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".

Comments

It's things like this that...

[beef623]

...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...

Re:It's things like this that...

[7Prime]

While I agree, it also depends upon your definition of "Art". Now, a thoughtful, and more objective interpretation of the word boils down to anything that is produced through a creative process. Society, however, has subjectively attatched their own sense of taste onto the word so that anything that doesn't appeal to them is unartistic, and is often degraded to meer "entertainment". The word "art" is sort of the darling of the accademic community, and thus, reflects a certain bias towards certain works that share sensibilities that resonate with the tastes of people within that community. I'd consider myself deeply ingrained into that psychographic, yet it's important to recognize ones own biases.

Some have attatched additional requirements to the word. You often hear things like, "to be art, a work must not serve any purpose other than itself," yet hardly any art philosopher would dare reject the entire genre of architecture, which most deffinitely does provide additional functionality. Then there are those that argue that the purpose behind art must not revolve around the aquisition of wealth. Yet the vast majority of works we consider art were created with the intention of being sold or licensed. Some would boldly go as far as to suggest that no work of art must have corporate backing... yet it is impossible to execute even some of the simpler forms of cinema without the budget of a small country. Should we, then, deem all cinematic visions "off limits"?

Games do, on the other hand, have one slight distinction that separates them from all other forms of art: they have a goal. This is the only arguement I have heard, to date, for the possibility of not being able to define video games as art. Yet, even the conception of this goal is a creative endevour. Coming up with a great puzzle or difficult situation, in a game, takes quite a bit of fine ingenuity that can not be defined in any other way than being "artistic". When it comes down to it, the goal driving a game forward is simply that genre's counterpart to the clock ticking down the seconds until the end of the symphony, or the spacial dimension of a sculpture; it simply serves to give the work direction and structure.

So, in closing, most of these comments can be taken as snide remarks by those in older generations who are simply inequiped to evaluate a new art form. One particular person is only going to enjoy a fairly small subset out of any given genre, this is true for any medium... but people completely inequiped to evaluate a genre are, then, unable and unwilling to find any of the redeaming characteristics that they normally would be able to find in any other genre.

Ok

[LordPhantom]

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.

UWE

[mastershake_phd]

Instead of using "game-like" in a deragatory manner you could say "Uwe Boll-Like"

300's "game like nature"

[nephridium]

..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.