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Why Are There No Highbrow Video Games?
simoniker writes "In his latest 'Designer's Notebook' question, columnist Ernest Adams asks a very simple question: are video games' lack of cultural credibility partly due to the fact that "we don't have any highbrow games"? Titled 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?', Adams asks: 'Almost every other entertainment medium has an elite form... We produce light popular entertainment, and light popular entertainment is trivial, disposable, and therefore culturally insignificant, at least so far as podunk city councilors and ill-advised state legislators are concerned.' Do games have an image problem compared to other popular media, and how do we fix it?"
You mean that they focus on emotional problems in a deep and meaningful manner?
People don't like to do that, they like to watch other people fail at doing that.
As far as high brow goes, we have Patrician, Total War, Civilization, and the Sims.
All of which offer some pretty interesting insights if you look deeply into them.
One of the largest factors is probably that in a book a grammatical mistake is something from the author that might lead you to think about something diffrently, a bug in a game totally spoils your ability to analyse the small points that are so important for real understanding of the artist.
We don't want good ones! Look at the reaction to Elephant's Dream - the plot of which covered an abstract look at the internet - on Slashdot. Total mockery. Even Wikipedia doesn't bother to mention the story.
Can you immagine the Slashdot comments if ED was used as the basis for a game, exploring the nature of the internet?
Couple that with the fact that naturally creative types are pushed away from/dont want to touch programming or the 'hard' subjects that go along with video game design and you end up with the situation we have today.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
These are EXACTLY the two games that came to mind for me, too. The problem with saying there are no highbrow games is that makes it seem like the author has seen them all... So maybe this is a stretch, but, who is to say a game like Rallisport Challenge 2 isn't highbrow?? First of all, its gorgeous and doesn't have anyone killing anyone else with a machette. And do you know what the bankroll of someone who is really into Rally racing is like? I mean if you can travel to another country or even another continent to see a race, you are not exactly sweating it.
Chess and Bridge come to mind. Those are two games that are often played by the literatti...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
But to be honest, I don't know if I can take somebody seriously who says something like 'Suppose the only music in all the world were rap or heavy metal.'
I mean, honestly, has the guy never heard of Saul Williams?
Hell, even Tupac wrote books of poetry, and with artists out there like Mos Def, Talib Qweli, Outkast, etc., it's hard to understand how somebody could use rap music collectively as an example of "low art".
But then again, given his examples of high art being the kind of things that wealthy white people put on tuxes to clap softly to, I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in what he has in mind.
High brow means "we're better than you are because of our choice of entertainment".
There are no high brow videogames because the people you think are the better people don't talk about how they're better because they play Y videogame instead of Z videogame.
In other words: STFU you pompous, pretentious snob.
Entertainment isn't high brow or low brow. Different people are entertained differently by different things and no one is better or worse because of their entertainment choices.
Whatever it may mean...
Let's face it, though, that the computer culture is, so far, a short one. It's a very new medium, unprecedented by anything it developed from that could be viewed as the "heritage" of it. Music developed during the ages. Even movies had their roots in theatres and plays. Computer games have nothing to draw from.
Thus they are not taken serious as a cultural element. One could argue that the junk that's currently sold as music is at best what fast food is to cooking, but there is "good" music, maybe it's a bit dated, but there are pieces of music that can be considered true art. And it needn't be something along the lines of Mozart or Beethoven. A lot of "pop music" is very capable of moving people, inspiring them, it had some serious impact on our life and it even had influence on politics and the way people see the world. I'm especially thinking about music from the peace movement in the 60s, for example. Most of it can be considered pop music, but it had a "message", it contained elements that are thought provoking, it's not just easy listening and entertaining.
Such precedents are missing in the computer games history. And now is maybe one of the worst moments to try something like that. Making games is costy. It's not like you can sit down in the basement with your friends and you strum your guitars 'til something with a message comes out. You need good people, with a lot of math and physics in their brains, and I do take a serious background in computer languages as granted, who spend a lot of time working out the game.
And then, nobody will buy it. It doesn't carter the fast food generation gamers, who want a quick, fun game to rush through and then go on to the next. And, as stated before, people who are looking for entertainment with depth, meaning and message are not looking for it in computer games.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> Is highbrow merely a synonym for "pretentious and boring"?
Sometimes it is, though it may be due to hypocrisy rather than intent. The culture of the elite is supposed to portray the best traits of humanity, its noblest and worthiest virtues, its most beautiful aspirations, and the perfection of taste. One might contrast this with the culture of the "proles", which tends to glorify mediocrity and small aspirations, encouraging its consumers to adhere to a "steady-state" life of simple wants, of "living for today", of thinking as little as possible, and generally enjoying what they have.
The danger of striving for perfection lies in the inability of some people to objectively judge their own abilities and achievements. The culture of the elite naturally incorporates the belief that a man can better himself, and unless this man knows what "better" means, he could simply assume he is already "better" than everyone else. These are the "highbrow" types that we normally call "prudes".
> Is highbrow something like "acquired taste"?
It is a taste acquired when a man acquires the set of moral values that goes with it.
> Is highbrow "difficult to understand"?
If you do not possess those moral values, then it is impossible to understand. Likewise in this situation, the "highbrow" type will find it impossible to understand your culture because he will not have your moral values.
There's a simple reason and it's to do with acceptance. Take for instance animation. Generally speaking Western cultures up until recently animation was considered a childish thing, because on the whole animation was made mainly for kids. If you look at Japan to take an obvious example, animation is not simply aimed at children, nor are comics. They are cross generation mediums which appeal to people in Japan of many ages. There isn't the same snobbery to animation by adults as there is here.
However our attitude towards animation is changing, in part due to the adult themed animations coming from Asia. With deep searching themes and adult discussions of sometimes very tough subjects these are certainly not Mickey goes to the beach animes.
It's the same with games. In the future games will gain a foothold among an adult audience. Our generation might be the one leading that assault, as we are so completely embedded in a gaming culture. However these things will take time. Don't expect it to take place over night.
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And it wasn't until "Birth of a Nation" (25 years later) that anyone even BEGAN to expand that medium's horizons.
While composing most of the elements that now make modern filmmaking, it would be more accurate to say that The Great Train Robbery was one of the first films to explore film as a long form different than drama (1903, so 13 years after). It utilized "parallel editing, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting" as well as pioneering the theory that the element of a film was a shot (as compared to a scene, the unit of a play, which dominated filmmaking thinking up until then).
One could also say that in this modern communication era where the length between flash and bang is much shorter and that it should be reflected in the maturation of a medium. There are Eisners for webcomics and humanities departments are embracing blogging and hypertext. While those are just extensions of existing media, they've still matured very quickly.
Of course I'm in the camp that what makes a game a game is a competitive element (either PvP or Player v. Machine) which is absent from art (even the interactive type). A game can be profound just as art can demand something of its audience but by needing to satisfy that element it is wholly seperate from art (unless using the most liberal use of the word where we could discuss the art of the fast ball or the art of running the pick and roll). But Merchant Ivory isn't the way to think about making better games. Merchant Ivory is just yuppie porn like Architecture Digest. "Highbrow" is what folks throw out when their only measure for entertainment is if it is something that "someone like me" should do. It is completely perpendicular to the concept of quality.
What is music when you despise all sound?
The problem is that "highbrow" is not defined
I agree with your point, but my theory...
I think "High Brow" means inaccessible. It's a socio-enconomical class marker; In many ways, it is often legitimate.
The upper socio-enconomic classes have more money to educate and entertain themselves. These people thus are introduced to a variety of forms and influences. Sometimes, allowing them to develop a more 'nuanced' taste. This has nothing to do with the person's natural abilities, which are equal across classes. This is all nurture.
The elite, now 'learnt', begin to take interest in different things. Everyone else 'below' this elite socio-economic class begin to follow suite because it is ingrained in us to 'improve' our socio-economic class. It's a bain hardest felt by the middle class.
So why 'dig' inaccessible things? Exclusivity is one yes. But these forms of art may also simply provide enjoyment to people who prefer to invest more into their enjoyment, and choose to do so in that fashion.
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"High Brow" activities aren't mutually exclusive with other activities. I enjoy going to the art museum, I enjoying reading, I enjoy theatre, and I enjoy video games. I'm sure there are plenty of others here who enjoy those activities as well. Enjoying something high brow doesn't require you to have a butler and live in an estate where you don't have to interact with the common man. In fact I used to play the violin, currently practice martial arts, and this weekend I put up drywall. Go figure, I'm not just a computer geek ready to be pigeonholed for my entire life. Sorry if this sounds a bit aggressive, but I dislike how people have the notion that someone can't cross boundaries. If you use computers you don't know how to use a hammer, you work on cars so you can't be intelligent, or you like video games so you can't be mature.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey popped into my head. There was also Shadow of Destiny for the PS2 which seems like it will never have a sequel.
Who are all of those people I see lined up at the symphony, bookstores and museums, Mario Mushrooms?
If you live in a place large enough for there to be people lined up at the symphony, bookstores, and museums -- a place large enough to HAVE a symphony or museums -- then you live in a place large enough that even if there's 5,000 people in attendance, that's still only a tiny tiny percentage of the city's entire population.
I would bet that Major League Baseball fills more seats in a single game day than all of the United States' orchestras do in an entire month. "Highbrow" pursuits are, simply put, not very popular compared to other pastimes. Why should video gaming be any different?
Rembrandt is a famous dutch artist and his "Nachtwacht" (nightwatch) is a classic. It is also a 100% commercial piece, made to order. So is the Mona Lisa and many other famous pieces of arts.
So what do we got in culture? Knob jokes and made to order artworks. Woopee! Most of the composers composed to the taste of the crowd being little different then say a current commercial rap artist. Art for the sake of money.
Yes there have been artists who worked for the sake of art. They usually died poor and early and miserable. By that standard EA should be producing future classics if only they made working conditions even worse.
There have been games wich have touched my emotion, the simplest is perhaps Planescape Torment but another game was a godsim game where you controlled the evolution of clay animation represented creatures. Ones that didn't meet your standards were mass killed with a nasty zap. At the same time I played it a tv docyu played on WW2 killing camps. That made me think. I don't think the game designers had it in mind but the game made a connect in my mind and that counts in my book.
Will in a 100 years time games like Planescape Torment or others still be remembered. Don't know. The point about classic art is that it still survives in roughly the same form. Music especially we can still listen to 1000 years later as long as someone keeps the notes save. But can we even today play games made a mere decade ago?
Games age badly. While pong survives because new versions are allowed with uptodate graphics a planescape torment just sits there with graphics that today just hurt the eyes.
No this isn't juse being shallow, nowadays shakespeare plays are no longer played with candlelight, we use modern stages, modern instruments and artworks have been cleaned up and restored.
But I agree with you, this guy is just pretentious. Merchant Ivory movies as high art? Then I got the game for you. Myst. Thanks for playing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Art is essentially a medium of communication, from the artist to the audience. The best art conveys feelings and notions which can not be conveyed with literal descriptive language alone. The interactive nature of gaming, almost by definition, excludes it from being regarded as an art form, beyond the creative trappings of the game's "eye candy" and music soundtrack.
This is a very sophisticated notion, and the greatest challenge for gaming designers and critics today. I do not agree with it, but it's not trivial to refute.
Part of the problem is that video games are not homogenous in an artistic sense. Most art forms are, and thus they can be placed in a fairly straightforward conceptual box: film consists of moving pictures and sound; music in essence consists of sound only; sculpture consists of arranged and constructed objects; literature consists of language only; etc.
A video game always contains music, and it may contain cinematic sequences, and it will certainly contain still images of some sort. Many games include some amount of text material and a story. Certainly all of these can be art in and of themselves, but they all have their own history, so it's tempting to strip them away and examine the game without these "tacked-on" elements.
There are only a few games which betray this notion with clarity, and many of these are not well known. Rez is the best example I know; while it is indeed futile to consider Rez without its music, the game also adds something that the music doesn't have on its own. (Go play Rez now, if you care about art. I'll wait.)
Games like Rez can be regarded as unique, though, if you consider the game side of the experience a mere hypnotic device designed to increase mental immersion and thus increase the effect of the music. Also, this example doesn't apply so easily to a game like Super Mario Bros. However, I feel it is a good starting point to show the fallacy of the notion that interactivity excludes artistry by definition.
To go from there, I argue that the nature of art in a video game in general is what I call the "constructed experience". Traditional art can discuss and portray what it's like to be a pirate, or a race-car driver, or a spider; video games aspire to replicate the experience itself, within various limitations.
Of course, the real-world experiences are more or less dull, so we throw in a princess or two to spice things up (just like painters rarely paint the many dull scenes that they would see). Actually, this has led to the more imaginative practice of inventing the experience out of whole cloth, so that you too can spend a day in the life of the Prince of All Cosmos as he rolls up anything and everything to make new stars. When we hear talk of "gameplay", this is what it means -- the creativity and hard work that goes into creating a meaningful and textured new experience for the player. In a great game, this communicates something more than mere "fun", and that is where the art is.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
It's all about market segmentation. The high brow market is not as large as the 15-25 year old males who want to see the movie on opening weekend. So you're upside is limited. On the other hand, it's cheap to produce films for them. Seriously, how much did Vanya on 42nd Street cost to make?
The sweet spot is a high end of the middlebrow segment, that will flock to a movie like Sense and Sensibility to see Ang Lee's take a novel they had to read in college. You don't blow huge amounts of money on post production, don't have any megastars unless they're anti-slumming for some artistic cred, in which case they aren't charging on the same payscale as they do for Titanic.
I'm not sure that there is an analgous way to produce a cheap, high brow game.
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I'm not going to read the article (it isn't "highbrow" enough for me), but maybe the point he should have made is that there aren't ENOUGH "highbrow" games. This is probably because of the high cost and low sales (considering the price) of video games and the relatively "lowbrow" demographic that they continually fall back on because it is cheaper and safer than chasing other groups of end users. So of course there isn't that much content there, because it's all being aimed at the lowest common denominator, which is often too low to even be common.
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I singled out Bach in my post for being particularly ingenious, and certainly some of the asethetic value of Bach's stuff can be appreciated without a prior explicit understanding of what's going on in the piece; I would submit to you, however, that your friends' musical backgrounds was closer to Bach than you might imagine. Rock and Alternative Rock borrow heavily from old blues, it is true, but also from Classical music, particularly its tonal structure, and also its peculiar use of meter (which is not present in a suprising number of other musical traditions), and some of the instruments would sound familiar...at least more familiar than, say a sitar, or liuqin (Chinese lute) which are based on different tonal scales.
If you were to play that same Bach piece to someone who grew up with a different tonal scale, like a 5-tone Chinese scale, I doubt you would get the same reaction as you did with your friends; the gap is far wider, and the music does not transmit emotion with any accuracy. I just (odd coincidence) finished reading an essay by Theodore Gracyk who describes an experiment he runs in his class every year, playing westerm music of various contexts and purposes and then playing eastern music of similar contexts and purposes; the students can easily pick out in the western styles which is meant to be somber and which joyous, which secular and which religious, but have no luck guessing what emotion or purpose is meant to be conveyed by the eastern works.
What I was trying to make clear in my post was that these sorts of cultural contexts (which are present in some extent even in popular music) frame our understanding of music and our appreciation of it; formal education and training reveals the explicit structuers behind the music and also helps to create a reservoir of experience with whcih to compare works and search for similarities.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
People are mentioning Civilization as an example of a high brow game, but it is mere beer-and-pretzel Gilbert and Sullivan compared to more intellectual games such as Imperialism (1997) -- an abstract game of 19th century strategy -- Europa Universalis II (2001) -- a wonderful game of 15th-19th century history with ~200 active countries and realistic diplomacy -- Crusader Kings (2004) -- a medieval dynasty simulator with inbreeding, inheritance, and assassination on a grand strategic map -- Victoria (2003) -- a seriously hardcore game of economy and realpolitik -- and Hearts of Iron II (2006) -- a WW2 war game of strategic envelopment, pincer movements, and blitzkrieg.
There are many other fine games, but these are the ones I think of when I think of sophisticated gameplay and claim to highbrow status.
My other body is also not wearing any.
I don't think the author was saying that we need a romance game; what the author meant was that we need more games with intellectual subtlety. Comics are an excellent example here: comics aren't lacking in technical skill. I'm currently studying art in college, and even though I may understand the intricacies of a Caravaggio or a Michelangelo painting, sometimes I'd rather just read Spawn. Comics aren't lacking in complex plotlines, either... there are many examples of fantastic writing in the comic-world.
The bottom line, though, is that true classics of any artform have layers upon layers of subtleties. There just aren't many examples of comics that are truly rich in intellectual value. From my own experience, I've found that most classical painting was done using very conventional, often uninspiring, subject matter. Look at the Mona Lisa- a standard portrait of a woman. Nothing exciting. What makes the Mona Lisa so amazing is the incredible subtlety and thought that went into the painting, and that isn't something you can pick up at a glance. A Spawn cover may look more interesting, but it pales in serious comparison.
So back to video games- there are many examples of intelligent, extremely well-executed video games out there. However, I don't see any games that are comparable to Bach or Rembrandt or Dickens. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are beautiful pieces of art, but beautiful doesn't necessarily mean "high brow".
"A mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to it's original dimensions." -a Super King Buffet fortune cookie
mmm... interesting.
Anyone remember Watchmen?. Moore and Gibbons' series played a big part in rehabilitating comics from being regarded as a junk medium. The made a point of using every literary device they knew in the series. They wanted a graphic novel that had every hallmark of a "proper" novel. Along with Art Speigleman's Maus and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, they changed the way that comics are regarded in the west.
On the other hand, Watchmen is as fine a superhero story as anyone is ever likely to read. They did it without abandoning the format or the conventions of the genre. So maybe we can find some similar fusion in the gaming world.
Is Gary Larson's The Far Side less than brilliant because it lacks plot development? Of course not. Nevertheless, it's possible to have a comic that works on many more levels than Larson's did - if only because of the restrictions of the one-panel format.
That's fair enough...
I think, ultimately, a computer game should aim to engage the player on all those levels. Which is to say it should have the involvement of Tetris, the depth of civ, the story of Planescape: Torment, the realism of Far Cry and in the process hit as many literary and dramatic benchmarks as it can.
Not becuase Tetris is a bad game - it isn't. But because we can take the medium so much further.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!