Garsh, I'm so sorry you couldn't email me. I would have loved to discuss this subject. Had you troubled to google my name you'd have found my Tarleton homepage and my email address and we could have discussed this like adults. Instead, you chose the cowardly path of pressing an attack behind my back to an audience of like-minded gamers. Obviously you prefer preaching to the choir to engaging in a thoughtful debate.

I'd like to thank you for making my "protest too much" point for me by dismantling my letter line by line. You must have a great deal of free time on your hands. Thanks also for singling my letter out from of all the ones in agreement with Mr Ebert for your inane and splenetic response. Oops, I've used words you probably don't know, so I must be trying to make myself sound smart and make you feel dumb. To the contrary, for better or worse, I have a large working vocabulary, and I respect the readers of my work enough not to "dumb it down" by using "laughable" instead of "risible," for example. Sorry to make you consult a dictionary, but I'll bet it's well used. Instead of interlarding (see how smart I am?) my comments, I'll bullet my response to your rant.

*I mentioned that I was a Ph.D. and a professor by way of defending gamers against the charge that only people of low intelligence bother with videogames, not to make myself sound smart or to establish myself as an authority on this subject. And why do you put scare quotes around my name and title? As I said could have verified my identity simply by googling my name and locating my university homepage.

*You certainly have a large chip on your shoulder for being a community college dropout. Your ad hominem (explained below) attacks against my education and vocabulary show you to be a fine example of the anti-intellectualism that pervades this country. When did ignorance and stupidity become the virtues you take them to be?

*I don't think I am mistaken about my videogame experience. When I was 12, I had the original Magnavox Odyssey, which was the first videogame system of all. Since then, I have had Odyssey 2, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Intellivision, Colecovision, NES, SNES, Gamecube, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis (with 32X), Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, Sony Playstation 2 and Xbox. Does that cover most of them? You may have grown up on Nintendo, but I was there a long time before you, pal.

*Nothing in your response up to the point where you answer my comment, "What art does that VGs do not, and probably never will, is edify and ennoble (even in the form of subversion)" (roughly half of your entire opus) is anything more than an attack on me, my education, and my vocabulary. There is not even an attempt at logical argumentation to address the points I was making. That is what an ad hominem attack is: attacking the person when you don't have an actual argument to make. Incidentally, your actual first substantive response is a logical fallacy called "begging the question," which means asserting as a premise what is to be proved in the conclusion.

*Regarding the longevity of videogames, you make a fair point. I probably did generalize too much from my own experience. But I do maintain that for every gamer who finally finished Zelda after 20 years (incidentally, it took me only about a month, but never mind) are definitely in the minority of the total population of gamers. I will certainly admit there is a hard core of gamers who continue to play and enjoy antique games. But they are by no means the majority. However, just as with your claim to the contrary, mine is an unsupported assertion, and only an actual survey could settle the issue.

*My analogy between paintings and videogames is not retarded, but I should have come up with the following one to answer your point-evading objection. When one buys a copy of Goethe, one does not throw away one's copy of Cervantes. Now books are "re-prints" just as games are, in the sense you mean. The alleged (I was going to say "putative," but I didn't want to send you to the dictionary again) work of art is the game or the novel, not the thing you hold in your hand.

*Calling Van Gogh's work a "suicidal nutjob's demented splotches" is just more of your taking pride in your anti-intellectualism. Van Gogh is virtually universally acknowledged as one of the great geniuses of painting in human history. Your lack of appreciation of his work does, however, speak volumes about you. No wonder you consider videogames art, you don't know art when you see it. And why are you so proud of not having read Goethe and Cervantes? Again, when did ignorance become a virtue?

*Your concluding bullet comments are either beside the point, more question-begging, or more ad-hominem attacks.

*Your dictionary seems to have failed you when it came to the word "adjunct," which has nothing to do with being a secretary. Adjunct Professor just means I was a temporary professor teaching three courses rather than a permanent professor teaching four. You seem to have confused "Adjunct" with "Assistant" and "Assistant" with "Assistant to."

*You missed the entire point of my letter, which was to defend videogames (I wouldn't dare call them "VGs" after your scathing attack) by pointing out that they are sublimely entertaining and therefore worthwhile, and for people of all intellectual levels. This very site, after all, is called "GamesAreFun" not "GamesAreArt." I only questioned the pressing need to apply the term "art" to them. Why is "fun" not enough?