I made a mistake in the last piece. Roger Ebert's last claim - his argument grew progressively weaker over time as opponents weighed in - was that perhaps video games could be high art, but not in our lifetimes. What I meant to say, and I guess didn't articulate very well, was that yes the argument he made in limited form was probably right: we probably won't see a great work come in the form we are expecting it in: in a large-scale high budget game.
We might see contenders rise up from the indie underworld, and they'll definitely be less sophisticated and glossy, and we can expect a resumption of progress in the far, far future, since the interactive medium has really seemed to have seized our imaginations.
There's also the indeterminacy of the march of history. It is really difficult to predict just what will happen next, though what will occur will have to occur within the increasingly defined restraints posed by resource depletion and social disintegration. But to reiterate, life is a strange and unpredictable thing.
