Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
What about a mod for GTA that has the characters enacting Hamlet?
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?
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...
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.
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.