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On Game Developers and Legitimacy
Gamasutra is running a feature by game developer Brian Green on how he and his colleagues are still striving for legitimacy and respect as part of a medium that's still commonly thought of by many as "for kids" and "potentially harmful to kids." He notes that while financial legitimacy is no longer in question, artistic and cultural legitimacy are taking more time. Green makes some interesting parallels to the early movie and comic book industries, and points out that moral outrage against comic books did significant damage to the medium's growth in the US.
"... in the United States there was a 'moral panic' about the corrupting influences of comic books on children, as there often is with many 'new' media. The government threatened to enact laws to censor comic books, for the good of the children. (Does that sound familiar to game developers?) The industry reacted by enacting their own regulations, the Comics Code Authority (CCA). The Comics Code Authority heavily restricted the content that comics could contain. For example, the words 'horror' and 'terror' were not allowed in the titles of comics. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and similar creatures of the night were forbidden."
Define art.
Your definition will either include videogames or exclude a good amount of things everybody considers art.
My parents didn't have to worry about what comics I bicycled up to the corner convenience store to buy.
Now, to remain "relevant" and "hip", comics are "graphic novels" with topics I don't want my son reading about (yet). Even if the corner convenience store still existed, and it sold comics.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Art: Everything 'arty' except videogames? ;-)
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Watchmen is a great work, and many of the batman comics that I've read have told a story as well as many books I've read. Have I ever read a comic I consider to be as thought provoking and, well, good as the Count of Monte Cristo? No, of course not, but I've read a few that I would consider as good as Asher Lev, Pride and Prejudice or other critically acclaimed novels.
As for video games, I don't know whether they'll ever be considered art, and I do believe that your comment (though worded badly) is legitimate. In the end, these are games and should be treated with the same respect you'd treat a football game or soccer game. I'm hoping that the industry surprises me with something that tells a story so well that I'd consider it art, but I haven't found one yet.
A critically acclaimed video game turned movie will go a long way towards legitimacy.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
We've had movies based on games, games based on comics, games based on movies and TV shows, movies based on TV shows, games based on books, and soundtracks for all of them (but comics of course). Everything has been intertwined for years. And only the most idiotic of individuals could possibly isolate any one of these media and consider them not to be works of art.
Chrono Trigger. Street Fighter II. Virtua Fighter. Starcraft. Metal Gear Solid. Art?
Games are some of highest forms of art in existence as they include:
- writing: storyline, plot twists, character history and back story
- visual art: graphics, design, characters, creatures, environments
- animated art: motion capture, cartoon animation
- special effects: rag doll physics, explosions, stop motion (Max Payne), complex lighting
- sound: sound effects, samples, ambient noise, environmental sounds, foley noise
- music: original and licensed music, Chrono Trigger has amazing original music, Grand Theft Auto has amazing licensed music
- acting: voice acting, including many AAA games having Hollywood level talent
Are games considered brilliant works of art? David? Mona Lisa? Sistine Chapel? Are they considered as exceptional art because of the difficulty of the work?
What about the difficulty in creating an original title such as Half Life? Or Starcraft? Or Chrono Trigger?
David wasn't the first statue, Mona Lisa not the first painting, Sistine Chapel not the first mural, Starcraft not the first RTS, Half Life not the first FPS, Chrono Trigger not the first RPG, but they are standouts, works of a art, and unique accomplishments. And much time, thought, and effort went into the making of all them.
Just look at the balance of Street Fighter II (which took fifteen years), or Starcraft (still being balanced every day in Korea and Blizzard HQ), or Virtua Fighter (Sega revises the arcade versions several times). Is there not an art of game balance?
Balancing Virtua Fighter, where you have a cast of 19 extremely different characters that fight in different ways, or Starcraft where three completely unique races competing on different maps with different starting locations. Is there not an art to balancing those games? If it was a science then each character would be the same, each race the same.
And level design. It's EXACTLY like set design but more imaginative as you aren't confined to real world physics. Cliff Blezinski designed some of the most amazing architecture I have ever seen. What buildings did he create? None. He made levels, amazing levels, in Unreal Tournament. Levels that are works of art. (UT1 also had an amazing soundtrack).
Directing an in game cut scene is exactly like directing a scene in a movie (except the actors don't talk back). Look at Final Fantasy X or Metal Gear Solid 4.
Creating a game soundtrack is the same as making one for a film or television show. Look at Grand Theft Auto, Chrono Trigger, Halo.
Creating the 3D models for characters in game is the same as carving a statue. The characters in Virtua Fighter 5R are extraordinary when you see them moving on an HDTV monitor at the arcade.
Writing a script or character for a game is the same as writing one for a book or comic. Solid Snake & Niko Bellic have fuller lives and stories than some of the longest running television characters.
Animating a character and his or her in game moves is the same as animating a character for an animated or 3D movie. The animations for Virtua Fighter 5R are just as impressive or better than Toy Story or Wall-E. VF5R moves at a blazing 60fps and the animations are fluid and jaw dropping.
Cinema is art, music is art, television is art, painting or photography is art, writing is art, and so are games.
What if you developed a game and everyone came to play?
In an odd sort of way, that is just what Metascore is.
Calvin: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. "High" art!
The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. "Low" art.
A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. "High" art.
Hobbes: Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?
Calvin: Sophomoric, intellectually sterile. "Low" art.
Consider that to some even chess champions who make it be and become rich and famous are just game playing kids. (I'm reminded of the teacher in Searching For Bobby Fischer). It's not realistic to expect people who won't take an intellectual game like chess seriously where becoming good at Grandmaster level requires serious study to suddenly take game developers (and professional game players for that matter) seriously. It would take a massive cultural shift in multiple cultures and countries for that to change.
Best to just nod, smile and cash your pay cheque. The rest of us do the same, but we don't get to be as creative or have as much fun with our creation.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so."
Plato
Any actual game developer who states otherwise is just being modest.
-Modeling ...
-Texture Painting
-Effects
-Art of Balancing Gameplay
-Art of Writing Story
I won't bother to list any more.
Some may say that there have been no games good enough to be considered art.
Bullshit.
If everyone sucked at painting, would it no longer be considered an art?
Ever play The Longest Journey or I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Why not just make ESRB ratings enforcible by law to the same degree as alcohol sale and consumption? If a minor is found to be playing a game rated above his/her age level, the purchase is checked. If it can be proven that the purchase was made by the parent, then the parent gets into legal trouble, just as if they had given their kids alcohol. If the minor bought the game on his own resources (like, say, maybe a teen who has a job and buys an M-rated game while under 17 years old), then the kid gets in trouble, and the parents get told to ramp up the discipline so that the minor doesn't play inappropriate games again.
This solution can come complete with carding and everything.
I see no reason why this shouldn't be a perfectly viable solution to the perceived "problem" of today's video games, with respect to appropriate material. And this solution wouldn't disrupt industry operation in the least.
Thoughts?
These games never really surpassed anything but an emulation of movies, interspersed with point-and-click gameplay. There's more to it to that, but games as a medium shouldn't be defining themselves through the definition of movies or books.
I work in the "Games Industry", so I'll throw in my two cents.
Part of our problem is that the high profile titles are still stuck in what I'll call the Sitcom and Movie Of The Week phase. We have lots of heavily promoted titles that, to an outside observer, are only midly different (my mother would not be able to tell the difference between L4D and Fallout 3, just as I can't tell the difference between Fraiser and The King of Queens), and the production and release of these titles is largely driven by profitibility.
There are smatterings of "art" games, and it is my belief that these games are the ones that will bring legitimacy to the industry, although it's going to be an uphill battle. Let me take this sentence apart, because I want to clarify what I mean and why I'm making this argument.
A game like Emily Short's "Galatea", which is a text based game (ostensibly "Interactive Fiction"), is art, if solely for the beauty of the prose and the exploratory nature of the interaction. There are a vast array of possible conversations that the player can have with the title character, and these are mature, adult conversations, with depth and emotion fitting of any high quality published novel. But barely anyone knows about this game outside of the IF and Academic community.
Another game is Johnathan Blow's "Braid", which I began playing for the third (fourth?) time again last night. Not only is it beautiful, fun, polished, and unique, but the time-manipulation gameplay ties in with the plot in an almost magical fashion. Who, or what, is The Princess, and how exactly does she fit into the timespace continuum? Even after I put down the controller, I find myself thinking about the story far more than the button mashing or the puzzles.
But these two games also reveal part of the challenge, in that a game in the purest sense, as James Earnest (of Cheapass Games) used to attempt to impress upon me often, doesn't care about plot or story or pretty graphics. A game is about rules and play and fun, and that's it. So intertwining the game play aspect with the story aspect is the real challenge for legitimacy, because it's through story and narrative that people develop an emotional connection to the content, but it's via interaction that they experience this narrative.
I think there are a handful of approaches that are starting to tie interaction and dynamic narrative together. Fallout 3 (which I haven't played, admittedly) and Fable 2 are probably good examples, although they're perhaps the modern day "Die Hard" equivalents: yes, romance drives the plot, but it's really about guns and explosions. Cultural legitimacy, when playing a certain video games becomes the mass-populace in-thing to do because there is a positive (or at least thoughtful and broadly appealing) common experience to be had, this is probably at least another decade off. I think we need to see more Braids and Galateas, and better Fables that are less about sword slashing and more about our inner conflicts as human beings, before we get there. I think we need development teams who are more artists and storytellers than algorithmic optomizers, and I think we need to make games that take more risks and fail not simply because the framerate was poor or the textures were blocky, but because they tried to teach us something about what it means to be human and just wound up being weird.
Those are the mistakes we need to make in the industry, so that we can learn from them. Only when we understand how to merge interaction with introspection will video games be legitimate forms of art and entertainment.
Green makes some interesting parallels to the early movie and comic book industries, I once heard a psychologist compare Grand Theft Auto to Birth of a Nation as technically brilliant and psychologically poisonous. Ideas have consequences.
Moore's Top 10 is better than Watchmen, but nobody cares since it's comedic. Therein lies the problem with these debates. People fixate on their subjective perceptions of "seriousness".
PS Careful what you say about Pride and Prejudice, Austen-ites are mean bastards and ready to rumble.
Definitely art:
Deus Ex.
The Fallout games.
The Half-Life series + Portal
Perhaps System Shock 2
Maybe not "art", but comparable to things that sometimes are considered art:
Max Payne 2--it's obviously not "The Godfather", but it's certainly better than your average gangster/cop movie. A damn-near flawless game. Does what it sets out to do, does it well, tells its story, and makes a graceful exit.
Many RPGs are every bit as good as a decent fantasy novel. Some are even better.
Uhm, the Tomb of Dracula, which had both vampires and werewolves in it, is a CCA approved comic.
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/thumb/d/d8/Tomb_of_Dracula_18.jpg/300px-Tomb_of_Dracula_18.jpg
/agree about Top 10. Watchmen is great, but over-rated and dated, much like V for Vendetta.
Yay me!
Art is something which has no real use.
Another rejected technology.
This has been happening since the advent of the novel
I work kind of in this area as a researcher, so maybe I have a rosy-glass view, but the arguments seem a bit dated to me. Sure, in say 1999 this was a problem, and not that many people took games seriously. But in 2009? Yeah, people still like to kvetch ("games are rarely taken seriously blah blah and we aim to change that" is a standard opening move if you're writing a paper), and maybe the average person on the street doesn't, but there are plenty of inroads:
There are journals and academic conferences on games, in both the humanities and computer science.
MIT Press has an entire division of books about videogames. I'm currently reading one about the Atari 2600, which, yes, even covers its role as a cultural and artistic platform.
There are initiatives and companies to use games for "serious" purposes. The U.S. Army in particular takes them seriously and funds development.
Braid sold over $1m, despite being a kind of weird arty game made by a single guy. You can even get an MFA doing fine-arts stuff related to games.
Heck, Gamasutra itself frequently publishes about games as art, and it's semi-high-profile (at least to the extent that getting linked at Slashdot once a week counts as semi-high-profile).
I mean yeah, I'll agree that far more people respect, say, film than respect games. But it's not as if this is some novel argument and nobody has ever thought about taking games seriously before. Also, to some extent, it's the fault of people not making more interesting games: Hollywood may be crap, but there are a lot more innovative indie films out there than innovative indie games.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
do you consider this art?
Don't click the link, folks.
But then you have George Lucas tweaking his movies 30 years after they were finished.
He sold his soul to the Divell for the almighty dollar. See also: Metallica. Both entities now drink bottled water and wear Dolce and Gabbana sunglesses while they settle in some trendy celebrity's lap.
John Lennon met Yoko Ono at an art exhibit where one of her pieces involved the spectator pounding a nail into a board.
Maybe John Lennon was also always on acid at the time, and was impressed by Yoko who was always on acid at the time, who in turn impressed everybody else who was on acid at the time. And hey, the dominance of being the leader of the greatest band of all time gets old after awhile. That's when being dominated by the nearest fuckable female Japanese loser comes into play.
Personally, I wouldn't call that "art", just like I wouldn't call a man sitting at a piano and not playing "music".
...and that's what boring space-marine alien-zombie FPS' are. No, wait. At least boring space-marine alien-zombie first-person shooters would play "heart and soul" with two fingers. Sure, we've heard it again and again without any real improvisiation, but eh. Status quo and all. Oh, shit, I've been troll'd.
Popular music too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
sponges are awesome, too
...you need to push things along. It has taken a long time for comic books to be accepted as an capital "A" Art form, almost 2 generations (or three depending on how we date things). I don't see a good reason why games will be accepted more quickly. There is the general reason of "cultural change happens faster now", but that comment is usually unaccompanied by argument or data so I take it with a grain of salt. We are 30-40 years into the history of video games and ~25 years into their entrance into the mainstream. I have no idea what arc they will take, but I can almost guarantee that it will travel through acceptance as an art form at some point. Will they be subject to an independent resistance against big studio control (a la the movie business in the late 50s to 1970s?) Will they await some major change in creation overhead before artists move into the genre? Are we too far in late capitalism for that to happen? No one knows.
But I can tell you one thing. Most of these game designers aren't helping. Sure, Ted Sturgeon can tell us that 90% of everything is bunk, but we really are reaching into the crapper for most of the content here. There are some wonderful games out there. There is some deep work going on in the business, both in writing and in the design of a game experience. But most of these guys are pushing out undifferentiated games with middleware populated by Mary Sues and John Does. The studios (just like movie studios) don't care and honestly neither do the fans (in most cases). Where a game is a rare combination of artful, AAA, and well promoted, it will make bank. When it is two of the three or (worst), only artful, it will usually sit unloved. Like I said, this is not a problem unique to the gaming industry. For every truly wonderful film out there we have a dozen Dane Cook rom-coms that make you despair for humanity. But simply making that comparison leaves us with an incomplete picture. Those movies that we consider artful and important all took risks. They all represented serious investments of time, blood and money from their creators. They came about (at least in the case of Hollywood) from bitter fights and internecine warfare. Some of the works we think of today as powerful and compelling were almost eliminated (or mutilated) by studios interested in formulaic crap. And for every Kubrick or (young) Lucas or Scott there were hundreds of equally talented souls who just didn't make it. Who said the wrong thing to the wrong guy. Who pushed too hard or didn't push hard enough. Who said "fuck it" and decided to make Disney movies for the rest of their career. Game designers have to be willing to take those risks--the studios aren't going to do it themselves.
Surprise, surprise, striving for legitimacy and respect involves...striving for legitimacy and respect. You don't get to be respected as an "artiste" until you make some games that can seriously be considered artful. Meridian 59 is pretty god-damn good. But most people don't have games like that under their belt.
let's not forget about the medium of machinima, where films (a medium often seen as high-art) are being made with video games (a medium often seen as vulgar and low-art)
or how about artists who use video games as an artistic medium? I have stepped into commercial galleries where video games were the basis for an artwork.
as a professional artist, who has been formally educated in the fine arts, and who has exhibited work on 3 separate continents; it is my opinion that video games are very much a form of art.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Watchmen may well be over-rated (in a way it, like Maus, has become the poster-child for "Serious Graphic Novel"). Still, I really don't think it's dated. It's "out of date" of course, but that's inevitable. If nothing else, I think it preserves a sense of the time permanently and, at least for that alone, is art.
Let me say it this way: Suppose I were totally unfamiliar with Moore; and someone gave me a copy of Watchmen with all the copyright notices changed to 2009, and they said something like "This graphic novel was just written. It explores the social tensions about power and nuclear brinksmanship of the late 70s and 80s, through a critical and intertextual examination of the development of superheroes in context of society." (or whatever)
I strongly suspect that I would read it and come out of it saying "Wow, that guy absolutely nailed the 70s/80s and froze it in these pages forever, while in an alternate history nonetheless."
By contrast, this is not true for V for Vendetta.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Current art critics will probably never widely accept video games as art. There was a penny arcade strip which explained this trend throughout history. (Someone will probably reply to this with a link.)
Ultimately games will be widely accepted as art. But it won't happen until the current crop of respected art critics dies of old age, their names are quickly forgotten, and they are replaced by a generation that was raised with games and knows wherein the art lies. Then they will go on to snub there own generation's struggling art form and the circle of life is complete.
BASE Conflict for Quake 3
Maybe this guy would get some respect if he wasn't such a little bitch.
Who cares if people don't respect your industry, are you SO hungry for approval from people you have nothing to do with that you lose sleep over the gaming industry being dissed or misunderstood?
How is it even a bad thing to be making things for kids? Its a fantastic thing, if not necessarily the case.
God, when will i stop asking rhetorical questions?
Are video games art? I would contend that the vast majority are not, in the same way that a Kinkade painting isn't: there may be basic, technical merit, but they're overwhelmingly trite and kitschy, and have all the emotional depth of a Harlequin romance.
I don't accept the entirety of Ebert's argument against games-as-art. I don't think that developers are particularly driven to create games-as-art at the moment either, while their producers are breathing down their collective necks to give us the next Christmas blockbuster. Our ideal of games, placing the player in control of everything from camera to pacing, flies right in the face of a traditional work's careful composition... and I don't think that we've really grasped how to use the medium beyond creating highly detailed stick figures in interactive Dick and Jane stories.
Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and similar creatures of the night were forbidden.
For example, from the wiki article on the Comics Code Authority:
Marvel skirted the zombie restriction in the mid-1970s by calling the apparently deceased, mind-controlled followers of various Haitian super-villains "zuvembies". This practice carried over to Marvel's super-hero line. In the Avengers comic, when the reanimated super-hero Wonder Man returned from the dead, he was also referred to as a "zuvembie".
Hackneyed androgenous anime figures with an emo lead wielding oversized weapons doing physics defying acrobatics in some stock fantasy world on a quest to save the world is art???
Oh and a game engine where the 'role playing'element consists of walking towards the next blinking dot on your map and pressing the dialog button??
At least its not your tolkien-esque elves orcs and dwarves.
MGS series I guess you have a partial case but FF series...
and yes I was a huge FF fan as a kid, remember playing through FF3 as a kid, FF4, FF5, FF7, but seriously could not give two ----s about any further sequels.
Its art with the same level of artistic depth as a Macross episode.
I'll bite.
Pride and prejudice is a mills and boon novel wrapped up in ye olde english language, combined with mildly insightful social commentary that was apparently very insightful at the time, but now not so 'edgy'.
God I despise Jane Austen!!!!!!!!!!! (scars from high school and uni english maybe)
This country has never seen worse times, and I imagine in 18 months or so they'll let us know just how bad it is right now.
Gaming is recession proof and that means people are still spending money on it regardless. That poses 2 HUGE threats:
1. The government is going to come in and look for easy taxes, think Liquor and Cigarettes, (and now video games).
2. We are 15 years away from online currency being taxed, for profit or leisure quote me on this one.
People are getting desperate as these are desperate times. People are LOSING EVERYTHING. Its not long before they look for a scape goat for peoples desperate attempts at financial freedom and security before they blame video games for the countries lack of morals. Maybe they should ask the Auto and Bank industry if they play video games.
The writing is on the wall...I'm just glad that a democratic President gives me some hope in this backwards country. I think its time the people take it back and call nonsense on all this B$.
Kids - like everyone else - were watching television. Men were reading paperback books.
Mickey Spillane. "My Gun Is Quick"
Comic book sales were in a steep downward spiral and crime and horror looked like a quick - cheap - way to recapture an older audience.
The immediate problem was that distribution was routed through the same news outlets as everything else.
In the drug store with Scrooge McDuck and the cigar store with the bondage themed True Detective magazine.
The hard core stuff sold under the table. It could be - and often was - a very sleazy business.
The larger problem was that the newspaper comic strip was still in its prime.
Caniff. Al Capp. Chester Gould. Walt Kelly. Charles Schulz ---.
Both veterans and newcomers producing really, really, good stuff in every genre
--- and when they fought their own battles against censorship, they came into the fight with much better ammunition.
I don't disagree with your lists (except for Fallout 3, which is kind of shitty when weighed as a Fallout game)--but how the hell do you (apparently) value Deus Ex over System Shock 2...?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
A few general comments here.
First, this article is intended for professional game developers. I wrote another article on this topic for game players and enthusiasts at RPG Vault: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/807/807409p1.html Read that article if you want to see why legitimacy is important to everyone, and why attempts to restrict the content of games hurts more than just game developers.
The question isn't really if games are Art (with a capital A), but if they're seen as legitimate. The biggest example to show that games are not necessarily considered legitimate is in the numerous laws enacted to restrict the sales of games to "protect the children". Most of these politicians railing against video games are the same ones that would never think about trying to regulate books or even movies. Politicians will speak out against games because there is enough sentiment that games aren't really legitimate that the politician can score easy points. Thankfully, at least in the U.S., the courts have defended games in terms of free speech against various legislative attacks.
Personally, I think games are an incredibly powerful medium. I think that in the future we'll be able to develop games that have the same impact and meaning as classic movies and books; of course, we still have a very long way to go. On the other hand, we may not get that opportunity if we're hobbled by people who scream the battlecry "save the children!"
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
The issue isn't really what's "art" (but that tends to be very closely related), the issue is how much games are respected. As I said in another comment, the biggest issue we face is hostility from politicians that feel they can score easy points off of trying to restrict games "for the safety of our children." Being considered "Art" helps, but that isn't the only issue here.
I'd like for games to be considered legitimate so that we can see the full potential of the medium. I'd love to see a game that tackles complex issues like a book does. But, if we're only considered mindless entertainment that must be regulated, we'll never see anything that really pushes the boundaries.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
If a game developer wants games to be taken seriously, he (or she) ought to start making games that can be taken seriously. I can't think of any game on par with The Lord of the Rings, or Les Miserables, or Till We Have Faces, or (to use more modern examples) Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, or Hyperion, or any of dozens of great books I've read.
Sidenote: more prominent boobs on the box aren't going to earn the gaming industry any more respect. They may increase sales, but the same can be said of romance novels, and they're not widely regarded as great literature either. Sometimes, to gain respect you have to give up a few sales.
I realize that games aren't books, and we should have different expectations, but the best games still seem to be about on par with mediocre books in terms of character development, emotional impact, and philosophical content.
I think games ought to take some inspiration from the anime industry; there's a whole lot of bad anime, but there is also some great anime, and I think part of the reason why is that the people in charge are willing to take risks and explore complex issues, and they trust their viewers to "get it". (This can result in bad anime as often as good anime, but the industry on the whole seems to encourage risk-taking, whereas the game industry does not.)
I don't play a lot of games, so it may be that I'm just not aware of the rare gems out there. Riven is the best example I can think of off the top of my head as a game that made me think deeper thoughts (and I don't mean the puzzles). Some of the Zeldas have been pretty good overall (though all of them are rather silly at times, and perhaps a little too predictable). I have heard good things about Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, though I haven't actually played either.
If anyone has any great suggestions for what they think is the video-game equivalent of, say, Pachabell's canon, or Michaelangelo's David, or the Notre Dame cathedral, or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, please enlighten me with your suggestions.
As somebody who just read Watchmen for the first time a few months ago, I have to agree. Didn't feel 'dated' at all, it was just (like most writing) set in the past.
Ever play The Longest Journey or I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream?
Well, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was of course a short story before it was a game, so that's a bad example. I sure tried to play The Longest Journey, but it was deadly dull, By the "art has no practical use" metric, I must therefore conclude that The Longest Journey is art.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I thought V for Vendetta perfectly captured the descent into totalitarianism of a modern society. It didn't capture a particular decade, but I think it did a great job of being a 1984 for post-1984. It doesn't yet seem dated, though I'm sure it will in 100 years, as almost nothing is truly timeless. If anything, the ubiquitous surveilance in London makes it more relevent today.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Any book one is forced to read in high school automatically sucks. I admire 1984, but I can't stand to read it for that reason. Dickens, OTOH, simply sucks.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Gameplay? no - you never choose to make a game less fun in the name of "artistic freedom"
But wouldn't it be awesome if someone did?
Story, music, images, cinematography - all of these have been independently established as forms of artistic expression. Some games even have semi-respectable artistry in these aspects.
But no one messes with the gameplay in the name of art.
Gameplay - the thing that binds everything to the player - absolutely cannot be ignored in this medium. In RTS games I have used strategies I believed to be inferior because they seemed more dramatic. In RPGs I have created characters I believed to be inferior because they seemed to tell a more interesting tale. I don't believe I am alone in this. If I may presume, many people want to see the imperfectly balanced game. They would rather lead the doomed assault than be rewarded with an unsatisfying "you win" screen.
There's certainly potential for art within the ordinary gameplay models, but how much more interesting would things be if those models were occasionally abandoned?
"Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and similar creatures of the night were forbidden."
Thank god. Who needs more of that? I guess it forced comics to be original and creative; e.g. punisher, x-men, .
The problem many video games have is that they too often include zombies for no apparent reason and they add nothing to the plot line. They simply ran out of ideas by the Nth level and decided to toss in zombies.
Examples, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Prince of Persia (the original didn't have any zombies, all sequels did), CoD WaW, Doom 1 - 3, Quake 1 - 2 & 4, Resident Evil 1 - XXI, etc. I think even the new SiN sequel had zombies tossed in.
It gets really old, redundant, and moronic. I wish game companies would just stop doing it. If you're making a game and you say to yourself, "You know what this game needs? Zombies!" Please, just shoot yourself.
i mean for christ f@#$ sake, video games are a multi billion dollar industry. you can hardly meet a 7 year old who hasnt participated in simulated mass murder in some RTS, or known the thrill of gibbing some 'bad guy' in an FPS...the military is actively recruiting people who play video games to control their new armed drone robots and aircraft, ever f'in movie has a video game made about it, and vice versa, there is a voluntary rating system for games that parents simply ignore, every scientific study about games psychological impact gets shot down by ten thousand whining bloggers, .....
and yet, you are still so oppressed and misunderstood by the cold, cruel world.
really. i dont get it.
you want historical paralells? how about when money became the most important factor in the production of hollywood films, which absolutely crushed and destroyed every last ounce of creativity....
to the point where an entire 'sub industry' had to be created, the "indy scene", that could feed back creativity into the system.
i have been playing games since 1985, and ya know what? they are worse, and it is not because of the evil government forcing you to say 'this game is not good for 5 year olds because you can see the guys spine come out'.
it is the industry, the money, the sheer and unadulterated greed. game 'journalism' has been a joke for 15 years, game 'conferences' are pure marketing orgasms, the entire video card market has been turned up and over to satisfy the lust and ego of teenage boys, and yet... somehow, you have this deep question about why people dont think you are legitimate.
A similar battle is being fought by gamers for acceptance of video games as a legitimate sport. Personally, I feel this is a bit of a stretch compared to calling video games an art.
In Korea, starcraft players play in televised matches, earn sponsorship deals, and train every day to be on top of their game. America is not as enthusiastic in it's acceptance. The Championship Gaming Series (CGS), a TV series on DirecTV, recently closed down. The CGS made waves in the community by paying it's players a salary, thereby elevating all of those who made the cut to online celebrities, with those who enjoyed the program watching their favorite counter-strike player or team perform in the same way many Americans enjoy watching their favorite football team or player.
Regardless of the CGS, the gaming community has slowly been gaining influence, there are now many lines of "gaming" peripherals and specifically designed "gaming" PCs. There are even endorsed PC parts and peripherals now, (The Fatal1ty line) much like professional basketball players get shoe deals.
Final Fantasy VII may not have the greatest overplot (Summary; evil life-draining alien comes to planet, man is infused with alien cells, man takes over role of evil alien, man is defeated by plucky young group of heroes) but on the individual level, the characters are well fleshed-out, have strengths and weaknesses of character, not just stock archetypes, and while the "role playing" is linear, it allows for a good deal of depth in the character development, unveiling each aspect one by one. I would say it is possible for a strong critical literary analysis of Final Fantasy VII, gameplay aside, which would be proof unto itself that the game is an art piece. Final Fantasy VI also falls under this merit; I would even argue for my least favourite, FFVIII, as being an attempt at art that's so damn convoluted and difficult to understand it falls down upon itself.
To compare it to the flying-missile-nonsense that is Macross is fairly insulting. Although the later series of that do TRY their hardest to have a plot, it just turns back into girls singing on spacecraft.
You might want to read this.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/89342-Pride-and-Prejudice-and-Zombies
There was no CCA for books, so how did they know you weren't picking up something horrible like Huckleberry Finn? What about going to a museum?
At the time about which we speak, these media weren't new anymore. Everyone has grown up with books and museums around. Thus nobody is seeing them as "bringers of the end of the world as we know it".
(But if you go back in history, you can pretty much find lots of examples of fundamentalists movement burning books to protect the population from their corrupting power)
Back in the comic book scare (or in other recent past scares like role playing games, rock music, etc.) or in the current video game scare, the considered media is new. Only a small fraction of the adult has grown up with them. The children (like always) are really interested into new things. Their parents just don't understand the media. They only see it from outside, and focus on the few negative points that are overhyped by the (classical) media : "beware kids believe so much in it that they confuse their fantasy and the real world", "warning, may contain uncovered nipple", etc.
They see the new media as a corruptor of the soul of their children and the bringer of the end of the civilisation as we know it.
After 50 years, video games will be considered the same way as books. Some other newest media-du-jour will be considered as too dangerous for children. And people in year 2060 will joke about how someone could consider some classical video game as something able to distort reality perception and provoke massive violence.
In short :
- books aren't new any more, they don't get censored much.
- video games are currently new, they'll get the fundie's ire.
For the same argument, read How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet by Douglas Adams
His born iwht/until 30years old/past 30y.o. categories pretty much sum this up.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
1. As opposed to what other art medium?
A crucifix in a jar of piss is considered art. A TV displaying static in an empty room is considered art. Or I've personally seen such works of art in a private collection as 4 pieces of A4 paper, 2 crumpled and 2 folded, then straightened out and framed. That was art. I've seen a sculpture apparently representing "death" which was really a steel sheet monolyth. No, seriously, it was a big rectangular box of steel sheet. That was it.
Or probably the best example here was a modern painting I've seen, which looked _exactly_ like a tetris game when you just lost. No seriously, it was essentially a square grid with 1 to 4 adjacent squares filled with one of 5 or 6 colours or so. Except I recon one of the rows should have been eliminated before because it was full. I wonder if it was an error of the artist or that was some thought-provoking part about the unfairness of life.
If _that_ is art, why isn't Tetris art? It can produce the same kind of an image. Why is it art if it's displayed in some snob's collection on canvas, but not when it's on the screen?
2. The general idea (or excuse) of art these days is that it's supposed to be "thought provoking" instead of anything else. (In fact, last I've heard about it at an arts college calling someone else's work "pretty" instead of "thought provoking" is the most grievous insult you can throw and not be sued for it. But use it only if you want to make an enemy.)
So then why aren't, say, the story arcs of City Of Heroes art? I know several did get me thinking about morality, or about doing what you think is right and discovering that you've been manipulated, and a few other things.
And I'm not even saying that City Of Heroes is the only game like that. Most games can provoke _some_ thought. E.g., KOTOR 2 did a good job of being pretty morally complex, and had more than a couple of situations worth thinking about. E.g., The Witcher got pretty philosophical at times, and it made a good point that sometimes there are no right sides to pick. E.g., Black And White, much as I otherwise thoroughly despised that game, did get me thinking a bit about divinity and such. Etc.
Heck, I once even wrote an essay about Chucky Egg as a metaphor for the struggle of the common worker against the oppressive corporate chickens. Ok, it was a big joke, but it did provoke that kind of thought at least. So even a simplistic one-screen platformer can technically be thought-provoking.
And again, if a crucifix in a jar of piss or a crumpled sheet of paper can use the "thought provoking" excuse, then virtually any game can. If you're the kind that's inclined to think of the deeper meanings and possible metaphors of that jar, I see no reason why you couldn't do the same about a Mario kart game. (See the XKCD strip where she gets all philosophical about choosing to not cross the finishing line. Ok, just to make him lose, but still, that's some thought provoked.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hackneyed garden-variety space-marine alien zombie-fighting crap like Gears of War/Halo/Crysis/Half-Life are fast-food for the mind.
As a game developer myself, I can appreciate the technical excellence that went into the making of a high quality title like "Crysis", in a similar manner that I appreciate a masterwork of art, like a painting or a musical piece.
All you do in the game is shoot at stuff, yeah. But all you do with a painting is watch at it. I think that the most important aspect of art is what kind of thoughts and emotions it provokes, and not how you interact or what you do with it. And not every piece of art is for everybody. Maybe the games mentioned above are "fast food for the mind" for you, but knowing how difficuilt it is to create a high quality game engine, I see and appreciate alot of things in them that maybe you don't.
I'd like to point out that I tremendously enjoy watching mid-episode music videos with outstanding scifi battle footage. It may not be art, but it's goddamn entertaining. You CAN always ask for more, but is it necessary?
When we moved to our present house in a small English town, over 20 years ago, our smallest child wandered off down the road and fell over. Very shortly afterwards, an elderly lady emerged from her house, put a plaster on her knee, said "You must belong to the people who moved into X's house" and returned her to us. That's the kind of society I prefer to live in. If it means a measure of censorship of publicly available material, I'd rather have that, quite honestly. My youngest daughter now works with children in an inner city environment and is appalled by how, despite their access to "extreme" material, their lives are actually very culturally impoverished.
The meta-message of the old comics to children was, in fact, that people in uniforms could generally be trusted and that they were people working to make society safe. That's quite a positive message.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I think that the games industry, now that it's a financially viable and we have alot of big companies vying for position, who do the marketing, foot the bills and who own lots of little companies that do all the hard work, the industry is not totally unlike the 70's - 80s Film Industry.
We've got the likes of EA, Take2, Activision Blizzard (tbh, they should just have called it Activizzard) in place of Warner, MGM etc, and for every "die hard" you have a "look who's talking", instead you have a "Far Cry" for every "Sims" or "Tycoon" game.
During this period there were a few excellent films that became classics like Blade Runner, Star Wars, just as we have our Half-life and Halo's
We've even seen a burgeoning Indie development community spring up with the advent of Steam's download system
Perhaps we're closer to the mid 90's now, how many Friday the 13ths and Fifa/Madden games have we had?
If the analogy fits, and we continue like this, we're heading for a plethora of sequels, prequels, remakes and 'reimaginings' - infact, we've already had Tomb Raider aniversary - will we start seeing Halo: The phantom menace in the next decade? or perhaps a merging of franchises with "FIFA Tycoon", or Maybe send Madden into space with "Madden X".
Maybe i've laboured this analogy enough for now, my stomach tells me it's lunch time.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
and stop looking at other people to validate you.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The answer is simple: why care about the ESRB rating in the first place?
Those ratings are silly and only favor censorship. Which is evil.
Just make a game as good as possible, target it to actual adult people and do not mold it around a special rating. If it gets rated M, just bear with it.
More and more games are M-rated nowadays anyway. I believe it improved sales more than reduced them.
Ico and, to a lesser degree, Shadow of the Colossus, rely on the interactivity to communicate the most significant aspects of the 'story' (if you can call the more abstract things they try to get across 'stories'), relegating the elements that games inherited from literature and cinema to supporting roles.
This makes them the only real attempts at truly artistic games (rather than games with artistic elements) that I know of, since most, as you point out, are artistic only in literary or cinematographic ways.
Hackneyed androgenous anime figures with an emo lead wielding oversized weapons doing physics defying acrobatics in some stock fantasy world on a quest to save the world is art???
I'm curious as to how any typical game could NOT be 'art'. No matter how shitty it is.
Music is, and games have music. Creative architecture is, and game worlds are composed of this. Sculptures are, and models are just another digital variant of that. There's (shitty) acting. There's animation and motion capture. There's the creative composition of all of these elements, another artform in itself. Even if I hated it as a game, I've never played one that had no artistic qualities.
The idea of a universal definition of "art" is (IMO) born of art critics trying to keep their jobs. I stick with what one artist friend told me: "If you feel something, it's art".
That is to say that the definition of art is a highly personal one. What is art for me may not be art for you and vice versa.
IMHO, Deus Ex is an all-around better game. It has flaws, to be sure, but I think that SS2 had more. Deus Ex also brings a lot to the table that SS2 doesn't even try to--and that's not really a failing of SS2, but I think that it makes Deus Ex a deeper and more substantial game.
Both are superb, though, and both are easily in my personal top-10 list of games.
Oh, and I forgot about the Thief series. Completing the third one... man, the whole thing felt so epic for a game series with such a small focus, if that makes any sense.
Hm, some more on games as art:
I read quite a bit, and not just shitty genre fiction (though I read my fair share of that too)--I'm very much enjoying working through the huge body of "canonical" literature. I watch movies, including some that make critic's lists. IMO, games hold up very well to those two forms of media as a method of artistic expression, and some of my most moving experiences with fiction have been in games. Depending on what kind of experience you're looking for, they may even be a better method for conveying your message.
Saving Private Ryan impressed with its gritty opening scene that famously gave the audience a glimpse of hell, but I doubt any movie could have given me as much insight--however slight it may be--in to the concept of shell-shock as the first Russian level of CoD did.
The feelings evoked by traveling through the worlds of Morrowind and (to a lesser extent) Oblivion were occasionally very similar to those I've felt appreciating real landscapes and natural beauty, and their rich histories and in-game lore rival that of all but the best fantasy literature. Chrono Trigger/Cross, a couple of the Final Fantasies, Arcanum, a couple of the Suikoden games, Planescape: Torment, Darklands--ALL better than the average fantasy/sci-fi novel.
No book or movie has come close to being as terrifying as a number of the games I've played. IMO, games are the clear master of several types of horror, some of which overlap with those attempted in film and books.
Half Life 2's coast section had a lonely atmosphere of a quality that can only be seen in some of the best movies.
Fallout I/II and similar games where you have to make moral choices can tell you things about yourself that you might not discover in a book or movie; for instance, I've found that I can't bring myself to do a "bad" play-through my first time in a game.
One of the only good parts of Fallout 3--and it was a damn good one--was the bit with Harold, which is among the most heart-wrenching experiences I've ever had with any form of fiction, bar none, and the interactive form it took was integral to that experience.
Good point. A man sucking his own dick is impressive, but is it art? performance art? Is a film of it art? Is a clip of it plus music art? We can all agree it evokes emotion -- disgust, laughter, envy, or arousal, depending on the viewer.
Since when does a video game have a practical use? Most are enjoyed for a period of time and maybe revisited again later, but I can make that same argument for Movies, books, and even paintings. Of course you could argue Wii has a practical use because people exercise with it (I know several Physical Therapy people that use them), but you could argue that a painting gallery makes you walk while you enjoy it, too.
I think the real problem Video Games have is that they are not a single medium, but rather an amalgamation of mediums. Video Games often combine Visual arts, Music, and coding (which some consider an art). I've seen board games that combine all of these (yes, even music - I can't remember the game, but it had a battery operated tower that played ominous music and crackled thunder - Dark Tower or something like that), but I don't know anyone that considers board games art. Of course, I know people that don't consider writing art, either - they say prose can be artistic, but a novel is not art - in that respect, a game can be artistic, but it is not in of itself art.
Personally, I loved The Longest Journey, but I enjoy a laid back game once in a while and people like my brother-in-law who was weaned on action games and shooters wouldn't find any fun in it at all. I really enjoy adventure games while watching live TV for instance - when commercials hit I work on the puzzles for a bit. That sort of game tends to work much better than games that require your full attention all or nearly all the time (shooters, MMORPGS, etc).
Please be a little more misogynistic. I can't get enough of it.
In the end, these are games and should be treated with the same respect you'd treat a football game or soccer game.
Fanatical crowds outnumbering the players thousands to one, potentially excitable to the point of a murderous mob?
I'm hoping that the industry surprises me with something that tells a story so well that I'd consider it art, but I haven't found one yet.
Why haven't you played Ico yet? It's been out for years and years!
You can't take the sky from me...
I've seen a sculpture apparently representing "death" which was really a steel sheet monolyth. No, seriously, it was a big rectangular box of steel sheet. That was it.
I remember reading about that one. Some well-known artist had a vision of a huge cube of metal. One day, he was driving around in New Jersey and saw a sign "You design it, we fabricate it". So he called them up. At first, he wanted a solid metal cube. It was explained to him how much a cubic meter of steel weighs and what it would take to move or display it. So he went with a sheet-metal cube with some internal support structure. The shop built it up and drop-shipped it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he had an exhibit scheduled. Really.
I've been to too many minor art openings in SF. A question I and a designer friend used to ask each other was "will this be around in ten years or will it have been tossed". A big fraction of the '80s stuff probably hit the dumpster years ago.
How can anything that is so much more enjoyable on ethanol be only for kids?
Hackneyed garden-variety space-marine alien zombie-fighting crap like Gears of War/Halo/Crysis/Half-Life are fast-food for the mind.
It's odd to me that you worded that the way you did. Hackneyed garden-variety? I haven't played crysis, but those other three at least were very original, Half-life especially redefined FPSes. Final fantasy, on the other hand, is almost to it's 20th iteration. It's been pretty stale at many points.
As far as the legitimacy goes, I feel like time will make fools of the critics. The establishment always looks down on new things, the french impressionists were widely mocked because they were doing something new. Clearly those people would feel like idiots today. In the early days of movies, there were undoubtedly people who would have laughed at the suggestion that they could ever be art, and those people also are clearly revealed to be idiots today.
The same thing will happen with videogames. It's already gaining traction. And it will happen faster too. Kids who grow up playing games realize they're not only for kids. As the old stodgy art establishment gets turned over, the new one will be filled with gamers, many of whom get into art because of games.
Likewise, kids who grow up playing videogames realize that their games didn't make them into killers, and will be less likely to buy that crap. I've never bought the argument that violent movies make real life violence because I saw movies like Terminator and Scarface growing up, and made it to adulthood without killing anyone. I played Doom, Marathon, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Carmageddon, and other violent games as a teen too and will never buy that crap about games either.
If nothing else, rest assured that the crowd who looks down on games is rapidly dying out.
The Comics Code Authority effectively crippled the medium of comics for decades, restricting it to kiddie humor and simplistic superhero stories. The only comics that were able to tell intelligent, challenging, or sophisticated stories for grown-ups after the CCA was established were those that developed through the "underground" drug culture, which weren't distributed to a mainstream audience and market. Fortunately, the CCA gradually became less relevant when comics stopped being distributed widely through newsstands (instead being sold only in comics specialty shops), and material like Watchmen, From Hell, 300, Road to Perdition, and a non-campy version of Batman (plus a whole range of comics that haven't been made into films) were possible. But it's taken decades for the comics medium to recover from (self)censorship, and the comics industry still hasn't. Since the imposition of the CCA, comics have withered into a niche medium, still dominated by the two genres that the CCA tolerated. Our culture is the poorer for it.
All so your parents wouldn't need to worry about what kinds of books you had access to.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I haven't realized that the slashdot community is so boring, when no talking about technical topics what a shame! I'll have to wait for the next IE/FF/(putYourBrowserNameHere) security problem...
The core argument of the post to which this replies (which, among other things, suggests the entertaining but artistically shallow character of the earlier FF games) appears to be that repetitive and sometimes predictable storyline, lack of verisimilitude and/or departure from zero-world physics, and reliance on oft-used and recognizeable plot conventions and generic modes makes for shallow art. I'm biased on this point, I guess, as I believe lots of the FF games incorporate carefully constructed and subtle, thought-provoking plot elements (e.g., King and Queen Eblana in FFIV: what is the source of the horror and sorrow these figures generate? Is it simply that (i) they are humans transmuted to monsters, (ii) that they prove humans can be made monstrous, or (iii) that they are monsters which bear the signs of what they have lost?). More important than determining whether these games are artistically shallow, though, is the question of whether their artistic profundity or lack thereof is especially important.
If the argument above suggests that "early FF games = shallow art b/c of repetitive and unrealistic qualities," and that "shallow art isn't really 'art' as we know it," then the argument simultaneously knocks a huge swath of important works out of the realm of art (e.g., Le Morte D'Arthur, Don Quixote, The Faerie Queene, all of the Pietas anyone ever carved ["I mean, Jesus died and his mother was sad. Here's a sculpture. How's that deep?"], still lives with flowers and fruit, etc). Art's a pretty big domain of human activity with a pretty big set of internal divisions, and those romances and sculptures and paintings belong INSIDE it, rather than outside it. I think works that expand upon earlier artistic traditions should remain, too (e.g., all the FF games mentioned above).
The romances referenced above, I guess, are the most vulnerable to attack w. respect to artistic status because they were entertaining in their day, and dull and repetitive to modern audiences. Much the same argument is being applied to these early FF games. But even if these romances and games aren't profound art, and even if they were designed purely for entertainment (neither of which I'm arguing), they're still culturally important art.
There's a lot more to determining whether something merits the name of "art," or determining whether it's profound or good art, than looking at Dali's "Persistence of Memory," putting hand thoughtfully to chin, and saying, "man, that's some deep artistic stuff. I feel that. Can't you just feel the artistic depth here? Boy, if you put that in an Xbox game, I'd feel that, too." That's like saying "food = BLTs, and every other conceivable comestible = dubious, subpar bodily nourishment not meriting the name 'food.'"
The realm of good art is large and broad, and I'm absolutely CERTAIN that FFIV and most of its variations are located therein.
(a) "Great art" and (b) "good art" and (c) "culturally important art" may all be different things, and will certainly be defined, and redefined, and squabbled over, and confused with one another umpteen times between now and the next -ism (BTW: what comes after postmodernism? Eh...). But alls I know is that FFIV (or confining it to the extent of my personal experience, FF2[us]) qualifies as at least one of (a), (b), or (c). /fanboyish.plugging.of.ffiv.disguised.as.reply
My chess set has majestically sculpted pieces and a beautifully painted wood board but that doesn't make the game of chess art. Even if I listen to Mozart while I'm playing, or instead of using chess pieces, hire Shakespearean actors to walk across a check-boarded marble floor and perform one-on-one battle and death scenes when I make a capture, those are all things attached to the game. It's hard to see this with video games, where the game mechanic is hidden so fully underneath the ornamentation.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
No but it makes that implementation of chess art.
It's mostly two things that rub me the wrong way; the body-parts of the state were a bit much ("the nose") although I see the point of it (fascist state=one entity); and the whole thing about Fate running things. It's just hard to believe in a single omnipotent computer these days. (Although I guess Adam Susan could have just been imagining its abilities, and really it was doing simple statistical calculations.)
For what it's worth, I think Moore said that the context of V for Vendetta was overly optimistic: it didn't even take a nuclear strike to bring about V's world.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The "practical use" of an entertainment product is that it entertains you. An entertaining movie cannot be art, and an art film cannot be entertaining (while of course an "art film" can). Personally, I think that's the wrong test: nothing accessible to the masses can be art, as "art" exists only as a way to allow a subculture to feel superior to everyone else.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Utilitarian art is still art. And games are more then just game mechanic. Do you not consider plays as an art just because all the kings and heroes there are fakes, or is opera not art because it is just people walking and singing. All art obey some form of direction, all have genre constraints. In case of play, moving force is script, in case of games it is game mechanic.
My chess set has majestically sculpted pieces and a beautifully painted wood board but that doesn't make the game of chess art.
But the minute you take a picture of it, it is art.
Taking pictures of nature is art...Almost anything visual is art (at least once its captured in a photograph). Art is protected by freedom of expression, but yet we are not able to state that anything visual is protected by freedom of expression (of course the definition of freedom of expression isn't what you would hope it means, to do drugs is expressing yourself, etc. etc.).
Hmm I seem to have cornered myself into an infinite loop...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
I'm sort of biased against GDC, but I agree it's the place to go for the industry take. My dislike stems mostly because I heard GDC founder Chris Crawford give me his "why GDC sucks now" spiel, and it was sort of convincing. He originally started it as a more experimental-gaming conference, as a complement to the similarly oriented Journal of Computer Game Design, where developers would discuss the future of games, innovative design ideas, etc. At some point though it got dominated by AAA titles and more present rather than future of games, and then sold out to CMP and became a for-profit venture, which is why it now costs a bazillion dollars to attend.
It's definitely the place to go if you want talks on the current state of AAA titles, though. The only other place that gets any of those talks is AIIDE, and it gets only a few a year (e.g. Will Wright and Doug Church in 2005; I forget what happened 06/07; Damian Isla, Steve Rabin, and Borut Pfeiffer in 08).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm not really interested in making an incrementally better game using current techniques; more into the indie-gaming, art-gaming, and experimental scene in general. Stuff like what these folks are are putting out.
Also I'm not sure what you mean by "only $995". SIGGRAPH is super-expensive as far as conferences go, and it costs $345 for grad students, or $800 for non-students. Most conferences are about $200 for students, $400-$500 for non-students. But then most conferences are also run by non-profit organizations, not for-profit companies trying to ream you.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I disagree. there is something special about games that movies don't have. Although the story is unfolding in a 3rd person fashion there is a direct connection between the main character and yourself. Games like the longest journey have a unique quality that having the player control the actions of April Ryan allows them to more fully understand and relate with the character. It add a larger feeling of ownership and makes that things that happen to the character feel more personal. because they aren't just happening to the game character in a way they are happening to you as well.
Nobody I know who writes games is working on $20 million dollar games, though. For example, I frequently work with these folks, who do a good business for themselves on development budgets measured in the thousands of dollars (sometimes tens of thousands; never millions). It's not the high-profile stuff, but there's a lot of other stuff going on besides EA and friends.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The main problem is good, inspirational, games are still the exception rather than the standard.
Most games published are just re-hashes of previous ones. Poor game play, a guy with a gun.. I played FarCry 2 recently, and while the graphics was great, it was boooring. Yet another shooter. HalfLife 2, good game, but similar scenario. The best game i played recently, Armadillo Run (IGF winner), and its not an industry game.
Unfortunately this is the standard from the big industry players. Shooters, sports, space games with bulky main characters, and sex fem supporting roles. Boooring.. Detrimental to society? Perhaps not directly. But definitely indirectly. Its like watching television. Ok, it shouldn't be illegal, but do you really want your kids watching it all the time.
There are a few exceptions. Too few.
I cannot see how anything in its twentieth iteration can be called, "Final" anything. Is it just me or has the love of money caused the Final Fantasy to live on like the television serial character who has just a year to live, year after year after year...
People I have known who were big on comics, focused mostly on the artistic aspect of the graphics. They talk about how a particular artist changed over time in the way they rendered a character. I don't think comic book were ever intended to embody in a few dozen pages as much literary content as a five hundred page book. Some plot, some character development, and intriguing artistic rendering of the scenes is where the artistic value seems to be. Comparing them to book makes no sense to me.
Because "that" was made with an artistic purpose in mind, Tetris wasn't.
You can ask the developer of Tetris and artistic considerations were the last of his worries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Concur. No clue why the its ranked "flamebait" except that a lot of Shashdotters see this stuff as something more than what it is (entertainment). I would consider the problems that comic books ran into much the same, seeing themselves as more than what they were. Get a grip on reality, if you're generating "fluff" for society (and that's not necessarily a bad thing) do a good job at it and get on with you're life.
Yes you can make a decent living at it; so from a financial perspective you have legitimacy, be happy with making a living at something (I hope) you find rewarding, create something that people can entertain themselves with, but that should be what the goal is. Anything loftier, is missing the purpose of it.
That is the first question a team developing a game should ask themselves.
Most games answer this in a very rudimentary fashion, which simply pass no mustard with current artistic theory and orthodoxy (or even heterodoxy).
Of course it would be enough for a development team to declare their game as art, but it would require some artistic justification for such an statement to be taken seriously.
Many folks here are confusing glossy with artistic, clearly lots of art are glossy and look great, but that is not even the starting point form most art today.
As long as all games have an eye on the profit it will be very difficult for them to deliver. Learn a bit about most influential artists in history and a constant that emerges is that they, in general terms, disregarded money. From Orson Wells, Van Gogh to Mozart: money was important but it was not driving their call to arms. The same can't be said from game developers (many of whom are uncultured in the most basic aspects of literature, painting, music, film making and photography. The music in games for starters is a painful experience as an aesthetic experience, plot in most games is childish and one dimensional).
How many game developers are serious Opera buffs? Very few (of the few I know, I have never met any who are) Opera for example deal with similar restrictions (implausible plots, not enough time for proper character development, etc) nevertheless this art manages to deliver the artistic goods.
For games to become a serious art they will need to learn from other arts and they will need to be made by people that are cultured (this includes popular culture, but popular culture by itself is not enough anymore: the Beatles learned from Stockhausen for example).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He isn't misogynistic, he just hates Yoko Ono. Personally, I would've picked someone else to break up a band over.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
and yes I was a huge FF fan as a kid, remember playing through FF3 as a kid, FF4, FF5, FF7, but seriously could not give two ----s about any further sequels.
While I admit that many of the later sequels are disappointing (I'm looking at you FF8, and I'm honestly not too happy with FF10 either), if you are a fan of the older FF games I highly recommend that you give FF9 another shot. 5 and 9 are the best of the series, IMO.
Knowledge != Intelligence
Thanks, but what I was getting at was that as a kid with my kid perspective I really loved and enjoyed those games. Nowadays I wouldn't bother, the old JRPG dungeon crawl linear plot same combat system (however tweaked) is too same old, same old. (I'm excluding stuff like Skies of Arcadia which actually has an original and different combat system)
You can't pretend to wax philosophical about art/aesthetic philosophy on a slash-dot comment. You should be ashamed for even trying.