Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

?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.