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Game/Movie Comparisons Raise Art Question Again
Via Game|Life, an article on the Variety site that sees something rather novel: a film writer defending games. Unhappy reviews of the film 300 sometimes cite the film's 'game-like' nature as a measure of it's poor quality, and Variety writer Ben Fritz calls those authors out on their poor grasp of modern media. Ron Gilbert, at the Grumpy Gamer site, has a few words of commentary on this issue. Coincidentally Gamasutra chose today to post a discussion of games as art which begins with the phrase "here we go again".
...just make you want to slap a guy. "It looks too much like a game" so what? It sure looks to me like its selling and I thought it was an awsome movie when I finally got to see it(it was sold out all weekend).
Back to the point though, what aversion do these people have against video games? Is it because they were fun? Is it because they didn't get to play them when they were little? Or maybe its because whole teams of artists of different kinds actually work together to make something that a normal person would look at more than once.
I just don't get it, a baby could take a crap in a diaper and these people would call it art, but if that diaper moves when you push a button...
FTA:300 is a vacuous film filled with bad dialog, stiff acting, a pointless one-dimensional plot and interchangeable characters that hardly deserve to be named in the script. The film barely has a first act and does nothing but drive to a preposterous conclusion led along by a sequence of ridiculous events. The Visuals are nothing more than technical masturbation. Simply put, 300 is the best damn film I've seen all year. I haven't had this much fun watching a movie in a long time. It's nice to see Hollywood is finally striving to be more likes games.
Ok, so in short, gamers as he sees it are only interested in the technical masturbation portion of what games are. IF that's true, then consoles that emphasize game play wouldn't be doing as well as a certain little industry darling that does is. But even if that's only about -gameplay- (as Wii games don't exactly have the best acting/plot), some of the most loved games out there have some incredible characters and/or plot. (textual or otherwise).
He totally misses the point, this movie was one for people who are looking for eye candy and visuals, not plot or well developed characters and script. There are games like this as well. For example, the difference between the Monkey Island series (amusing, somewhat witty script) and Doom 3. Implying that all games in the popular market in somewhat recent memory are terrible in terms of things that a typical movie-goer would find important only demonstrates an ignorance of what the over-21 year old gamer market really is looking for.
..has nothing to do with it being based on a game. It's based on a comic book (rather mediocre one imho) and it does a great job bringing the pictures and the story to life. Thus it succeeds in its aim and the people mentioned had obviously no idea what they were talking about. Spider-man is also a good example of a movie in which you could freeze at almost any frame and have a beautiful picture that could have been just like that in the comic book - that's skill, that's art!
That being said it seems "300" itself gets misunderstood by quite a few people, ostensibly because it has no accurate disclaimer at the beginning and most people are ignorant about the story and Greek/Persian history in general. It should be clear from viewing the first few scenes, that it is hardly a realistic depiction, but rather a fantastic (obviously biased) and embellished story told by a proud Spartan war veteran. The comic-like style is actually essential in pointing out this very fact.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Games must be fun, because Fun is the art. It's unfortunate that our language has such poor vocabulary for fun, because "fun" really encompasses a wide range of emotions that can't be found in cinema. What's dumb is to say that games should be like cinema; we have cinema to be cinema. Games should be fun; beyond fun there isn't a reason to make a game.
I guess this goes back to the days, not so long ago, where "fun" meant running around outside. If you want to be adult about this, consider Super Mario Bros. No plot, no characters, no story beyond "our princess is in another castle!" Yet gamers around the world will submit that as a defining moment in the art form, because it presented a new, fresh experience. Call this the Game as Experience Theory, if you will.
I don't have anything against story games, any more than I have anything against music videos. But when we talk about gameplay, there's a reason why Advance Wars is so great, while a game with the same plot, setting, and characters could just as easily be very bad, if it wasn't fun to play. The difference between the two is, in my view, quite deep. Often I think people believe it to be shallow due simply to ignorance. Take board games for example; a lot of people might look at Settlers of Catan and think "I could do that, it's easy, just some cards and some rules." In fact, it's very difficult, much like producing a great photograph.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
If the artist can intentionally provoke a specific emotional reaction in the viewer, it is art. The end.
+0 Meh
Freedom, shmeedom... that's not why I play games. Freedom isn't the only thing that games have to offer that other genres don't have. Or should I say, games offer a wide variety of different forms and varying levels of freedom, each of which, no other genre can do. I love cinema, I enjoy it a lot, I don't miss the opportunity to control the actions the main character has in the storyline, because identifying with an exquisitely-cratfted storyline is one of the main reasons why I watch movies, and it happens to be one of the main reasons why I play games, as well. But simply "not being able to control the story" doesn't make a game a movie, or any less reliavent.
There is no such thing as a movie that allows me to control the pacing, the camera angle, the position of the camera, and interact with the world in various ways. None of these things inherently call for variation of the overall plot, or character personalities. It is true that a game allows for a level of interaction that movies do not... but to what degree?
I, personally, don't play an RPG because I want to create a story, I play one because I want to be immersed in a finely crafted story, to a greater extent than a movie can deliver. I feel that society is becoming too full of itself, too arrogant to really listen to others, that even our storytelling must be our own. We want control, we want freedom... but at what cost? The cost of finely-crafted creative vision? We're no longer comfortable with sitting back and letting someone else make us do some serious thinking.
The bottom line is, we all have different interests. While I'd like games to be more than just "movies with button pressing to advance scenes." I don't want to sacrifice fine storytelling just to satisfy some amorphic need to control everything.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
"I believe that games would do better to become more 'movie-esque' than vice versa"
While games becoming "movie-esque" is good and necessary for some games, there is also going overboard like RPG's currently do. Final fantasy 12 for instance, is not my idea of good gaming. The game recieved rave reviews but all you did in the game was navigate and watch a bunch of dumb stuff. You were not even "in" the game, it was basically an navigation simulator. I do not play games to to just walk around and not be able to make choices about how and which movements I use to interact with my environment in a positive way. Now imagine if they automated a game like Gradius V or Ikaruga and you see the problems of basically passivizing games into movies rendered on a CPU. Not my idea of "gaming".
More and more games are being dumbed down to the point of the game being a movie rendered in 3D on a computer with little to no interactivity. The great things about games is the interactivity. Show me how making Civilziation 4 for instance more "movie-esque" would make Civ 4 even more addictive or a better game? Or may be tetris just isn't "movie-esque" enough? The truth is the more graphical emphasis you place on a game the more money, resources and risk you expose yourself too. After all if you take away the meat of a game, at some point people are going to become bored and drop gaming entirely since games stopped being games.
I think there tends to be a confusion regarding whether or not something qualifies as art. Just because something is artistic doesn't mean it's art. Just because something exudes style doesn't mean it's art. It's the same reason design isn't really art.
People like to refer to Shadow of Colossus as an example of art. It presents a novel concept, has a unique storyline twist and is certainly artistic in it's art style. But it isn't really art. Why wouldn't God of War, for example, be considered art. That game has plenty of style. It has a story that's arguably more immersive, even if it's a bit contrived.
To me, something can only qualify as art if the primary motivation behind the creative process was to create art. Certainly there are special conditions, for example when we look back on the work of ancient civilizations. But I think in that case we're so removed from the culture that work is being viewed out of its original context, with a sense of detachment. In that case we're free to create our own impressions.
However, with nearly all games and movies what is the overriding motivation for creation? Money, perhaps to tell a story, to provide an entertaining experience. The creation of art isn't the driving force. Artistic concepts and creative design are simply a part of that process.
There are the rare occasion where a movie or game could become art in it's own right. But that's due to the artistic passion behind the creative process but more importantly to the fact that the subject or presentation is so compelling it's transcended the medium. But that's exceedingly rare. It's not something that can be made to happen. I can think of one game that may qualify, Out of this World.
Interestingly, although the story for that game was interesting. I think it was a number of other factors that make it qualify as art. There seems to be this notion, however, that somehow for a game or movie to qualify as art it requires a deep, complex story. There are art movies out there that consist of nothing but random images. Hell, there is art out there based on little more than mathematical computations.
Perhaps some people believe that if games are taken more seriously they can attract a higher caliber of writers. The problem is that from a business standpoint it's irrelevant. The most important aspect of any game is gameplay. Second to that is probably immersion which is why graphics and audio are important. Story may enhance the game, but it isn't really important because in most cases once gameplay and story can't really coexist. Gameplay has to be interrupted to tell the story. Probably the only exception is adventure games, and to a lesser extent RPGs. Unfortunately not many developers seem interested in creating adventure games.
That's an important point. A quality story can sell a movie, and can sell a book even more effectively. A good story might help a game, but it isn't really crucial. So why would developers bother spending money that could be invested elsewhere. And the reality is that there really aren't that many good writers. Like anything else, the best ones are likely to go where the money is and where there's a greater chance of prominence. So inevitably, many game stories come off as amateurish.
That's all irrelevant anyway. Games are an important part of culture. Games serve their own function and I don't think what works for movies or books will ever work as effectively in games. It's a different medium with a completely different kind of involvement on the part of the person being entertained.
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but 300 is based on a graphic novel. Which in turn was based on a movie. Which in turn was based on embellished stories regarding a historical event. It's not that the movie is game-like at all. It's that it's a stylized, simplified comic-book like story.