Roger Ebert’s recent article claiming that games can never be art has spawned conversation and argument all over the interwebs of late. While listening to a recent episode of Gameshark‘s Jumping the Shark podcast recently, something Brandon said caught my attention.

If you want to hear it, download episode 14 and skip ahead to 58:00. I’ll paraphrase here.

There’s a painting down here in Atlanta. It is stunning. I stood there at looked at it for ten minutes straight. I just could not believe that anyone could make something that looked this amazing. To me, if a game can do that – that kind of emotional moment – I feel that that would be considered art.

What he said here struck a chord for me. There have been very few games that have had this exact effect on me. I could tell you that a number of difficult moral decisions in Dragon Age and the tense scenarios in Heavy Rain have brought about  emotional moments for me, but to hit the truly good ones, I’ve got to go back a bit further.

My continual references to Resident Evil 2 must have gotten trite to those theoretical few who read this blog regularly, but the terror I felt in this moment, being chased by the T-103 zombie was potentially the most exciting game moment of my life. Similarly, the rooftop chase in Beyond Good and Evil made me sit back after completing it, take a deep breath, and just say “wow.”

 But if I’m looking for a truly emotional moment in a game, the one I’d have to use is the very ending of Half-Life 2, episode 2. It’s made entirely possible by the “acting” of one Alyx Vance, which is of course a combination of excellent voice acting and excellent character face modeling. I swear – that scene just about made me cry. And a video game has never before done that.