Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers
"(about dogme 95) I believe it's time for a similar debate in the game industry. We, too, have an arsenal of production techniques, and they're getting more spectacular all the time. Yet how many games on the store shelves can genuinely claim to be innovative? They may have innovative algorithms, but very few of them have innovative gameplay. How many first-person shooters, how many war games, how many run-and-jump video games do we really need? We're depending so much on the hardware that we're starting to ignore the bedrock foundation of our business: creativity, especially in devising not merely new games, but new kinds of games."
-- Sébastien Chikara (sebastie...) (webmail), December 29th, 2005 12:23 AM. (Sébastien Chikara) (later) (link)
I want to baton your eyes out with my penis for mentioning this shit.
― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Saturday, 31 December 2005 20:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― S. (Sébastien Chikara), Saturday, 31 December 2005 20:46 (eighteen years ago) link
Too reductive. -20 points
― TOMBOT, Saturday, 31 December 2005 20:55 (eighteen years ago) link
And that's more than enough for me to call something "art". I'm not sure what it's missing that makes you not want to call it art. I doubt it has made anyone cry. I believe it has been taught as a "text" in universities, but I'd have to double-check with some of the people I know who would be likely to have paid attention to that. It has spawned slash, although I don't know if that makes it more or less likely to be "art".
(I'm also not sure what's "too reductive" about that, but that is quite a zinger! Whoo! Zing-a-zing-zing!)
Anyway I feel like I'm just repeating myself now, so I should stop.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 31 December 2005 23:31 (eighteen years ago) link
It just seems like not enough's been done to codify and enable us to talk about THAT sort of art and separate it well enough from the tradecraft of writing an engaging simulation. There are some things about game design, as there are in writing, photography, music, et al. that you can teach and learn through practice whether a muse speaks to you or not, in a sense. I suppose that Tetris, like the Rubik's Cube, Go, etc. is something that qualifies as informed by more than just a little genius, as opposed to, say, Half-Life 2, which is a brilliant but limited technical exercise.
I really don't want to think about wtf slash/doujinshi/fanfic people have come up with about Tetris. Why you gotta bring that up?
― TOMBOT, Sunday, 1 January 2006 00:55 (eighteen years ago) link
"That is my problem here that I'm trying to solve. Everything you say about Tetris is valid. But to me, the problem is that the main memerizing attribute of tetris is the same as it is in go or chess or baseball or poker - the rules of the game, the play, as it were."
is sorta what I was goofily trying to get at in the other butisitart thread. all conventionally recognized artforms require certain skillsets to create, but not necessarily to uhh consume. I was actually thinking about this a lot this week when i was trying to explain to a friend why football was appealing (besides all the bitchin violence hayull yeah). It can be thrilling, as a technical exercise, to see good teams carrying out well-executed strategies in a machine-like fashion, and it's also exciting (and more common) to see the crucial mistakes that are made, and the drama that is produced by it. i kinda don't remember what my point is now, i'm even more not-lucid than usual tonight cuz i've been taking hella ambien. i guess games are interesting in this respect because in many cases the skills required for different kinds of games are avatars for skills you might WISH you had: this meticulously constructed game world permits you to do amazing things which don't even exist in the real world, or physically demanding things that only certain, special people have the capacity to develop the skill for. well. actually now that i've given this 30 seconds thought i realize it's bullshit. what skillz do ppl who play DDR or katamari damacy secretly yearn to have??? lol@me.
"I really think that's something nobody called Ebert out on that they maybe should have, games don't actually give a shit about player choice at the end of the day! It's mostly illusory!"
the funniest parts of eg. final fantasy vii are where they attempt to give you some control over the storyline and present you with options like:
what would you like?.... 1,000,000 gil.... aids
and then even if you choose aids they're like, 'okay here's a million gil lol!' and then give you whatever they want you to have.
― I GUARONTEE ::cajun voice:: (Adrian Langston), Sunday, 1 January 2006 02:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― 24726, Sunday, 1 January 2006 22:27 (eighteen years ago) link
1. The choice to win or lose, according to the rules and laws of the simulation (including the run-on-rails narratives of RPGs).
2. The choice of how you do it and what kind of fun you can have in the process- in a limited simulation, most of these involve self-imposed handicapping of some sort (beating somebody at chess without ever picking up your queen) but in some of the best games you can win lots of different ways and there can be re-discovery of the fun in playing by doing stuff that may not be the most linear of paths from A to B but doesn't add a lot of extra risk or difficulty (Doug Flutie drop-kicking the extra point).
Choice category number 1 is ME being too reductionist, -20 points.Choice category number 2 is me finally figuring out what Casuistry was talking about.
So there's where a simulation can be talked about as an art of giving you a fun and expressive experience besides just containing nice noises and pretty lights or having well-coded I/O and collision detection; a simulation constructed in such a way that the illusory choice of win/lose is supplanted by the very real choice of "win/lose via elegant sniper fire OR napalm fastballs conjured from the ether OR a combination of these plus a sexy bitch with an axe"
And at the end of the day this still proves Ebert wrong. Except inasmuch as I agree with him, I think, that video games are still not very mature, but they're getting there.
― TOMBOT, Tuesday, 3 January 2006 16:18 (eighteen years ago) link
― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 4 January 2006 01:02 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Tuesday, 24 January 2006 20:40 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dan (LOL) Perry (Dan Perry), Tuesday, 24 January 2006 23:31 (eighteen years ago) link
is the funniest thing i've read in a long time.
― Dxy (Danny), Sunday, 10 September 2006 22:54 (seventeen years ago) link
ok wait there's tetris slash wtf
― J.D., Thursday, 30 August 2007 09:15 (sixteen years ago) link
link!
― latebloomer, Saturday, 1 September 2007 18:48 (sixteen years ago) link
http://www.bash.org/?745147
― Leee, Saturday, 1 September 2007 21:03 (sixteen years ago) link
:)
― gff, Saturday, 1 September 2007 21:57 (sixteen years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/PN3c5JS.jpg
― am0n, Wednesday, 12 June 2013 15:55 (ten years ago) link
God, I want to play that. I actually considered spending 300+ dollars just to play that game, but then I looked in my wallet.
― Rod Steel (musicfanatic), Wednesday, 12 June 2013 17:58 (ten years ago) link