Put in another way, what will demarcate the snooty high culture/low culture divide in games? It can't be just game genre, since you have Half Life 2, Halo, and Postal 2, all in the FPS category. I'm thinking it might fall into platform/"intended audience" lines, i.e. we already talk about "hardcore" or "serious" games. We decry Xbox/halo/madden-only gamers right now.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 19:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 19:58 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.it-he.org/u6/murderer.gifhttp://www.mbnet.fi/pelihalli/kuvat/uutiset/isot/garriott.jpg
― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― GET EQUIPPED WITH BUBBLE LEAD (ex machina), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:12 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:17 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:40 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 20:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:33 (eighteen years ago) link
I'm not arguing against that, I'm just asking whether that's all culture consists of.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:44 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:45 (eighteen years ago) link
But at any rate no, novels, theater, and cinema CAN'T do what Tetris or any other game can conceivably do, but on the other hand Tetris is to a great degree defined by its ruleset, and thus still no more mesmerizing than Mah-Jongg Solitaire or Su-Do-Ku, neither of which necessarily require a the "video" component, and neither of which people have asked Ebert if he thinks they are as cool as movies.
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 21:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:02 (eighteen years ago) link
i prefer the Picross/Paint-by-numbers thing.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:11 (eighteen years ago) link
http://img280.imageshack.us/img280/7663/leo34tp.gif
Depends on what you mean by "moved", I guess -- the way most people mean it, it was Ocarina of Time. But "moved" (as in, emotionally struck) isn't generally what I want out of art anyways, and certainly isn't the litmus test for whether something is a piece of (effective) art or not.
-- Casuistry (chri...)
This actually is my litmus test for art, which makes me wonder why I love video games as much as I do. Video games interest me, excite me, involve me, and occasionally addict me, but rarelydo they move me. But they have, and I think the medium has untapped potential to do more and be more. I would see a lot of games today as artistic, but only very, very rarely approaching something as lofty as art (particularly in the narrative/literary sense).
― Laura H. (laurah), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:23 (eighteen years ago) link
Part of it has to do with immersiveness, I guess, or how connected I feel with the game.
MGS was one that certainly made an effort, especially with the whole Sniper Wolf bit with the overly melodramatic/poetic death on a snow-covered battlefield.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Wednesday, 28 December 2005 22:36 (eighteen years ago) link
D'oh! When I googled I got his Land of the Dead review and tried searching under Romero's name from there, with no success. Sadly, the place I've read it before probably is the actual Sun-Times site. Moving on...
I don't think videogames aren't ART, I mean even noize music is art, but mature, they're not.
Why should chess be different, then? Is the difference in the total presentation-- i.e., you can have lots of different instantiations of a chess set but only one Super Mario Bros., so successive SMB games are separate works of art? I dunno about your thing about conventions not being stabilized enough, because I think the truth of that varies depending on the genre of game. Eugene Jarvis developed Robotron on the back of Berserk, and isn't Robotron the epitome of 2-D 1 screen shooters? It isn't like Smash TV was really an improvement. Similarly, does Earthbound speak to/epitomize a certain tradition of Ultima-derived Japanese RPGs?
That's going to be the same for games.
Yeah-- I think this already shows in the way classic arcade games are revered, and Tim Rogers's Earthbound thing. There's a lot of half-forgotten garbagey games that have been produced that nobody really thinks of as "classic" despite their extreme age, like almost all of the Galaxian rip-offs that you can play through MAME. Galaxian is justly considered to be a classic, but those games aren't.
pomo/university litcrit bullshit
Yeah, I was actually conflating that with considering games as an art somewhat, wasn't I? Not that you can't hold up Missile Command as a classic product of the Cold War, but that's not really telling us anything about the game qua game.
very, very rarely approaching something as lofty as art
Are there "art" games and "craft" games, similar to the divide between "art" and "craft" in cinema?
― Chris F. (servoret), Thursday, 29 December 2005 01:03 (eighteen years ago) link
"Stories" in the sense of being mimetic technology, maybe. I was probably on too much of a Grant-Morrisonesque bender when I wrote that before.
― Chris F. (servoret), Thursday, 29 December 2005 01:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Thursday, 29 December 2005 01:49 (eighteen years ago) link
As do some games and in my case it is always the soundtrack that does it, not the story or visuals. For example the music in Zelda Windwaker is very delightfully moving in places. The music in Voodo Vince is really chill, unusual jazz that adds a lot to the mood of the game.
I really wish games would put more money against the music, it makes all the difference IMO.
― Trayce (trayce), Thursday, 29 December 2005 02:01 (eighteen years ago) link
Certain comments on this thread reminded me of this:
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 (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 29 December 2005 05:23 (eighteen years ago) link
So I don't understand how anyone can have difficulty thinking of games as art (and often fully "mature" art!) unless they have never played a game or unless they have a weirdly limited view of what "real art" is (like, "art is something that didn't really happen that makes me cry", maybe).
My point being that while you CAN ask those kinds of questions about other art forms, you can't really ask them about videogames.
Those really aren't the sorts of questions you should be asking art. I mean this:
IS THE "HALO" SERIES AN ALLEGORY FOR AMERICA'S PERSECUTION COMPLEX IN THE LATE 20th AND EARLY 21st CENTURIES? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER AND DISCUSS THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MASTER CHIEF.
That's the kind of question you ask propaganda, not art.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 29 December 2005 11:01 (eighteen years ago) link
Anyway an aesthetic attention can be held with video games, in a museum, watching dew on freshly cut grass etc
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Thursday, 29 December 2005 14:44 (eighteen years ago) link
I suspect he spends more time thinking that they're "cool" than actually playing them. And "memetic", not "mimetic", WTF.
I think there's a lot of talking around in circles here
I was watching an interview with an actor tonight that was one of the extras to the Youth of the Beast DVD, and he drew a sharp distinction between contrasting "art" films to "entertainment" films as genres, and films made with artistry to "ordinary" ones. I think that pretty much sums it up.
Yeah, exactly. I think this is part of what I was trying to say before-- the experience of play has an aesthetic sense of its own, especially when it comes to things like control responsiveness. SMB has a feel to it that distinguishes it from other games in my mind.
― Chris F. (servoret), Friday, 30 December 2005 05:56 (eighteen years ago) link
SMB has a feel to it that distinguishes it from other games in my mind.
Chris F, I think the important thing is to find a way to codify the spearation between the tradecraft of making the gameplay "excellent" and expressing something.
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 16:27 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 16:30 (eighteen years ago) link
For example, I wondering if we differentiate between just the "art elements," e.g. like in FFVII, the pretty backgrounds(art as visual art), the dialogue(written narrative), Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack, etc. I mean, each of this bits have an art form about themselves(visual, music, etc), but it seems that a games art language would address the blending of these elements into a final experience. It's this aspect that makes me think a game art language would most resemble film, since film also combines similar into a (real-time?) experience. Am I making sense here?
We should develop a term for this language; is "gamecrit" too trite?
Somebody get Nabisco over here.
Also, Tom, i agree with you on the separation of gameplay & the rest of it when looking for what a game says, etc.
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 30 December 2005 17:03 (eighteen years ago) link
I was thinking yesterday, though, that the whole question that was raised to Ebert and the response is just the kind of thing that only happens to media that are still "upstarts" in the world, like comics and movies in the past, and rock and roll, and techno, and yada yada. Comparatively no genre or medium holds a candle to anything you hold it up against, because the rules are set by the established form. I'm not so much interested in justifying the inconsistently xlated text strings of FF:Tactics as being on par with The Bard as I am with trying to figure out where we can draw a line between "brilliant development" and "brilliant expression of not being a pipe" and how do we tell the difference.
Anyway why would you assume Nabisco has anything to say about this? He's an Xbox guy. They don't know anything about Art.
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 17:30 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish holiday travesty (kingfish 2.0), Friday, 30 December 2005 17:45 (eighteen years ago) link
I believe that is an African proverb. Which to me seems complementary to the idea that all stories are myths.
I find a lot of what people have said on this thread interesting, but ultimately I don't understand the need to qualitatively compare mediums. Does it make them more or less enjoyable or "good" if we decide that the medium is inherently inferior? And does anyone really believe we can say something like that, especially given how new the medium of video games is and how little time it has been given to develop artistically compared to literature or even movies?
― Laura H. (laurah), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:20 (eighteen years ago) link
does the problem with mating criticism and games, and devising an "is this game ART?" divining rod, come down to the fact that games are participatory and experiential in a different way than any previous artform? unlike music (pre-headphone) and film (pre-dvd), which were communal experiences, games are generally solitary experiences; unlike viewing a painting (or the act of painting!), playing a game is participatory and dynamic. so the art-ness, to clunk a term, of a game has to be evaluated on some tricky balance of viewing (the graphics, the music) and participating (the difficulty, the overall "feel").
ie, it's like trying to paint and decide it you've created art yet at the same time.
bitcrit?
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:27 (eighteen years ago) link
This is a great quote which I think proves the point that games are anything but solitary:
Imagine a person of my generation (born in the late 70s/early 80s) during his first week at college. He walks down one of the hallways in his dorm and hears the Zelda theme. He walks through the open door and discovers that there is some guy with an old Nintendo and a stack of cartridges. He scans them, rattling off names like Gradius, Contra, Kid Icarus, and Metroid. And he realizes that even though he's from a different end of the country and lived in the mountains instead of the city, he realizes that they both shared moments with their brothers and friends, late at night, working together to defeat Bowser, reading Nintendo Power, and saving the world of Hyrule.1
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 18:40 (eighteen years ago) link
?Not too sure what to think of that. Maybe I was not clear, I wanted to say the aesthetic concept of aesthetic experience includes but also surpasses the realm of art.
― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:43 (eighteen years ago) link
well of course they are, and of course there is textual intepretation and "player" involvement in all art up to and including games- i don't think that's up for debate by anyone perhaps save ebert. i think what i was getting is the ability to distinguish between "functional" art and "arty" art in games is tripped up a bit by the *degree* to which games are mandatorily participatory; in other words the player is involved in creating the art in a more physical sense than usual. it's like evaluating the doodles in the margin of a copy of maus; if i did it, it's probably just defacement, if t.s. eliot did it it's at least valuable and probably arty-criticism in and of itself.
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:52 (eighteen years ago) link
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 18:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 19:00 (eighteen years ago) link
Except that with video games, the eventual result of either you OR T.S. Eliot doodling in the margins is 99% likely to have the EXACT SAME RESULTS. I mean I'd pay as much for your level 70 with all Genji equipment savegame as I would for T.S. Eliot's level 70 with all Genji equipment savegame.
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!
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 19:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Friday, 30 December 2005 19:09 (eighteen years ago) link
One example: It's very common for games to display one or more brief splash screens with the logos of the publishers and developers, before moving on to the title screen where player interaction begins. Katamari immediately turns the Namco splash itself into a choose-save screen while simultatnously introducing the player to the basics of the unusual control scheme and theme music. I don't know that this in itself is an artistic statement of any sort and I know splash screens have been messed with before, but it's a really effective extension of the game's freewheeling spirit and playful aesthetic. The title screen of WLK carries this further and is one of my favorite parts of the game.
Touches like this show that a certain level of artistic consideration has gone into Katamari, not only in the realm of the traditional art "components" (the visual art and music contained in the game), but also in developing a space between this game and almost every other video game, in ways specific to the video game medium (controls, formal video game conventions, gameplay goals, etc). It's a distinct vision which is threaded through every little nook and cranny of the experience, from turning on the machine to quitting the game. And a lot of it is given extra significance because we now have a (short) history of games as a backdrop to work against.
― sleep (sleep), Friday, 30 December 2005 19:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― sleep (sleep), Friday, 30 December 2005 19:30 (eighteen years ago) link
so why is that illusion of choice so compelling, why are we back in the matrix and first year gnostic simulators etcetc?
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 19:50 (eighteen years ago) link
― metonymus prime (rgeary), Friday, 30 December 2005 19:51 (eighteen years ago) link
Well, to expand on Sébastien's response, we create the experience of seeing something as "art" in our own heads, so in that sense, viewing any beautiful object as a discrete aesthetic unity is like looking at a piece of artwork, albeit one not manufactured to be an "art object", whatever that is. Sort of like John Cage's thing about all sounds being music-- all sounds can be experienced as music if you want to experience them that way, even though they don't "mean" anything other than what they are.
turns into Art when it's no longer selling beer and is purely decorative
the important thing is to find a way to codify the spearation between the tradecraft of making the gameplay "excellent" and expressing something
Is there a contradiction here? Why does Peter Kubelka's Schwechater become art by eschewing overt meaning, when with video games the reverse has to happen? Is this an extension of Oscar Wilde's witticism that "all art is quite useless"?
why is "do i jump now or do i shoot now" when playing Contra a satisfying illusion of choice?
Well, isn't there some real choice that gets made there, within the confines of the game mechanics? Aren't there usually multiple ways to get a good result in a shooter? Conversely, once you've figured GROW RPG out, it's sort of expended its use as a game, hasn't it?
― Chris F. (servoret), Friday, 30 December 2005 23:48 (eighteen years ago) link
although if it's music maybe your choices when playing contra are like the frilly bits you add playing bach. or or a jazz solo!
tho i cannot play bach, or jazz solos. i can barely even play contra.
― tom west (thomp), Friday, 30 December 2005 23:53 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 31 December 2005 00:19 (eighteen years ago) link
I also don't buy the argument that [your favorite novel/film/whatevs here] transcends its well-made-machine status. Being a well-made-machine doesn't seem like the sort of thing you need to transcend.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 31 December 2005 18:58 (eighteen years ago) link
The difference between a choice and an illusion of choice doesn't seem terrrrrrribly helpy. But: The choice isn't in what you do so much as what you make of it.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 31 December 2005 19:17 (eighteen years ago) link