In 2012, Roger Ebert wrote, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. The question of what is or isnt art feels tired in 2025, but the ever-shifting defenses of why can still be intriguing. In this interview excerpt, game designer Sam Barlow and podcaster Justin McElroy explore Eberts reasoning for saying that video games couldnt be art: the fact that video games are, to some degree, mutable.This interview was done in September 2024 as part of the release of our documentary The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, about one of the most ambitious FMV games of the 90s. You can watch the full interview above.Sam Barlow: There was a period where, if I had a free evening and my family were out or something, and I got to choose what was on TV, Id be like, OK, Daddys going to watch something cool on the television. And I would sit down, and 45 minutes later, Im still paging through Netflix, looking at the stuff, seeing the algorithmic choices. So theyve done a really good job of making the browsing the shelf experience feel very interactive. Its personalized, right? I get different shows pushed to me. Not only do I get different shows, I get different thumbnails. The funny thing of, like you get the stuff, right, where its like, the thumbnail says Godfather, and then its a picture of one of the female characters from The Godfather that doesnt even have a speaking line, because the algorithm has decided, Oh, you like things with women in them; we need to push that on you.So theyve done all that stuff,and obviously the reason that movies and television are fixed its not 100% because thats how they work; its partly technology. If you were going to distribute a movie, it needed to be printed, and you needed a single master copy that was going to be printed several times, and then put in a van and driven to a movie theater, and then youd watch it. And the structure, it was such that, well, people need to sit in a room, and the length of a movies kind of baked around, How many screenings can we get in the day? Whats the size of the human bladder? How uncomfortable do I feel if Im sat in a chair for too long?But now that everything were watching is being streamed directly to us, stored on a computer somewhere, things dont have to be that way. [] Im free-associating here, but the famous line that we got from Roger Ebert of why video games couldnt be art was this idea that art is fixed, and is an authorial choice and if you can change the ending, etc., its not art, right, was his reading of what a video game is.My immediate dismissal of that is: Come on, Roger, you know how movies are made! You know that when Spielberg wrote this script, the ending was different, and you know that this scene wasnt in the original script. And then when they went and filmed it, the actor showed up and improvised and tweaked it. And then you know that when they got to the editing room, decisions were made. You know that a modern, expensive movie is screened to several audiences, different cuts, and then they go and make changes. There is a fluidity in the form that it already exists in the process. And we know that if youre making a $200 million Marvel movie, you have to hit the four-quadrant audience; youve got to please everybody. So youre not going to kill the dog. [] There is a conceit that if this medium was delivered one-to-one, to me as an individual, even without interactivity there would be a way of it being more calibrated.When I was doing Telling Lies, Breaking Bad was the big show. And at the time, there was this crazy discourse around the fact that, here was a show which generally was going with the opinion that Walter White was not the best dude. And it did have its cake and eat it a little bit. But then you had the weird Breaking Bad fanboys who were just like, Walter White rocks!!! Hes so cool! Hes the man who knocks! And you had the weird thing where they were hating on the character of Skyler, saying, She sucks! Shes a bad character! Ugh, we hate her! That is kind of a product of how TV shows work. You need an A character and you need a B character, and the B character is there to provide the friction; the A character is the one whose story were connected to.So if we were cutting a version of Breaking Bad for an individual audience member, and you wanted them to get the point they were missing, you could cut a version which tried to make it clear to this other audience that Walter White was a bad guy. [] All of these things are impossible to do if youre making a single, fixed piece of network television. But if you knew who you were addressing, and you had a bit more freedom because of the way that digital works, you could do something interesting there. And so I would love to have more fluidity to how we consume our digital video. I think thats a thing that would be really interesting have things that lean into that subjectivity.This is an example I always use that was really interesting to see. [] When they showed the movie The Notebook [] on Netflix in Europe, they put a cut of the movie that no one realized even existed, live on the service. And you had all these people sort of live-tweeting watching it who were all fans of The Notebook and Ive never actually seen The Notebook, but I believe it has a very [] moving, sad, double-hanky ending. Somehow they had uploaded a cut which actually had a happy ending, and you suddenly had all these people in real time being like, Is this a oh, whats the genie movie that doesnt exist?Justin McElroy: Kazaam.Sam Barlow: Kazaam. Yeah, they were like, Is this a Kazaam thing? Have I Kazaamd myself? Did I remember a different ending to this movie? Am I hallucinating? Am I having a heart attack? Whats happening? And you had this really interesting, kind of, visceral reaction based on just the assumption that video is fixed and immutable.Well be running more excerpts from this conversation between Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy each weekend. Recently, they discussed the usefulness of FMV as a label for games, and following that, whether watching film can feel more intimate than playing a game.The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft recently won the New York Videogame Critics Circles New York Game Award for Best Games Journalism.