Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

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.

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.

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

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.