Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

Ha! I'd argue that this is completely and utterly wrong about "serious" (or, at least, "interesting") film and literature, which requires player choice (usually in the form of figuring out "what to do" with the materials in the "text", coming to a collaboration with the text as to "what it's all about", wrestling with the author's choices, etc.). Art that doesn't give the player control over the "meaning" or "interpretation" of the text is called "propaganda"; games just provide another structure for "player" control.

Claiming the videogame format will never have the capacities literature has seems daft as a book or film can be ported directly into a (not very interactive) videogame.

The point at which videogames, even with all their current lamenesses, stop being by far the most thrilling innovative mutating enjoyable medium to be right now following seems kinda a better time to have this argument than now.

Does that even need explaining?

Depends on the video game (or the film). Babe determines its watcher's reactions much more narrowly than, you know, Animal Crossing.

in that some ways yr choice of "interpretations" is just cut down to "shall i run right and shoot some things or shall i run left and shoot some things?"

It's not what you do, it's how you feel or what you think when doing it (or after) that is at question here, though, surely?

(i think the thing to theorise around might be the kinds of communities formed around games-playing, and what kinds of interactions they offer) (i'm not entirely convinced that "art" is something to argue for) (or at least, couching the argument in terms of "x has less "artistic value" than y" is entirely pointless) (i.e. list thread-ish) (merry christmas, incidentally)

-- Chris F. (nieman...), December 27th, 2005.

he did? he gave Dawn of the dead four stars ten years later!

All stories are myths, though? I mean, maybe, but this seems like a vast dilution of the concept of a "myth". (And, for that matter: All culture is made of stories?)

Giving something a 4-star review isn't the same as saying that the medium is on the level with literature and film. I mean I'd give Terranigma four stars but there's no way that means I think it ranks up there with MAUS, L'Etranger or The Manchurian Candidate. Long, long way to go (not talking about the graphics.)

One problem with video games as they stand is that it's a bit too collaborative. You need to many specialized artists and too many software engineers to "help" you execute your vision. I think there are very few cases you could point to in games where you could honestly say an auteur had been at work. One of the reasons books and even graphic novels are able to be so powerful is that the entire body of the work, from the first word to the last, can be designed by a single individual according to their wishes. Films can come close but the medium is really still too complex to allow for full articulation by a single person or even just two people.

Whether video games ever outgrow the current malfunctions of the medium and its marketplace, I think it's interesting to note that video games may have had their moment in the limelight from 1980-1996, and have since receded to the provinces of children and the extremely socially awkward. I mean EVERYBODY knows how the songs in Super Mario 1+3, and most people in my generation have a passing knowledge of Sonic & Link, maybe even Metroid, whether their parents bought them a NES/SNES/Genesis or not.

This sort of forces video games to be culturally marginal, because they're much less accessible than books, music or film. Not only that, video games are mostly locked into the ephemerality of the hardware and software platforms they run on, which is a massive handicap. Every other kind of art we're talking about can be reproduced on a variety of media to make it accessible to just about everyone; only recently has emulation (mostly the illegal sort, sans gametap, modern-console backwards compatability and classics compilations) made old games worth seeking out.

Why, of course!

http://www.freaksshop.de/images/medium/endorfun_pc_.jpg

that said i think it's a dead end or wrong tree, this idea, but i dunno. i'm curious about nethack as an example of how my vaguely defined notion of a 'community' w/r/t videogaming works. (bcz theoretically the staff on nethack could = every player)

no, but i think they can function in the smae way.

and if we're going into the auteur/collab parts of different artforms, there are plenty of game designers who's sensibility dominates the product:

1) Miyamoto
2) Kojima
3) Tim Schafer

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.

Ouch! Considering the source, I'll tolerate the prickliness-- and I actually appreciate the fact that you're calling me out on this. Ebert reviews games often? (I ignored your ref to Cosmology of Kyoto when I "read" the thread last, so I skipped over the link.) I can't find the original Ebert NOTLD review, but a quick google of references to it forces me to admit that I might have been confusing an uninformed misconception of his review for fact there, even though I'm pretty sure I actually have read his original review of the movie somewhere (in one of his books, maybe).

Long, long way to go

Is there? How much more development does there have to be before video games are "perfected"? Aren't things like the arcade Asteroids and the original Super Mario Bros. already speaking with a fully-formed vocabulary, as technically crude as they might be? What else do they need to be aesthetic experiences on a par with the fine arts? Isn't the experience of playing them the text, and everything else the subtext? How overt does the "literary" content have to be in your opinion before video games can be art and not just bullshit? (And is The Manchurian Candidate really "literary" either? It's been a long while since I saw it last, but I thought it was more pop than visionary.)

Films can come close but the medium is really still too complex to allow for full articulation by a single person or even just two people.

So films aren't fully on the level of literature yet either? I think you might be wrong about how vital it is that one person generates all the work themselves-- aren't writers forced to sculpt the raw material of their first draft in much the same way as directors sculpt a finished product from the accidents of performance?

I think it's interesting to note that video games may have had their moment in the limelight from 1980-1996

Maybe-- maybe because by becoming more collaborative and big-budget, video games have moved away from the personal? I know lots of people
have claimed that the golden age of video games already passed once designers stopped programming their own games.

you CAN ask those kinds of questions about other art forms, you can't really ask them about videogames

You can't? Why not? This is what I was getting at with the "mythology" comment-- aren't there all sorts of implicit enculturation and value reinforcement involved in these fantasies of heroism and escape? I don't think there's any reason why people couldn't be teaching about the cultural dimension of video games right now. How much of the game do you need to experience in class to talk about it? Do you have to have students play through Final Fantasy VII in its entirety? I've had plenty of courses where only parts of long books were assigned-- sometimes it's the only way to do survey courses. Leave playing video games all day to the grad students, in that case. (I can imagine them now, stressing out because they haven't had time to do all of their assigned playing.)

This sort of forces video games to be culturally marginal

Interesting-- so video games were less culturally marginal in the days of the arcades because they could be experienced in full much more quickly? Yeah, the ephemerality thing is a handicap right now, but it was as much of a handicap in film before the technology developed-- lots of early movies were lost entirely due to storage problems, and there are probably lots of movies that are regarded as classics today that were marginalized and little seen for a long time because they weren't getting re-releases to movie houses-- modern "film buff" culture I don't think really started until movie catalogues started getting sold to television stations that need stuff to air (the omnipresence of the Universal monsters, 3 Stooges, Looney Tunes, and The Little Rascals as household names are all due to television showings, right? Same true for The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life?)

Also show me a videogame that's "controversial" for the ideas behind it instead of for the animated blood and fucking.

Eh... Was Naked Lunch controversial for the ideas behind it or because of the blood and fucking? Isn't Burroughs's willingness to be transgressive an outgrowth of the ideas though? Isn't the GTA debate over ideas-- churchy types seeing it as promoting some sort of implicit nihilism rather than as good, clean fun? I take your point about the lack of overt literary content in games to date, but I wonder how necessary it is for all games to be like Alpha Centauri or Planescape: Torment. I think that the material you're looking for already exists-- you could probably seriously analyze the ideas behind SMAC in the same way that you parody analyzed Halo.

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.

ok wait there's tetris slash wtf

link!

http://www.bash.org/?745147

:)

http://i.imgur.com/PN3c5JS.jpg

God, I want to play that. I actually considered spending 300+ dollars just to play that game, but then I looked in my wallet.