Revenge Of The Highbrow Games

simoniker writes "In the follow-up to last month's popular 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?' feature, The Designer's Notebook author Ernest Adams responds to the wealth of feedback submitted by further examining what a 'Highbrow Game' might be, and categorizing the potential audience for such a product." From the article: "Several people pointed out that much of what we see as high culture achieved that status because it's old. Longevity imbues a work of art with respectability regardless of its original purpose — and of course, time tends to weed out the inferior works. For every Mozart there are dozens of classical composers who went to their graves and are forgotten."

Comments

The Natural Evolution of Games

[MiceHead]

"Great Works" in video games will come about as a result of natural evolution in game design. Right now, we're strongly focused on visual aesthetics -- we haven't yet achieved photorealism, so every step towards that is exciting. (That's not to diminish the importance of gameplay -- but I liked UT2004 over UT because it was prettier, for one.) But once we achieve that goal, gamers will say, "hey, it's time for something new." Designers will likely branch out and try to create interesting games in other ways -- compelling unrealistic/surrealistic aesthetics; new and interesting modes of gameplay; and (why not?) attention to "serious subject matter with cultural implications."

But I don't think we're through with the "flash" phase yet. Photorealism is still new and interesting to most of us -- and players still buy games for their graphical splendor. Once that stops happening, developers will really start experimenting -- after all, how else are we going to get your money?

(BTW, did anyone see Ernest Adams talk in Worcester yesterday? I missed it, but it must have been great.) _______________________________
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Re:The Natural Evolution of Games

[pNutz]

KOTOR and Jade Empire?

That's our highbrow? That's pulp. They're both fun games, but one has an anime-level of maturity and the other is, well, Star Wars.

it may very well be that there's no such thing as a "highbrow" game, and the closest gaming will get would be "art house".

Arthouse is good. I'd settle with arthouse for now. Unfortunately, most games don't want to persue anything that might force players to think too much, make decisions that will have any lasting effect on the gameworld (Oblivion, et al.), challenge their perceptions of women and minorities (too--many examples--overload--), or present clever alternatives to violent solutions. Having all of these things still wouldn't make a game highbrow, it would just diminish the 15-year-old mentality (chicks, blood, easy). Investing in decent dialog systems or decent writers (probably the best solution for making the games, well, arthouse) would certainly be a start. There's no overriding trend or inherent unmarketability that's keeping this from happening. The industry is too greedy, cowardly, and incompetent to make such things happen. Indie developers are too underfunded. There's no Miramax/Lion's Gate level of big-studio-arthouse. There's nothing.

Welcome to hell. We'll be here a while.

Personally

[TubeSteak]

I'd consider all the hardcore flight sims & turn-by-turn strategy games to be the equivalent of 'highbrow' gaming.

It isn't for everyone.
It isn't light weight.
You have to invest a lot of time/money/mental energy
etc

OTOH, you can claim that they're very narrow niches... but that is what 'highbrow' stuff is nowadays. Though normally something has to be expensive to create exclusivity.

Definition of "Highbrow"

[Jerf]

Previously, I complained that he left the definition of "highbrow" totally underspecified. I am amused to see this quote:

Apart from the Merchant Ivory analogy, I deliberately left the definition of "highbrow" rather vague, partly because I wanted to see what interpretation my readers would put on it.

A valid idea, but he should have said he was using a vague definition up-front. (I do it often myself, so I know it can be done without also destroying the ability to make a point.)

Here, I'm going to grump a little about another underlying assumption this guy seems to be taking axiomatically, which is that there are no games that have been high-brow yet. Be sure you understand what an "axiom" is: It is something you take as given to be true and bend the rest of your argument around. Axioms can not really be "wrong". The question is, does the implications of the axiom correspond to the real world in a useful or enlightening way?

My problem with taking this axiomatically is I think it sort of ends up begging the question he's trying to pose. If he actually took the time to formulate a definition of "high-brow", he could almost certainly find a game that matched the definition, which would wreck his point. Odds are, it would be one of the games he mentioned. Instead, he seems to simply take it as given that there have been no truly high-brow games.

I'm not certain that this "highbrow" adjective he's trying to develop is a useful distinction. (Note: The entire purpose of an adjective is to provide a useful distinction, between the nouns that possess the distinction and those that don't, with the obvious extension into fuzzy logic.) It splits the set of all of the thousands of existing games into two sets: "Lowbrow", containing all of them, and "highbrow", containing none of them. At the moment, this is the very definition of a useless adjective, and if nothing has met his bar yet (with the possible exception of a currently-unattainable technology component), nothing is going to.

(Note: While he doesn't state that he is using this axiom, I infer it from the previous paragraph; the best way to explain his tossing out every game in existence is that he axiomatically assumed none of them meet the bar. He claims it's because we're not there yet; I'm disputing this claim and claiming he stacked the deck from the get-go.)

Re:Highbrow games?

[Control Group]

By masochists, maybe.

Chris Crawford tried...

[jesup]

Chris Crawford tried for a "highbrow" commercial game with "Balance of Power" in 1984-1986, an "Un-war" game about thermonuclear cold (and hot) war. He wrote a book about it later, and this experience lead to the founding of the first (that I know of) newsletter for computer game designers, and then to the founding of the Computer Game Developer's Conference, still running today.

Highbrow games can't include gameplay?

[jchenx]

I'd have to say that I agree with much of his article. Most of the titles and genres that people suggested are games I would agree aren't highbrow. But I think some games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus sure come close. Yet, the author disagrees because it includes gameplay ...

From the article:

Games that were visually or thematically innovative. By far the most frequently mentioned games were Myst, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. Other examples included Rez, American McGee's Alice, the Oddworld series, Grim Fandango and Bad Mojo (a third-person crawler; you play the role of a cockroach). I'm all for more of this, no question. Whether or not an innovative game is highbrow depends partially on the extent to which it avoids clichés of the medium. ICO was beautiful, unusual, and moving, but it still involved an awful lot of running, climbing, and whacking things with a stick.

That last sentence bothers me. Running, climbing, and "whacking things" is general requirement for many games. That's what makes it interactive entertainment. Is it a cliché of the medium? Sure, but frankly, there's a lot of clichés that even highbrow movies and literature have as well. You could argue there are always "wasted" and "throwaway" scenes and passages, although some may argue that those are just elements of the medium.