I understand exactly what you mean, but in a way, public awareness, at least to the level of knowing about the form itself, is required for an art form to reach its potential.
Of course, but it's still art. During Van Gogh's lifetime, his art was not appreciated by most people. Only after his death did it become famous. Does that mean that his paintings weren't art while he was still alive, just because there was no public awareness?
Otherwise, all you get is a small inbred group making art for each other, which eventually dies out when something new comes along.
That is so, but again, I question whether public awareness has any connection to whether something should be considered to be art.
And to your second point, no, narrative doesn't have anything to do with whether something is art, but narrative potential is a very large part of the potential of video games to be art. Yes, there will be dada and abstract video games, God willing, but I was specifically comparing video games with cinema, the art form they most resemble.
I think there already are abstract video games. Rez, for example, does not have any story (I think?), but I would say it's art. Battle Girl had no real story or plotline, but I would quite clearly consider it to be art.
What is a game? It's a combination of sound and moving pictures which allow for user interaction and generally tend to have some kind of goal. I've been to art galleries where the artist had created or commissioned interactive pieces that actually were games. I can not see how somebody could seriously claim that games aren't art, or can't be art, or aren't "high art" (whatever that means). Games are a combination of different media and interaction. There's nothing in games that makes them inherently different from other art forms.
I am a little bit surprised you don't see a narrative in dada, though. It can be said that anything that unfolds over time has narrative, has story.
Okay, but that is usually an unintentional narrative. It happens in your head because humans are bound to look for patterns and a story, but it's usually (or often, or maybe even always) not something the artist intended to occur.
In fact, this interpretation of dadaistic works is not entirely different from the interaction in games. In something like GTA, you may create your own story and do something that the creator did not intend. Ebert thinks that this kind of interaction automatically implies that games can't be art; yet they are very similar to what happens when you interpret a dadaistic piece. You create your own story.
Let's agree that video games have an enormous potential as art that is not being well served ATM.
I think the reason why his first attempts usually suck is that his ideas are too big for the development time of a single game, and he doesn't have the financial resources to say "it's done when it's done."
I've not bought a new game for my Wii since February due to the lack of interesting games, and it's practically been collecting dust.
I find that hard to believe. Some of the Wii games that came out during the last 6 months according to gamerankings.com: Sonic and the Secret Rings, Kororinpa, Tiger Woods, SSX Blur, Godfather: Blackhand Edition, Mario Strikers (it's out in the US by now, I think?), Mario Party 8, Cooking Mama, Super Paper Mario, Resident Evil 4.
There most certainly is no lack of interesting games on the Wii. Oh, and if you like Overlord, try the original. Pikmin runs on the Wii, after all:-)
I think you're missing the point. Yeah, the Wii is outdated compared to a PC, or even compared to the PS3 or the 360. But it's good enough for 90% of all games.
But Anime is hand drawn lines by usually a very talented cartoonist/illustrator, which is then colored by someone just as talented. Videogames cannot compete on this level.
What you're actually saying is: Art direction trumps realism. And if you look at it like that, games absolutely can compete. Look at things like Okami, Alien Hominid, Dragon Quest, Super Mario Galaxy, the Katamari games, Wind Waker, Jet Set Radio, or even the Wario Ware games. None of these have particularly "good" graphics if you look at realism, or number of polygons. But they all have awesome art direction.
Which is why graphics are mostly good enough nowadays: Great looking games are possible if you have talented people working on it. Same as Anime, really.
Totally off-topic, but I've noticed there are tons of ads for Renaissance on/. right now. It's not a sequel, and the visuals are extremely impressed. Maybe you should click on an ad for once:-)
Of course, it's a French movie, not from Hollywood.
Microsoft put away enough money to fix 100% of all sold 360s. I have no idea what the failure rate is, but Microsoft clearly expects it to be higher than 7% or 8%.
Again, you're running into the same situation that Linux is in: not enough dedicated apps for 90% of the market,
90% of the market? Of what market?
and a market that isn't really savvy enough to emulate Windows software in the Unix environment.
So you mean the home market? Having used Macs for 10 years, I've never found even a single app that I wanted to use that was available on Windows, but not on the Mac.
Examples?
I love Unix, I love Linux, and as a pure operating system, I think OS/X works well. OS/X would work a lot better if I wasn't convinced they're eventually going to stop concentrating on their operating systems for any other purpose than to sell their iPods and iPhones.
Why would they throw away half of their profits?
My gripes with Apple are all about their gadgets. They release virtual beta products as the Next Big Thing, and let their early adopters do the bug testing;
Any specific issues you're talking about, or just general FUD?
I've stated the above in comments even better worded than this, and gotten modded down as either "overrated" or "flamebait" each time. I'm no M$ fanboy in the least bit, but I do think that OS/X - and Linux, of which I'm a huge fan - are too niche for Joe Luser.
I find that a strange position to take. "Joe Luser" uses his computer for web, mail, music and letters. Why would he not be able to do this on a Mac? There's one group of users that should go with Windows PCs: PC gamers. Other than that, I do not know why a Mac would not do everything the user wanted it to do.
For businesses, it's a different store. In those cases, there are often specific applications - sometimes even DOS-based - which they need to run, and to which there are no alternatives. Clearly, using Macs is a bad idea in many of those cases.
(...) cult of personality (...) fuck it (...) fanbrats (...)
Maybe you should stop to consider that the downrating might have had less to do with some kind of cultish fanboy conspiracy, and more with your superficial arguments and general choice of words?
Even the movies of the Lumieres were public sensations. The often excellent demo scene work is way way beneath the radar.
Yeah, but that is due to the fact that movies were new and exciting and public, while the demo scene is something that is very specific - you have to have a certain computer and be in a certain environment to even be exposed to it. Either way, I don't see how public awareness has anything to do with whether something is art.
Plus, I think the demo scene does not yet touch the narrative potential of video games. That narrative is what Ebert was describing in his excellent critique.
Personally, I don't think the narrative potential has anything to do with whether it's art. Are dadaistic works not art because there's no narrative potential?
If you use 50% of your iPhone's battery and then plug it in, that counts as 1/2 of one of these 400 charge cycles. If your broken charger kills your phone's battery, that's hardly the battery's fault.
Maybe if you informed yourself instead of spouting wrong and/or insulting stuff, you would not get modded down? Just a thought.
What does "Apples are too limited, software-wise" even mean? Do you mean that Mac OS X limits what you can do with it? It's a Unix. You can do whatever the hell you want with it. Do you mean that there aren't enough apps for Mac OS X? I've never been in a situation where I couldn't find an app I was looking for. Do you mean that you can't run Windows apps on Macs? Because that would be wrong, too.
Oh, your point is that people who play online games often come over as immature? Well, d'oh:-)
Only a small percentage of all gamers play online games regularly, and even non-gamers become immature when they are anonymous. I don't really see the correlation between gamers and (im)maturity.
New R* franchises usually aren't too successfull. Which is a pity, because some of them are pretty cool games. Table Tennis, Manhunt and Bully got good reviews, yet they didn't sell too well. As an owner of a PS3, I'm glad to see a new R* game come my way, but I doubt it'll do too much good for the PS3 itself. Hopefully Sony didn't pay that much for it.
The Heavenly Sword demo actually lasted all of 5 minutes, including cut scenes. And it's a gigabyte download. I'm hoping there will be a second, longer demo for the game.
I don't really understand the "interactivity" argument. Well, I understand the argument (I think it goes something like "if it's interactive, then the gamer is creating the experience and not the person who made the game, so the person who made the game can't be an artist, but the gamer might be one"), but I don't think it has any kind of merit. Yes, the gamer can decide what to do, but every decision results in something the game designer has designed. The gamer can't really create something - unless we're talking about games like Second Life or Little Big Planet. All the gamer can do is decide what part of the designer's picture he wants to look at. The interaction in games isn't really that different from the interaction of a viewer with a painting - you can look at different parts of the painting, but you can't add your own strokes.
I think the Silent Hill movie was too much art and not enough entertainment. It was gorgeous, and it had a deep story, and it asked interesting questions about psychology and guilt, but it just wasn't entertaining.
No. Are you intentionally trying to misunderstand me? I'll make this easy.
He: "[Apple] didn't even bother putting any UI components in to help you diagnose what the problem is" Me: "Diagnosing a problem in Mac OS X is really simple using the logs all applications and system components write."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, but it's still art. During Van Gogh's lifetime, his art was not appreciated by most people. Only after his death did it become famous. Does that mean that his paintings weren't art while he was still alive, just because there was no public awareness?
Otherwise, all you get is a small inbred group making art for each other, which eventually dies out when something new comes along.That is so, but again, I question whether public awareness has any connection to whether something should be considered to be art.
And to your second point, no, narrative doesn't have anything to do with whether something is art, but narrative potential is a very large part of the potential of video games to be art. Yes, there will be dada and abstract video games, God willing, but I was specifically comparing video games with cinema, the art form they most resemble.I think there already are abstract video games. Rez, for example, does not have any story (I think?), but I would say it's art. Battle Girl had no real story or plotline, but I would quite clearly consider it to be art.
What is a game? It's a combination of sound and moving pictures which allow for user interaction and generally tend to have some kind of goal. I've been to art galleries where the artist had created or commissioned interactive pieces that actually were games. I can not see how somebody could seriously claim that games aren't art, or can't be art, or aren't "high art" (whatever that means). Games are a combination of different media and interaction. There's nothing in games that makes them inherently different from other art forms.
I am a little bit surprised you don't see a narrative in dada, though. It can be said that anything that unfolds over time has narrative, has story.Okay, but that is usually an unintentional narrative. It happens in your head because humans are bound to look for patterns and a story, but it's usually (or often, or maybe even always) not something the artist intended to occur.
In fact, this interpretation of dadaistic works is not entirely different from the interaction in games. In something like GTA, you may create your own story and do something that the creator did not intend. Ebert thinks that this kind of interaction automatically implies that games can't be art; yet they are very similar to what happens when you interpret a dadaistic piece. You create your own story.
Let's agree that video games have an enormous potential as art that is not being well served ATM.Okay, I agree :-)
You think you have it bad? All we PS3 owners have is a 5-minute demo of Heavenly Sword :-)
I think the reason why his first attempts usually suck is that his ideas are too big for the development time of a single game, and he doesn't have the financial resources to say "it's done when it's done."
I find that hard to believe. Some of the Wii games that came out during the last 6 months according to gamerankings.com: Sonic and the Secret Rings, Kororinpa, Tiger Woods, SSX Blur, Godfather: Blackhand Edition, Mario Strikers (it's out in the US by now, I think?), Mario Party 8, Cooking Mama, Super Paper Mario, Resident Evil 4.
There most certainly is no lack of interesting games on the Wii. Oh, and if you like Overlord, try the original. Pikmin runs on the Wii, after all :-)
I think you're missing the point. Yeah, the Wii is outdated compared to a PC, or even compared to the PS3 or the 360. But it's good enough for 90% of all games.
What you're actually saying is: Art direction trumps realism. And if you look at it like that, games absolutely can compete. Look at things like Okami, Alien Hominid, Dragon Quest, Super Mario Galaxy, the Katamari games, Wind Waker, Jet Set Radio, or even the Wario Ware games. None of these have particularly "good" graphics if you look at realism, or number of polygons. But they all have awesome art direction.
Which is why graphics are mostly good enough nowadays: Great looking games are possible if you have talented people working on it. Same as Anime, really.
Totally off-topic, but I've noticed there are tons of ads for Renaissance on /. right now. It's not a sequel, and the visuals are extremely impressed. Maybe you should click on an ad for once :-)
Of course, it's a French movie, not from Hollywood.
Microsoft put away enough money to fix 100% of all sold 360s. I have no idea what the failure rate is, but Microsoft clearly expects it to be higher than 7% or 8%.
90% of the market? Of what market?
and a market that isn't really savvy enough to emulate Windows software in the Unix environment.So you mean the home market? Having used Macs for 10 years, I've never found even a single app that I wanted to use that was available on Windows, but not on the Mac.
Examples?
I love Unix, I love Linux, and as a pure operating system, I think OS/X works well. OS/X would work a lot better if I wasn't convinced they're eventually going to stop concentrating on their operating systems for any other purpose than to sell their iPods and iPhones.Why would they throw away half of their profits?
My gripes with Apple are all about their gadgets. They release virtual beta products as the Next Big Thing, and let their early adopters do the bug testing;Any specific issues you're talking about, or just general FUD?
I've stated the above in comments even better worded than this, and gotten modded down as either "overrated" or "flamebait" each time. I'm no M$ fanboy in the least bit, but I do think that OS/X - and Linux, of which I'm a huge fan - are too niche for Joe Luser.I find that a strange position to take. "Joe Luser" uses his computer for web, mail, music and letters. Why would he not be able to do this on a Mac? There's one group of users that should go with Windows PCs: PC gamers. Other than that, I do not know why a Mac would not do everything the user wanted it to do.
For businesses, it's a different store. In those cases, there are often specific applications - sometimes even DOS-based - which they need to run, and to which there are no alternatives. Clearly, using Macs is a bad idea in many of those cases.
(...) cult of personality (...) fuck it (...) fanbrats (...)Maybe you should stop to consider that the downrating might have had less to do with some kind of cultish fanboy conspiracy, and more with your superficial arguments and general choice of words?
Yeah, but that is due to the fact that movies were new and exciting and public, while the demo scene is something that is very specific - you have to have a certain computer and be in a certain environment to even be exposed to it. Either way, I don't see how public awareness has anything to do with whether something is art.
Plus, I think the demo scene does not yet touch the narrative potential of video games. That narrative is what Ebert was describing in his excellent critique.Personally, I don't think the narrative potential has anything to do with whether it's art. Are dadaistic works not art because there's no narrative potential?
If you use 50% of your iPhone's battery and then plug it in, that counts as 1/2 of one of these 400 charge cycles. If your broken charger kills your phone's battery, that's hardly the battery's fault.
Maybe if you informed yourself instead of spouting wrong and/or insulting stuff, you would not get modded down? Just a thought.
What does "Apples are too limited, software-wise" even mean? Do you mean that Mac OS X limits what you can do with it? It's a Unix. You can do whatever the hell you want with it. Do you mean that there aren't enough apps for Mac OS X? I've never been in a situation where I couldn't find an app I was looking for. Do you mean that you can't run Windows apps on Macs? Because that would be wrong, too.
All Manhunt versions averaged reviews around 76%, with the highest reviews above 90%.
Oh, your point is that people who play online games often come over as immature? Well, d'oh :-)
Only a small percentage of all gamers play online games regularly, and even non-gamers become immature when they are anonymous. I don't really see the correlation between gamers and (im)maturity.
I actually don't think there are that many "pure" Cocoa apps. Many apps use Carbon stuff as well, and part of Cocoa calls through to Carbon.
New R* franchises usually aren't too successfull. Which is a pity, because some of them are pretty cool games. Table Tennis, Manhunt and Bully got good reviews, yet they didn't sell too well. As an owner of a PS3, I'm glad to see a new R* game come my way, but I doubt it'll do too much good for the PS3 itself. Hopefully Sony didn't pay that much for it.
The Heavenly Sword demo actually lasted all of 5 minutes, including cut scenes. And it's a gigabyte download. I'm hoping there will be a second, longer demo for the game.
Yeah. Not only would I not pay for the demo, but I also would not buy the game without playing the demo first.
How does gaming make one anonymous?
I don't really understand the "interactivity" argument. Well, I understand the argument (I think it goes something like "if it's interactive, then the gamer is creating the experience and not the person who made the game, so the person who made the game can't be an artist, but the gamer might be one"), but I don't think it has any kind of merit. Yes, the gamer can decide what to do, but every decision results in something the game designer has designed. The gamer can't really create something - unless we're talking about games like Second Life or Little Big Planet. All the gamer can do is decide what part of the designer's picture he wants to look at. The interaction in games isn't really that different from the interaction of a viewer with a painting - you can look at different parts of the painting, but you can't add your own strokes.
Well, the demo scene most certainly is creating art and has been for a long time, so there's a gaming analogon to the "short art-films" you mention.
I think the Silent Hill movie was too much art and not enough entertainment. It was gorgeous, and it had a deep story, and it asked interesting questions about psychology and guilt, but it just wasn't entertaining.
Yeah, but a lot can. I think the bigger issue is that the games are made for the stylus. I think most games would be unplayable without one.
See, your post would have been much better had you ended it with a :-) !
No. Are you intentionally trying to misunderstand me? I'll make this easy.
He: "[Apple] didn't even bother putting any UI components in to help you diagnose what the problem is"
Me: "Diagnosing a problem in Mac OS X is really simple using the logs all applications and system components write."
All clear?