News of Roger Ebert’s death struck me a lot more than I expected it to. It also came as a great surprise even after learning that he had cancer (long after he actually contracted it, mind you). For some reason, I felt like he was going to be around for a lot longer than he was; that he was going to exist outside of space and time, defying all logic and reason.

It also wasn’t until recently that I started really reading his stuff (around the time that I started doing criticism of my own). His style is hard to pin down, but his influence is not. He was responsible for much of the way that modern criticism works. He was knowledgeable but rarely condescending or pretentious. He was simply trying to share his love for a medium with all of us.

Unfortunately, before I made an effort to learn more about him and become more familiar with his portfolio, he said some… less than stellar things about the medium of video games; specifically that they would “never be works of art, or at least not while any of us are alive.” This inspired a completely unwarranted disdain from me. He openly admitted that he didn’t have a wealth of experience with video games. How could he possibly know whether or not they were art?

It turns out that that rhetorical question was precisely the one to ask. He didn’t know as much about the medium as anyone who was a part of it did, so we knew that what he said wasn’t really relevant. We don’t have to care about what he said at all, and the only reason anyone did in the first place was because Roger Ebert was an important name, and if an important name was talking about our medium in an unflattering way, he’s an enemy.

But just because he said these things about video games didn’t mean that he was an uncultured, un-knowledgeable man in every respect. In fact, he knows more about movies than most of the gaming culture actually knows about games. It was only when I realized this that I began to care for the man’s opinions in the field that he was most experienced in, and he certainly was most experienced.

Even when I didn’t take explicit influence from what he wrote and the way he wrote (at least, not that I have been consciously aware of), the fact that I was doing what this renowned, respected, insanely knowledgeable man had been doing for the majority of his life was incredibly inspiring. After Community taught me that loving things with my whole being was okay, Roger taught me to channel that love into writing. In my work, I only hope to honor his legacy.