In a presentation originally given at GDC 2011 titled “An Apology for Roger Ebert,” Infocom and LucasArts veteran Brian Moriarty (Loom) came to the defense of film critic Roger Ebert and his views about video games as art. Here, his lecture is reprinted in full with his permission.]The title of this lecture, “An Apology for Roger Ebert,” may require a bit of clarification.I’m not here to offer an apology in the sense of regret for anything done wrong.This is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia, the systematic defense of a position or opinion.It’s a defense of Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who, a little over five years ago, annoyed our industry by declaring that “video games can never be art.”For those few of you unacquainted with this controversy, I’ll spend just a few minutes recounting what happened.It all started with a bad movie.On October 21st, 2005, Universal released its adaptation of the first-person shooter game Doom.I didn’t see Doom, but Roger Ebert did. He awarded the film one star.In his review, he wrote, “Toward the end of the movie, there is a lengthy point-of-view shot looking forward over the barrel…