And this is not just genre snobbery. Comic books became graphic novels when Art Spiegleman wrote Maus about the holocaust. This was again almost instantly recognized as a true work of art and he is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along side Picasso, Warhol, etc. Call me when the Museum of Modern Art exhibits some video game screen shots.
There are such a thing as standards, until video games grow up and get some standards and move beyond sophomoric relativism they can be guaranteed to never produce a work of greatness. Why, because guess what like all great things good art is hard work and relativism encourages laziness. Why bother to strive to produce great and moving art if everything is just the same and no different than clouds drifting by in the sky in it's level of attainment?
Re:1900s 3 D stereoscope post cards come to mind
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
I have hunch (art dudes have hunches:)) that the people arguing art is completely relative are techies, and that you aren't relativists in your own field so let me give you some examples that may ring true in your field so you'll get it. Programming has certain canonical texts like "The Mythical Man Month," and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and "The Art of Computer Programming" by Knuth.
I think you will grant me that these texts are more important and insightful than the latest J random "dummies" guide to writing AJAX or whatever the latest programming fad is. WHY are they more important? Because they offer deep insights into the very nature of coding that transcends any particular coding language or time or place. They are books that give you many ah-ha type insights. Well art works the same way, the way artists train themselves is by looking at works that contain deep insights into the human experience like Guernica:
If the artist has a VERY RARE combination of creative insight, and skill, they may produce another work as insightful as Guernica but it's about as likely as J Random programmer being as insightful about coding as Turing or Knuth.
Back to the original subject I believe it will be obvious when video games produce their Guernica because it will produce a powerful reaction and will be discussed everywhere even by ordinary people on the street like Guernica and Citizen Kane were as soon as they were released.
These are works of genius which in themselves have the power to move people unlike subjective interpretations of clouds. Again this is not to say that video games aren't capable of producing good art with this level of insight but I sincerely suspect it hasn't happened YET or I would have heard about it, in fact everyone will hear about it, it will rock the world in the same way the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix, or Patti Smith, or Public Enemy did by bringing true artistic insight into the pop culture of rock and roll.
Where is video games Knuth, Turing, Picasso, Hendrix? Hint it's not going to be obscure when it happens, it will likely start an entire movement in video games when it happens just like surrealism was a movement in the arts, and the hippies, punk, and hip hop were movements in music and the entire culture. Has ANY video game transformed the culture in this way? I don't think so.
Re:1900s 3 D stereoscope post cards come to mind
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
Why do think 3 D steroscope cards left nothing of lasting value? You have not addressed the idea of lasting value in your post despite how verbose it is, lame.
1900s 3 D stereoscope post cards come to mind
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
Nice try at relativism but the world doesn't really work that way. There is a reason we still read Dostoevsky and not other dime store novels of the same era. Some art works for whatever reason have lasting value, and other don't. The best way to express why they have lasting value is that they move us in a non trivial way and give us deep insights into what it means to be human.
Note lasting value does NOT equal boring, I predict that the Sex Pistols, Radiohead, Spike Lee movies, Public Enemy and the art of David Hockney will also have lasting value and these are all radical non boring artists. By lasting value I mean that we will listen to or watch and admire the works of these artists 50 years from now. The trick of course of identifying which works have lasting value in the present which is a very tricky proposition. Perhaps there are video games that will have lasting value, the original Sim City and Myst seem to point in that direction but even these high quality games don't move me very deeply, sorry. Again perhaps there are games capable of moving people in non trivial, non melodramatic, or visceral ways, but I haven't seem them yet.
I think the fundamental problem with video games now is that they are an ephemeral medium very tied to having the latest video card and processor, and may not even viewable at all in 50 years except in crude emulations. This is not does not mean that this isn't capable of change, but it does mean it's hard to make a work of lasting art on a moving platform. Perhaps this is the reason that 3-D post cards from the turn of the century left us nothing of lasting value. Again video games MAY transcend being a novelty item in historical terms but to me they haven't proven that proposition yet.
Another problem is that artistic masterworks are identified strongly with the personality of their creators, where as video games don't have that same strong personality and are identified more with their publishing houses than their authors. Again not that these things can't in theory be overcome but to not even acknowledge them as hurdles and to go for easy relativism would be very naive.
Who said anything about prejudice? I didn't say video games aren't capable of being good art, I said they haven't reached that point, YET, big difference.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you ask "are they GOOD art." Of course video games COULD be good art, but 99.999% are not. Is Myst perhaps good art? Perhaps, but I'd argue even Myst doesn't touch us at the level good art touches us which is in a region of the subconscious beyond words. I have never seen a video game with wabi sabi. Photographs and movies yes, video games not yet.
Most video games are good at adding more, as in higher resolution graphics, faster, more explosions, more team play, etc. But how many video games try to reach less and the still point at the center of our being as described by T.S. Eliot in Burnt Norton?
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."
Perhaps there is such a game I haven't seen that has these qualities, perhaps Spore will be it, but if such a game exists I haven't seen it.
You can write me off as a pretentious old dude who "doesn't get it," but I still say video games could be art but aren't yet. Where is the Ingmar Bergman, the Picasso, the Public Enemey? Sorry I just don't see it yet.
Is 100 megs what we should expect from a browser from now on? I have 2.5 gigs of ram on my dual G5 Mac and I need every spare K when doing photo manipulation work. If browsers are going to start taking 100 megs plus I'll have to keep mine closed when doing photo manipulations which sucks because I like to upload to flickr directly when I'm done.
BTW my copy of Firefox is at 42 megs now with only one tab open. I thought Firefox was supposed to be the slim trim fast browser, where did it all go wrong?
Why does a browser need to eat a 100 megs, is that mostly cached images? If it isn't that insane. I remember when entire operating systems with guis came on half a dozen 1.4 meg floppy disks.
You hope... Or we could be hitching horses to a buckboard to ride into town when the cheap oil runs out and there is no good energy substitute available.
B.S. the OMG the world is scary protect the children by coating the world with latex safety bumpers b.s. comes from BOTH parties. Politics in the U.S. is shot to hell. Watch this little bit by George Carlin to see what time it is:
Dumbass moderator someone asked the origin of the "the constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper" quote in the great grandparent post and I obliged. It's sad but I pine for the late 90s slashdot that was merely filled with unwavering Linux zealots.
"GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
I've heard from two White House sources who claim they heard from others present in the meeting that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
The record shows the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that "goddamned piece of paper" used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the "Constitution is an outdated document."
If you believe NSA spying, bill of rights violating, presidential singing statement congress undermining Bush is a "strict constructionist," you are an utterly naive fool. It's not just "liberals" who are fed up with Bush but ex-Reagan cabinet people like Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.
Like we are given any alternatives that aren't in the pockets of the corporations and that don't blow up little kids with bombs. A pox on BOTH the Dems and Repigs and the Greens and Libertarians are shut down by the MSM as to be worthless. Far better to lock down to a logging gate like I did than waste time voting for the warmongering bitches of the military industrial complex.
Of course it's unconstitutional but will the supreme court ACTUALLY overturn it? Remember George "the constitutional is just a godamn piece of paper" Bush has appointed 2 supreme court justices.
Here is my submission to slash for a story in JUNE:
"Google listens to t.v. to pick ads Fri Jun 16, '06 03:25 PM Rejected"
If it's a hoax it's a long running hoax that's yet to be debunked,which is possible of course, but is it probable? Oh and thanks slashdot editors for blowing off yet another submission of mine only to pick up the same story MUCH later, sigh.
Yep mod parent up. The last thing I want is more complexity in the O.S. itself that would make it more liable to crash and take down the system as a whole. Keep the crashy stuff in userland, thanks.
I have probably played hundreds of games of risk against both people and computers and I have never been tempted to try to take over the world and in fact I'm quite antiwar when it comes to real life. It's quite sad when it's news that a judge has protected our first amendment right to free expression and recognizes fantasy in games is just that fantasy. If the judge hadn't ruled that way I'd be worried about the fate of books from the Iliad to Jarhead.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is not just genre snobbery. Comic books became graphic novels when Art Spiegleman wrote Maus about the holocaust. This was again almost instantly recognized as a true work of art and he is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along side Picasso, Warhol, etc. Call me when the Museum of Modern Art exhibits some video game screen shots.
http://www.ithaca.edu/news/release.php?id=394
There are such a thing as standards, until video games grow up and get some standards and move beyond sophomoric relativism they can be guaranteed to never produce a work of greatness. Why, because guess what like all great things good art is hard work and relativism encourages laziness. Why bother to strive to produce great and moving art if everything is just the same and no different than clouds drifting by in the sky in it's level of attainment?
I have hunch (art dudes have hunches :)) that the people arguing art is completely relative are techies, and that you aren't relativists in your own field so let me give you some examples that may ring true in your field so you'll get it. Programming has certain canonical texts like "The Mythical Man Month," and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and "The Art of Computer Programming" by Knuth.
t hr /P rogramming
m ain.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Mon
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_
I think you will grant me that these texts are more important and insightful than the latest J random "dummies" guide to writing AJAX or whatever the latest programming fad is. WHY are they more important? Because they offer deep insights into the very nature of coding that transcends any particular coding language or time or place. They are books that give you many ah-ha type insights. Well art works the same way, the way artists train themselves is by looking at works that contain deep insights into the human experience like Guernica:
http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/guernica/g
If the artist has a VERY RARE combination of creative insight, and skill, they may produce another work as insightful as Guernica but it's about as likely as J Random programmer being as insightful about coding as Turing or Knuth.
Back to the original subject I believe it will be obvious when video games produce their Guernica because it will produce a powerful reaction and will be discussed everywhere even by ordinary people on the street like Guernica and Citizen Kane were as soon as they were released.
http://www.filmsite.org/citi.html
These are works of genius which in themselves have the power to move people unlike subjective interpretations of clouds. Again this is not to say that video games aren't capable of producing good art with this level of insight but I sincerely suspect it hasn't happened YET or I would have heard about it, in fact everyone will hear about it, it will rock the world in the same way the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix, or Patti Smith, or Public Enemy did by bringing true artistic insight into the pop culture of rock and roll.
Where is video games Knuth, Turing, Picasso, Hendrix? Hint it's not going to be obscure when it happens, it will likely start an entire movement in video games when it happens just like surrealism was a movement in the arts, and the hippies, punk, and hip hop were movements in music and the entire culture. Has ANY video game transformed the culture in this way? I don't think so.
Why do think 3 D steroscope cards left nothing of lasting value? You have not addressed the idea of lasting value in your post despite how verbose it is, lame.
Nice try at relativism but the world doesn't really work that way. There is a reason we still read Dostoevsky and not other dime store novels of the same era. Some art works for whatever reason have lasting value, and other don't. The best way to express why they have lasting value is that they move us in a non trivial way and give us deep insights into what it means to be human.
c ards/stereocard.htm
Note lasting value does NOT equal boring, I predict that the Sex Pistols, Radiohead, Spike Lee movies, Public Enemy and the art of David Hockney will also have lasting value and these are all radical non boring artists. By lasting value I mean that we will listen to or watch and admire the works of these artists 50 years from now. The trick of course of identifying which works have lasting value in the present which is a very tricky proposition. Perhaps there are video games that will have lasting value, the original Sim City and Myst seem to point in that direction but even these high quality games don't move me very deeply, sorry. Again perhaps there are games capable of moving people in non trivial, non melodramatic, or visceral ways, but I haven't seem them yet.
I think the fundamental problem with video games now is that they are an ephemeral medium very tied to having the latest video card and processor, and may not even viewable at all in 50 years except in crude emulations. This is not does not mean that this isn't capable of change, but it does mean it's hard to make a work of lasting art on a moving platform. Perhaps this is the reason that 3-D post cards from the turn of the century left us nothing of lasting value. Again video games MAY transcend being a novelty item in historical terms but to me they haven't proven that proposition yet.
http://www.sandiegohistory.org/collections/stereo
Another problem is that artistic masterworks are identified strongly with the personality of their creators, where as video games don't have that same strong personality and are identified more with their publishing houses than their authors. Again not that these things can't in theory be overcome but to not even acknowledge them as hurdles and to go for easy relativism would be very naive.
Who said anything about prejudice? I didn't say video games aren't capable of being good art, I said they haven't reached that point, YET, big difference.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you ask "are they GOOD art." Of course video games COULD be good art, but 99.999% are not. Is Myst perhaps good art? Perhaps, but I'd argue even Myst doesn't touch us at the level good art touches us which is in a region of the subconscious beyond words. I have never seen a video game with wabi sabi. Photographs and movies yes, video games not yet.
l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_sabi
Most video games are good at adding more, as in higher resolution graphics, faster, more explosions, more team play, etc. But how many video games try to reach less and the still point at the center of our being as described by T.S. Eliot in Burnt Norton?
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/norton.htm
Perhaps there is such a game I haven't seen that has these qualities, perhaps Spore will be it, but if such a game exists I haven't seen it.
You can write me off as a pretentious old dude who "doesn't get it," but I still say video games could be art but aren't yet. Where is the Ingmar Bergman, the Picasso, the Public Enemey? Sorry I just don't see it yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Bergman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Enemy
Such as? Before you answer consider the energy cost building the entire infrastructure system.
Is 100 megs what we should expect from a browser from now on? I have 2.5 gigs of ram on my dual G5 Mac and I need every spare K when doing photo manipulation work. If browsers are going to start taking 100 megs plus I'll have to keep mine closed when doing photo manipulations which sucks because I like to upload to flickr directly when I'm done.
BTW my copy of Firefox is at 42 megs now with only one tab open. I thought Firefox was supposed to be the slim trim fast browser, where did it all go wrong?
Why does a browser need to eat a 100 megs, is that mostly cached images? If it isn't that insane. I remember when entire operating systems with guis came on half a dozen 1.4 meg floppy disks.
You hope... Or we could be hitching horses to a buckboard to ride into town when the cheap oil runs out and there is no good energy substitute available.
Internet condom:
1) Slow and bulky (check)
2) False feeling of security (check)
Oops it broke now I'm going to have screaming twin core processors everywhere.
B.S. the OMG the world is scary protect the children by coating the world with latex safety bumpers b.s. comes from BOTH parties. Politics in the U.S. is shot to hell. Watch this little bit by George Carlin to see what time it is:
4 837.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1
Hint the more AFRAID BOTH parties can keep us the less likely we are to question the government or the ill effects of corporate globilization.
This pointedly stupid yuppie safety crap isn't left or right it's stupid.
Dumbass moderator someone asked the origin of the "the constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper" quote in the great grandparent post and I obliged. It's sad but I pine for the late 90s slashdot that was merely filled with unwavering Linux zealots.
Done deal:
i cle_7779.shtml
"GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
I've heard from two White House sources who claim they heard from others present in the meeting that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
The record shows the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that "goddamned piece of paper" used to guarantee.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the "Constitution is an outdated document."
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/art
Anymore questions you'd like answered?
If you believe NSA spying, bill of rights violating, presidential singing statement congress undermining Bush is a "strict constructionist," you are an utterly naive fool. It's not just "liberals" who are fed up with Bush but ex-Reagan cabinet people like Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.
h tm
See: http://www.vdare.com/roberts/060501_constitution.
Me and the other 2/3rds of the country. Deal:
p proval060815State.htm
http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2006/50StateBushA
Fascinating how you assume I'm an Al Gore supporter. Guess what narrow brain there are other choices like none of the above.
Like we are given any alternatives that aren't in the pockets of the corporations and that don't blow up little kids with bombs. A pox on BOTH the Dems and Repigs and the Greens and Libertarians are shut down by the MSM as to be worthless. Far better to lock down to a logging gate like I did than waste time voting for the warmongering bitches of the military industrial complex.
Of course it's unconstitutional but will the supreme court ACTUALLY overturn it? Remember George "the constitutional is just a godamn piece of paper" Bush has appointed 2 supreme court justices.
Here is my submission to slash for a story in JUNE:
"Google listens to t.v. to pick ads Fri Jun 16, '06 03:25 PM Rejected"
If it's a hoax it's a long running hoax that's yet to be debunked,which is possible of course, but is it probable? Oh and thanks slashdot editors for blowing off yet another submission of mine only to pick up the same story MUCH later, sigh.
Coward or not mod parent up as insightful. More people need to THINK before they blidly trample historical artifacts.
Yep mod parent up. The last thing I want is more complexity in the O.S. itself that would make it more liable to crash and take down the system as a whole. Keep the crashy stuff in userland, thanks.
I have probably played hundreds of games of risk against both people and computers and I have never been tempted to try to take over the world and in fact I'm quite antiwar when it comes to real life. It's quite sad when it's news that a judge has protected our first amendment right to free expression and recognizes fantasy in games is just that fantasy. If the judge hadn't ruled that way I'd be worried about the fate of books from the Iliad to Jarhead.
Actually if you read the fine(?) article he does mention windows.