows me ways of expressing my pleasant feelings in beautiful words, which, if repeated to others, convey my beautiful feelings in ways that they can understand and sometimes even feel for themselves. Wow!

Certain films do this as well. Music, painting, sculpture, dance, and theater also do this. I have never met a video game that could, though I hope that someday, someone will make one that does.

I was both a voracious reader and gamer through my teens. Now in my thirties, I read more than play video games, but still occasionally fire up the 'ol joystick. The two can co-exist, but the experiences are very different. I don't think I could make a comparison, even though this poll was purely hypothetical and for one specific book. Books are an investment of empathy; video games are more about accomplishment.

Something of note about video games: Recently, I discovered an online emulator that allowed me to play the same games I played 20-30 years ago and as I started in, I was overcome with torrents of nostalgia. It affected me more than any piece of music, photograph, film, or scent that has ever taken me back to the innocence of childhood.

That Hemingway quotation reminded me of something Ken Burns said at a lecture I was lucky enough to attend: "Huckleberry Finn is our Iliad and our Odyssey." Which sounds like he's saying pretty much the same thing as Hemingway, but he goes on to explain that while Homer's epics deal with the ancient and more universal issues of War and Home, Huck Finn is about the more American issues of Race and Space; race as it relates to American slavery (since, of course, racism is NOT an exclusively American issue) and Space in the sense of the sheer scale of our country, and all the natural beauty that fits in that space, which must needs be preserved. (The lecture was about his National Parks documentary.) Personally, I would suggest that Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick are America's Iliad and Odyssey. But anyway, I love that quotation.

I think the key issue here is generation.

I'm a child of the 90s. As long as I have been breathing people have had video games to play. And since I could read the text on screen, I have been playing them too. At the same time I could read text on screen, I was reading text on the page. Both literature and video games have been a very large part of my life.

I would choose video games over Huck Finn. My reasoning is very simple, perhaps too simple: relation. I don't relate to Huck Finn's themes. I understand it's a classic American novel, and it is indeed one that I vastly admire - but there is no relation there. Video games, however, are a much more versatile medium (another issue in the poll is that you didn't choose a specific video game) and I relate to certain games. BioShock, for example, a very Ayn Rand dystopian society. The morality posed by the game is certainly relevant. Is it worth it to save the lives of murderers, or to save yourself? The game does pose a choice, but in that choice it can invariably guide your own moral ideals to reach their conclusion. I won't spoil it, for the story of the game is very captivating, but it does guide you to the same conclusion, regardless of your choices in the game.

Now this isn't to say that I would choose ANY game over Huck Finn. Games like Grand Theft Auto I would laugh at and pick up Huck Finn in a heartbeat. But some games tell very rich and captivating stories that my generation relates to more than a book about a boy and his slave friend.

What it comes down to is that video games are just like films - some of them are going to be The Last Airbender, but others are going to be Citizen Kane.

Roger,

I didn't vote because when I tried I had to register. Or I misunderstood, but the point is my result is not included, and I would have voted for Huck Finn.

Now I'm not so sure. I'm not a gamer, but I'm open-minded to the possibility that a definitionally great game could be pretty great!

Of course you'd pick Huck Finn. It's not a choice for you; you have no interest in video games such that you can't even play for free as an academic experiment to back up your summary ruling in the post that started this whole kerfuffle.

But, Jesus Christ, Roger, the arrogance: "I'm suggesting that some are still at a foolish stage, and have the freedom to evolve out of it. Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives." I still can't believe that you're neither self-conscious nor open-minded enough to realize that you haven't done the appropriate legwork to be telling us the paltry value of video games.

I'd be a lot more open to your condescension, although no more forgiving of it, if you had any critical thought about the subject of your critique. But by all means, prescribe away. Roger knows best.

Roger, what was your line about "Transformers"? That someone who thought it was a great film was not "sufficiently evolved"? This applies to reading, too. Dump all video games for Huck? Heck, I'd trash 'em all to save one Flannery O'Connor short story, or Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," or either ending of "Great Expectations," or the measliest poem by Hopkins or Donne or Yeats, or Ray Bradbury's "I See You Never"--jeez, even the scene where Randall Flagg kicks a dog to death in "The Stand" is worth more than the whole lot of them. The pen is mightier than the pixel--well, used to be.

Side question--spurred by the image of Twain working for id designing games: If Shakespeare were alive today, would he be a playwright or a filmmaker? ("Both" is a cheating answer.)

I actually wrote my undergrad thesis paper on "Huck Finn", comparing it to "The Birth of a Nation" and Americanness in cross-medium art, utilizing many passages from your own essay on "The Birth of a Nation," Roger. Whew. The essay can be found at the bottom of this comment, but I'll summarize my central point about the novel. The final eleven chapters, in which Jim is subjected to unnecessary cruelties in the name of farce, enduring snakes, rats and heat when he is already technically "free", undermines and jeopardizes virtually all of the themes Twain had explored up to the point. In short, "Huck Finn" is a great novel with a poor conclusion, and the clearer it becomes that it is one of the defining works of American Literature, the more this dilemma needs to be dealt with.

My essay, from my blog:
http://www.ghostonscreen.com/2010/05/huck-finn-dw-griffith-and-rebirth-of.html

I have not read Huckleberry Finn, nor have I played this abstract "great video game", so the poll seemed a bit moot from from perspective.

However, I can say that as a 21 year old guy, I have a great many more good memories with video games than with books. I have loved a great many books, not brilliant works of literature (I dislike reading shakespeare for example) but books I have loved for their relevance to my own life. However, they could never give me the social experience of beating a game with a friend, desperately arguing with my parents for 10 mins to get to a save point, or the pure despair of having a memory card with 100's of hours in saved games being destroyed.

While video games rarely impact me in the deeply emotional way that a great book or movie does by virtue of their story, they have their own set of virtues that I personally would dread to give up. If I wasn't able to read fictional books as a child, things would have been different, and I would have lost a lot of knowledge and pleasures. However, I cannot fathom my childhood without video games, nearly every friend, memory and moment of passion I had involves them. Giving them up would be giving up the world I now live in and my personal culture and way of life.

I hope all the readers of your blog who do not fall into the gamer generation do not feign despair. We young ones are not all completely susceptible to the allure of vivid graphics and "stunning" technology of video games, cell phones, etc. Indeed, it sometimes seems that "Art" now only has a lifespan of 2-3 years before it is disregarded as null and void. At this point, if something came out after 2007, well, it surely can't be art because it lacks the enhanced, 3-d special effects and the improved design engine. If you haven't noticed, I'm not just talking video games anymore.

My generation seems to have a problem with separating aesthetics from "newness". Too often, we are wowed by the presentation and hype of something new, rather than its actual delivery. We see beautiful, tightly-edited trailers giving away the money-shots of most new blockbuster films, as well as Microsoft and Apple conventions wheeling out new technology like the latest freaks of a Barnum & Bailey circus ring. Aesthetics have become a shock-and-awe process. We are only interested in the building blocks of design, and what that device can only promise in the future. More apps, better graphics, quicker downloads, motion-controlled...etc. These are the new definitions of aesthetics.

Yet I, too, refuse to accept this. I, too, who have also played video games and own some systems and hold certain titles dear to my heart. Your poll leads me to shame. In fact, I think you are ashamed of it as well, Roger, but you are too kind to post that on here. Choosing a great video game over Huck Finn wields an ignorant and unruly disrespect towards our elders, towards American history, and towards the Western canon altogether. In fact, the only possible excuse I can make is that perhaps the newer generations don't find racism such an outrageous issue any more. However, we all know it's very alive and well, but perhaps not at the forefront of American politics anymore.

Harold Bloom is correct in stating we exist today in a world of chaos. The lineage of our forefathers is dying out and being replaced with the aesthetics of what I call "newness". In one of my college classes, a class designed to PROMOTE literacy in secondary schools, our teacher discouraged us from pursuing the classics. She believed kids were not interested in reading them anymore and that we should try and engage them with newer and "fresher" texts. Once again, we are replacing beauty with something new and now supposedly "fresh", as if Huck Finn has become stale. However, I doubt if many contemporary texts describe a thunderstorm the way Mark Twain can.

So let’s talk about books, Roger. Let's talk about their ability to better us, to break down the edifices and seek out that ripe and tacit imagination and connect and speak and breathe to us. A video game has never created characters like Charles Dickens has, or developed empathy like the ever sagacious George Eliot has always been able to do. I've never wept at a video game. I've never felt transformed or inspired. I've been impressed and delighted and intrigued, but I've never felt altered like I have with Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence. Indeed, it’s safe to say that Jude the Obscure changed my life. No video game has done that. No video game has comforted feelings of depression or elation. Whether that can be done or not, we’ll see. But I already see what literature does. Great literature propagates the tacit conditions we all undergo and suffer and brings them to the forefront. To read Shakespeare is to invariably read about ourselves and our current and "fresh" struggles. Indeed, can Hamlet ever grow stale? Perhaps if we discover immortality, but until then, we are all to be or not to be.

I am deeply troubled by your poll, Roger. Probably more than I should be, and probably more than you are. But I am so tired of being part of a generation that feels it's too smart for its own good. We are not literate, but we do feel we are all critics. We have not read Shakespeare or Keats or Eliot, but we have criticized them for being outdated or boring or pointless. We are creating our own aesthetics, which you rather brilliantly touched on with the concept of frisson. We can tell you how many novels Charles Dickens wrote or how Hemingway killed himself, but we cannot tell you about poor Louise's unhappiness in Hard Times or what that old man is really fighting for out there on the sea. We can't tell you, and we don't want to! We feel we are better than that, and that is why I am ashamed. To choose a video game over Huck Finn is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of respect.

In an age Xboxes, iPhones, and Michael Bays, you are bravely carrying the Promethean torch to our starving minds. Please keep talking about books. You can't understand how fresh it really is to hear these great works being preserved.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever" -Keats

I think there is a problem with the original debate. The problem lies in that video games are actually composed of two parts: the art or graphics, and the game itself.

Consider a particular chess board with very detailed figures. The creator of the board would feel very slighted if what they created wasn't considered a piece of art; even without the board actually ever being played, work has been put into the pieces and board to draw the same feelings as a painting might. In the same way I feel a graphical artist for a video game might be slighted if their work wasn't considered art, it's just in a new medium being presented in a new way. Because it's part of a video game, the fact that the graphics by themselves can be considered art is muddled.

Now consider the actual playing of a game of chess. No actual board needs to be pictured, in fact all that needs to be present is the moves taken written out. This is commonplace in plays, as I've seen Macbeth in an African setting, or Romeo and Juliet with pistols involved and no lines changed at all. The actual scripts for plays with no actual actors playing it out can be considered art. In the same way, when Bobby Fischer played some of his world championships, those game moves can be considered an art. But this is chess and not a video game. The problem is that there are little to no video games that have reached the popularity or skillful play of chess. (The reason for this is the nature of graphics constantly improving, but this is besides the point).

What this comes down to is the question isn't "are video games art", as we know graphics, drawings, or paintings can be considered an art. I think the real question is about "is the act of playing a game an art", which lumps in much more than just video.

Read Tom Bissell's EXTRA LIVES: Why Video Games Matter

Why a choice between Twain and video games? They don't necessarily serve the same purpose or artistic need. I gave up video games for 10 years bc they were one dimensional and stupid. Last year, I rediscovered them and saw that it is now a different beast. Truly artful and in it's infancy. Gaming has a lot of potential. Think movies-in-the-first-person.

Huck Finn would not exist without Shakespeare.
Citzen Kane would not exist without Huck Finn.
Mario would not exist without Citizen Kane.

What is art? It's choosing a ceramic toilet.

I consider myself well-read, I read Huck Finn and I agree with everything you said about it. But I voted for the videogame. I did so because when you give me an ambiguous word like "great" and give me free reign over it, you let me interpret it any way I wish, and to me a great videogame is one that does appeal to emotion and intellect, one that does spark empathy, and one that does contain a sense of individual passion. Are there games like that now? Maybe not. Are they coming? Maybe not ever. But to me, that's the only way a game can be considered great. I believe they have the potential. I'm going to study game design at USC in the fall, and I'm interested in exploring some of that potential.

I didn't get to vote on the poll, but I would've picked video games, if only because I was never a fan of Huck Finn. I'd rather be reading something new, preferably set in the future. Everything you said about Huck Finn is true; it just isn't for me. Also I was force fed Huck Finn in some English Lit class years ago, which is never a good way to introduce someone to great literature.

If you had, as some suggested, compared a "great video game" to a "great novel" I would be far more torn. How can you even compare the two? An apple and an orange are far more similar. The feeling of playing a great video game is very different than the feeling of reading a great novel. I'm a reader and a gamer and I love both pursuits.

I have a fear of not being "well-rounded" enough for one of those healthy,
appallingly overproductive lifestyles you'd imagine Einstein or, because I'm currently reading his excellent memoir, Christopher Hitchens were so familiar with.
It's my personal phobias regarding the future that keeps me hooked to exploring different cultures and sciences on a spirratic basis. Being socially "neurotic/inept", I have only the great tongues of history to bridge whatever gaps I have to a world beyond myself. Knowledge keeps it all afloat.

Our viral age would have never blossomed were it not for the obsessions of
some hermit named Newton. That's what drives me more than anything else. A
level of devotion capable of cancelling out all petty desires. And now with the internet,
there is hardly a book, film, or any other artistic/educational medium not readily available through a simple search. The flow of information will only grow and escalate, all while our minds dwindle further down the plug.

The grace of a voice will never die, despite the youth that wilt it's body. Shakespeare solidified his place in our world by documenting how we percieve ourselves better than we could ever hope to. We live his in the eye of his observations, as we float in the realm of Newton's science. You could give these guys credit for shaking our worldview in a span of time comparatively minute to continents splitting, and with just as lasting an impression.

Anyway I forgot what I was even saying. I guess I believe that any immersion that allows
growth in any possible way is definitely worth a go. I have no problems admitting to being a video game fan. But that doesn't mean you'll find me playing the Michael Bay equivalent to one. Even if it happens to be what the majority of video game players get off on. It's true that finding video games of depth can prove more extraneous at times than with film, just like it's true that the payoff can be just as rewarding. And what's so wrong with something Kaufman prob would've dreamed up had it not already been there?

Anyways, nice blog as always. :)

Also, keep in mind that many students were bludgeoned over the head with Literature in high school, especially Huck Finn.

Teachers eschewed the humor, the craft, and the storytelling of Twain's book in lieu of quizzing us to death on every facet of perceived symbolism the book contained, until the very marrow of the piece was sucked dry, along with what joy we could get from the experience. They did the same thing to Catcher in the Rye and other classics.

The point? Don't assume your quiz is a telling indictment on today's lack of reading (although I fear it is). Honestly, even though I don't play video games, based upon my own experience, I would have voted against Huck Finn in your quiz, too.

If you had asked about the Lord of the Rings, or the Forever War, or any number of other books that students are allowed to enjoy on their own (not ruined by curriculum requirements and over zealous teachers) you might have gotten a different outcome...

Roger, I can't believe people are still harping on you about preferring Huckleberry Finn to video games. When I read you state that video games could not be art, I was very unhappy. To hear you merely state your preference and belief that reading Huckleberry Finn (and reading in general) would be a more rewarding endeavor than playing a video game, I am perfectly happy to let you have your opinion. As a matter of fact, I think you might feel encouraged to know that I, as a lifelong gamer, for the most part agree. Partially as a gesture of gratitude for your recognizition and admission of your previous folly, and partially as the result of that fantastic passage you shared with us, I will be re-reading Huck Finn for the first time since my own childhood. It's in line behind Coin Locker Babies, The Story of Crass, and American Gods.

I can't help but wonder if the fact that you are a film critic and that just about every movie based on a video game has been pretty awful has something to do with your dislike of video games.Then again, it could just be an age thing. Most of the people commenting here, and taking the poll, grew up with video games, but you didn't.

While I haven't read much Twain--most of my reading is either fantasy or horror novels except for the occasional Wodehouse--I did vote for Twain in your poll. I can't help but think that the reason it lost is because it was one book against all games and it is a book that many people might avoid because it is considered a classic.

I can't help but think that if you had put Twilight (the book) vs. all video games, you would have gotten different results, and that actually scares me a little.

One thing books do that video games will never do (at least not organically) is take on a completely singular form in the head of each and every reader.

Twain's thunderstorm passage looks different in my mind than it does in yours. What makes it exhilarating is that his descriptions of bending trees and flashes of light enrich the memories of storms each reader carries.

When you read you are stirring your own pot of experience. You are also adding to that pot and reevaluating things you've perhaps taken for granted. When you play video games, that part of your brain is inert.

That being said, I remember conquering Super Metroid with a heavy heart. I didn't want the game to end, but when the the screen tallied the 70+ hours I'd spent playing, I considered it time squandered.

I don't have a problem with people defending their love of video games, but I can't fathom why people so casually dismiss READING. Incredibly depressing.

I didn't vote on the poll. I have played video games, but found them to be a waste of time. I would have voted for "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" which I have read several times, and I have also seen the movies and plays based on it.

Since this was a Twitter/Internet poll for people drawn to you based on their interest in movies, you might have asked if they would rather watch the movie.

As you mention, Mark Twain's book itself is controversial and according to the American Library Association, in the 1990s it was the fifth most challenged book in the United States. Is it appropriate for teaching in the public school system? Is it anti-racist or racist?

I think "Huckleberry Finn" does suffer from sexism and this aspect became more obvious to me as I grew older. Twain was, in that respect, very much a man of his times.

Widow Douglas, Huck's caretaker, is gentle and thus more likable than her spinster sister Miss Watson. There is that clever section about a woman who fools Huck into revealing that he is a boy in disguise, but then there is also the example of the Wilkes sisters who are duped by the Duke and the King. It seems for the most part, women have to be saved but are the civilizing/religious influence in the lives of men.

Reading both the 1876 "Tom Sawyer" and the 1884 "Huckleberry Finn" led me to read other writings by Mark Twain including 1881 "The Prince and the Pauper," the 1889 "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," and the 1916 "The Mysterious Stranger." I was most impressed by an essay of his that was published posthumously, "The War Prayer."

Twain was discouraged from publishing the essay during his lifetime because people feared it would seem sacrilegious. It was published in 1916 (in "Harper's Monthly"), six years after his death.

You can read the full text of this essay online and there has also been a one-act adaptation for the stage as well as a short film (2007).

I also have seen Hal Holbrook portraying Mark Twain and his audience seems to indicate that there is much interest in Mark Twain still because Twain was a great thinker who could challenge people with a good dose of humor.

Roger,

I regret that I have not read Huck Finn for reasons unbeknownst to me and to everyone else. In fact, to be honest, I have not read nearly as much literature as I'd like, although there are plenty of novels I've read that are easily better than many, if not all, video games - those being the likes of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, etc (PKD and Dostoevsky are my two favorite authors). Recently, I went to Half-Price Books and picked up a few things (although I wish I had more money). One book was the screenplays to Bergman's Silence Trilogy, which is awesome, and the other is a little Japanese novel called Thousand Cranes, which one the Pulitzer Prize back in 1968. So far, it's been a fascinating and interesting book (reminding me of Dostoevsky not in wording, but in tone and situation), one that I had known nothing about before picking it up and looking over it at the store. I think that someone who's interested in reading should just be a very curious person, someone who might just look at the aisles of a bookstore and find something he might not have noticed otherwise. And then he might take that step and purchase the book right there, gaining a small world of knowledge (which may or may not be the right term here), that of which he otherwise would not have been privy.

But, yes, I do think you're right that there needs to be a push for learning other great literature in schooling. As a nineteen year old, I know that I did read quite a bit in High School, and the like, but I cannot think of any reason we could not have, perhaps, done more. In my final English class, we didn't even have enough time to finish Brave New World, which was rather disturbing for me (while I loved the class for other reasons, it was a pretty unfocused mess, to be honest, which I did not know was the case when I signed up for it). The two Dostoevsky novels that I've read (and I plan to read more in the near future, but some translations I find are...less-than enthralling) are ones that I chose for my own reading that year, since we had a Senior English project each semester. The stipulations were very lax, usually, but if it got people to read, then it was great. One of my friends read two books that, I would think, should have been required anyway: A Separate Peace, and The Sound and the Fury. The fact that I still haven't read them (although I've been desperately wanting to read the latter) annoys me, but, alas, I wish I had twice the attention span so that reading would be simpler. You're right when you talk of distractions from the internet, and so forth. Sadly, it's something that I have a hard time staying away from for too long. Hopefully I choose to read more in the future.

Savvy

"In fact, I recently told a reader that if forced to choose, I would sacrifice every video game in existence for the works of Shakespeare and not give it a moment's thought."

I agree with this absolutely.

I do agree with most of what you say here but I think it raises an interesting question. I don't think reading comprehension is down because people aren't reading, I think it is because of the low quality of what they are reading. I worked in a public library for 5 years and left last year as disillusioned as ever. The head librarians were ordering in boxes and boxes of 'chicklit', Rachel Ray cookbooks, Manga comics and horrid children's series like Rainbow Magic Fairies. All the while classics like Huck Finn, were becoming tattered and old and thrown out without being replaced. And when people complained that we didn't have classics, we bought a bunch of new glossy ones and shoved them in a corner. I'm not sure why, maybe we had conditioned people to not expect them but nobody checked them out. It's like this in school libraries too. Whenever I approached management they would either call me elitist or bust out the old cherry - "well at least the kids are reading". So I agree the world of books is great, it's just really important to distinguish which books.

A fantastic, and relatively quick read on the subject: "Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library - By Ed D'Angelo

Thank you for writing this article. I'm a gamer, a passionate one. But I came into gaming later than most gamers. Before games, I was a reader. Still am.

I am often frustrated by that I see in gaming. It's adolescent. The themes, even for a rated M (rated R) game are immature: lots of blood, explosions, sometimes sex but nothing that grips me.

What I think you are seeing comes from the fact that gamers have been under fire for many a year now. We've been told that our passion is stupid kiddie games at best, will turn us into godless serial killers at worst.

Collectively, we've had to circle the wagons and defend, defend, defend.

But that's starting to change. Maybe this type of blog is helping us. Before we had to say "games are just good fun: it's not going to turn us all into school shooters!" Now you come along and force us to say "Games are Art!!" And suddenly, we have to look around at the racism, sexism, uber violence and REALLY bad storylines and ... well... who knows?

I thank you. This opens up the debate. This conversation will make us better.

Marcie

www.yellingatpixels.wordpress.com
@yellingatpixels
@Jay_Cat

I agree with your assessment that those numbers probably reflect more the population as a whole than the original numbers where Huck was winning. But the reason for this is plain and it has nothing to di with videogames being art or not being art. It has more to do with entertainment. The average person in the American public would not see Huck as entertainment, but they would see a videogames as such. I prefer the entertainment AND art in Huck, but alas I am not the average American. And neither are you Ebert.

The survey is like asking people if they would rather watch a Fellini film or a Michael Bay movie. I bet the general public would also prefer Bay by a similar margin. Sad, but true.

-Tyler Malone
http://myfilm500.blogspot.com

"The world of books allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions."

No, books allow us to *read* about what it felt like to walk in those shoes. Computer games allow us to *actually walk* in their shoes, be confronted with the decisions they had to make, and understand what it was like to be part of their world.

But in the end, both forms transcend that, and allow us to use our imagination to experience something unique. The difference isn't half as big as you imagine it to be.

I have enjoyed video games in the past, and likely will in the future. I am blessed to have avoided the Skinner boxes that are the long term campaign games, ie WOW, Guild Wars, Star Wars Universe, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. However much enjoyment I derived from the games I have played, though, pales in comparison to the richness "Huckleberry Finn", and all of the countless hundreds, if not thousands, of books I have read since early childhood. Where else could I find my favorite literary inside joke?

"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take, In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn In customary suits of solemn black, But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, Breathes forth contagion on the world, And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage, Is sicklied o'er with care, And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops, With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery--go!"

That's pure gold, right there. Reading that passage aloud in my 11'th grade American literature class was one of the hardest things I have ever done, as my laughter prevented my tongue from doing it justice.

I did a part two to the original video I did for you suggesting different Video Games. This time I included some actual gameplay and some longer clips so that the presentation is better. If I had some idea of the kind of game you be willing, if you did try a video game, I could scout better for you in the next part.

Video Games That Roger Ebert Can Play (Part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtqiOV0XviM

I read Huck Finn in high school when I was 17 years old. I really enjoyed it and I have thought about on many occasions since then. I would be lying, however, if I said it was some kind of life changing experience. It was simply an enjoyable book.

I got my first video game system (the Sega Master System) when I was 5 years old. I spent hundreds of hours bonding with my Dad as we played baseball and football games together over the next 6 years. These are memories that I will treasure for the rest of my life!

Later, as a young teenager, the arcade game room in the mall was where I found something I could shine at. Mortal Kombat was one of the most popular games at that time, and I could compete with guys twice my age... and beat them! Having something that I was good at gave me confidence in myself and was helpful during those crazy years as a teenager.

I'm 30 years old now, and over the last 7 to 8 years I've played countless hours of online video games (City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, etc). Dozens of my current real life friendships have come from people that I've met online. I have hundreds of funny stories and fantastic memories because of these great games.

Great video games have been part of my life in a way that no one book has even come close to, even one as great as Huck Finn. Video games helped me bond with my family as a child, gave me a sense of belonging as a teen, and opened the door to dozens of friendships that I now cherish as an adult.

Roger, I've enjoyed reading all of the debate over that last few weeks, and I respect those who chose Huck Finn, but for this lifelong gamer the choice was a no-brainer.

I should make a Huckleberry Fin video game and then have your next pole question be "would you rather read Huck Fin, play a video game or play a Huck Fin video game?"

I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, open-minded and capable of appreciating great literature. I was raised to be a good reader; I more-or-less taught myself how to read at age 3, and was a voracious reader throughout my childhood.

However, as a young adult, I find reading to be more difficult. For some reason, I just can't get through a book in a reasonable amount of time; I'm an extremely slow reader. I'll sit wrapped up in a book for 2 or 3 hours, and at the end I'll realize I barely made a dent in it. I get stuck in loops where I find myself reading the same sentence over and over again, and it takes an uncomfortable mental *nudge* to get myself to continue. Overall the experience leaves me more weary than satisfied, and I often neglect to return to the book for several weeks thereafter.

I think I just don't know how to read a book properly. I partially blame the internet; I'm so used to my attention being spread to its limit in all directions that I forget how to be patient and focus all my attention onto one particular task for a significant length of time. Since I grew up with the internet, this has been the case since I was old enough for my parents to allow me to go online.

I was inspired by your recent blog entry in which you decided to take some time every day to read alone in a room without a computer. However, I suspect that it came easier for you than it would for me, since you presumably spent the bulk of your life without the nagging influence of the internet. For you, this task was like returning to the way things once were. For people my age, it's starting something totally new. It's a daunting task, but I intend to attempt it as best I can.

I'm with you every inch of the way on this one, Roger. I have played video games, and not a few. At 50, I've played thousands of hours of video games. I could put it another way - I've wasted days and nights of my life playing video games. Why wasted? Because not one of them improved anything in me other than my dexterity of a couple of my digits. That's why I quit playing them altogether about five years ago. On the other hand, I can also say that I have read thousands of books, from the "great" to the pulp, and each book I read informed me a little more about the human condition and my own place in the world. Can't even begin to say that for video games. THere was a movie about C.S Lewis a while back, in which he poses the idea that we read to know that we are not alone. I beleive - but of course cannot prove and will be pummelled for saying it - that we play video games because we prefer to be alone.

As I skim the comments on my way down to write my own, I'm struck by two thoughts.

First, I see that many people blame their education for ruining their experience of Twain's work. At age 23, this is very true of my own experience. There's something terrible about being required to read a book. Some books, including The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter and Walden, were such a bad experience in school that I doubt I'll ever appreciate them. Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn were too good to be completely ruined by a teacher, but I've had to look at them with fresh eyes to see them as good literature. And I'm eternally grateful that I was never forced to read Farenheit 451 and could experience the book on my own terms.

Roger, can you list a handful of books I need to read, that my education turned me away from?

Second, you've profoundly changed the way I think about Art with a capital A in the midst of this games/books debate. You wrote in your last post (I paraphrase) about works that instruct you about yourself and others, that make life more rewarding. I know it's an imperfect and personal definition, but it gives me a better sense of why some art stays with me, and why most art isn't really Art to me.

So, if an experience crafted by another person moved me, it may be Art? That is to say, if it changed who I am, or how I make decisions, or how I perceive the world, I am changed - I do not stand where I was before. Hopefully it is an improvement! I have found most moving experiences in literature and music, some in the visual arts, very few on film and in dance, almost none in poetry. This may be a function of my exposure to, and skill at reading, each medium.

I've been exposed to a lot of games, I think I "read" games pretty well, and I'm starting to design games. Curiously, none of the games put forward as Art have moved me noticeably. Though I love the culture changing games like Mario and the "artistic" games like "Shadow of the Colossus," I can't say either has made me a different person. Ironically, that distinction can only be claimed by "Rollercoaster Tycoon" (1999), through which I overcame my fear of theme park rides.

Anyway, thank you. I've learned that when I do set out to create Art, I want it to be something that can move people.

Shakespeare is more important than Huckleberry Finn. The works of Shakespeare provided the English language with approximately 1,700 words; without Shakespeare, the language spoken by Americans and residents of the Commonwealth around the globe would different and probably far less expressive. Certainly English language video games would be different, and Huckleberry Finn too.

As you correctly state, Huckleberry Finn had a similarly foundational role for American literature as Shakespeare had for the broader spectrum of English language drama and literature. The first two-thirds of the novel provide an achingly poignant portrait of a boy and a man, united by the shared experience of abject poverty but straddling constantly that deepest fault line of American life, then and now: race.

And then Jim is captured, and the book devolves into the shallow hijinks we thought we'd left behind with Tom Sawyer, a crass self-parody that undermines the careful and tentative character development that had come before. As Hemmingway also stated, "If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."

Huckleberry Finn remains beloved today for the same reason that To Kill a Mockingbird remains beloved today. Both have their flaws, but both provide readers hope that empathy is capable of bridging even the widest chasms that divide American life. The outcomes are not always happy -- indeed, in the case of Huckleberry Finn the more honest outcome would have been much less happy than what we got -- but they provide us with protagonists that start out with the perspective society has equipped them with and grow into an understanding that includes a world beyond their own circumstances.

In a twenty-first century where American politics have perfected the art of dehumanizing one's ideological enemies, this is the greatest argument for keeping Adventures of Huckleberry Finn over even the greatest of video games. (And I voted for the video games)

When you described the scenario of losing all the works of Shakespeare, all the video games, and everything else, I couldn't help thinking of "Fahrenheit 451" and the people who memorize books and keep them in their heads. If enough people keep reading Shakespeare, I don't think we will ever lose his works until the human race dies out. Unless, of course, we all memorize Shakespeare like Huck Finn did ("To be or not to be; there's the bare bodkin..."). We don't all need to be Laurence Olivier, but it might be enough to be Doc Holliday from "My Darling Clementine", in case a Shakespearean actor being tormented in a saloon needs assistance ("But that the dread of something after death...").

However, I am sure that there cannot be a "Fahrenheit 451" scenario for video games. How exactly can you memorize a video game? You can remember the experience of playing a video game, but how do you convey that to other people? Of course, this will probably be the same situation for film. We can describe the plot of a film, recite the dialogue, act it out, but it won't be the same thing. The same will probably apply to painting, sculpture, and music if we lose them. We may be able to replicate the originals, but it just won't be the same.

I'm 18 years old and, of course, I know a lot of people who love video games. I haven't been an avid video game player for many years, but I do enjoy playing video games with friends. I would not be particularly crestfallen if all the video games disappeared, but I know a lot of people who would be, so it's not for me to say that it would be an easy loss.

I am willing to accept the idea of video games as art, but I don't think they will be very lasting. Instead of viewing the scenario of art disappearing, let's view the scenario of humans disappearing, leaving behind our art. Whatever civilization comes after us will be able to look at our art and see what we were like. However, this will only be art that has physical evidence. Digital art will probably disappear. The next civilization can look at our paintings and sculptures. They may not be able to read our words, but that they may learn. They may not be able to project films like we did, but they can still shine a light through a film print and see the image on a wall (this is why I hope film doesn't go completely digital). But they will look at our computers and video game consoles with puzzlement. They may discover what they were, but the games themselves will disappear.

I don't think that there is an "either/or" choice for playing video games and being well-read. I think being well-read is more important than playing video games, but there are people who disagree with that. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't read. People should be encouraged to read, especially for their own enjoyment. Reading can be just as exciting as a video game.

The scene in the saloon from "My Darling Clementine" that I mentioned earlier is one of the greatest examples of the importance of being well-read. I don't know if I've ever felt angrier in a movie than after one of the Clanton boys says to the actor, "You don't know nothing but them poems." Well, maybe if he would listen, he would know how great "them poems" are. I don't care if he's never had the opportunity or education. He has it now. But that's not the point of the scene. The primary emotion in that scene is the astonishment and wonder that the violent, drunk, unpredictable Doc Holliday suddenly reveals that he knows Shakespeare. Even though he has gone out into the wilderness, he still remembers. And the new schoolteacher Clementine probably knows Shakespeare, too. Wyatt Earp is needed to deal with the violent Clantons, but the lasting way to deal with the violence is to teach the children of Tombstone to read. Reading will not just make them smarter, it will make them better people.

From my own personal experience, I have to disagree with some of you guys who say that video games " allows us to walk in the shoes of people who lived in other times and other places, who belonged to other races and religions. It allows us to become more humane and open-minded," just as much as novels. I'll admit I rarely play video games, so I could be missing the boat here, but I'm playing Red Dead Redemption right now and it's a damn good game, but it doesn't make me feel immersed in "the west" half as much as when I read Lonesome Dove or the Sackett books or even Stephen King's Gunslinger series. Again, I'm 34 and I've probably played less than a dozen video games, so I'll be the first to admit I'm far from an expert.

I think the novel has a sort of magic edge over other storytelling forms by virtue of the fact that it is just words. Movies and games have all these tricks- visual cues, music, actors, they can more easily slow time down than a novel can (no one can stop you from skipping through pages with your eyes just sliding by the words, but you can't fast forward in your local theater), but a novel gives you the guideline for these things and then eases you into supplying the tricks yourself. And prose. Great prose. Even the filmmaking ability of Scorsese (great as he is) is no substitute. I'm biased and I freely admit it and I'm not calling anyone a fool for disagreeing with me. I think Roger gets so worked up about this because he truly loves the written word and not enough people in our society embrace reading nowadays. I can't fault him for that. I dig him for it even if he's a little curmudgeonly about it from time to time.

Those of you haven't read Huck Finn are missing out. It's not my favorite book, but it is a cornerstone of American literature, warts and all (that last quarter everyone is talking about). I couldn't be proud of completely skipping a popular part of my own culture, be it video games or Huck Finn.

I mentioned the foreword on the other thread. I'll mention it here too, just to make sure everything ends up in the right box.

The foreword to Huckleberry Finn:

NOTICE

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

EXPLANATORY IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR.

He didn't want this work of high art to be taken seriously. He meant the book chiefly as entertainment. That is also in accordance with the history of how he wrote it. He wrote it because there was overwhelming popular demand for a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which Twain would forever consider the better book. In that context, I'm not surprised that he dilly-dallied, and occupied himself with developing his game.

Huck Finn, is, essentially, America's first popular novel. It's chief purpose was to sell lots of copies and entertain the general reading public. So in that sense, the comparison to a videogame is surprisingly appropriate. Now Huck Finn, clearly, despite being like a videogame, is far far better constructed than most of them, as your block quote shows.

But is it better constructed than the best? The absolute best? Well, that's why it was 50-50 I guess (due to margin of error, you should count the poll as 50-50).

Also, you should remember that most people from my generation and the next generation up (luckily not me) have had Huck Finn ruined for them by lousy English teachers, so even if it's an appropriate comparison, it's not a fair fight.

I brought this point up before but I still can't understand why the issue even has to present itself. Choosing between reading Huckleberry Finn on a given day or engaging in another hobby (videogames, surfing for porn whatever) may be a temporary dilemma but it's academic.

You can read Huckleberry, then play videogames, then re-read or not re-read Huckleberry 20 years later. Being a modern man... we can have it all.

I am with you on the importance of reading books though. I just don't agree that it should have some sort of an exclusive privilage over other activities and in some respects I don't expect its automatic superiority. There are plenty of awful books around. Tom Clancy anyone?

Show me someone that has played a video game and taken it to his heart and I'll show you someone who is in desperate need of a good book.

Great literature can never be replaced by video games or even films for that matter. There's a profound relationship you have with a good book when the author is right inside your head. The sights you see and the emotions you feel are all your creation and more real than any 3D special effect. The only other thing that might come close to it is listening to a great piece of music... not videos, though.

I'm an avid gamer and aspiring filmmaker, but have to admit that video games, as they are now, are definitely at the bottom of our creative food chain. That's why the books are always better than the movies and that videogames based on movies suck so bad. By the time any material makes it to your fingertips, it's stripped of all it's soul.

Well, it depends on the reason for a differin' opinion that indicates whether a fool wrote it or not.

Used to live in Calaveras County, home of THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF; now and then I would sit in Samuel's dilapidated old cabin alone on the top of a hill just above Angel's Camp. It was only a bunch of railroad ties with a leaky roof slung over a dirt floor. In there he was "Samuel," you could feel it.

A lonesome ghost of forlornness still vibrated from the dust and wood. It overwhelmed those left by his fellows lying drunk and content on that dirt floor; he wanted to make something of himself more than ten times his drunken fellows.

I'd go home and think about it. His forlorn was a bigger forlorn than mine. And so his laughs were bigger and longer than mine. His "buffoonery of letters" still make me laugh harder and longer than my own do.

Unbeknownst to me, Rodge, I was tweeting @aliarikan while you were putting this up. Make sure to read ROUGHING IT, I wrote Ali, who lives in Istanbul, which was also one of Twain's subjects of remedy for ambitious forlornity. The stories of meeting the Mormon Chief, stranded in a snowstorm, and burning down Lake Tahoe, my favorites.

Video games a good fantasy for excess jism, Twain for a good laugh from the soul. Of course I voted for Twain. My soul isn't a teenager any more.

Great books are timeless whereas great video games aren't. Video game franchises sustain their popularity as long as the publisher keeps updating.

When Final Fantasy VII came out, it was THE hot game. Totally valued it more than Pride and Prejudice, which I was forced to read in English class and which I dismissed as a chick book.

I played through FFVII, loved it, and still feel nostalgic about it. Maybe because of the way I bonded--and still bond--with people over our memories of the game. But I haven't played it in years and I'll probably never play it again. In any event, I can't--my original Playstation console doesn't work anymore. Same thing with Resident Evil II and Metal Gear Solid. Early favorites that created very memorable gaming experiences.

And yet, I still pick up Pride and Prejudice, Gatsby, Blood Meridian--if not to read all the way through then to read certain passages that continue to resonate. I'll probably continue to do this ten, twenty, thirty years from now.

Last year, I bought and played through Resident Evil 5 and Metal Gear Solid 4. Great games in their own rights, and both have surprisingly high replay value. But can I imagine myself playing those games in five years? Probably not. I'll have traded them in at Gamestop for Resident Evil 6 and Metal Gear Solid 5.

Mr. Ebert,

I have just been diagnosed with papillary thyroid carcinoma (quite literally last week) and am facing surgery on July 20th, my daughters birthday.

A few weeks later I'm supposed to receive radioactive iodline treatment. I understand you went through this several years ago.

I'm not stating this for sympathy's sake, honestly, I feel for my family more than myself. At 39, I only hope to be there for my little daughter to lead her into adulthood.

I was 9 when we got an Atari (later renamed the 2600); with time, I moved onto ColecoVision, Nintendo, a GameBoy while I served during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, a Sega Genesis in college, an Xbox when I worked for Texas Instruments (we made the DSP chips that went in them), and now a PS3.

I grew up with video games and while I certainly don't consider myself a "gamer" (I outgrew that when I finished puberty), I do enjoy video games from time to time.

But I have no intention of bringing a GameBoy or a PSP into isolation. Instead, I will be bringing one of the works of Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

So you understand the delicious irony on the topic of this blog.

I prefer books, not a Kindle or other hand held wireless reading device (isn't a book, by definition, a hand held wireless reading device?).

There's just something organic about a book; something that forces the creativity of the reader to imagine for himself the people, places, and things that occur. The authors task is to bring it to life, and when successful, a good book makes you feel as if you have been there: be it the Mississippi with Huck Finn, on the Orca fighting the great white shark Jaws, or on an island off the coast of Costa Rica being pursued by man-made Dinosaurs.

The movies on Huck Finn, Jaws, and Jurassic Park are entertaining, but EVERYONE knows, the movie is never as good as the book; the video game less so.

Ebert: As I'm sure the doctor told you, papillary thyroid carcinoma has a cure rate above 95%, and radioactive iodine treatment is completely painless. The worst thing that happens is you have to sit in isolation for a couple of days--so bring along some good books!

I love Life on the MIssissippi. Love it.

I pity authors more than people who aren't "well read." They can simply make the choice to, well, read more. But what can modern authors do?

For instance, it boggles me that someone like John Barth can slave away, writing one thunderous masterpiece after another, only to receive essentially no popular recognition whatsoever (a somewhat unfortunate adaptation of his "End of the Road" notwithstanding).

Agree wholeheartedly that "Huck Finn" is a landmark, but I'd also offer that Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" is the one book wholly comparable to it in prose, wit, narrative sweep and mastery of dialect. Everyone's at least heard of "Huck Finn," but "The Sot-Weed Factor?" Nadda.

I often read -- and enjoy -- your blog, Roger, and pretty much always find myself agreeing with you. I've never commented before, but reading this thread today, I can't help myself. I would choose Huckleberry Finn in a heartbeat. But what I wanted to say was this: I am astounded, and somewhat disturbed, by the number of people who refer to reading as a "passive" activity. Reading, at least the way I do it, is not passive. It would take a neuroscientist to describe all the complicated things take place in the mind of a reading person, but every serious reader knows that the experience is anything but passive. Deep reading, as opposed to skimming; Nicholas Carr is good on the difference. Just because an experience doesn't have sound effects does not make it passive!
I am also disturbed by the assumption that people who prefer books to videogames are elitist. How is that so? Certainly not economically. I have a houseful of books, most of them bought used; my well-read copy of Huckleberry Finn cost a couple of dollars, and I need no special equipment to enjoy it -- cheap reading glasses from the drugstore and a lamp or simply the light of the sun. I suspect your average videogame costs more, not to mention the equipment needed to use it.
It never helps a debate to accuse one's opponents of "elitism," whatever you mean by that.

Being a tutor of English to high school students, I can safely guess that 98% of teenagers today would rather play video games than read ANYTHING.

I am trying to turn my current student on to short stories. Chekhov isn't doing the trick. I'm moving on to something with a bit more humor. I pray Bradbury's short stories do the trick.

The lack of reading is evident in the way they think and communicate. They don't know much of anything and don't care to know much of anything.

One summer when I taught a SAT class I was putting an article we were reading in its historical context. The dialogue went something like this:

me: "What was happening in our country in 1776?"
silence
student 1 : "The Depression?"
student 2 : "That was the 60s, stupid!"
student 3 : "Was that when Columbus came to America?"
me : "Somebody shoot me"

I'm a former game developer myself, and I've since moved to the film industry, so my pick on a poll like this one is fairly obvious. That said, is it just me or is the poll questioning itself a little bit stacked in favor of gaming? It offers up the option between an arbitrary choice of video game and a specific work of Mark Twain. Well, of course, people are going to pick the video game, because they get to choose their absolute favorite game, whereas they don't get choice on the literary option. Even for fans of Mark Twain, what do they do if they happen to favor Tom Sawyer or Pudd'nhead Wilson?

If given the option between my absolute favorite game and not really my favorite work of Mark Twain, obviously I'd choose the game. Now to be fair, I'm more or less of a geek to the point where my favored reading material would not really be fiction of any stripe. The same geekiness and years of working on things at least related to gaming means that I approach games in a very different manner than most gamers because I naturally want to analyze everything. When I picked up Uncharted for the first time, the first words that popped into my head were "linear damped torsion springs". Obviously, not normal for the average gamer. But it does mean that before I'd pick up a work of modern American literature, I'd pick up peer-reviewed academic literature. I'm not the type to universally recommend that people read Huck Finn, but I am the type to recommend reading Newton's Principia. The scope to which I identify with Mark Twain is really more found in his aphorisms, standalone humor, and political stances more so than anything to do with Tom or Huck.

Now if given the option between a single favorite game, and a single favorite book, I would probably favor the book, though it would be close because with a selection of only ONE of either, I can get all I can get out of them within a finite amount of time. Between the option of a library of terrific games and a library of terrific books, then there's little question I'd favor the books. But in both cases, it falls as a completely different question than what you posed in the poll.

Huckleberry Finn was great, but what is your opinion of Brothers Karamazov? Dostoyevsky gave equal time to all of his main characters, including some insight into Smerdyakov. The theme in fact seems to be confusion: Can Alyosha believe in a personal god after his mentor had such an inauspicious death, is Ivan truly haunted by a demon, why does the prosecutor at the end make such sense even though the reader knows Dimitri is innocent.

In fact, the theme of confusion makes it more palatable then another of Twain's books, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. A good portion seems to be Twain criticizing everyone who doesn't meet his standards. At times it becomes a liberal Mallard Filmore. Twain doesn't give his opposition the same platform Dostoyevsky gives.

One final note: Imagine Brothers Karamazov as
a video game.

I really can't help but imagine discussions like this taking place during the infancy of cinema (on a much smaller scale.)

As you are well aware, Mr. Ebert, we can have both cinema and literature. If it won't continue to give you fits, I'll go ahead and have my games as well.

A few random observations:

- I can't recall when exactly I "started to read". Most likely it was when someone (Mom or Dad) pointed out printed words to me and sounded them out. Once I made the connection between the black markings on the paper and the sounds I was hearing, I was off to the races.

Even then, as I now realize, I was one of the lucky ones. In school, I was somewhat thrown by other kids who, for whatever reasons, had difficulty reading words aloud from a printed page. It was as if they were being told to solve some impenetrable puzzle, all by themselves and with as little aid from the teachers as possible.As the years and grade levels went on, I was bewildered by how some of my schoolmates seemed to get worse at reading aloud. (This is suburban Cook County in the early '60s.) And these were kids who had no trouble expressing themselves in words on the playground.
I wondered sometimes what would happen if you were to hand a kid a transcript of what he just said aloud and ask him to read it. I swear to you that there were guys I knew who would not have recognized their own spoken words in written form.
Not that I'm holding myself up as some paragon of literacy. My reading tastes were an early casualty of the Required Reading List. The wall between what I Had To Read and what I enjoyed reading went up in my school years, and remains largely unbreached to the present day. I'd still rather read a good mystery than something more pretentious with a "literary" cachet.
And I have never put up the artificial walls between books, movies, and television. I didn't learn the word synergy until I was an adult, but that was how I came to regard all storytelling forms: Read the Book, See the Movie, Watch the Show! It was all the same to me,just different ways to do it. That was the fun of reading to me, and still is. When I was younger I tried to find other kids who felt this way; I never could, and after a while I gave up trying.
As I got older (but no wiser), I found that even within the literate there were those who would savagely denounce those things they didn't care for.
One possibly amusing example: Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories are pretty much universally well-loved and admired, especially for their narrator, Archie Goodwin. But I remember one respected critic who didn't like them; he characterized Archie as "an overgrown Huck Finn."
And he did not mean that as a compliment.
(Altough Rex Stout decided to take it as one anyway.)

- The fatal flaw in your survey question was, in my mind, your attempt to direct the answer your way ( the common flaw in all such surveys).
Admit it, Roger: you thought your side would win, and that's why you specified Huck Finn and left the VG open.
Your question was loaded, and that's the oldest trick in the pollster's book.
If you had left the book title open, you would have opened the door to any published book, such as whatever the latest best-seller might happen to be.
What was the last "best-seller" that you read and liked? You always seem to take pride in avoiding whatever the flavor-of-the-month on the list is. That's not much different than the "literati" who pronounce from on high that this currently popular novel is unworthy of notice while their own small-selling favorite is superior in all ways.
The problem with that kind of thinking is that ultimately time makes these decisions.
How many authors came into their own long after they stopped writing?
How many sensational first-time authors became one-hit wonders?
It's just like William Goldman said about moviemaking: Nobody Knows Anything.
We all just go to the bookstores, find our favorites, scout out the newbies, and hope for the best.

- And this brings me to the one man in America who is almost singlehandedly trying to get his countrymen back to reading books

I refer, of course, to Glenn Beck.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZAAATTTTTT?

You read right, folks.
Glenn Beck is using his radio and TV shows as a vehicle to get his audience to read books - and not just his own.
His reading list is a highly selective one, to be sure.Your book is unlikely to get on it if it doesn't (a) reflect his socio-political-historical viewpoints or (b) confirm his locked-in ideology.
But those are indeed books he's pushing night after night, and his audience is buying them and reading them.
Glenn Beck's Choir is being reinforced in this way.
Somehow I don't think that Keith Olbermann's weekly reading from Thurber, admirable as that is, is having quite the same effect on his side of the room.

- As with all my other ramblings, I ask only one small favor:

Think about it.

While I doubt it likely that you'll respond to this, I'm fairly convinced that you'll still read it. I took part in the poll, and while I put myself on the side of preferring Huck Finn to any video game, I looked at it a bit more objectively.

I think great literature in general is to be preferred to any video game, though Huck Finn is hardly my favorite novel. That esteem goes to Melville's tale of the great white whale, Moby Dick. Of course I'd rather read that, regardless of how wrapped up I may find myself with a game like Red Dead Redemption at the moment. I'd even take a sci-fi great like Lucifer's Hammer, or the pulpy fantasy/horror of Karl Edward Wagner over anything I can play on my XBOX or Playstation 3.

The fact of the matter is that typically and with few exceptions, I have my game systems left over from a time when I was without books. A transitional period I guess, though I do still find myself drawn to certain games, I spend much more time perusing my bookshelf. That's the case with anything that I can consume to leave me with any knowledge or wisdom. I have never learned anything new from a video game, regardless of the enjoyment that it gave me.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for authors for kids?

I pick an author each year for the Ruthless Gradeschoolers to read, discuss, etc..

Last year: we read almost all of Roald Dahl's books for kids. This year: Judy Blume.

If The Raj read Twain at 7, then it looks like we're going with Twain for next year. Twain will be a good shift in a different direction.

[At that age, I was too busy thinking about movies to have read much of anything not movie-related. Wish I read more.]

Ebert: Robert Louis Stevenson? Conrad short stories? Sherlock Holmes? R. K. Narayan?

Reading some of these comments, I'm rather surprised by:
1) the number of angry readers (that's blog readers, not book readers, evidently) posting vitriolic rants that seem to demonstrate no indication whatsoever that they have read a word of your blog post, and
2) the number of readers, abrasive and supportive alike, who have not read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I would think to not read a Twain book once every, say, two years or so would result in some sort of social phenomenon that gives some the headache, others St. Vitus's Dance, and the rest the blind-staggers.
As far as the poll goes, perhaps some understood the word "value" at its most utilitarian and weighed the usually free cost of one online copy of Huck Finn to the sixty dollar price tag of your average great game and voted accordingly.

Ebert: A lot didn't read the post, that's for sure. They point out what's wrong with the questions and suggest other novels and in general reveal they didn't even read the first 2-3 paragraphs.

Yes, Please! Let's discuss books! I read and love all your movie reviews, but only see the movies rarely. I DO read all the time, though. I've never met anyone else who's read "The Horse's Mouth", have you read it? How about the Gormenghast trilogy? I am so excited!
Thank you Roger.
One more reason to love you!

Ebert: Gormenghast! Oh, yes. Yes.

Driving with the kids long distance. They're playing games on hand-helds. Sounds of screams and buzzsaws abound."Use your headphones," I roar.
Later, I'm playing an unabridged audiobook version of Huck Finn in the car's sound system. As I hear the virulent racism that was taken as a matter of course in Huck's environment come out of the speakers--a real kick to the gut--I almost told the kids to put the headphones back on.

There is nothing I've experienced in 20 years of video game playing that can compare to the point where Huck decides that if failing to turn in his runaway slave friend is a sin, he'll accept damnation.

At the ripe old age of 36, I don't play video games anymore. I did when I was a kid. Mine was the first generation to be exposed to video games, and I had many wonderful hours playing Atari, and later Nintendo.

I also spent many hours reading books and Huck Finn was one of many (I read it twice.) For me, if ever forced to choose between the two it would also a no brainer. In fact, as a working adult, I have chosen. I'd rather spend my leisure time reading than playing a first person shooter.

I can't imagine it bodes well for our country, that so many people disagree, but then again I'm becoming more and more of an old coot everyday. I now complain about the price of everything; wax nostalgic over the good ole days when stupid sitcoms polluted my television, instead of stupid reality TV; and lament the fact that kids today don't have it as tough as my generation of slackers did. So what do I know?

Ebert: Few people are born fools, and those we cannot help. I'm suggesting that some are still at a foolish stage, and have the freedom to evolve out of it. Sooner or later, they will either understand why Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives.

I can't help but think that you're still operating from a position of assumed superiority. By saying that people are going to either choose the "right answer," i.e. that Huck Finn is more worthwhile than a video game, or the "wrong answer," i.e. that the video game is more worthwhile, you're not allowing for the fact that a discussion/debate like this is a largely subjective one that lacks a right or wrong answer.

I'm not saying that I disagree with you, necessarily. While I don't have a huge attachment to that particular novel, I can think of many books that have given me gifts so wonderous that I'd trade game after game to hold on to those experiences. It's just that I don't feel that this question is one that can be dealt with in concrete terms.

A suggestion: "Sooner or later, they will either understand why I believe Huckleberry Finn is more to be valued than a video game, or they will not. Getting to that point will be one of the best experiences in their lives."

Couldn't agree more.

Best,
Adam

I agree with Ayn Rand's criteria for proper art (say what you will about her politics!) -

"One of the distinguishing characteristics of a work of art, including literature, is that it serves no practical, material end, but is an end in itself; it serves no purpose other than contemplation."

"as soon as I start playing, my motivation gets twisted. It’s no longer that I just want to relax and de-stress. The act of starting to play has created a new desire within me, a desire to win the game and be praised by the game. That desire was not there when I chose to play, but the act of choosing to play created (or perhaps “reawakened” or “reactivated”) a new desire within me."

The game pulls at my existing interest in baseball and statistics and awards, but in doing so, prevents me from thinking about it as a representation of values.

From my own experiences, video games, even the ones I loved (Civ2, Chrono Trigger), earned my love by playing upon and rewarding my existing preferences and anxieties. As with any activity that you work at and become good at, video games helped reinforce my ego and give me confidence in my ability, but they did not open new frontiers the way books do.

When the object being considered starts pulling or pushing the observer, it'd be as if words began also to advertise in addition to their role as symbols for reality and allowing for communication, (Save on auto-insurance, every time you use the word "tweet"!) It breaks its potential for contemplation.

Roger, beautifully and evocatively written as always. No matter whether I agree with you or not, "how you are about it" in this medium is always high-quality.

Which is why I'll sidestep the debate, since I like to read and to play video games (and the debate's closed anyway), and just pose a few questions.

How did you get to be such a good writer?

How did