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Videogames Doomed for a 'Comics-like Ghetto'?
At the Newsweek blog LevelUp, journalist N'Gai Croal wrote this week about the sometimes-precarious position of videogames in popular culture. The frustrations of legislators, lawyers, and 'pro-family' groups aside, the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US. And yet, there are some folks who see gaming as just another fad, which in some time will be equal in popularity to comic books or tabletop roleplaying. N'Gai starts to form his response by noting that learning to play videogames is considerably easier than developing an appreciation for literature of any kind. He then goes on to note that the (oft-cited) lack of weighty subjects in gaming is more due to the 'pop culture' nature of the hobby than the medium itself. "Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005?" He discusses some ways to address that, but do you have any solutions? Or are games doomed to be the playthings of adolescent boys for the rest of the century? (And yeah, I resent the 'comics ghetto' label too.)
Every male in my high school played starcraft, no matter what social group they came from. The same could be said for halo. Gaming should be thought of as a medium or a category, like comics are a subcategory of literature, and RPGs are a subcategory of card/board games. I don't see the popularity of Halo or of Guitar Hero-type games fading.
Except of course games make tons of money - and comics are pretty popular. They should find another word.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
What exactly does "comics ghetto" mean anyway? It's not that comics aren't already an art form. e.g. Maus, Sandman.
The problems with that theory is that the tabletop hasn't changed much in last few years. however video game consoles grow with the growing technology and will almost always be "cutting edge" for the time they are made. I haven't seen a cutting edge board game since this.
...would suggest otherwise, gaming is moving into new areas not well served before. Hde games will only become more accessible for non-gamers. Personally I'm looking forward to fully-immersive games to become a reality. Like a good version of the Virtuality units of old.
Wait wait wait...you get a bunch of friends together and play (mostly) older games....and yet you don't play multiplayer Goldeneye, Masters of Orion, or Diablo? A curse upon your house...
Living With a Nerd
I can't remember it myself, but in the good ol' days movies were a seen as disreputable form of entertainment only indulged in by youngsters with nothing better to do.
If video games see a similar development, maybe in 50 years or so they will be seen as wholesome entertainment for the whole family?
Puzzle games.
Nethack.
Raise the next generation of children (through strong parenting and education reform) to learn that high culture is something to aspire to.
Of course, it's really pretty simple. If there's a demand for games, more games will be made. If there isn't, there won't. We can go around and around on whether X is as popular as Y or is it as popular as B? Who cares?
Right now, the gaming industry is moving a lot of units. There are also a lot of really good games out there now, too. Is this because it's a lucrative market or is the market lucrative because of the good games? Again, an argument that really doesn't matter to anyone that's not trying to get ad clicks.
In summary, if you like to play games, play them. If you don't, no one's forcing you to. No big deal. Life's short. Get some fresh air now and then too...
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Video games develop a set of skills just as reading a literary work improves comprehension. Problem solving skills are often best learned by being tasks to complete. Video games if properly utilized can be used to develop problem solving skills along with motor skills. The appeal of educational video games (which were already around when I was in elementary school) may wear off, but I highly doubt they will disappear. Just as there are sports that some people don't enjoy during PE, there will be games given in school that some kids won't like. The real question is whether people will be tested in there game playing skills. Are people expecting a rise of gaming to the point that people will expect competency at it? Will it be considered appropriate that a fifth grader can properly solve certain tasks presented in a virtual environment that has been deemed appropriate for them? The thing is, people who play RPGs do learn certain skill sets whether they intended it or not. People playing a FPS develop certain skills. Finding a way to translate these skills to the real world (robotic surgery or engineering) is a task for the next generation of teachers. Using examples from pop culture has always been a teaching modality - it depends on the quality and capabilities of the educator to show the relationship between things done in the classroom and how they can help in daily life. I am sure someone much smarter than me will one day show the great wisdom gained by being a WOW farmer (couldn't come up with a better example, I don't play video games much - I spent my childhood writing and hacking cheesy games instead of playing them - but that is because I suck at them).
When all else fails, try.
Remember, it's not art unless it takes eight or more years of expensive (and exclusive) education to enjoy it.
Everything else is just "folk art". But we just call it "art" to make the simpletons feel better. They aren't good enough to begin to understand Art.
Only if videogames learn to use gameplay mechanisms that don't involve violence. Right now, the majority of videogames are violent, whether that be shooting, punching, or stomping enemies. If the games industry were hollywood, this would belike having 70% of the films be action movies. Of course, 70% of movies are not action movies. Video games need to diversify.
Not everybody is even good at the gameplay mechanisms required. Portal is intellectually challenging with its puzzles, but the coordination required makes it hard for a lot of people to play it. I think adventure games had this right all allong: a simple interface, gameplay that involves puzzle solving and curiosity, and the opportunity to create a good story driven by the player. Instead we have shoot shoot, a cutscene with story here, shoot shoot more shooting.
It's gettign better, but it's not there yet.
Yah, we play games we all can enjoy, mainly RTSes and FPSes. We all use laptops, so we gravitate on the lowest common denominator. That and TA now has unofficial support for 5000 units per player... We have had wars on 64x64 maps with 30000 units at one time. Meh to Supreme Commander and its onerous graphics and cpu requirements.
And no, We dont like GoldenEye much. We all agree that we hate Do-ya-blow with a passion, and never played MoO (read about it).
Magic is one of our favorites though. They like to play "Kill the guy with the Stasis or Megrim deck..." and thats me. As taken from Gauntlet: Blue Mage Is About To Die.
Last year Roger Ebert responded to Clive Barker's comments on Ebert not considering video games art:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070721/COMMENTARY/70721001
There are some good thoughts in there even though Ebert is definitely in "Get off my lawn" territory.
I love the Half-Life series. I think there's a lot of wit and intelligence and creativity there that you don't see in a lot of other games. But every time I sit down to play a new episode I inevitably think: "It's just a First Person Shooter." Portal gets even higher marks for creativity. The way they develop the GLaDOS character and the use of plot twists and the out-of-left-field use of music is brilliant. But is it art?
I guess I tend to think of video games being "artful" rather than "art".
More than just entertainment for the whole family, video games can become a great teaching tool. Imagine learning about history in an RPG, witnessing historical events first hand. I still remember Oregon Trail. I wonder why more educational games haven't been released? Textbooks are huge business, why not textbook games?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... American Comics deserve every bit of ghettoization they have. The vast majority are of the superhero type, which are mindboggingly complex in their timelines, crossovers, retconning and super powers galore. Compare this with European comics (specifically Belgian and French), and you'll find everything from High Art to Low Art, super heros, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, surreal, spy, WW2, funny, serious, story-driven, art-driven, and anything else you can think of.
As an example, after hearing so much about the Sandman chronicles, I browsed through one. I found the art disappointing, and the story mildly interesting. However, it was still miles beyond any of the DC and Marvel comic books next to it.
Yes, there are great examples of American comic artists - Frank Miller comes to mind. But they are the vast exception in a sea of mediocrity.
This is also why I think that videogames will escape ghettoization - they are a worldwide phenomenon, and this alone will prevent them from sliding into a state that is as narrowly focused as american comics. To some extent, I think they already have. I can think of a number of games that are more art than game - Psychonauts, for one. Okami, for another.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Gaming is definitely here to stay. In fact, it is differentiating and becoming ever more sophisticated every day. What gaming will become will be full virtual worlds, with total immersion. Display technology is poised to become extremely cheap, and we will have wall-sized displays in our homes. Eventually they will be 3-D, and the graphics will benefit from massive parallelism to make the scenes indistinguishable from reality. And just as with alcohol and every other attraction that can be abused, there will be many people who live in a fake world every moment when they are not working; and just as the majority of people do not grow mentally once they leave school, there will be a majority that go home every night and live in the game world and do nothing of significance in the real world. Meanwhile, the game makers will fly their jet planes and have real-life experiences while the masses live in a dream world, drugged on the synthetic products created for them. I see nothing wrong with where the technology is headed; I just lament that most people will be controlled by it instead of controlling it: but not all.
a friend of mine who is a fellow bookworm were talking several years back, and i told him about how i hadn't been touched by the plot of final fantasy 7 in the way that a lot of other people had (there's a touching bit where the female lead character dies and i had heard from several people who had said they'd been deeply moved by it).
he looked at me and said "maybe you and i aren't as affected by it because we actually read".
the cinema, theatre, and music can all be as deeply stirring as a good novel. comic books don't seem to get it most of the time, but there are "graphic novels" that attempt to speak in an adult way about adult situations.
games are just another popular art form, for better or for worse.
The fix is to sh!t-can the twitch-reflex games and go back to the more cerebral RPG's
Remember Full Throttle? What about Torins Passage, or Leisure Suit Larry?
Games can be both fun and mentally stimulating, they can incorporate AI and puzzle solving, and exercise more than our targeting reflexes.
All it takes is creativity and a willingness to focus developer energy on the plot behind the game instead of trying to outdo each other in implementing ray-traced motion-blurred explosions.
I think it's entirely possible, and I think it's quite a good analogy--but not in the same sense that he's using it.
Part of the reason why comic books, at least in the United States, aren't accorded as much respect as an art form can probably be traced back to the hysterical allegations of Dr. Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. In short, he claimed that within those pulp pages, the amount of violence, of innuendo and sex, and the like would twist and stunt the growth of the children consuming them--and lead to crime, as well, by glamourizing it.
As a result, the publishers themselves began to censor their books with the industry's own Comics Code, refusing to take chances with so-called weighty subjects, and ultimately consigned themselves to a niche audience that, until recently was utterly unable to get any significant mindshare among the general public; even today, comic books and graphic novels are rarely accorded the same respect that other, textual novels are given, so much so that movies such as Road to Perdition try, somewhat, to obscure their source material.
These days, it's Jack Thompson and his ilk claiming that within the realm of the electronic world, the violence of Unreal Tournament, the sex in God of War, the anatomic issues in The Sims and the like are seducing the youth of our country and twisting their growth by forming them into school shooters and contributing to the deplorable state of culture and decline of the US.
This, coupled with ballooning budgets for games, is leading game publishers to not only inconsistently apply their own self-censorship group, but stick to only those games that have made money in the past and try to deflect criticism away from themselves any way they can; weighty subjects are less likely to be tackled in games such as these, precisely because returns for the money aren't as guaranteed, and the response from modern-day Werthams would decry the fact that these games are filled with sin, even if they're as exquisitely crafted as, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bridge to Terabithia, A Wrinkle in Time, 1984, and the like.
If anything, it's that mentality that would consign videogames to any sort of cultural "ghetto".
Of course, on foreign shores, like Japan, comics never had to fight the puritanical streak; it's doubtful they're suffering from the same odd notions about games there these days, too.
Wasn't the idea behind the Wii to *stop* this from happening? Seems like a stupid time to say such a thing just after games like Brain Training for the DS and the intuitive Wii console have been released.
One of the best games that comes to mind is Ultima 7.
I can think of Siberia: after finishing the first part of the game I felt like I had finished reading a great novel.
Just because COD4 outsold more "artistic" games like Bioshock or Portal that doesn't go to say that these games sold poorly either. They are also among the most-bought games of this year after all, even if they didn't quite reach #1. You can say the same thing about books too, since pop-culture paperbacks often sell more than a masterpiece. I think this goes for any form of media. Also, it completely depends on the demographic you ask whether or not it's easier to play videogames or read a book. Obviously these people have never met my mother...
Weaksauce as they say...
Full disclosure: I worked heavily on the production of Bioshock's voiceover, so I have a bit of an opinion on this topic.
:)
My own take is that gaming is a very broad medium - possibly even beyond film. We see in the film industry a single medium containing both Requiem For A Dream and Dumb and Dumberer. Miller's Crossing and Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit.
Games (not "entertainment software", games, damnit) cover a similar spectrum, even if the high-brow fare is a bit thin on the ground right now. Such was the case for film when that industry was gaming's current age.
At this point in time much of the gaming industry occupies the same functional niche as pornography - people go home after an exhausting day at work, have a beer, demolish noobs on Team Fortress 2 to relax, and then go to bed. But the existence of pornography in film does not prevent that medium from providing works of real intellectual and artistic substance. Neither does gaming as pornography - both literally and metaphorically - hinder the development of deeper experiences.
I think if anything gaming provides the potential for experiences of greater power than film because we can develop both narrative-driven and sandbox experiences for our audience. We've seen the promise of the latter in GTA*, Oblivion, and I believe we'll see more of it in Spore. We've witnessed an outstanding achievement in the former named Call of Duty 4 - and my hat is off to Infinity Ward for such an amazing work. Beyond the singleplayer, massively multiplayer games can also provide a great range of experiences - from Ultima Online's open-ended fantasy simulation to Planetside's extremely structured gameplay.
We will get gaming to the level where it can be taken seriously as a work of art. We are getting it to that level. Right this moment. Your patience, please.
*I am a Take 2 employee, blah blah blah the opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of my employer etc. etc. ad nauseum.
I don't think that you can draw a useful comparison between comics and games in the way that this article seems to be trying to do. Comics are a genre, of literature I guess. Video games are more like literature than comics, in that you're talking about a broader range of things, which can be broken down into genres. (which isn't to say that you can't break down a genre such as comics further.)
You could probably make a decent argument that some genres of video games have already fallen into a 'ghetto'. Flight-sims are only a small slice of the video game market, and adventure games have sort of fallen by the wayside. Either through market shifts, or just certain types of games basically becoming obsolete, genres will grow and wane in popularity, but probably never completely disappear.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Comics don't HAVE to be like that, y'know. Just take a look beyond the crap churned out in the USA by the likes of Marvel and DC (and in Japan by the manga industry) and check out the Franco-Belgian comic scene, for instance.
Games, ultimately, are going to be similar - there's going to be a lot of big-budget crap, but also lots of smaller, indep productions. In fact, it's *already* like that, and FWIW, the movie industry would be a better analogy, anyway.
But as someone already indicated in a tag on the story: who cares as long as it's fun?
The lack of weighty subjects ceased being a problem in the video game industry many years ago, when Tomb Raider's Lara Croft gave us not one but two weighty subjects to consider.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Games are different. There will always be games in one form or another. Which form will they take? Well, if convenience and accessibility have anything to do with it, then how about in my living room, on my pc, my cell, or a portable device in my pocket? Coincidentally, these all fall under "video games". So unless these mediums go away, video games are here to stay.
As a species we've been playing games far before we started reading, and surely we will continue far after we stop.
The question is useless if you have the mindset that the answer must always be yes for videogames to have a significant cultural impact.
Most games are not art. Some games come close, most do not. It simply does not matter. A more important and useful question would be 'Are Vidoegames culturally significant?'. There are many things that are culturally significant that are not in any great way considered art.
World of Warcraft is not art in and of its self. But you can say that it is a common experience shared by millions of people across different cultures. It is a medium in which people who may otherwise never interact with one another or meet one another may do so repeatedly. To me, that is culturally significant.
Video games have caused various laws to be passed and debated. In the US, those laws are generally along the lines of what content ought to be allowed. Content we would not think much about in a more passive form is much more sensitive when presented in an interactive form. In Japan, there have been laws passed to prevent the DragonQuest series from launching new games on work days because too many people skipped school and work.
Also, for a fad, videogames has endured and thrived for far longer than a typical fad would. How many fads persist beyond 25 years?
Who cares if they are not Art. They have become a rather important aspect of modern culture regardless.
END COMMUNICATION
It cost Leo Tolstoy what to write 'War and Peace'? 20 bucks worth of paper and 4 or 5 (ok 12) pens?
Even a modest video game is going to cost 5 million $, and the decent ones are 10x or more. They HAVE to have mass market appeal. There will never be much in the way of really high quality games that aren't 'pop culture'. At least not until one person can make them single handed, or with a couple of people and a really small budget (like indy films).
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Video games may be a hell of a lot easier to learn than literature appreciation, or even basic literacy, but I do have one question about that...
So?
My son is so incredibly happy that he's picking up reading skills that the Nintendo and my wife's computer are almost growing dusty from lack of use while he spends his time reading dinosaur books, and Calvin & Hobbes. True, hardly great literature, but the fact is just because something's easier to do doesn't mean it's going to win outright.
Then again, maybe the issue isn't the kids... let's face it, movies with substance, with a message, with depth and meaning don't tend to make a lot of money, and thus either don't get made, or only get shown on select screens for two weeks, and then fade into obscurity. Transformers made HOW much money?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
The reason gaming is taking a more prominent role in pop culture and gaining an ever widening audience has more to do with the fact that people who grew up playing video games are moving into an older demographic. More and more parents nowadays buying games for their kids also played video games when they were kids. Video games will gain another step when it gets to the point when first generation gamers become grandparents.
~smith55js
How many comics have been turned into highly successful movies, let's see, off the top of my head:
...not to mention lesser successes (Catwoman, etc)
Batman
Superman
Fantastic 4
X-Men
Spiderman
The Hulk
Hellboy
Blade
That's the kind of "ghetto" I'd like to be stuck in. How many book->movie conversions have had such success, percentage-wise?
I work for a large company that sells many things, including video games. I feel that video games should be considered an art form and appreciated as such, however the average "gamer" couldn't give a crap. Now I consider a gamer anyone who walks into my store and has a passion for a game, genre, developer, etc. The important part is the passion. During my time in the industry I find that the average "gamer", while passionate about their chosen game, is not interested in gaming as an art form. The ignorance of the common "gamer" is what is holding video games back as an art form. Until the population of "gamers" begins to appreciate their games as works of art, the outside world will continue to cast down and ridicule.
He discusses some ways to address that, but do you have any solutions? Or are games doomed to be the playthings of adolescent boys for the rest of the century? (And yeah, I resent the 'comics ghetto' label too.)
..., etc.
This author is making a false assumption.
Narrative entertainment has many forms, and has evolved over thousands of years. From oral tradition, to plays, to books, to film, to comic books, etc. What do all these forms of entertainment have in common? Passivity. The viewer exercises no control over the medium, and places his or her mind into the hands of the artist(s).
With gaming however, the audience is required to take part, and in some cases even re-write the story. As a race, we've had about 30 years to explore electronic gaming vs. the thousands of years we've spent with narrative...to claim that we've exhausted the possibilities of electronic gaming after such a short span is very presumptuous. To make parallel comparisons with something as mature as narrative is absurd.
Faster processors, more cores, multi-threaded apps, more memory, larger & faster hard-drives, faster network connections, lower network latencies, better AI, natural language processing, facial recognition, mesh networks,
Any combination of the above technical improvements could open a window into an application space we've never seen before. Gaming is not a dead medium, it's an evolving medium that's restricted by what our computers are capable of...and that's a restriction that will continue to relax into the foreseeable future.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
The superhero who was raised in the ghetto, and he fights to improve things.
God spoke to me.
I think you're right on the money about games being an emerging form, and you're right to compare games to film as well. In fact, the more you know about film, the more striking that analogy becomes. So if you'll forgive a film geek for drawing the analogy in even more detail:
When film first began, it was a widely accepted fact that it would never be an art form. To a large degree, this was because people mistook temporary technical limitations for inherent artistic ones. "Film is silent and in black and white, and theater is in color with sound. Film will therefore always be an inferior version of the stage, at best." Indeed, film was generally seen as nothing more than lowbrow entertainment for illiterates, immigrants, and other types deemed inferior by meanstream society.
But then technicians solved more and more of the technical problems--allowing filmmakers to tell longer stories, and to film in more settings--and meanwhile, filmmakers were learning more and more about the possibilities of this new art form. Even before sound and color, you were beginning to have masterpieces that were recognized as works of art. Birth of a Nation was the first one, although it seems crude (and horribly racist) by modern standards. But by the time you got to the 1920s, people were making films that can still move modern audiences. Yet it took another decade or two for highbrow literary critics to catch on to this explosion of creativity.
The comparison to games is pretty obvious, I think. Technical developments are allowing better and better visual effects, and game makers are getting more and more sophisticated about exploiting the strengths of the form and working around the weaknesses. I would say that Doom was the gaming world's equivalent of Birth of A Nation--a work of tremendous energy that synthesized a whole lot of already existing elements into something that felt new and exciting. And I would say Deus Ex and Thief were like the films of the early 1920's--one day they will be classics, but when they came out, they were still part of a particular artistic ghetto. And now videogames are catching up to the films of the late 1920's/early 1930s--they are very sophisticated, and the outside world is just beginning to wake up to their merit.
One last thought: if commercial gaming began in 1972 with Pong, then the medium is 36 years old. If commercial film began in 1896 with the Lumiere brothers, then it would have been 36 years old in 1932. Which means that videogaming is evolving right on schedule. This means we can expect the Citizen Kane of the videogame world sometime in the next five or six years...
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
The quote: "...playthings of adolescent boys..." is completely dismissing the fact that the average video gamer is 33 years old, so the submitter of this article has put forward a false assumption/non-factual belief.
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Is anyone actually surprised that on a day that the PS3 and PS2 both outsold the XBox 360, hardware shortages and the Blu-Ray win lead to a perfect storm, and we actually get some numbers on 360 failure rate, that /. doesn't have a thing about it.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
The best example of innovation came from a game that many of the business people just didn't want to finance, and that is Sim City (and the Sim off shoots). It was a truly think-outside-the-box game; no obvious win scenario, with the real pleasure coming from just creating cities and learning how different elements interacted with each other. As the years went on it proved itself to be an enduring contender.
Unfortunately the business people (as opposed to the creative minds) will have the ultimate say in how long a franchise like this lives. In order to try and maximize their profits these people and the games they finance will inevitably be constrained by their economic and marketing equations. Take for example the decision to turn Sim City into Sim Societies; a much easier to understand marketing vehicle: easier and more intuitive to play than developing Sim City into a yet more complex and compelling game / simulation, and thus making it harder to play and more niche-like. Sim City could probably be profitable for decades to come, but with diminishing returns due to the increasing realism and complexity that would be had as it is further developed.
Much the same can be said for the pre-mature death of Sim Earth. A very interesting and educational game, and I suspect that at least part of its demise was the rather poor windows port of this game (the Mac Version was awesome).
Of course if people start bringing politics into the game creation equation then this will also be a hindrance to creativity. Games like politics also strive towards the lowest common denominator. So it goes.
This is sort of a pet peeve of mine -- while it's true that 90% of comics are of the superhero-variety, a number of comics are treating the medium as a new way to tell a story instead of delivering mostly-vapid storylines. Blankets, Fun Home, Maus, Flight, etc. all are stellar examples of how comics are emerging from this 'ghetto' and becoming something more respected.
The problem is with distribution -- but for those looking to find more 'serious' games should look to the indie gaming scene instead of the shelves at their local Game Stop.
Sturgeon's Law not disproven by comics, film at 11!
Of course, you can find these in American and Japanese comics, too. The difference is that they only bother to import the good stuff from Belgium, so when we see Belgian comics, we think they're all great.
If it had been written in France, and was only so-so, would they have bothered to translate and import it for you to find on the shelf in America? I think what you're seeing is what statisticians call "sampling bias".
Sturgeon's Law, damn you! Why can't comics be like romantic comedies or Esperanto poetry or hip-hop music, where 100% of artists worldwide are great at it?
I think what you're seeing here is less the difference in medium between videogames and comics, and more the difference in medium between paper and digital. Webcomics are kicking butt today, in large part because worldwide distribution is so cheap.
Of course, games may have a slight leg up, because comics often rely more on words, and so translation is a smaller fraction of the cost of conversion. You can even play videogames if you don't understand any of the words -- I've done it. Then again, often you can get fans to translate your webcomic for you. Over time, the cost of producing videogames has gone way up, and the cost of producing comics has gone way down. I read comics every day which are written by one person with a copy of Photoshop; I can't remember the last game I played that was developed by fewer than 20 full-time employees. This is the ghetto they should be worrying about: how can games remain innovative if the creativity has to be filtered through a company? I've seen great movies made by 1/10th as many people as some games.
As artists can't even agree on what is and isn't art when they're talking about art, it's unlikely we'll come to an agreement with games, but even if the vast majority of games are just there to be popular and fun, there will always be the Frank Millers and others who aren't as popular, but continue to create not because they just want the money, but because they want to actually create something artistic (choose some definition of art: your choice). Even if they don't sell as much, people have a natural inclination to search for what they consider beautiful, and that will always attract a decent amount to the good stuff, even if the rest has no more plot than Packman (even if they're fun).
As a medium, though, games actually have a vast amount of untapped potential, because they are so different from movies or books or paintings. When you start up Half-Life, you are IMMEDIATELY Gordon Freeman. When people talk to you, you have a direct connection to them and you're a part of things. You aren't just reading, "'...', said Gordon blankly." You get to be Gordon... err... blankly '...'ing. In a way, this is similar to interactive fiction. Check out Adam Cadre's IF for instance, which makes extensive use of using an immediate connection as a player to shape perspective. Photopia is an excellent example. It's a game with virtually no real gameplay, but it tells a story in a way no book or movie could. I think video games in general have this same potential. This potential is around storytelling and communicating ideas and emotions in a different, direct way than anything else - through experience rather than empathy or capturing a single moment. Whether it's art or not is irrelevant, though personally, I'd say that the quality and ability to communicate ideas and emotions is probably pretty important in the definition of art.
It could just be that you like the dramatic experiences that you make up better than those that are put before you. Depending upon the 'literature' that you read, the author makes demands upon you to visualize the situation and fill in the gaps s/he left out. No matter how good a writer s/he is, something will be left out. There is truth in the saying, 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' Pictures, especially moving ones, generate a sense of the event for you with details that may not be exactly as you would have imagined them if you had free reign to create them yourself.
If you look at a highly detailed picture and you see a man leaning over a corpse crying, there is only one interpretation of the physical nature of the event. The man can only give one expression; can only give one pose; that everyone who views that picture will share.
Books are not quite like that; words are far more fluid. Unlike the people who would view the aforementioned picture and share the same image, each person who would read about the man leaning over the corpse and crying would take away a different mental image. Maybe, if the writer wrote a novel about the man leaning over the corpse, it might come close to the accuracy of the photograph, but it is unlikely.
Not that ambiguity is a bad thing, however, don't attack other media just because your imagination is good. Visual media suffer from less ambiguity and, in the case of viewing static images, generally require less imagination than textual mediums.
As for, specifically, your issue with Final Fantasy 7; I wasn't moved either, however, I'm seldom moved by cinema or books either. However, I think the issue with Final Fantasy (in general) is that it plays against the strengths of gaming; it isn't hugely interactive and games that are not interactive don't really allow you to gain a connection with the characters.
Example: If I set down and play the Sims; spend 8+ hours making a family, generating back story, building their house, and creating a neighborhood for them to inhabit; and in the first 30 minutes they end up dying by fire (and I didn't intend for that to happen); I will be far more distraught then seeing a character that I didn't really control too much and didn't like to much in the first place dying.
From here I could do a whole rant on how I'm upset with the lack of RPG in MMORPG's, but now that most of them are MMO's, I can't be too angry...
[insert witty comment here]
The technological base that video/computer games are built on has just recently come to a point where the emphasis can be on actual game design and what makes a fun game and not software development, architecture, how to make a game/graphics engine etc... There are free and commercial engines available now that are relatively easy to use and allow a game designer to focus on game design just as the recent shift to digital video and digital cameras has reduced the complexity of entry of up and coming filmmakers into the indie film industry. This almost has to happen for any industrial medium to transition to an artistic medium.
Visuals arts, architecture, live music and dance have relatively easy to come by mediums. With Film and audio anyone can get there stuff seen and or heard through some social network or youtube and the tools of the trades are easy to come by. For the game industry to survive and complete the transition to art the mediums of its expression must become commodity. The independent game designers must have some way of creating and presenting there work without being too in-cumbered by technicalities.
On a side note, I think the lack of weighty material has more to do with a fear of not selling enough units than anything else. The game industry mimics the music and film industries when it comes to taking chances. Small players innovate and the big players only take chances on things when the idea has been a proven money maker.
On another side note, the comic book industry faded mainly because other mediums of expression started attracting the interest of creators/artist that may have otherwise been working in comics. The people who have real love for comics are the people who still support that art form and create in that medium.... There is nothing wrong with that.
I'd say COD4 is almost as artistic, if not just as artistic, as Bioshock. Some of the cut-scenes/events are extremely powerful, especially the last scene and 'Aftermath'.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Just ask yourself these questions.
1) Does grandma read comics?
2) Does grandma play the Wii?
They attempt to appeal to niche sectors of the population with puerile stuff.
No wonder nobody is taking it seriously as an art form.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yeah, that's a B for billion. That's how much revenue the video game industry brought in last year. I wouldn't mind living in that ghetto.
These people are out of their minds.
... tabletop roleplaying"
Video games are in their extreme infancy. If this was literature, Tetris is a haiku. Film? Mario is Charlie Chaplin. Think of handheld controllers like you think of nickelodeons.
When development tools are reduced to the simplicity writers were afforded with quill and ink, when anyone can sit down and make a video game as easily as they can sit down and write a novel, then you can start asking for Shakespeare's and Bach's.
And when you say "playthings of adolescent boys," I guess you're not talking about all the PlayStations, Wii's and Guitar Hero's in the apartments of every 28-year-old woman I date.
"... equal in popularity to
I can't believe someone typed that and then clicked Post.
8 years of education in most countries is not more than the equivalent of primary and a bit of secondary education, which in developed countries, would mean pretty much everybody.
I don't know what some folks have about exclusivity, to achieve something exclusive requires hard work and dedication.
If you think you are going to fully understand a fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach, an opera by Wagner or a painting by Michelangelo just by being stupid and don't making any effort, well, be my guest, I am nobody to inconvenience fools.
You can buy excellent books about classical music or any of the other fine arts for less of what you would spend in one dinner in any half decent restaurant, classical music CDs are perhaps the cheapest form of music, most civilized countries subsidize heavily the arts (museums in many countries are free or very cheap) and there are lots of worthwhile sculpture or architecture that costs nothing to see.
So at the end it all boils down to personal effort, but in this era of instant gratification, where we want everything (including culture and wisdom) now, there is little wonder that some people thing an intellectual effort is some kind of dirty pursuit.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If they do die a "comic book ghetto" death, it won't be for lack of anything else to do. They'll most likely be replaced by something more entertaining. Like train sets, kites, slot cars, race tracks, ...the list (of still fun activities) goes on and on. I loved comic books as a kid. Still do to some extent, but I've out grown them. I haven't stopped buying them because they're no longer "cool". The stories are just too over dramatic for my 32-year-old sensibilities, and I don't have +$5 dollars to spend on a 10 minute read. I still love D&D, but haven't played since my Navy days. I never have the time, don't know any more good DM's, and my wife would probably leave me if I allowed it to take over my life.
Comic books haven't changed much, or at all really, from their conception. They are still pamphlets with drawings and word bubbles. Video games on the other hand are constantly evolving. Pong doesn't look like Halo, and neither will look like games developed 20 years from now. Maybe the markets for comic books and video games have a lot of overlap right now, but because the two medium are so different it's impossible (and pointless) to predict it will stay that way.
Solutions:
If you want to create something that isn't subject to lowest-common-denominator marketing then open-source it. Leave it up to the programmers, designers, etc to decide how a game will evolve instead of the marketing people. You will have complete freedom (I'm being presumptuous here, but all things being equal...).
Yes like a lot of great works of art it may not be popular in the creators life time, but it will exist. I have always found the "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" aphorism to be correct. And like business ideas, if you leave them to the venture capitalists, then you are quite literally selling yourself out. Art and business are two different things. They can compliment each other, but the latter will often dilute and subjugate the former.
Odd - since quite young children seem to enjoy being told stories (which sounds like "developing an appreciation for literature" to me).
So, perhaps the translation is "The videogame industry has yet to fully develop a parasitic industry of critics who 'appreciate' video games by writing pretentious deconstructions of them".
Currently, so-called "reviews" of video games are just descriptions of what the game entails, whether the gameplay is compelling and the quality of the technical execution. Anybody who has "developed an appreciation for literature" knows that proper reviews are smug little essays designed to impress upon the reader the reviewer's extreme wit and cleverness while scrupulously avoiding saying anything informative about the actual work under review, but citing myriad other obscure works in the clear expectation that any worthy reader will be familliar with them all.
Once the videogame industry has evolved such critics, all that remains is to ensure that all 5th graders are forced to write 1000 word reports on the influence of the depiction of dwarves in "Colossal Cave" on the works of Scott Adams then videogames will be accepted into the pantheon of true art.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Not to get into a science vs. art debate, but I think that's one of the key elements of contention here. Art is 100% a subjective creation of individual culture. Science is based on the laws of reality. Art is based on subjective value systems which may have huge importance in personal or shared value systems, but which, at the end of the day, will have no more reality than what people agree to give it. The end result is that it's pointless to try to place one's artistic apreciation on a level above that of anyone else. The methodological understanding of the creation process, sure. But it's still just taking arbitrary criteria and agreeing that the particular meaning it gives is the right one.
In our magic games, it was always "ALL RIGHT!!!! Everyone gang up on the blue wizard/counter deck!" (or the door to nothingness deck, depending on which one my buddy was playing) This was a requirement, for if we didn't, Mike would certainly win.
His infinite sapling-deck was always a...favorite.
Living With a Nerd
of stupid (comic-like) video game ghetto material on the big screen ... oh wait ...
Andrew Keen, is that you?
I think some kids are on your lawn, you'd better go scare them off.
I'm going to argue that video games are not art, and may never be. But this is not a criticism of video games. The fact that I do not see games as "high art" is not to look down upon games. For example, I consider chess one of the finest achievements of human kind, something of cultural and political significance, and the worthwhile past time of some of the greatest minds that have ever lived. Maybe a goal of seeing video games as high art is not a good standard to judge them by.
Games can be important, of interest to all people, and held in respect. Their "artistic" role however is generally to act as an inspiration for, or a metaphor within, a work of art. You'll be able to find references to chess in every art form humankind has ever devised. A game of chess could be animated, delivered in 3D with incredible graphics and audio, with chess pieces designed by a world class sculptor moving on a board designed by a reknowned architect, against a backdrop painted by a famous artist, to a soundtrack written by a talented composer, orchestrated by a genius and performed by a philharmonic orchestra. You could devise some sophisticated plot that is reflected in the almost infinite variety of moves the game allows.
And yet, most would still call it a game rather than a work of art. All the "art" mentioned is simply window dressing for the game itself. The chess pieces may be sculpture, but are not part of the game of chess as such.
So what would video games need to achieve recognition as a serious art form? I don't think we'll know until we've reached the point they've earned that status. Then we'll look back with hindsight and go, "This is what it means for a games to become high art". But I'll take a stab at how we'll know we've reached that point. Once lead game designers start to achieve general recognition for their games and their meaning, just as everyone's heard of Shakespeare, Dickens and Hitchcock (insert locally relevant artists here...) then video games will have achieved the same status as "art".
Once they have, we'll be able to look back to now and consider where it all started. But currently, it may just be that even examples of great art direction (I liked the atmosphere of Thief, personally) is really just great interior decoration for a game. Current technology does not allow for the finesse of expression of actors in a film, or oil paints on a canvas, after all, and rarely do you feel the game has been designed to tackle complex dramatic themes - most plots and scripts are fairly cliched, frankly. This could all change however as technology advances and designers / directors are freed up to work on the art rather than the mechanics of their creations.
A lot of people are going to say a lot of things about this subject.
They're all morons.
Here's the truth: The less control the creative staff have, the less successful the industry will eventually become.
People won't continue to buy shit games.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Videogames could be the cultural equivalent of a ghetto filled with thugs, whores, crack dealers, derelict housing, corrupt cops, stray bullets, overflowing sewers, the homeless, broken glass, and gun-toting radioactive giant sewer rats and I'd still be happy as long as games are fun and stimulating.
:)
I'll leave determining what and what isn't art to the professional intellectual masturbaters
Most of my favorite movies, and most of the movies that I would consider "great works of art", are violent.
Are you going to claim that Michael Mann's 90's blockbuster "Heat" is not art? Or Quentin Tarantino's "Reservior Dogs"? What about that Mel Gibson revenge movie, "Payback"?
One of the most critically-acclaimed movies of 2007, "No Country For Old Men", just happens to be a violent crime thriller.
Violent games, like violent movies, are great. Being violent does not preclude them from being art. Nobody can tell me with a straight face that Mass Effect is not art. Maybe its not accessible to them, but its definitely art, because I said so. Ditto for Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty 4, God of War 2, etc.
- infinite spin (explained),
- spin triples (explained), and
- a randomizer that lets you play forever (explained part 1 and part 2).
It's a good thing that there are still fan games that let the player screw back.In several western Europe countries, such as France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, comics are NOT a ghetto. In fact, comics (or graphic novels) are a full-fledged, mainstream, thriving art form in France. Go to a the French equivalent of Barnes and Noble (FNAC), and you will see a huge section filled by graphic novels for all kinds of audiences.
Only in America are comics a sort of ghetto for mildly socially inept teenagers.
Why you may ask? Because in France, comics are considered an art form, while in the US they are merely a business.
The will be true of games. American games will end up being merely money-making products based on hollywood licenses or boring sports simulations. Hopefully, games will develop into a real art form in other parts of the world.
- Anonycous Moward
Sometimes people have to set themselves up as better-than. Literary fiction gets outsold because it's a chore to read. Graphic novels aren't in a ghetto, unless they're being put there by someone who is holding on desperately to the idea that their superior idea of what constitutes art is better - HAS to be better - than yours.
Video games are definitely NOT going the way of the comic book. I agree with many posts in this thread that like any medium, vgs can be high or low brow. But I see the future of video games as taking us towards living in alternate worlds. We might visit these worlds for education, for discussion, for sex, for sport, for distraction, etc..... Consider 2nd life and eve online and other mmorgs. Are they art? Not *fine* art. Are they low brow? Like real life, these mmorgs contain players that are just there to pass the time, and others who are there for deeper pursuits. In that way, i think the analogy with film is limited. Film can be high or low brow, but it is passive. It can lead to interesting discussion, but generally not with the film maker. Video games, more and more, are simulated realities. The more future technology allows full immersion (touch, smell, taste) in video games the more they will be like life and less like film. Presumably these same technologies will push into film as well, making film immersive but still passive.
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Shakespeare, Mozart and Dickens all made entertainment for the masses. What's the line about politicians, whores and buildings?
I just imagined 40% of new games being romantic comedies. And whimpered.
Spore, or even one of the follow up on Oblivion... Who knows.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Shakespear is boring; much of his work is trivial, and most of it plagiarised. His genius lay not in his works as such but the way he used language; the rhythm of his phrasing; making nouns into adjectives; bending grammatical constructs; using imaginative analogies; and creating characters well suited to their parts. To suggest that there is no Video game comparable to a Shakespear work is untrue. My first computer game was 'Rocket Lander' played on a teletext machine in the late 1960s, you typed in coordinates and waited for a printout to see the effect. It took geniuses to create the screens, solve the Hidden line problems, and all that eventually created the 'Computer game'. In effect such games turned audiences into performers. In fact the development of computer games is by far the most important development in history. They are the spin-off from a world that is fast changing from verbal to visual communication. Written language is on the way out. Shakesspear cannot be read in English by someone who doesn't read English, but computer games can be played in any 'language'. If there is ever to be world peace then a common language is required. That will come from the essense of computer games. The effects and possible solutions to global warming, asteroid impacts,and god-given disasters will be shown by computer simulation that has been developed by those whose profits come in some way from computer games.
"This is an issue I've been pondering for a very long time, from a philosophy/aesthetics point of view. the real problem here is that we lack a sufficient definition of art in the first place, people have been asking what art is since Socrates, and we STILL don't have a bloody clue. It belongs in that class of "I know it when I see it" ideas, in that what we call art is largely defined by culture, time, and arbitrary academics."
debatable.
Ok, I didn't RTFA, but from the summary it seems that N'Gai's main complaint is that video games do not attack "the weightier issues." This is the same bullcrap that the "literature" world spews out over and over again, to justify the reasons why their products (art house movies, literature, etc) do not sell.
What the literati need to do, is to wake up and look at the world. Books, CD's, Movies, Games, they are all about ENTERTAINMENT and the sooner they realize this, the sooner they may be able to sell their own boring ideas. It doesn't need to have an explosion to be entertaining, nor does it need to be gross or vulgar. These obviously do help, but it is not a necessity. I am sure that everyone in here has been subjected to literature whilst in high school, college, and university. Please, anyone who managed to finish an entire chapter without either a) falling asleep, b) stopping for a break, or c) getting the cliff notes, please make a comment to that effect.
I am sure that there won't be many replies.
I never managed to finish any of the texts that were set out during my final year of high school. The only one that I remember was "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt. This book was exceedingly dull. I think that I managed to read 2-3 chapters and then did my entire assignment based upon those chapters and what I managed to get a friend of mine to do for me (thanks Mel) and I like to read books. I have got hundreds of them at home, and they are all entertaining. It is the adventure, the struggle, the hope, the failure and the successes. No book of literature has ever been able to capture my imagination in this way.
So before N'Gai relegates us to a "Comic Ghetto" maybe he should look towards his own writings, his own contributions to the arts and entertainment, and ask himself, "why is my stuff crap?"
And don't worry about his ghetto jibe, after all the comic ghetto is much larger, and a much more exciting place to be, than the cold ivory tower of righteousness of the literati
I am not stubborn. I am right!
...learning to play videogames is considerably easier than developing an appreciation for literature of any kind. Yes, so? Learning to read literature of any kind is considerably easier than developing an appreciation for it. Most gamers I know have very little appreciation for games other than "Check this awesome physics" or "look at the bump mapping with 17 quadrillion triangles!". Nobody ever says "That is an amazing piece of level design, see how it flows from one section to the next and leads the player through?" or "This is an amazing piece of character building".I love reading, have done since I was very young, and enjoy a good book. I would even say I'm capable of appreciating good books, but it took time and experience of a wide variety of literature to get to that point. Likewise with games, I've been playing them since I was young (Not as young as reading), but it took time and experience of a wide variety of games to build an appreciation for the good and a dislike of the bad.
Any idiot can grab a controller and race around in Need for Speed Diamond eXtreme Carbon 16 Special Edition 2 and call it a masterpiece of gaming, but people can also grab Billie Piper's autobiography and call it a triumph of self-expression through writing.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I'ld expect this to be dug, surprised it got slashdotted.
Of course games will have no value to anyone who doesn't want bigger boobs! It's not like NASA's shuttle flight simulator is based on game technology... jackass.
You are only seeing what you want to see. You look at American comics and only see the tired superhero genre while looking over sees and seeing avant garde literature. Just like an old film buff - they look at the past and only see Hitchcock's work, not Ed Wood's. They look at the present and only see Uwe Boll, missing Christopher Nolan.
I think you're right that the problem is that comics tend to be endless serials. However, there are comics which do have have endings, such as Watchmen, Sandman, Maus, V for Vendetta, or Top 10, many of which are great.
Playing video games a lot is like having autism or being addicted to television. It makes you less socially capable, more solitary, and less likely to invest in activities that make your life better. Is it any different from being addicted to drugs?
Video games are not destined for any ghetto, but video game players are already seen as the losers destined to always be underpaid and overtaxed because they're like children, oblivious to the actual workings of the world.
Anti-Globalism
Unfortunately I don't have a link for you.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
If people want to discuss video games as an art form...These guys have taken Monkey Island and turned it into a play.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
"...the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US."
Um... does not follow. What the heck does commercial success have to do with viability as an art form?
People seem to make this same argument over and over. "Video games make more money than movies, so they MUST be an art form!" What the heck? Does everything that makes money count as art? The average high-class prostitute probably makes more money than the average jazz musician; does this make her the better "artist"?
It's either the crassest, most commercial rationale ever, or it's a very subtle critique of culture. Maybe it's actually true that whenever a society dumps enough money into a particular luxury, it eventually feels obligated to lionize it as an important "cultural form," like Art-with-a-capital-A.
every generation a new medium, or means to tell stories and entertain is introduced. and the old guard of the day has this great opportunity to slam that medium as the down fall of the youth or society, this cycle repeats itself every so often. it's easier to get people to focus on a scape goat for a problem that has existed since man has been breeding. each generation swears that the next is unruly and out of control and destined for doom and we basically get doomsday prophets of a sort trying to rally, so called respectable citizens and orginizations to the cause to "Save our youth". the video game industry hs been the current target alongside rap and rock for the last 20 years at this point, those who cry against gaming have mostly accepted that they're not getting anywhere at least not where they intended, so the scheme now is to undermine the artistic and intellectual side of gaming. basically if they can't squash a culture or medium, than they try labeling the entire culture in such a way as to make anyone who is associated with it appear essentially low class or uncultured. as gamers or fans of comics, anime, rap, whatever, the best thing to do is not get riled up but continually point out their ignorance and and continue enjoying the things we enjoy.
Early sci-fi was considered trash, its writers werent considered real writers. And yet decades later we can look at those early works and see depth of theme, symbolism, characters, and plot/story structure that rival literature. The "word smithing" or flowery poetic language used in most literature was lacking because many of the writers had an in science not poetry. But the symbolism was much richer even tho the language was plainer.
1) Squirrels are poor sources of meat, buffalos are great sources of meat, deer and bears do in a pinch.
3) Dysentery, whatever that is, sucks.
4) I don't care how cold it is or how low the food stores are -- you do NOT attempt to caulk the wagon and float across the river, or ford anywhere where the water is deeper than the ankles on the dystentery-afflicted squirrl you have allowed to tag along with you.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"Right now, the majority of videogames are violent"
Is there some reputable source you got this from, or is this another example of Slashdotian Ass-talkery?
"In short, it has nothing of what I find important in graphic art."
And the Dark Knight series did?
Seriously, your criticism is just as easily leveled at that series, and honestly, the are was the weakest component. I remember thinking while reading it "who the hell paid this guy money for this" which is pretty standard for my critiques of Frank Miller. It's muddled, dreary, and distracts from the story.
And again, seriously, if you're going to criticize Sandman, you're going to have to get used to having your opinion dismissed, especially if you hold up Miller as a counterpoint. I suggest for your next trick, you tell us how crappy Watchmen was...
MAYBE because BioShock is gruesome horror and single player only while COD4 is both single player and packs a very good online multiplayer part, not focussed on horror (which doesn't appeal to some people), has made less of a scandal (killing little girls in BioShock) AND has the better graphic quality (although BioShock is a great looker by itself).
I don't even know how to begin to know why they compared Madden to Shadow of the Colosus?
Let's compare apples to apples and orange to orange.
If your going to compare the video game industry to literature or an art house movement then you have to keep in mind how each is created. Writing a book takes nothing more than a computer (or a pen and paper for you Luddites out there), not very hard to get a hold of. Shooting a film requires a camera and the facilities to edit the film, more challenging but still doable. Creating a video game takes an extraordinary amount of programing knowledge, software, and computing power, extremely hard for the 'every day artist'. I have a million ideas for video games, some are good ones, but I can't just sit down at my computer and whip one out without a support group of some sort. Bringing a new game to market is very tough and it's more profitable to go with a game that has mass appeal to make back your money investment. I'd hazard to say that MYST has been more of an artistic/literature worthy game and it's popularity skyrocketed as soon as it came out. Can we make it easier for the every day artist/writer to create a video game? I think if you did there would be less talk about video games being devalued by English majors.
I don't cry when reading, and I don't cry when I'm watching a movie. I've cried a dozen times while playing Lost Odyssey, and I haven't finished the first disc. Does that make Lost Odyssey a work of art? Maybe not, but I'm certainly getting my money's worth.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Prism Rangers make me want to punch kittens.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
It also shows what happens when the powerful lose sight of their ideals in the face of adversity.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
What are you going to do, drag the bear back to the friggin' wagon?
I write sci-fi for metalheads