I don't think it was that. I don't...think. I'm really not that sure, though, it could be interpreted several ways.
Someone should post his Macklemore tweet just to get all the idiocy from him out of the way. (well, the iceberg of it)
Anyway...
If I remember correctly, Ebert came at it from the side that games contain artistry (music and so on) but on the whole it is hard to label them as art and not just games because of the interactivity of it all and lack of auteurism. If I'm remembering correctly, his supposition was something akin to "If games are art, then chess is art because craft and artistry goes into making chess pieces, and no one would really consider the game of chess to be art in and of itself", or at least "high art". I very much may be misremembering. Lots of endless debates on definitions and whatnot that never went anywhere of substance.
The Gamergate stuff that someone mentioned makes this a bit thornier. People who play games don't want to admit they are playing games (usually targeted to children), and instead want to be partaking in serious art along the likes of film, books, poetry, and paintings. The problem is that if you then treat games as art, and dissect them, their culture, influence, and so on, you run into a giant mess of racism, misogyny, and other political issues. So then you have two camps: those that want to bury their heads in the sand and those that go "wow, games and gamers are kind of terrible and we should point them out and improve on them!". But, both groups want games to be taken seriously because it is their hobby of choice.
There's also a rush to get gaming going as an artistic form despite how young it is. Not to say that film criticism and artistic criticism didn't exist in its infancy, but a lot of it blew up post war. And, because it is still young, a lot of the dialogue and discussion is driven by young white men who either didn't go to college to study this type of stuff, or didn't go to college at all. (i.e., a lot lack what the general idea of criticism is supposed to be which is something you really really see in popular youtubers)
At least we moved on from the incredibly stupid argument of "where's the Lester Bangs of game reviewers".
Lastly, here's my ridiculously stupid hot take: We as of yet don't have a "Citizen Kane" of gaming, but we have something... The Birth of a Nation of gaming:
! And I'm serious in this nutty comparison.