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Katamari Damacy - A Critique
Beth A. Dillon writes "In this Game Career Guide feature, Katamari Damacy — A Critique: Part One, Ryan Stancl argues for game criticism in part one of a three part series on Katamari Damacy, this week featuring Biographical and New Critical forms of analysis." From the article: "Video games now, more than ever, need to be not just reviewed, but critiqued, because of their negative image in the press, in politics, in the general public, and quite simply because they are so ripe for critiquing. Games aren't just for kids anymore, and it's not because of the sex and violence. Over the next few weeks I will be introducing you to eight schools of criticism - Biographical, New Critical, Marxist, Structural, Jungian, Psychoanalytical, Feminist, and Post-Colonial - giving a little history behind each, and showing how they can be used to critique the video game Katamari Damacy for the PlayStation 2."
I can see the intellectual exercise of critiquing a game according to any number of schools of thought. What I don't get is for whom is such critique necessary?
The gaming audience isn't really interested in anything but a straight review. Your politicians aren't interested in anything beyond general conversation about the negative effects of games.
Maybe your soc or psych professor wants to hear about it, but I doubt there's anything to say that hasn't been said before about games.
I don't mean to be down on this, but it just seems like an utter waste of time and effort. There just doesn't seem to be a payoff here.
"Woo, tangent."
This article is TOILET PAPER.
Clearly the King of All Cosmos represents the "man", screwing up royally, and making the Prince (mouse sized) fix his mistakes, by creating a bigger and bigger ball of the proletariat. This clearly glorifies bailing out the powerful, sticking it to the little guy to rectify the mistakes of 'the man'. The message of the game is 'be a good little consumer'. This game should be banned at all costs. It is just the man keeping us down.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Calamari *IS* a delicacy...I don't know why someone would want to criticize that. ...nevermind...
Oh, wait...I read the headline wrong.
yeah, Anonymous coward -1 offtopic
Maybe you don't have enough RAM, but here you go:
def doesAnyoneCare():
return False
(Maybe the last one is performed by a French guy?)
Maybe a little bigger next time?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I told you that a liberal arts degree wasn't a waste! Do you know where my McDonalds shirt is?
> "Video games now, more than ever, need to be not just reviewed, but critiqued, because of their negative image in the press, in politics, in the general public,
Yes. Subjecting Far Cry to deconstructionist critique is the sure way to gain widespread public acceptance.
Let's all talk about fracturing Katamari Damacy along it's natural fault lines and reading the subtext underneath it! It'll be so much fun!
The author has clearly either run out of reasonable things to think about, or is still in or has just gotten out of university, which is the only place anyone actually thinks these things have any relevance.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
... is, is it FUN?
If a game doesn't have that, it doesn't matter what philosophical, political, biological, cultural viewpoints it presents.
--
Game Design is about the unholy trinity: Abstraction, Logicalness/Consistency, Convenience
Unfortunately, far too mamy players are argueing about the wrong thing, usually the red herring of realism. If you favor realism over abstraction, you have a simulator, not a game.
I've got only one real argument with this guy's point about why games need to be critiqued. A game should be worthy of critique rather than review. For example, critique of Katamary Damacy might be intellectually stimulating for the writer and fans of Katamary Damacy, but the game itself does nothing that deserves critique. It's the equivolent of critiquing Zoolander.
The point of videogames is almost solely as entertainment, and there's very few games that go beyond that. A game like Shadow of the Colossus would merit critique in opinion because it creates a unique universe, with mythology, and presents classically inspired questions of the nature of heroism. NBA Ballers, on the otherhand, doesn't need any critique.
--What, you ain't know about them country fried sessions?
There really is only one measure of a game. That is the profit to the manufacturer.
All soci-whatever-isms are taken up by the market behavior.
End consumer, store positioning and "culture reaction" are all taken in by the final sales.
Wether the game feeds violence, care-bear-ishness or whatever.
I disagree with the above posters. I remember when the slashdot community got in a big huff each time Ebert questioned the status of videogames as art. Guess what art does? It gets critiqued. Literature, painting, theater, sculpture all do. Recently(the past few decades) have seen movies and, to a much lesser degree, television have become viable subjects of critique. So why not video games? Not all games are purely entertainment to occupy your time. If they were, the majority of games would be the simply puzzle games like solitaire and their ilk, games that most people it seems on slashdot scoff at as "not real games." Games usually tell a narrative whether obvious or not. Myst wasn't just a set of puzzles disconnected from each other. It was a series of puzzles that both helped unlock parts of a story and were part of the story themselves. Another, perhaps less obvious example, is Contra. You're not just a "thing" with a gun shooting other "things." You're a commando fighting soldiers and aliens. Level progression tells you you're fighting in some overall picture. Even without narrative, you like certain games and not others, and I don't mean quality alone. I've liked some 9/10 games and not others. Why? Because of some aesthetic response that merits examining. When we examine games critically we can better understand, perhaps, the mechanics of enjoying a game. Then hopefully, we put that to use and make more enjoyable games. The article in the end I take as a first step towards this aim, though I don't necessarily like its analysis, though maybe because I've always been more of a historical/marxist/political reader when it came to my undergrad thesis.
-- Maybe this is all Takahashi thinks is going on, or perhaps this is all he wants the critic to believe is going on, but the truth is, there is so much more - to not only this game, but every work of art out there, waiting for the viewer to unlock.
If the artist claims there is nothing else going on and the viewer insists that there is something else going on is it not possible that the viewer is creating hidden meanings to fulfill their own desires? Making something of nothing?
-- The critic then misses all the subtleties, the deeper meanings, completely ignoring the work of art itself in the most extreme cases.
At this point the critique is no longer a critique. It is now its own piece which simply references a work in order to provide its own existance. It has lost the plot.
-- For example, in terms of Katamari Damacy, the King of All Cosmos talks in record scratches because the player, the mere mortal, could never understand the words of a god. The text is laid out of what he's saying for the player only because the Prince, who the player is playing as, his son, a demigod, can understand him.
Or maybe it's because the game was done on the cheap and they didn't want to record audio tracks for all the languages - maybe they just wanted to do text.
-- The weirdness of the words spoken by the King (and the majority of the other characters in the game) could be boiled down to bad translation, but in a game that's this deep, there's no way. Some of the dialogue will be discussed below in relation to other schools of thought.
He's - rolling - a - ball - around. Sooooo deep.
-- Again, those were just two small New Critiques. An exhaustive list would be near-impossible to compile and then put back together again to create a deeper meaning for the work, for there are just far too many things that are part of the overall package of a video game.
Exactly, you are fabricating a deeper meaning which did not exist before you began your critique.
The author of the critique did the work claiming game critiques have never been done. I say even after this piece of work a game critique still has never been done.
Review - a general survey of something, esp. in words; a report or account of something
Critique - a criticism or critical comment on some problem, subject, etc
What the author has created here is neither. It is in fact a fabrication of hidden meanings, non of which were intended by the creator. And this is my least favorite form of writing. The same is done with art as famous as the Mona Lisa. It's a picture of a woman with a smirk. Why does there have to be a deeper meaning?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
It would actually yield a lot more than that if the author stuck to one type of critique and extended it for several pages, instead of expending so much effort explaining the critique and then throwing out two superficial paragraphs, or a bunch of quotes, to apply it to the game. He writes as if nobody is familiar with these styles of critique (common in English programs, if not necessarily among the Slashdot crowd), but more troublingly, he writes as if no one has ever critiqued games before (which is false). Hopefully, the next installment will be somewhat less superficial and more involved. Good, interesting critique -- e.g. Orwell in his essays, or Roland Barthes in "Mythologies," or anything by Walter Benjamin (who is mentioned in the bibliography), can be a joy to read. They tend to go on for many interesting pages.
I'm pretty sure there has been critique of video games going back at least as far as Zork and possibly earlier. (Interactive fiction and hypertext were hotly debated topics among certain academics in the 1980s.) I get the sense that someone didn't do his homework... It's an admirable attempt to get Slashdotters interested in these discussions, but the laziness of it all will make them even more contemptuous of English majors. If you're barely going to do it, why do it at all?
That's pretty much genius right there. In one stroke, he connected the classic metaphor in the central text of Western thought (the cave in Plato's Republic) to the actual lives of millions of people around the world today. In other words, he showed that what was a philosophical thought experiment is now a concrete reality. My only beef with the text is that I didn't write it...
That said, there's still a lot of work to do to make gaming theory into a solid discipline. Gameology is a good site to go to watch that process in action. What I find most exciting about the potential for the discipline is that gaming makes the process of creating new worlds concrete and observable, which allows us to gain better insight into exactly what happens when we interact with a) the real world b) other mental abstractions.
Well, think of it this way: if you see Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as a satire, you'll get a real kick out of it. If you see it as an indoctrination into a life of crime, you may be wary that other people are playing it. An in-depth critique of the sort the author seems to want to apply could shed some light on the matter, and perhaps determine the creators' intent, or whether GTA:VC is "a good thing" in terms of the goals of one or another critical community (e.g. Marxists, who might take issue with the game's anarcho-capitalism). I don't know much about Katamari Damacy but I don't see why the same sense of academic study can't apply to it.
Give a hoot, read a book!
While I'm disappointed that I have to wait to read the other two parts of this critique, I'm glad it's being posted at all. This is a game worth in-depth analysis.
One of my favourite aspects of video games is the representation of the real world. Many people are enthusiastic about this aspect of gaming but most don't share my take on the subject. I wouldn't be a Slashdotter if I wasn't wowed by pixel shaders and bump mapping and advanced AI, but what really fascinates me is the artistic representation of reality - the statement made about our world facilitated by creative use of limited resources.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is one of the greatest contenders in this field as its depiction of a fictional California-esque state is totally astounding, replete with buildings, streets, varied geography, natural wonders, rolling landscapes, and all juxtaposed by a pissed-off populace. There's a great scene in Lucasarts' Grim Fandango where Manny Calavera, protagonist and reaper, travels to the realm of the living to collect the souls of recently poisoned fast food patrons, and the real world is quite a ridiculous caricature that is completely alien through the eyes of residents of the land of the dead.
Katamari Damacy is unique in that the protagonists are not human at all, but permanent residents of deep space. To The King of All Cosmos and The Prince, Earth is one planet of millions, but it is not just any planet. The Earth is populated by excitable little people who have absolutely littered their entire planet with stuff, and it is this stuff that makes Earth a suitable place to collect materials to repopulate space with stars.
Stuff here, stuff there, stuff everywhere! Not only can anything smaller than your katamari be rolled-up and added to the clump, but every collected item can later be examined replete with a concise but innocently baffling description in the limited omniscient of the space-faring royal family. Some such descriptions of the hundreds upon hundreds of ordinary objects and creatures include:
Coconut Crab -- "A crab with strong claws. It doesn't look anything like a coconut at all..."
Peach -- "A butt-shaped fruit that is more tasty than butts."
Faucet -- "Hot and cold water comes out of the same place. We are amazed."
Loud Momma -- "Her voice is loud and when she laughs, babies start screaming."
This is why the game is deserving of critique - because the game itself is a critique of urban civilization. It patently points out how much more complex and frivolous and ludicrous our lifestyle is compared to the orderly motion of the galactic ocean.
Furthermore, this analysis goes to show how effective the game is at alleviating stress! Consider all the things you worry about in a day - the cost of living, pollution, rush hour traffic, long lines, crime, the environment, the fact that you'll never visit all the places you want to see, etc. All these things become insignificant in Katamari Damacy. You needn't worry about any issues - any objects - larger than your katamari until later on because for now they are simply obstacles, and anything smaller is all but an insignificant bump. To The Prince, ignorance is bliss. All that matters is to keep on rolling. Put your frustrations aside, block out all unneccesary data, and just keep on rolling. Just push and push, your katamari grows and grows, and before you know it you're towering over people and cars and buildings and mountains until the very curvature of the planet is a minute detail of the great cosmic tapestry.
There are a million possible interpretations of this depiction of reality. One could argue that the game is an advocate of Buddhism, declaring earthly luxuries as mere white noise. Or pe
I'd expect lots of hidden meanings. For example, look where long coding hours combined with thoughts of "love for pet bunny" + "maybe I'll get to date a girl someday" led these game coders: http://www.ffinsider.net/ff12/pix/viera.jpg
"Gameology" ( http://www.gameology.org/ ) seems to be about on the same level as "assology" ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ass ology ).
A critique of this game at this point is pretty far behind the times and not really all that relevant now that there have already been two additional iterations released since then (We Love Katamari & Me and My Katamari). If anything, the sequels are in more need of critiquing than the original. There is much wrong in the sequels that have a direct negative effect over the gaming experience, when compared to the original Katamari Damacy.
The author should probably start focusing attention on the new "innovative" games, like Okami and Loco Roco, rather than drudging up old news about an otherwise great game.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I could go news, and I will HAHA! You thought there was another point of view? Honestly though it's interesting in the fact it's complete bull.
Honestly you can critique any game this way and find absurd things, but the fact is most games arn't art. People don't labor over every line of code and such these "critiques" are more about the player or critiquer's own opinions on the game. When designing a game there's a vision, but most of the time the vision is "roll stuff up, have fun" "Kill large groups of enemies" Just because a game has text doesn't mean they meant anything by it. They have record scratches and it's a deep meaning for the talking of a god to a player? WTF?
In the end it boils down to people who call games "art" only speak of their games at best. Even then they are normally talking about the graphics, there's no attention to detail in games at least not to the level that critiques are needed to understand them.
I think the question you're opening up here is not, "Why would anyone go to such overexaggerated critiques for videogames?" but more, "Why would people go to such overexaggerated critiques for anything?" Such masturbatory criticisms are usually written for a specific audience - for people who like to read critiques. Naturally, those people want to see such things for everything...
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
It's called "pretentious".
Come on people... they're video games. Escapes from reality. An interactive entertainment medium.
We don't need those types of critiques for games. Sure, there are literary critiques and movie critiques... but I find that more often than not, critiquing pieces of art can become over the top and obsessed with their own virtuoso. Additionally, what the critics may think is a masterpiece may be trash to me, and vice versa.
Is there a Pseudointellectual kind as well?
Rob
This is a far cry from Roland Barthes!!
If you go actually RTFA, you'd see that he spends fairly little time actually critiquing the game, giving only a few examples of how KD might be critiqued in that style/school. If you, like me, got excited at the post's title, look elsewhere.
I've been saying for years that the last great platforms were the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Neo Geo, where fun games were prized over realistic gritty violence and hot coffee.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
The reason he probably chose this game is because it's something that everyone is familiar with, it's off-beat and interesting like any good art, and it's whimsical enough that no one will take it too seriously and get offended by the reviews when he takes on contorversial styles like Marxist and Feminist.
Incidentally, did anyone else read the New Criticism section and realize that they now had a name for all those hated, pretentious, fluffy critiques that make up nonsense from symbolic manipulation like some sort of postmodern augury? Yeah, me too; I hate those people.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").