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Game Devs on Ebert's Put-Downs
Gamsutra has a writeup of a recent Austin Game Developers meeting. Damion Schubert, Allen Varney, and Scott Jennings took the stage to discuss games as art and Roger Ebert's opinions. From the article: "McShaffry then asked the panel to consider whether Ebert was picking on youth culture in general, and assuming technology wasn't an issue, whether popular games like Grand Theft Auto would be played 500 years from now, like the works of Shakespeare are enjoyed today? Jennings didn't want to speculate that far into the future, but he admitted to still playing and liking the Final Fantasy games released for the Super Nintendo."
There's a fundamental difference between Shakespear and GTA: one was on paper, one is digital.
Five hundered years from now, we don't know what the technology will be like. Maybe they'll be calling "Quantum Computing" old and busted. Maybe they'll revert to Zip drives. Will the Playstation 128 be able to play Playstation 2 games? Will Sony even exist?
But there will always be paper.
Well, until we deforest the entire planet, but at that point I doubt playing video games from a half dozen generations back will be on our minds. So, while the concept may remain (assuming we don't have a Demolition Man-like future), the game will likely not be played except by the handful of "hardcore" hobbiests who procure working-condition units of the PS4. Don't rule out it being taught in game design classes, though.
Mario is an entire other matter.
Heck, sometimes I can't even play games that are from this decade, or they want me to have a specific set of video drivers.
So, given that I've got some Apple II+ computers sitting in my garage with floppy disks that are probably melted to goo now, I'd guess that the chance that any game from today will exist 500 years from now is close to nil.
of course, most movies won't be around then either.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
First, movies and television were often scoffed at by snobs for lowering the IQ of {America, The World, The Universe, etc.} A Movie critic arguing that games are dumb or "not art" (intending the same meaning) is not a shocking departure from the norm.
Second, how many movies are art? Very few, fewer in reality than in the minds of those who made them for certain.
Third, who cares? Unless you are trying to get in some university liberal arts curriculum, whether games fall under "art" or "entertainment" is purely academic. As long as any of the above entertains me, I'm interested. Art for art's sake has never appealed to my sense of functional technology. If it doesn't entertain me, I won't pay for it, and I won't go out of my way to see it. Worthless is a word that comes to mind.
In terms of what time will view of any of these things, we just don't know. Movies aren't even old enough to achieve immortal status. How many people have seen "the classics" of movies? Probably only the older crowd (when they were first run), film students or movie buffs. Video games are in a more difficult position of sometimes being positively inaccessible due to technological means, in addition to only being 30 years old.
Finally, do games matter? Do sports matter? Does gambling matter? Does drinking till you puke followed by casual sex matter? Yes, obviously. A sufficient number of people feel games are so powerful that people kill over them (not just video games, remember the Dungeons & Dragons nonsense?) They're in the media, a lot of money is spent on them. They matter. Will they matter in 100 years? It's hard to imagine there won't be video games then. Will they be the same games? Probably not in their original 8-bit NES implementation. However, is Romeo and Juliet a brand new work, or a from-scratch-rewrite of older books, the oldest of which I have read dates back to ancient greece?
would be played 500 years from now, like the works of Shakespeare are enjoyed today?
Are Shakespeare's works seriously "enjoyed" today? How many people who have to study his works today in school enjoy doing it vs. playing GTA? And what's the deal with the "500 year standard", it's circular and self-fulfilling. We read/view performances of Shakespeare 500 years later, because they're so great, as evidenced by how people still read/view it 500 years later! Go us!
How many people, as a fraction of the population, go to Shakespeare plays *purely* for the joy of seeing it, irrespective of the buzz behind them? How will that compare to the fraction who plays Rockstar games 500 years from now?
(And it's more like 400, but whatever.)
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Is Roger Ebert art?
Normal people have feelings besides boredom and amusement. Americanism has certainly stunted your emotional development.
I have a hard time calling storytelling (such as movies) art. I guess most people would define art as the expression of an idea. Some video games do this, some do not. Perhaps second life is closer to art, but that's not really a game, is it?
Many or most video games are simulations (art immitating life?). The lifespan of a simulation ends when we can do a better simulation.
Excluding simulations, I would compare video games to other games like chess, which people have been playing in one form or another for thousands of years. I have to believe that people will probably still be playing some form of tetris a hundred or more years from now.
Meanwhile, grand theft auto will be as popular 500 years from now as the hallowe'en movies.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Ultima 4
Also, there are lots of good games. Even if you don't agree that Ultima 4 was a classic, there WILL be classics.
Video games have been around for 40 years or so. Saying there won't be any profoundly classic games at this point is like saying there would never be classic literature 40 years after writing was first invented.
Also "making ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic" is self-righteous and pretentious. Way to congradulate yourself, Ebert. Your entertainment doesn't just entertain, it makes you better than the rest of us. Bravo.
And what's the deal with the "500 year standard"
Double the age of the United States of America, rounded up to the nearest century, is one conception of an upper limit on what constitutes "limited Times" under the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Not to be crass, but Ebert can suck it.
/My 2 cents, at least as valid as Ebert's when discussing video games.
He mentions that video games are typically just a waste of time; I would posit that movies are just as much a waste of time. It's like asking a classical music critic to judge whether or not a certain modern sculpture is art -- don't ask a movie critic about video games.
I've had plenty of "oh wow" moments in video games. I've also been affected emotionally in video games (which, I'm sure, was intended by the designers). I've also been stimulated to think critically about a topic by video games. All these things indicate that video games *can* be art.
Yes, there are artless videogames, just as there are artless movies and artless novels. There is also "bad" art out there, in every media. I believe that as video games continue to be developed, very many more of them will be intended as art pieces, and will succeed in being considered art.
Also, keep in mind that the movie industry is losing $$ to the videogame industry -- video games are eating away at film's cultural mindshare. Ebert, as a part of that industry, has a professional interest in promoting movies over video games.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
All digital media will disappear eventually due to technological changes and the emergence of DRM. Since we can not copy or migrate DRM protected content without assistance of the copyright holder, and they may or may not exist in the future or wish this migration, the content dies. How many movies have been lost forever because they were kept in a vault and not copied in time? DRM is a digital vault where artistry is left to die.
So, all movies, music, and video games created today will eventually cease to exist and thier creaters forgotten, while older artists will be remembered because thier creations can be freely copied. Only print media will be left for our legacy.
some companies have open sourced there games such as Id. also infocom interpreters are avialable. So Unless a company make a effort a either keeping it up to date with technology , releases code or has a cult following of fans that reverse engineers it, it will die
I expect the version of Tetris to survive will be the one in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail game, where one piled dead and dying corpses on top of each other, some ... well ... not quite dying as in "I'm not dead yet.", "I'm feeling better."
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Will people play GTA in 500 years? I would say no. That game, while not bad, doesn't really have much stuff in it that would survive a longer periods of time. The story isn't ground breaking, the gameplay could be done better (aiming, vehicle physics, etc) and in almost all aspects of the games you will have a easy time picking something that could be improved. And if I have the choice between something that is good and something that is better, I'd pick the better one and in a few hundred years we will have seen very many games that have cars and guns in them, so no reason to play GTA, except for historical interest.
However that doesn't mean that games from today will be completly forgotten. Such games as Tetris or Pong will survive in mobile phones or other portable devices for a long long time. There simply isn't a reason why they would disappear, they are cheap to produce, simple and basically perfect at what they do. Graphic improvments won't help and the gameplay is also so simple that there is little room for improvment. Games such as SuperMarioBros are similar, even so a lot more complex, they do what they do almost perfectly. A totally different kind of game that will probally survive for quite a while are some adventure games, those LucasArts games, while quite old, are still among the best, if not the best, of the genre. And again, they do what they do close to perfection and new technologie can't do much to improve the game experience those games provide.
So in the end many of the games released these days will probally completly forgotten in a few years, since there will be newer games that do, what they did, but simply a lot better. But all those games that focus on something that isn't limited by todays CPU power, be it pure gameplay or story, are here to stay Will they survive 500 years? Some might, especially those that broke new ground. But 500 years are a long long time and I doubt that many/any movies of today will survive for that amount of time.
Why does there always have to be some stupid variation though?
The tetris released with the original gameboy is probably still the best version out there. Great music. Great gameplay. No silliness. The MS Entertainment pack version is also pretty good. Tetrisphere for the N64 is probably the furthest thing from the original that is still really good.
Tetris Worlds for the GBA is better than the gameboy version only because it is in color, which is nice, and because the cartridge doesn't stick out the bottom. The overhang just ruins the pocketability. It would have been better if they had just released a shrunken-cartridge, colorized version of the original. I really don't need multiple 'world' backgrounds.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
When you come down to the differences between movies and games, there is really only one. Games require interactive participation while movies are entirely passive experiences. Adding interactivity to a movie turns it into a game - in fact quite a few developers tried to incorporate this into PC gaming in the mid 90's.
The real question becomes whether true art is possible when there is a level of interaction with the viewer. The answer to this is clearly yes, in fact it is one of the key characteristics of the postmodern art movement. A simple example of this would be the Hypertext, a postmodern novella form that depends entirely on the user to navigate their own path through the story.
What Ebert is really addressing is that the presence of interaction encourages game developers to focus on gameplay elements to the detriment of the traditional artistic potential of the game. This brings up a valid point, namely the existence of "good art" vs. "bad art". Any veteran gamer can probably give several dozen examples of each, as any movie fan can no doubt give several dozen examples of each as pertains to movies. There's no way that a movie like Gigli is more artistic than an excellent game like Fahrenheit simply because it is non-interactive.
In the end, however, I can't really blame Ebert for being wrong about games. He would change his mind if he was exposed to any of the hundreds of games that feature "good art", such as Fahrenheit, Fable, KOTOR, Max Payne, etc, but even when those are given media coverage it is the other features that are hyped instead of their artistic prowess.
Besides that, the medium presents some problems for the artists, since development costs are so high, one of the cornerstones of art, the chance to experimen is rather limited.
That situation is slowly starting to change with modding and such giving young artist a chance to try out different ideas. Also the fact that more and more game creators are raised with the medium should help alot.
But most importantly, as soon as people start talking about whether something is art or not, run, there's bound to be an avalaunch of bs coming your way. It's one of the only arguments more pointless, bitter and polarizing than mac vs pc.
What part of "assuming technology wasn't an issue" didn't you understand?
My stupid web site
What part of "assuming technology wasn't an issue" didn't you understand?
Man, the first two posts I see make the same basic only-skimmed-the-article error. You guys are so anxious to throw your voice in... Well, I have no problem posting basically the same comment twice.
My stupid web site
No one will give a shit about GTA in 10 years let alone 400. This is due to the fact that GTA really isn't anything special at all - although it is still art.
I disagree. In retrospect, I don't think Super Mario Bros is that great either. It's definitely been surpassed. But it will be played. Why? Because it was the ground-breaking. The colorful worlds, the side-scrolling non-repetitive play... It will be remembered and played.
Same with GTA. Super Mario 64 was arguably the first big step in the 3D game age, and GTA was the second. Future games will do it better and have better stories, but they won't break ground better.
I personally think Shakespeare is overrated. But he's influenced a lot of stuff that I like better, and for that, I give him credit and try to familiarize myself with his works.
My stupid web site
That is an interesting comparison as the GTA games borrow very heavily from films. If you've played GTA II and Vice City there are large sections of plot, story, characters, episodes, and locations that are taken straight out of The Godfather films and Scarface. To an extent you could call GTA "Al Pachino: The video game." GTA would not be as successful were it not for these blatant nods to popular films.
Also, keep in mind that the movie industry is losing $$ to the videogame industry.
This oft quoted statistic actually only refers to domestic box office, not including DVD sales, TV sales, rental releases, etc, all of which add up to significantly more than the box office. Generally speaking, movies are still much bigger than games.
But other than that, I agree with what you're saying. One can waste a lot of time with a bad novel. One generally wastes a heck of a lot of time with Bad TV. But there are good examples of both, just as there are good examples of games.
If one were so inclined, one could make a list of games that could be considered culture-worthy. Mine would include:
Silent Hill
Zelda
Tetris
Pac-Man
Final Fantasy 3/6
Dada: Stagnation in Blue
Katamari Damacy
Maniac Mansion
Little Nemo the Dream Master
Eyetoy: Antigrav (*Cough*Cough*)
Street Fighter 2
My Food
Sim City 4
Xenogears
Metal Gear Solid
The Sims
Super Mario Brothers 3
Puzzle Pirates
Lode Runner
Anyone want to add to this list?
The ______ Agenda
Games that are in movies will survive.
Think of:
War Games (would you like to play Global Thermonuclear War)
3D Chess (Star Trek, many others)
and let's not forget the one in the movie Big.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just making stuff up, but how about this: 500 years from now, movies will have long-since left the theatres, and will be games, played at home in your living room which you can't see because you're encased in a full-body VR suit. Others present with you have their suits on as well, and you're all networked into the story together. Safety issues are somebody else's engineering problem, I'm assuming you can somehow move about without worrying about running into your couch. You participate in the story, with a level of influence on the plot that is determined by the directors and/or writers. You can engage in a movie that only gives you a passive role, a bystander of some sort. Since you're basically an 'extra' there's still lots you'd be able to find interactive and interesting, it would just be with stuff that's not essential to the plot, in the background somewhere. In other productions, you could be the hero, or the bad guy, or one of their friends/henchmen, or whatever. We'd start rating movies on additional statements like, "Was there enough to do in it?" and "You'll lose weight playing this movie".
More and more games are tending toward being interactive movies these days. And movies have subtly drifted in that direction of games, with DVDs where you can see alternate endings and discover hidden things and stuff like that. As both media forms advance in technology, they may grow into each other and become some morph that's sort of like the holodeck, where all the programs are bought/rented from the VRIAA or something like that.
Ebert misses a major point- Art can be bad. Art can be really, really bad. As long as we think that for Art to be "ART", it must be good, we aren't understanding wat Art actually is. All Art is interactive. Movies, paintings, plays, symphonies all require your attention and grant the depth of meaning and expression based on your experience of them- which happens in time, causes thought after the fact, asks questions, gives sensations- ALL art is interactive. With out you actively watching the movie and thinking about it (interacting with it) it is simply light flickering on a wall. Games, like any form of art, are capable of poorly executed attempts at expression, just as bad films and songs and paintings. When Ebert says that no game can compare to the "great" dramatists, he is by definition excluding any and all art that doesn't reach the pinnacle of it's respective form as 'not art.' On that I call bullshit. Art can be inept, poorly executed, clumsy, barely inspiring, derivitive etc. etc. But it does remain art nonetheless. Games are conjured out of the minds of their creators to be experienced by an audience- who hopefully will come away from the experience having been engaged, entertained, and challenged. That is enough for Art. Ebert is too quick to cling to an elitist idea of Art that considers the actual material to be the art, rather than the interaction bewtween the materila and an audience. I submit that Art is in fact a VERB and not a noun. Art is something that only occurs between a work and an audience. Otherwise it is just a bunch of atoms, photons or sound waves. Art is the tree falling in the woods with people there to hear it.
The argument itself is flawed. We already have a rich history of games from the beginning of culture that are just as "classic" as any painting or piece of music. Instead of asking if a game will stand up against Shakespeare or Citizen Kane, how about asking if it will stand up against Chess? Or even Tennis?
A game achieves greatness through its gameplay, not setting. Yes, some games have stories, but that will always come second to the mechanics-- is it fun, is it stimualting, is it a challenge. (Yes there have been games with decent stories, like Fallout 2 or Final Fantasy 6-- but what made those games great was the way the story elements complimented the game engine itself. Those games would have been long forgotten if they were not challenging and fun to play.)
But what's really relevent to this discussion is his attitude towards violence in movies. OK, he's entitled to hate slasher movies because they're pretty much all exploitative, unimaginative crap. But that's not why he comes down on them. He consider them evil, "cynical", "misogynistic", and otherwise morally uncool. This from a guy who worships Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker who thoroughly exploited the pornography of death.
Perhaps if the graphics in GTA-III had been better, it wouldn't bother him so much that the game is mainly about killing people....
So there's no point in contending that games can be like Shakespeare; they can't, and you don't want them to be. To make a game like what Shakespeare does, narratively, is to cripple what makes a game worthwhile.
Ebert says "video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic." Would he say the same about sports or athletics? He might be right -- but the counter is not to say that games do the same, it's to say that "watching TV or a movie represents a loss of time that could be spent becoming better problem-solvers, to practice reacting to different challenges, to become more proactive in our approach to the world". And we'd be right.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What about a mod for GTA that has the characters enacting Hamlet?
Of course classic video games also made more money than movies did in the early eighties. Until they stopped .. making any money at all.
Frankly as Ebert has a writing credit on this pseudo porn film I really don't think he's that qualified to decide what is art and what isn't.
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I wonder if Mr. Ebert expects expects films to be viewable in their original media in 500 years. What with periodically-changing film sizes and speeds, and now digital video codecs, Ebert's own favorite art form doesn't seem particularly "eternal" either. In fact, just like video games, the only ways to appreciate old films are to 1) preserve the associated film player, or 2) convert the film to the new format. Sure, you could bust open the film reel, hold it up to a light, and look at it frame by frame, but that goes against the artist's intended viewing scenario, something Ebert considers extremely important.
Perhaps Ebert realizes all this, but thinks that the contents of the film (if not the physical medium) is safe from the ravages of time. After all, there are works 100 years old which can be enjoyed by film buffs even to this day!
Mr. Ebert might notice other points where video games are plainly different and not-at-all-identical to film:
Which brings me to my point: does Ebert intentionally ignore the obvious similarities between film and video games, or is he simply too ignorant of the history of video games to see them in the first place?
Ebert might be right!
Every year, dozens, maybe even hundreds, of films discussing the human condition, controversial topics, and important figures of the past, are released that, rather than providing simple entertainment, actually broaden the minds of the viewers and takes the taboo and makes it discussable.
And what do we have?
Halo 2's commentary on religous extremism, Final Fantasy's many, many, many discussions on what makes a person "human", Starcraft's look at the depths of evil and how it takes advantage of the hopes of good men, Warcraft's look at how old hatreds only die slowly.
Good? Yes, albeit not the central aspect of the pieces.
As good as any of this year's Best Picture nominees?
No.
Well, if you ask my sister, maybe Crash. But that's about it.
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
I mean, except chess, which was also a product of the rennaisance.
And checkers which by some accounts predates the Epic of Gilgamesh by about a thousand years.
And go, mancala, tic-tac-toe, golf, of course...
I think much of the confusion comes from the question of what is Art/Literature vs what is simply popular. Many of today's greatist hits will be all but gone in 25 years. Look at Star Wars, for example: who remembers what movie won Best Picture in 1977? It wasn't Star Wars. I have no idea what it was. While I could look it up if I wanted, I doubt it is a movie that many people are interested in now. But a valid claim could be made that Star Wars is a work of art. I certainly could see it being watched a hundred years from now.
The same is true of video games. I doubt GTA has any real staying power, and will probably be virtually nonexistant in a mere 10 years. But I can think of a few games that have a good chance of making it. A few people before me mentioned Tetris. I don't see that game ever going anywhere, and there will be implementations of it for as long as there are humans around to play it. Pacman is another game that is likely to survive -- it's just too addictively simple.
But I'm not sure even those two games really qualify as art. They are just a mindless pasttime. The first game that came to my mind when I was thinking of games as art is The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. Even today, that game is remarkably immersive, especially given the limitations of the technology it was implemented on. It is, to me, true art. Not because of the storyline (which, while not bad, isn't very deep), certainly not because of the graphics (anything coming out now is better in that regard), but because of the whole experience. You can disagree with me on this specific game if you want, but my point is that there are games that really do reach the realm of art, at least to those who are open to see them as such.
There aren't very many true artists in the video game world, but I would say Miyamoto is one of them. Give it 500 years, and he may very well be viewed as gaming's Shakespeare. Time will tell.
The fact is that theatre (as in actors in front of an audience) has been around a lot longer than movies (heck, it had been around a long time before Shakespeare was born), and movies have been around a lot longer than video games. They are all very similiar, in a way. They are just different ways to engage someone in an entralling way. Games as a medium of entertainment are really still developing (and I'm not referring to developing technology here), and from a historical perspective are really very new. So for someone to say that they aren't art, and can't be art, is to do the true masterminds of gaming an injustice.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
As nicely shown in the movie "Renaissance Man". People have to be taught in order to enjoy shakespear. How is that for backwards compatibility. Shakespear's work is put on a high pedestral by the people that "like" it an shoved down the throat of children at school.
Sure you can claim that a lot of stuff is based on the works of Shakespear, but if it wasn't for shakespear someone else would have thought of it. It could even be possible that Shakespear based his works on lesser known people who were lost in history (including their work, yes that happens).
It's just a habbit of these "old" people to put down a new art form, they have done that often enough in the past. So why would this one be different.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Basically don't assume that Ebert necessarily is part of a conspiracy, when the same happens every day even with people without a vested interest. The fact is, in every generation there will be a resistance to what's new, and snobs arguing that the old ways were better. Even when there's really very little conceptual difference, there will be some snob going nostalgic about how in his day people were going to the theatre instead of these newfangled movies. E.g.,
- The Theatre. Nowadays it's such a posh thing and "culture" to go to the theatre, and we throw Shakespeare's name around like a sign of being soo educated. In the early days of the movies, the theatre was thrown around as the place properly educated citizens go to, and movie snobs argued that movies are crap for idiots, and rots the mind to boot. But back in the early days of Rome the theatre was considered a decadent thing and forbidden by the law, to prevent it from rotting the mind of the youth. The first theatre that was a permanent building was officially mis-named a "temple", and had a small shrine, so it could be slipped around the law.
- Chess vs RTS or vs modern tabletop wargames, like, Battletech or Warhammer 40k. Nowadays playing chess at some posh club counts as socially acceptable and an intellectual exercise, playing Warhammer 40k at the games shop is seen as something for nerds without a life. We have international chess tournaments, and it's seen as a reason for national pride to win one, but a Battletech tournament is something noone respectable would admit even watching a recorded clip of, unless it's as something to deride and lament.
However, Chess was invented as basically just a strategy game, nothing more, nothing less. The original names of the pieces closely reflected actual units used in the field at the time. E.g., infantry, war elephants, etc. In fact, originally a 4 player strategy game, with each player starting on one of the 4 edges of the table with half the pieces one side has nowadays. Except they had a major problem finding 4 players all the time, so it got reduced to two, and each player took two of the former armies. One of the Kings got renamed to Grand Vizier in the process and given the nastiest abilities in the game. (The Queen was little more than the King's personal slave back then in that part of the world, so she didn't get to star in a war game. That's also how come a foot soldier, presumably male, can be promoted to Queen: the original promotion was to Vizier, not marrying the King. The European piece names, like Queen or Bishop, came much later.) So basically what we have is a game that at the origin was no better or worse than nowadays the WW2 strategy or wargame of your choice.
The list goes on and on, and doesn't only include cultural things. E.g., coffee, which nowadays most of us nerds pretty much live on, stirred some great protests when it got introduced, e.g., in London. AFAIK some ladies' organization even went as far as to argue that it makes the men impotent.
That's all there is to it. Some things are seen as socially acceptable or "culture" just because they've been around longer. There'll always be a bunch of people who make it their life's mission to preach that everything old is good, just because it's old, and anything new is crap, just because it's new. And not only old people. There'll always be a bunch of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) who'll side with what looks fashionable just because they want to look fashionable and cultivated too.
And this is really all you see here too. There's no need to assume some conspiracy when an old-fart movie-buff argues that games are crap and movies are culture.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What percentage of literature produced today will still be read in 500 years? Not much, I'm guessing. And publishing sensation Dan Brown sure as hell isn't going to be - unless post-humans want to marvel at our primitiveness.
And, oh yeah, Shakespeare also had the little advantage of thousands of years of written tradition behind him - stories being told on paper, and oral epics before that. Generations of humans perfecting the art. No way could Shakespeare have innovated so much without that history: every writer learns by reading, copying, branching out on his own.
How long has videogaming been perfecting its art? Thirty years.
Finally, one huge but....TETRIS! Anyone who thinks that Tetris, the most perfect game of all time, is immortal. It isn't going anywhere. Gameboy Advanceolution 2500 is going to let us spin blocks with the power of thought, no question.
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Also, I disagree with everything on your list except Silent Hill.
Enlighten me (seriously - I've never played it) - what was so groundbreaking about Super Mario 64?
A Mind Forever Voyaging has to be on that list.
This comment does not exist.
Ok, the word "conspiracy" was the wrong one to use there, but still, you get the idea. I won't deny that he _might_ have financial interests there, but I'm just saying that he _might_ just be genuinely that retarded. He _might_ just be an arrogant snob genuinely resisting all that's new and threatening to his elitist view of the world.
People can act just as retarded -- if not even more retarded -- for ego masturbation reasons (think "I'm elite because I watch artsy pretentious movies, you're all a bunch of uneducated barbarians because you play Planescape Torment") as others do for financial reasons. When someone's self-esteem is based on being holier (or more cultivated) than thou, they can defend that premise to death, because accepting the alternative can be more devastating than death.
Which of them it really is, we'll probably never know. Maybe a little of both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Games are fun. They're diverting and enjoyable pastimes. Sometimes they can provoke thought, other times they can be pure adrenaline-fests.
What they're generally not, though, is art.
At least, not at the level of Shakespeare. One person's art is another person's garbage, but you'll find the proportion of people prepared to state that Shakespeare and other works of literature are Art with a capital 'A' than you'll find people who actually play pretty much any single game on Earth. You think ten million people is a lot of gamers? Try a few hundred million readers.
When books have gone the way of clay tablets, works of literature will still exist. Shakespeare builds upon earlier works, which themselves build upon earlier works. New authors take existing themes and expand them in some area, or re-tell them for a new generation. The result is that books we now consider great works of literature are books that mean something, that capture some piece of Humanity or show us who we are.
Games don't do that. That's not a criticism - they generally don't set out to do that. A good game entertains first and foremost (like a good book) but the appeal wanes over time. The games I loved twenty years ago on the ZX Spectrum don't seem quite so thrilling now, but the same books my great grandfather read are every bit as relevant today.
Well, the literature at any rate.
I love video games as much as anyone. My hobby is writing RPGs, so a lot of my spare time is spent on that side of them. I'll play Halo-x and enjoy the plot (although not as much as Marathon, but sometimes you have to let things go), or Unreal 200x and enjoy the visuals. I'll look at boxes for Doom-n and wonder when they'll release the game instead of the tech demo. I'll get Oblivion soon-ish, and probably a few others before the year ends. I look for enjoyment in these games, and I generally get it.
I don't look for meaning, and they don't offer any.
...essentially, that a medium substantially the same as paper would be around forever. Text is a remarkably efficient way of storing information, give or take, and can be reproduced on many two-dimensional mediums with ease (that ease factor going up steadily for the past 3000 years), and seeing that it is so efficient, and seeing that nearly all of humanity's information-product is in written form (hence a huge investment), it is not likely to go away anytime soon. Now, of course it is likely there will be another major hard-copy-material improvement soon analogous to the papyrus-parchment-paper evolution. But writing (on 'paper') is, I think, pretty much here to stay.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
By extension of your logic, the Mona Lisa is only art because it's on canvas. Would it be any less beautiful if it was created on a tablet PC? Would Michelangelo's eye for the human anatomy be any less impressive if David was a model of polygons? For that matter, would Hamlet be any less art if it were an ebook?
Shortly: yes, yes, and no. The medium can often have an impact on the message. Anyone who has been to an art museum knows that it is quite a different experience seeing a painting in person than it is to see a reproduction, either electronic or physical. Michelangelo's eye, and not incidentally his craft, are particularly impressive because he used the tools at his disposal (which do not give themselves as readily to accuracy as manifold polygons) and crafted an enduring physical representation, not a mere picture. I'll give you the Shakespeare only because it is art primarily when it is performed (and so its written medium doesn't much matter), but I would add that a Shakespearean play is much different acted on a stage than on the siver screen or on television.
The value of some work of art is not merely in the data trapped in the piece but also the entire context of the piece, which includes its medium and its creator (and his/her craft).
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
SMB64 was the first 3D platformer (or at least the first one recognized as worth playing). The analog control of the N64's controller was the perfect way of interfacing with a character in a virtual 3D world.
It's an excellent representation of hardware designed around a software engineers desires.
Personally, I see the potential to make the same analogy for the Revolution. Especially since MS and Sony seem to prefer putting the cart in front of the horse...
Are you fucking kidding me?!?! It's more rare to see a RPG that *DOESN'T* make you play the good guy.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
To someone who dismisses artistic works because they do not entertain him as much as his television does?
Shakespeare's plays were never published in his lifetime.
On the contrary, the majority of his plays were published in his lifetime, and often very soon after they were first written. Hamlet, for example, was probably written some time between 1599 and 1601: the first authorised printed edition was published in 1604, at most 5 years after the work was written, and some 12 years before Shakespeare's death.
(Hamlet is an interesting example, actually, because it's thought to be a remake of a previous play by someone else, which was probably less than 10 years old when Shakespeare wrote his version. Try doing something like that today, and see how long it takes for the lawsuit to arrive...)
The idea that plays could be read for pleasure, that English drama was something more than disposable popular entertainment scarcely exists before the death of Shakespeare.
This is also incorrect. Printed playscripts were extremely popular within Shakespeare's own lifetime, as witness the vast number of unauthorised editions of his plays (the first pirated Hamlet appeared in 1603, a year before the first authorised edition). Nobody would have gone to the considerable expense of printing a text that they did not expect to sell, and they did not sell these playscripts to other acting companies.
In future, please consider doing a little basic fact-checking before you stand up and start pretending to be an expert.
A lot of the early movies are almost unwatchable nowadays. While Laurel and Hardy have aged well a lot of earlier movies just don't work anymore with todays audiences and are rotting away in archives.
As for shakespeare himself, I doubt he was the only playwright of his age. So where are the works of all those others? Justly or unjustly forgotten?
As with any art form games will have a lot of crud that may excite people at the time but is ultimatly forgotten in the long run. This is nothing new. People have produced art for thousands of years yet only a tiny part of it is known let alone still enjoyed. Why should games be any different?
If you want to judge games by their longivety then take games that have been with us for a couple of decades. Games like pong. Oh, but modern versions of pong are not exact copies of the original? Well neither are most productions of shakespear exact copies of the original. Most wouldn't be able to understand it.
Frankly I don't know if pong or tetris like games will still be played in 500 years time. Games are an active form of art, not passive. They have the element of technology that forces them to change. We don't still play the same game of tennis or soccor or golf as it was played 100 years ago.
Then again, how many of you seen shakespeare in the theater by candlelight vs in the movie theather? Just because the GTA in 500 years will be on a holodeck does that not make it the same piece of art? Same as shakespeare on the silverscreen is the same art as on stage?
Then again who cares it is art, art sits unloved in museums. Does the game industry really want that to happen?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why do you have to compare games to the greatest playwright in history? Plenty of plays and poems and paintings produced over millenia have been long forgotten, only the finest last. Video games have been around for a few decades, why expect the Hamlet of video games to have been made by now? Were the finest works of literature written 20 years after the invention of the written language? (The answer is no by the way.)
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Ico, Rez and Shadow of the Colossus... surprised you forgot them, they are pretty much the definitive arguments for the "games as art" crew.
You can learn a lot when you read someone's posts. They may have perspective or knowledge you haven't yet become privy to. That's one of the things I like about this site, you can really learn from a wide variety of people things you would otherwise never come across! It's great, it really is. Long story short, you should read people's posts -- especially before responding!
Why do I bring this up? Because you quite obviously didn't read my post. I didn't dispute that there are useful categorizations that put Shakespeare's English in the same category as what people speak today, i.e., that we and he spoke "modern English". The whole point of my posts was to criticize the hyperbole going on when people try to express this or similar ideas. The GGP said that 90% is "identical" to what we speak today. Yet it's not. And it's important that we critically evaluate such statements before they become "true" by force of repitition.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
SMB64 was the first 3D platformer (or at least the first one recognized as worth playing). The analog control of the N64's controller was the perfect way of interfacing with a character in a virtual 3D world.
He pretty much said it. It wasn't perfect; there were some camera isues, and after playing Ocarina of Time it's definitely hard to go back to Mario 64. But at the time there was no 3D platformer that even came close to Mario 64, and it took awhile for it to be significantly surpassed. I'm not sure if it's inaccurate to say that Mario 64 created the genre by showing us what kind of things we could do!
My stupid web site
seriously, ebert gives his "thumbs up" aproval to any old garbage film these days. we may not be playing metal gear, or tekken tag 500 years from now, but we'll also probably not be watching any modern day films, either.
I predict, however, that 500 years from now, there will still be a "madden football" every year. however, they'll just call it "madden" and "football" out of habit, as in 500 years, nobody will have any clue who "madden" is, or why the game of "football" doesn't involve people kicking a round white ball with black pentagons painted on it.
The one that spawned your devil soul! I was responding to both you and one of the replies to you and mistakenly labeled it 'parent' when I meant 'grandparent'. His (her?) point was indeed the one I pointed out. Sorry for the confusion.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Even if technology wasn't an issue...
Shakespeare wasn't even close to the first twenty five years of plays as a medium. Given the obvious Illiad, he wasn't even in the first twenty five hundred years of plays.
To liken the incredibly young concept of computer games to the already tens of centuries old concept of plays in Shakespeare's time is a little unfair.
Imagine if we could go back to thirty years after the first guy came up with "drama". We'd likely find nothing more advanced than, "Ug kills a sabertooth." Not exactly a classic that's been enjoyed through the ages.
Look at the first thirty years of motion pictures. We had classics like: "Oooh look, a steamtrain", "Horse running", etc. Even attempts at taking the existing notions of drama and applying them to the new medium don't really exist except for film historians today - just as even the best attempts to apply plot and character to modern games likely won't exist for anyone except game historians in another hundred years.
On one level, this seems to support Ebert - Modern games are primative compared to established media and perhaps not a fully evolved art form.
Then again, Ebert wrote, "But for most games, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."...
True. And the same can be said of the first thirty years of his beloved medium of film. Fortunately for him, people didn't give up on film because the first thirty years wasn't yet a fully evolved art form - they kept with it and great pieces of art like Citizen Kane or The Godfather got to be made in time.
Should we have abandonned drama because "Ug kills a sabertooth" wasn't deeply evolved art? Should we have abandonned literature because the first scratches on clay weren't deeply literary? Should we have abandonned painting because the animals on cave walls weren't evocative enough? Should we have abandonned photography because stiff looking over posed people weren't art? Should we have abandonned film because it didn't achieve art in its first 30 years?
If the answer to all of those is an emphatic "no" - it strikes me as remarkably short sighted for Ebert to be glad people invested the time to evolve those mediums but regards computer games as nothing but a loss of precious hours that should be better spent elsewhere.