You got me there. I was making an absolute statement to grab a little attention in a crowded forum... but when it comes to the Dogme films, I felt that somebody had to point out that the emporer had no clothes on: As much as some people like to call the Dogme a good idea, it systematically slashes away most of the personalized artistry of film-making and results in boring and pretensious films.
The fact that you liked "The Celebration" may invalidate my opening statement a little, but not my overall point, I hope.
the undeniable fact is that several very good films have come out of them, as measured by awards, ticket sales, reviews and, most importantly, the films themselves.
Please name four.
If I, who watches more films (more independant films, in particular) than the average Joe, has both seen and enjoyed them, you win the argument. If not, then I just can't take your statement seriously.
After doing so, it should be possible to return to a happy medium, in which the story and the camera are given appropriate weight.
But that happy medium is there, if you are willing to look for it. "Pi" and "Blair Witch" were both very stylized, auteurist productions, and both succeeded in being very creative stories (whether you liked those films or not, they were certainly unique!)
The idea is that only by such a deliberate overreaction can we guarantee the revival of storytelling skills.
And my point is that their idea is flawed. we can have a revival of storytelling skills without such gimmicks, and the directors with real talent are already doing so.
Well, strictly speaking, TOS lasted 3 seasons AND six blockbuster motion pictures. (Seven, if you count Generations, in which Kirk dies.)
Voyager promised so much and delivered so little, it's sad.
When the pilot of Voyager first aired, the characters were pretty much all introduced through the perspective of Ensign Harry Kim... which had me thinking "coo1! they are going to do a Star Trek series that tells the story of a green, disposable henchman, instead of spending most of their time with the front-on view of the Captain's bridge chair!" -Wrong. That idea would have been too good. They used Harry as a device to introduce us to Captain Hepburn er.. I mean Janeway (the least interesting of all the leads to date), and then prompty forgot about him for two and a half seasons.
When they introduced "The Doctor", I thought "cool! An AI that actually thinks and behaves the way you would expect and AI to think and behave! He's going to be the greatest Star Trek character ever!" -Wrong. A few short episodes, and he became a carbon-copy of Data, and most other non-humans on the show... hoping that someday Geppetto will make him into a Real Boy! The day that The Doctor "went beyond his programming" is the day I began to actively HATE the show. (When 7of9 showed up, we had the treat of having TWO quests for humanity on the same show... oh joy! From that moment on, Voyager was always better to watch with the sound turned off.)
When the annoying salvage yard guy was brought on board as a comic relief, I thought "okay... maybe they will kill him off before long. That would be nice." -Wrong! They killed of his hot girlfriend instead. Morons!
When it became obvious that he would not die soon, I thouhgt "okay... maybe he will be an interesting underworld connection and spy for them." -Wrong! They made him the ship's cook. On a ship that replicates food automatically.
When they introduced Tuvok as a vulcan (not a half-vulcan, like Spock was), I thought "cool! An actual full-blooded vulcan who has no 'human' side to suppress. He will be a real bad-ass!" -Wrong! He is exactly like Spock in nearly every way. The butt of the same jokes, carrying the same repressed demeanor, the same "humorous" moments of catching him in the act of almost showing emotion. What a waste of time.
In short, all of the characters on Voyager are flat and stale reconstituted archetypes. It's as if somebody got their hands on an old Star Trek role playing game, rolled up a few boilerplate characters, and used them for the show. For the last 3 years, UPN has had to run promos every single week that promised "ONE OF THE CREW WILL DIE!!!" or, "THEIR LIVES WILL CHANCE FOREVER" just to get people to tune in, only to discover that it was just another episode in which they manages to get x light-years closer to home, one or two characters learned something about themselves, and Janeway sits in her ready-room with grave doubts about the moralluty of whatever they just did.
Face it, Voyager is a stupid show, and it's death is welcome news to most Star Trek fans.
They understand and expect that noone will adhere to these guidelines. These rules are an idealistic extreme, written to nudge the general game development community a little bit to the side.
Yes, I read the whole article too, thanks. (That's why my post is #90, instead of in the low 20's.)
You, however, are missing my point.
GENRE 95 was ill-conceived, because they overlook the fact that ever since the old days of D.W. Griffith, the art of film has been defiend as something other than traditional drama, and it has been a Good Thing. Films are well-served by the egotist directors who give us stuff like "Citizen Kane" and "Twelve Monkeys". The camera is a part of what defines the art, and DOGME 95 represented an effort to remove the importance of the camera, in favor of the performance and the story.
Likewise, most really great computer games have more going for them than a creative story. All the 3D art, the death animations, and the never-ending quest for more "realism" is part of what makes games interesting.
Still, props to this guy for calling for and end to stale genres. When there is another leap forward in game-play that matches the magnitude of Quake's release, I might be interested in buying another sci-fi shooter... but until then I think I have played enough of them for a while.
I get the impression that the sentence you quoted was merely badly worded, not so much ill-conceived.
The point they were driving at was that a "normal" person would not even think to look in an oil canister to find a med kit, where as the typical game junkie would immediately know that blowing up the oil canister is worth a try, because you get hidden goodies when you destroy objects in a game.
In art, it is often useful to impose arbitrary structures and limitations on what your are doing, in order to challenge your mind.
Kind of like writing haiku instead of free verse poetry. The limitations of the form encourage creativity.
That said, I think that the challenge of balancing interactivity with the feeling of narative is more than enough challenge for any game designer. The question of "how do I tell a story when I don't know what the main character will do?" is something that we are all still trying to answer.
Also, you are still programming, which means that you need to create a finite state system in which a correct reaction results from any given action of the user. You need to keep in mind the limitation of the player to master controls, absorb information, and comprehend the events. You also need to work within the physical reality of a 2D screen connected to a computer or game console.
For all these reasons, I don't think we need to impose more limitations on ourselves, just yet.
Alright. We might as well drop it. Our little debate has been going on in the middle of a minor story which nobody is likely to go back and re-read anyway.
Why? Because the art of film is not the drama. Take away the auteurist director, the interesting camera work, and the other "trappings" they are hoping to avoid, and you are left with a stage play, shot on location with a souped-up camcorder. No thanks!
Likewise with gaming... The best 3D games are the ones that are emersive. I can lose myself in a low-G Quake deathmatch, and imagine myself drifting through the air in a wide, parabolic art, emptying my shotgun at my enemy. It's magical and dreamlike. Take away the "death animation" and replace it with something less real-looking, and your diminish the experience.
That said, I applaud this guys effort to urge more creative genre choiced.
The most fun solo FPS I ever played was Outlaws by LucasArts. Nobody makes westerns into computer games, but they did it, and did a great job at it. I felt just like John Wayne when I walked through the middle of town with a rifle in my hands, just like Clint Eastwood when I lit dynamite sticks with my cigar, just like Buster Keaton as I was leaping from one train car to the next, and just like Robert Redford every time I ducked behind the corner of some saloon to reload my revolver.
While I don't know if anybody should bother to follow these guidelines too cloesely, every game designer should read this manefesto just for the ideas it might give you. Here's a few that came to mind for me:
CHARIOTEER: horse racing in the Roman Colleseum.
MED-EVAC: play an unarmed medic who must enter battlefilds to reach wounded soldiers to bandage their wounds and get them on a vehicle to the MASH unit.
TIMBER TYCOON: Buy and manage forest land to produce wood for lumber yards and paper mills. Clear-cut enough to make a profit, but don't attract attention from the environmentalists, or they will spike trees and pull other stunts that could injure your logging crew and/or slow down production.
MARS MISSION: You have the required propulsion and life-support technology for a manned mission to Mars. Using actual orbit maps, plan a mission for the next available launch window and fly it. (A later expansion pack could involve building a sim space station.)
But somewhere after the first season or two, Paramount brought in some highly skilled writers and staff, and has now taken over TNG's spot as my favourite Trek series yet.
That's because when DS9 was cancelled, the best writers from that show were hired to rescue Voyager from total suckitude. The writing of individual episodes did improve, but the characters are so stale and annoying that even the injection of new writing talent (and the borg known as "two-of-double-D") was not enough to save the show from being horrible.
Killing it at the end of this season and starting over with a totally new show was the best decision they could have made.
what i am saying is that the Open Source movement/society operates in a communist fashion
Yes, and what I am saying is that you are incorrect. To simply share or give away something is not acting in a communist fashion. To say so redefines "communism" to include all acts of benevolence and charity, which it does not. What makes communism different from (to use my earlier example) a rich patron paying for a publicly available art museum, is that communism is a complete economic system.
Nor is working in collaboration with others really communism. People were collaborating on projects for the good of mankind long before Karl Marx invented the concept of communism.
One could go further to point out that Linux is an artifact of the capitalist economy, because if market forces (and the adept salesmanship of our favorite Evil Corporation) had not resulted in a vast, cheap, and open platform for Linux to thrive on (x86), then Linux would have been little more than a hobby project for a handful of geeks who wanted a new Unix-alike to play with.
The Ain't It Cool stories about Star Trek that have been put up recently are entirely without a clue as to what the new show will be like, so that site's stories from an entire year ago are probably worth less than nothing.
Ain't It Cool is a rumor site... take all stories there with a grain of salt.
No, barter would imply that it is his property to exchange. In a communist society, his crops would not be "given in return" for Linux software, but would belong equally to all memebers of the community.
A barter system would be one in which a farmer would pay for software with corn instead of cash. With communism, farmers would be able to use the software for free, but also would have no claim of ownership where their crops are concerned.
If there is any private property, then you don't have a system of collective ownership of property.
Everybody sharing everything is communism. A few people (programmers) sharing one thing (software), is not communism, it's just sharing.
"the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members" that certainly sounds like open source developers
Again, if I can consider myself a member of the "open source community", yet reserve the fruits of my labor for myself (i.e. maybe I sell closed software for a living, even though I use Linux, apache, mozilla, etc.), then it is not a communist society. If it were communism, everybody in the community would have just as much access to my software as I have to Linux.
That was exactly what spoiled the show designed to look like a live newsfeed that NBC ran back in the 80's about terrorists with a nuke on a ship in Charleston harbor.
No, what spoiled that show was shitty acting and an idiotic story.
Well, wouldn't you agree that just because not everyone in America votes, it's still a democracy?
First of all, America is not a democracy, it's a democratic republic.
Secondly, voting does not need to be mandated in order for the system to be considered a democracy.
Finally, communism is an economic system in which the concept of private property simply does not exist. Some people doing something nice for everybody is not communism.
There's nothing abstract about my argument. My previous statement still holds against everything you said. If a farmer who uses Linux is part of a community in which he is also expected to share the fruits of his labor (the food he grows), then it's a communist society. If he keeps the fruits of his labor, then it's just Free Software, and communism has nothing to do with it. End of story.
reactionary: Characterized by reaction, especially opposition to progress or liberalism.
communism != liberalism. Some would insist that the difference is subtle, but liberalism is a different thing. Speaking critically of communism is not reactionary, merely anti-communist... and I was not speaking critically of communism in this case, merely pointing out that the open source movement is also NOT COMMUNISM.
Like I said, if every farmer that uses Linux contributes free food to the community, it's communism. But they don't, so it's not. It's one group of people (programmers) voluntarilly contributing to the good of everybody, like when a rich patron chooses to fund an art museum.
An act of benevolence by one group is not communism. In order to have communism, you need to have a complete economic system built around the lack of private property. Anything else is not communism.
Finally, at no time did I express any disparagement towards communism in my original post. Next time, try reading and comprehending the entire message before getting "pissed off" next time. That would be great, thanks.
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I meant that some code is maybe is as elegant as Ives, not that Ives might have written code that's as elegant as Beethoven.
Was I really that unclear, or are you trolling me for not being careful enough about my writing?
If he says "yes", then you can point out that art sometimes applies to that which has a function.
If he says "no", then drop out of his class and never listen to anything he says again. Seriously.
Some would say that Perl does not require much attention to detail either, and that mistakes can be incorporated into the work. :)
I can mostly agree that well-written code is art, in the sense that good archetecture is art...
But I have never seen anybody's code that rivaled the elegance of Beethoven.
Charles Ives, maybe.
The fact that you liked "The Celebration" may invalidate my opening statement a little, but not my overall point, I hope.
Please name four.
If I, who watches more films (more independant films, in particular) than the average Joe, has both seen and enjoyed them, you win the argument. If not, then I just can't take your statement seriously.
Films are made because we like looking at moving pictures.
But that happy medium is there, if you are willing to look for it. "Pi" and "Blair Witch" were both very stylized, auteurist productions, and both succeeded in being very creative stories (whether you liked those films or not, they were certainly unique!)
The idea is that only by such a deliberate overreaction can we guarantee the revival of storytelling skills.
And my point is that their idea is flawed. we can have a revival of storytelling skills without such gimmicks, and the directors with real talent are already doing so.
I would gladly pay my hard-earned cash to play any of the other three games you mentioned though, if they were done well. Great ideas!
Voyager promised so much and delivered so little, it's sad.
When the pilot of Voyager first aired, the characters were pretty much all introduced through the perspective of Ensign Harry Kim... which had me thinking "coo1! they are going to do a Star Trek series that tells the story of a green, disposable henchman, instead of spending most of their time with the front-on view of the Captain's bridge chair!" -Wrong. That idea would have been too good. They used Harry as a device to introduce us to Captain Hepburn er.. I mean Janeway (the least interesting of all the leads to date), and then prompty forgot about him for two and a half seasons.
When they introduced "The Doctor", I thought "cool! An AI that actually thinks and behaves the way you would expect and AI to think and behave! He's going to be the greatest Star Trek character ever!" -Wrong. A few short episodes, and he became a carbon-copy of Data, and most other non-humans on the show... hoping that someday Geppetto will make him into a Real Boy! The day that The Doctor "went beyond his programming" is the day I began to actively HATE the show. (When 7of9 showed up, we had the treat of having TWO quests for humanity on the same show... oh joy! From that moment on, Voyager was always better to watch with the sound turned off.)
When the annoying salvage yard guy was brought on board as a comic relief, I thought "okay... maybe they will kill him off before long. That would be nice." -Wrong! They killed of his hot girlfriend instead. Morons!
When it became obvious that he would not die soon, I thouhgt "okay... maybe he will be an interesting underworld connection and spy for them." -Wrong! They made him the ship's cook. On a ship that replicates food automatically.
When they introduced Tuvok as a vulcan (not a half-vulcan, like Spock was), I thought "cool! An actual full-blooded vulcan who has no 'human' side to suppress. He will be a real bad-ass!" -Wrong! He is exactly like Spock in nearly every way. The butt of the same jokes, carrying the same repressed demeanor, the same "humorous" moments of catching him in the act of almost showing emotion. What a waste of time.
In short, all of the characters on Voyager are flat and stale reconstituted archetypes. It's as if somebody got their hands on an old Star Trek role playing game, rolled up a few boilerplate characters, and used them for the show. For the last 3 years, UPN has had to run promos every single week that promised "ONE OF THE CREW WILL DIE!!!" or, "THEIR LIVES WILL CHANCE FOREVER" just to get people to tune in, only to discover that it was just another episode in which they manages to get x light-years closer to home, one or two characters learned something about themselves, and Janeway sits in her ready-room with grave doubts about the moralluty of whatever they just did.
Face it, Voyager is a stupid show, and it's death is welcome news to most Star Trek fans.
Yes, I read the whole article too, thanks. (That's why my post is #90, instead of in the low 20's.)
You, however, are missing my point.
GENRE 95 was ill-conceived, because they overlook the fact that ever since the old days of D.W. Griffith, the art of film has been defiend as something other than traditional drama, and it has been a Good Thing. Films are well-served by the egotist directors who give us stuff like "Citizen Kane" and "Twelve Monkeys". The camera is a part of what defines the art, and DOGME 95 represented an effort to remove the importance of the camera, in favor of the performance and the story.
Likewise, most really great computer games have more going for them than a creative story. All the 3D art, the death animations, and the never-ending quest for more "realism" is part of what makes games interesting.
Still, props to this guy for calling for and end to stale genres. When there is another leap forward in game-play that matches the magnitude of Quake's release, I might be interested in buying another sci-fi shooter... but until then I think I have played enough of them for a while.
The point they were driving at was that a "normal" person would not even think to look in an oil canister to find a med kit, where as the typical game junkie would immediately know that blowing up the oil canister is worth a try, because you get hidden goodies when you destroy objects in a game.
Kind of like writing haiku instead of free verse poetry. The limitations of the form encourage creativity.
That said, I think that the challenge of balancing interactivity with the feeling of narative is more than enough challenge for any game designer. The question of "how do I tell a story when I don't know what the main character will do?" is something that we are all still trying to answer.
Also, you are still programming, which means that you need to create a finite state system in which a correct reaction results from any given action of the user. You need to keep in mind the limitation of the player to master controls, absorb information, and comprehend the events. You also need to work within the physical reality of a 2D screen connected to a computer or game console.
For all these reasons, I don't think we need to impose more limitations on ourselves, just yet.
Best of luck to you.
So wizz-bang effects is not the only way to sell a game... just the easiest way. (... oh yea, and the only way to sell a crappy game.)
Why? Because the art of film is not the drama. Take away the auteurist director, the interesting camera work, and the other "trappings" they are hoping to avoid, and you are left with a stage play, shot on location with a souped-up camcorder. No thanks!
Likewise with gaming... The best 3D games are the ones that are emersive. I can lose myself in a low-G Quake deathmatch, and imagine myself drifting through the air in a wide, parabolic art, emptying my shotgun at my enemy. It's magical and dreamlike. Take away the "death animation" and replace it with something less real-looking, and your diminish the experience.
That said, I applaud this guys effort to urge more creative genre choiced.
The most fun solo FPS I ever played was Outlaws by LucasArts. Nobody makes westerns into computer games, but they did it, and did a great job at it. I felt just like John Wayne when I walked through the middle of town with a rifle in my hands, just like Clint Eastwood when I lit dynamite sticks with my cigar, just like Buster Keaton as I was leaping from one train car to the next, and just like Robert Redford every time I ducked behind the corner of some saloon to reload my revolver.
While I don't know if anybody should bother to follow these guidelines too cloesely, every game designer should read this manefesto just for the ideas it might give you. Here's a few that came to mind for me:
CHARIOTEER: horse racing in the Roman Colleseum.
MED-EVAC: play an unarmed medic who must enter battlefilds to reach wounded soldiers to bandage their wounds and get them on a vehicle to the MASH unit.
TIMBER TYCOON: Buy and manage forest land to produce wood for lumber yards and paper mills. Clear-cut enough to make a profit, but don't attract attention from the environmentalists, or they will spike trees and pull other stunts that could injure your logging crew and/or slow down production.
MARS MISSION: You have the required propulsion and life-support technology for a manned mission to Mars. Using actual orbit maps, plan a mission for the next available launch window and fly it. (A later expansion pack could involve building a sim space station.)
That's because when DS9 was cancelled, the best writers from that show were hired to rescue Voyager from total suckitude. The writing of individual episodes did improve, but the characters are so stale and annoying that even the injection of new writing talent (and the borg known as "two-of-double-D") was not enough to save the show from being horrible.
Killing it at the end of this season and starting over with a totally new show was the best decision they could have made.
Yes, and what I am saying is that you are incorrect. To simply share or give away something is not acting in a communist fashion. To say so redefines "communism" to include all acts of benevolence and charity, which it does not. What makes communism different from (to use my earlier example) a rich patron paying for a publicly available art museum, is that communism is a complete economic system.
Nor is working in collaboration with others really communism. People were collaborating on projects for the good of mankind long before Karl Marx invented the concept of communism.
One could go further to point out that Linux is an artifact of the capitalist economy, because if market forces (and the adept salesmanship of our favorite Evil Corporation) had not resulted in a vast, cheap, and open platform for Linux to thrive on (x86), then Linux would have been little more than a hobby project for a handful of geeks who wanted a new Unix-alike to play with.
Order your copy of Star Trek: The Operating System today!
Also known as "WindowsME".
Ain't It Cool is a rumor site... take all stories there with a grain of salt.
A barter system would be one in which a farmer would pay for software with corn instead of cash. With communism, farmers would be able to use the software for free, but also would have no claim of ownership where their crops are concerned.
Everybody sharing everything is communism. A few people (programmers) sharing one thing (software), is not communism, it's just sharing.
"the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members" that certainly sounds like open source developers
Again, if I can consider myself a member of the "open source community", yet reserve the fruits of my labor for myself (i.e. maybe I sell closed software for a living, even though I use Linux, apache, mozilla, etc.), then it is not a communist society. If it were communism, everybody in the community would have just as much access to my software as I have to Linux.
No, what spoiled that show was shitty acting and an idiotic story.
First of all, America is not a democracy, it's a democratic republic.
Secondly, voting does not need to be mandated in order for the system to be considered a democracy.
Finally, communism is an economic system in which the concept of private property simply does not exist. Some people doing something nice for everybody is not communism.
There's nothing abstract about my argument. My previous statement still holds against everything you said. If a farmer who uses Linux is part of a community in which he is also expected to share the fruits of his labor (the food he grows), then it's a communist society. If he keeps the fruits of his labor, then it's just Free Software, and communism has nothing to do with it. End of story.
communism != liberalism. Some would insist that the difference is subtle, but liberalism is a different thing. Speaking critically of communism is not reactionary, merely anti-communist... and I was not speaking critically of communism in this case, merely pointing out that the open source movement is also NOT COMMUNISM.
Like I said, if every farmer that uses Linux contributes free food to the community, it's communism. But they don't, so it's not. It's one group of people (programmers) voluntarilly contributing to the good of everybody, like when a rich patron chooses to fund an art museum.
An act of benevolence by one group is not communism. In order to have communism, you need to have a complete economic system built around the lack of private property. Anything else is not communism.
Finally, at no time did I express any disparagement towards communism in my original post. Next time, try reading and comprehending the entire message before getting "pissed off" next time. That would be great, thanks.