Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

-- 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.

Yeah, I think you're right-- my point is that I think there has to be lots of "mythic" content in these things already, just as a result of the gameplay itself! I think that the position that you're in as a protagonist and the things you have to face as antagonists are telling a meaningful story already-- making video games potentially time-wasting bullshit and invigorating cultural experiences at the same time. And obviously, there's a spectrum of meaningfulness to be had-- but how much more do you need for video games to touch your soul? Aren't you part of the Nintendo generation? Is the problem a lack of "adult" works? (Has there been a video game Maus in this sense yet?)

Aren't we telling a story to ourselves as we live our lives? I'm the guy talking vapid bullshit, TOMBOT is the hero rising to squelch that, et cetera? Or is that vapid bullshit? I think kingfish knows what I'm getting at. Not just value judgements, but we're constantly forced to live in reifications just because of the way that we're constructed, as finite thinking beings that have to make sense of a very large and complex system-- "all seeing is a perspective seeing", etc. I don't think I'm abusing the word "myth" much in talking about the fact that we're forced to simplify and place value on things just to survive as human beings, and that we're enculturated into doing that. Aren't myths explanatory stories that speak to/give us an intuitive sense of the way things are?

Covered this already. I guess I disagree with your take on how authors in any medium produce work-- you're assigning them causal powers of creation that I don't think they actually have.

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.

I wasn't utterly sober posting this… and I'll be more lucid on another thread tomorrow where I needn't worry about framing the argument re. Ebert. What I'm actually getting toward (incoherently) is a point about the locus of the narrative experience and the kind of obligatory Verfremdungseffekt current games (perhaps) enforce.

Grep for "Silent Protagonist" on this thread and read down from there, I discussed a little bit of the difference here and Dan chiming in with his own treatment of the "masking effect" confirmed my suspicions:

RPGs are better in 2D. Discuss!

I don't think so! And more to my point (and Nolan Bushnell's point, and Satoru Iwata's point) the inaccessibility of so many videogames would make such a game likely to just fall by the wayside, unnoticed by anybody but you, me, and maybe Tycho & Gabe. I mean Maus is weird and hard enough for people unfamiliar with comics to accept as worthwhile, if you had to learn a new set of hand motions and object relationships just to open the book and turn pages it would be even more marginalized than it is!

I don't think videogames aren't ART, I mean even noize music is art, but mature, they're not. I think the main problems all have technical underpinnings; the marketplace is immature, the generation gap is hard at work, and the conventions are all still highly unstable.

What definition of "art" is this? The dialogue in Tetris is shit!

I like the Penny Arcade argument: music is art, yes? Design? Graphic art? So you add a joystick and it's no longer art?

An esquisitely carved chessboard with beautiful and ornate pieces is art, too, but CHESS, itself, is not. Chess is tradecraft. Playing chess is even more so. Battle Chess is no different; why can it as a whole be considered art when you would probably not say the same of regular old chess?

So yes to both birds with one stone.

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.

http://www.it-he.org/u6/murderer.gif
http://www.mbnet.fi/pelihalli/kuvat/uutiset/isot/garriott.jpg

I'm not arguing against that, I'm just asking whether that's all culture consists of.

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.