Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

i prefer the Picross/Paint-by-numbers thing.

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).

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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."

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.

Anyway an aesthetic attention can be held with video games, in a museum, watching dew on freshly cut grass etc

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.

Anyway an aesthetic attention can be held with video games, in a museum, watching dew on freshly cut grass etc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

?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.

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.

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!

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.

so why is that illusion of choice so compelling, why are we back in the matrix and first year gnostic simulators etcetc?

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?

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.

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.

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.

-- 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.

Too reductive. -20 points

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.

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?

"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.

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.

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.

is the funniest thing i've read in a long time.