Ok, Pixars Toy Story... CGI Right? That was art. ID's Doom 3... CGI Right? That isnt art? Same deal... Games are as much art as movies under these principals
That's like saying The Devil in Miss Jones is art on the same level as La Dolce Vita or Empire Strikes Back just because all of them are shot on film. The argument doesn't hold water. I think that what Ebert is getting at (which has been flagrantly ignored by a number of the respondents) is the fact that, thus far, videogames are, by and large, strictly entertainment. They can be visually stunning, but then again, so was The Phantom Menace when it came out; I don't think anyone's going to refer to that one as 'art' under the definition that Ebert is reaching for.
To clarify that defnition, 'art' goes beyond just 'pretty movie, I likey,' or anything that's ever been painted, composed, written, or shot on film. No one will claim that this comment is 'art', and so why would Postal get such treatment? Art, real art, has to touch people in a way that provides meaning, not just entertainment. Using Doom 3 as an example, I don't think the game really ever hits an emotional chord, with the exception of the fear of an Imp jumping out at you. It's not art, it's just entertainment. Now, I would say that you can make a case for ICO, Xenosaga, and Final Fantasy VII as being 'art' in Ebert's definition, but I think the fact is that he hasn't played these games, and probably has never heard of them.
So, rather than lashing out and calling the guy names, try to understand for a moment what he's saying: "To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers." I think he's setting the bar a little high for a medium that's just beginning its fourth decade, but he's right: There hasn't been a game yet that lives up to Shakespeare, Yeats, Scorsese, Steinbeck, or Mozart. Had he not set the bar that high, I think it would be easy for us to counter the argument on his own terms.
First off, looking at the picture, all I have to say is, "Nice shoes." Next, I feel that it would really establish him as a true savior of India if this Indian version of Spider-Man, in his first issue, were to save several sacred cows from the clutches of their version of the Green Goblin, who would no doubt look very similar to Ronald McDonald.
I'm really kind of afraid to get a liquid-cooled computer, out of fear that the system might spring a leak or something. I'd hate to hop back on my Windows box one day and tell my friends, "Yeah, I can't use my Mac right now, because I'm waiting for the plumber."
I would've cut the Romero & Carmack section simply due to the fact that the "borrowing computers" story was very well-told in the book Masters of Doom. Besides, if the filmmakers ever wanted to talk about the videogame industry making bad decisions to this day, I think we need to look no further than Eidos' deal with Ion Storm during the development of Daikatana... and -while we're on the subject of Eidos- anything having to do with the last Tomb Raider game. In other words, I smell a sequel!
After the way Infinium Labs has treated [H]ardOCP, I have to suggest to the stock analysts never, under any circumstances, to give this stock a 'Sell' recommendation, lest Infinium's legal department threaten suit for defamation.... Ooh, I just heard the doorbell; I think I'm being served!
Granted, there are a lot of worse people to give Gauntlet over to than John Romero, but -after the whole Ion Storm thing- giving him control of a game as a means of stemming Midway's veritable flood of red ink is simply a bad financial idea all around. Actually, he's probably matured since Daikatana, and hopefully has learned a little something about marketing. If not, at least we can all look forward to this print advertisement:
"The Gauntlet Barbarian Is Going To Make You His Bitch!"
In this big list of comments, I'm seeing two sorts of groups emerging, those being the people who agree with GamerDad that our history is being destroyed, and the people who just don't care. And I think that we're not really getting to exactly why the used-games market doesn't care for packaging or manuals:
They're not selling to collectors. Or, rather, collectors aren't their primary market. The primary market is made up of people who just want to pick up a game either for sentimental reasons or because they missed it when it was new. I mean, let's call these games what they are: USED. If they were up to GamerDad's necessities, they'd be referred to as 'Vintage'.
As long as the game plays, that's all the majority of buyers really care about. I mean, think about it: It's EB, not an antique shop, so it makes sense that collectors would probably have to go somewhere else to find something that's suitable to their needs.
This game could be just the thing to sell to the SimCity crowd, because I'm quite certain that there are people like myself out there: We build utopian societies in which the people are friendly, the garbage is picked up regularly and the grass is green... and then comes THE FINGER OF GOD! Actually, that's how I refer to whatever disaster I'm using, but here's hoping that The Finger of God will actually be a usable disaster in the next revision of SimCity. Building the cities just isn't as much fun as destroying them.
In any case, I've always found SimCity's disasters somewhat lacking, since there's fairly little control over them, and the cities just don't burn very well. With FloodRanger, I could do away with entire communities as I please just by routing drainage. Pity the game's not built with fun in mind, which leaves me waiting for SimCity 5 and the Finger of God disaster, as well as the Starbucks On Every Corner cataclysm.
I actually found this to be pretty funny, given that Mythic has probably spent a fair chunk of change on lawyers, only to have the whole basis of the lawsuit get trashed. I'm really not sure whether to be happy or sad for them.... Actually, it all just makes me laugh, just like with every other frivolous lawsuit in the gaming-industry.
I agree that -in terms of the Star Wars canon- there will inevitably be a disparately large number of Jedi across all of the servers. Unfortunately, it seems that most classes are effectively unnecessary in the game, in that a hundred percent of the players on a server could be Jedi and, as long as one of them had a clarinet, they wouldn't have to worry about much of anything. In my opinion, it's a lack of true interdependence that would allow something like that to happen. I'm not saying that it would happen, because some people would probably then gravitate to bounty-hunting, which would then create a use for a crafter-class to make the weapons for said class, but there's no true dependency on any particular classes beyond someone having Musicianship I, just to get the battle-fatigue down.
It reminds me of a history I read of the Virginia Colony during its first years of existence: The people living there eschewed planting corn because they could make money off of tobacco, and so -as a result- a very significant portion of the population died as a result of starvation. The people who came across the Atlantic to work as iron-mongers, carpenters and various other necessary non-farming occupations chose to farm tobacco, which meant that various services were not being met, and the Virginia Colony very nearly went up in figurative smoke. However, since no one is actually truly dependent on anything in Galaxies, there is no real-world kind of check that would prevent Jedi from running as rampant as tobacco-farmers in Virginia.
All I'm saying here is that -at least to provide some sort of consistency in the Star Wars universe- something will have to get done to put the Jedi back into check. Otherwise, it won't be uncommon in a year or eighteen months to hop on a server that has a fifty-percent Jedi ratio, which is just outlandish to me. But, it ends up being a business decision in which Sony has to decide whether they want the fifteen dollars a month from the thousands and thousands of players who will moan if their Jedi lives aren't fairly comfortable. My bet is, they'll take the money.
Since release, there's been several very large patches, major revamps to several professions, and now a total revamp of the Jedi system. So, again, why would I pay $50 up front?
Let's not forget the fact that, despite these large patches, the addition of vehicles, not only are the players paying fifteen dollars a month to play, but inevitably there will be an expansion pack, which will be yet another twenty to thirty dollars; which doesn't include a free month of play (seeing how they've already hooked you). It's bad enough that the patches for some of these games are already enormous (Final Fantasy 11's install, anyone?) and are often adding significant amounts of content (vehicles in Galaxies), but often MMORPG expansion-packs come off as glorified patches. After all, in order to keep parity with the players who have bought the expansion, there is often a rather sizeable patch for the un-expanded players, just so they can see others using what they didn't buy. To me, that's considerably more insulting than the initial fifty-dollar payment for the game.
The sniper-rifle has been included in so many games because it serves a role in an infantry unit. That's one simple explanation. I think it's simpler to say that the sniper-rifle is included in these (primarily) multiplayer games because there are people out there who like to use it, and simply wouldn't enjoy -let alone buy- the game if they couldn't be snipers (poor things).
A lot of the comments have talked about the lack of realism of sniper-rifles in these games, but I think it's not so much the sniper-rifle itself or even the ones who wield it. The problem, in my opinion, lies in the level-design which empowers and elevates snipers to their godlike status. The answer is fairly simple, then: Foliage, or at least alternate means to travel from one place to another, which doesn't involve running through open fields in which they would very likely become sniper-bait. I suppose that another part of that problem is in the way that a lot of "sniper-friendly" levels place the two bases at the very ends of the map, thereby not allowing for any sort of infiltration other than of the head-on sort.
To clarify, I'm not looking to totally marginalize the sniper into a virtually useless role on the multiplayer battlefield. There have also been some very good comments on this board regarding the difficulty of sniping in certain games (America's Army, for example), which is also a valid point, though a number of the snipers out there don't want that much realism; they just want to be kill-gods, and probably will end up (figuratively) shooting down my idea as well, but I think this is a valid concept for making shooters fun again for this guy over at FiringSquad. As to whether those maps get generated and adopted for particular games is entirely up to the community.
Okay, there were supposed to be line breaks in that, but I hit Submit instead of Preview, then realized that it was HTML formatted instead of plaintext, so please excuse the utter lack of readability in what would've been an otherwise coherent post.
The inherent goodness about PC-based RPG's is that the developers continue to lay the ultimate fate of the game's longevity in the hands of its players, with reference to the mod community. After all, consoles aren't going to start handing out SDK's or development tools for modding anytime soon, and probably never will; thus all attempts at extensibility will have to be created by the developer, which -as we've seen with MechAssault- will likely carry with it an extra charge. However, as far as the PC community goes, the ability to mod a particular game is a selling point for both the player and would-be modder.
Case in point: Neverwinter Nights had two strategy guides out at the time of its release. One, we'll call it the Player's Handbook, in that it was just basically a walkthrough for the as-packaged game. The other one could be referred to as the Dungeon Master's Guide, essentially spelling out how someone could develop a scenario, if not an entire module. While Morrowind certainly has an active mod community, I don't believe I've seen any other games ship with such an obvious (and well-publicized) push for community involvement as happened with Neverwinter Nights. Of course, then again, I also think they were hoping to create an enormous network of persistent linked servers, run by players, in hopes of creating some variety as a free alternative to the monthly-fee of Massively Mundane -er, Multiplayer- RPG's. Unfortunately, that lofty goal never quite panned out.
I, for one, cranked through Knights of the Old Republic on the Xbox within three days of getting the game and I appear to be the only person on earth who was left wanting. In about thirty hours of game-time (yes, I know what that breaks down to), I finished the majority of the side-quests, spent another few hours to see the other ending, and it's a nice and compelling game all around, but after it was done, there was nothing left to do, and -given that Bioware created Neverwinter Nights- how I wanted some extra content.
Reading through the Dynamic Content section of the article, I came to the conclusion that this could make videogames fantastically bizarre. Imagine for a moment the Xbox processor during a game of DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball:
"Hmm, we're just not getting the right emotional state out of this guy... Mesh Engine, can you go up a cup-size or two on that one?... nope, that didn't work. Physics Engine, we're looking for a little more jiggle, here... Now, AI, could you spike the ball a couple of times? Aha! There he is, he's back now."
America Online's apparently carving themselves a real niche in the music business, going to records as a means of publishing, rather than MP3, WMA, et cetera. I wonder if they're going to be putting some of the records out on the white vinyl, because it's totally collectible.
I, for one, can't wait to buy an LP-ROM for my computer so I can listem to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, Pixars Toy Story... CGI Right? That was art. ID's Doom 3... CGI Right? That isnt art? Same deal... Games are as much art as movies under these principals
That's like saying The Devil in Miss Jones is art on the same level as La Dolce Vita or Empire Strikes Back just because all of them are shot on film. The argument doesn't hold water. I think that what Ebert is getting at (which has been flagrantly ignored by a number of the respondents) is the fact that, thus far, videogames are, by and large, strictly entertainment. They can be visually stunning, but then again, so was The Phantom Menace when it came out; I don't think anyone's going to refer to that one as 'art' under the definition that Ebert is reaching for.
To clarify that defnition, 'art' goes beyond just 'pretty movie, I likey,' or anything that's ever been painted, composed, written, or shot on film. No one will claim that this comment is 'art', and so why would Postal get such treatment? Art, real art, has to touch people in a way that provides meaning, not just entertainment. Using Doom 3 as an example, I don't think the game really ever hits an emotional chord, with the exception of the fear of an Imp jumping out at you. It's not art, it's just entertainment. Now, I would say that you can make a case for ICO, Xenosaga, and Final Fantasy VII as being 'art' in Ebert's definition, but I think the fact is that he hasn't played these games, and probably has never heard of them.
So, rather than lashing out and calling the guy names, try to understand for a moment what he's saying: "To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers." I think he's setting the bar a little high for a medium that's just beginning its fourth decade, but he's right: There hasn't been a game yet that lives up to Shakespeare, Yeats, Scorsese, Steinbeck, or Mozart. Had he not set the bar that high, I think it would be easy for us to counter the argument on his own terms.
First off, looking at the picture, all I have to say is, "Nice shoes." Next, I feel that it would really establish him as a true savior of India if this Indian version of Spider-Man, in his first issue, were to save several sacred cows from the clutches of their version of the Green Goblin, who would no doubt look very similar to Ronald McDonald.
I'm really kind of afraid to get a liquid-cooled computer, out of fear that the system might spring a leak or something. I'd hate to hop back on my Windows box one day and tell my friends, "Yeah, I can't use my Mac right now, because I'm waiting for the plumber."
I would've cut the Romero & Carmack section simply due to the fact that the "borrowing computers" story was very well-told in the book Masters of Doom. Besides, if the filmmakers ever wanted to talk about the videogame industry making bad decisions to this day, I think we need to look no further than Eidos' deal with Ion Storm during the development of Daikatana... and -while we're on the subject of Eidos- anything having to do with the last Tomb Raider game. In other words, I smell a sequel!
After the way Infinium Labs has treated [H]ardOCP, I have to suggest to the stock analysts never, under any circumstances, to give this stock a 'Sell' recommendation, lest Infinium's legal department threaten suit for defamation. ... Ooh, I just heard the doorbell; I think I'm being served!
Granted, there are a lot of worse people to give Gauntlet over to than John Romero, but -after the whole Ion Storm thing- giving him control of a game as a means of stemming Midway's veritable flood of red ink is simply a bad financial idea all around. Actually, he's probably matured since Daikatana, and hopefully has learned a little something about marketing. If not, at least we can all look forward to this print advertisement:
"The Gauntlet Barbarian Is Going To Make You His Bitch!"
In this big list of comments, I'm seeing two sorts of groups emerging, those being the people who agree with GamerDad that our history is being destroyed, and the people who just don't care. And I think that we're not really getting to exactly why the used-games market doesn't care for packaging or manuals:
They're not selling to collectors. Or, rather, collectors aren't their primary market. The primary market is made up of people who just want to pick up a game either for sentimental reasons or because they missed it when it was new. I mean, let's call these games what they are: USED. If they were up to GamerDad's necessities, they'd be referred to as 'Vintage'.
As long as the game plays, that's all the majority of buyers really care about. I mean, think about it: It's EB, not an antique shop, so it makes sense that collectors would probably have to go somewhere else to find something that's suitable to their needs.
This game could be just the thing to sell to the SimCity crowd, because I'm quite certain that there are people like myself out there: We build utopian societies in which the people are friendly, the garbage is picked up regularly and the grass is green... and then comes THE FINGER OF GOD! Actually, that's how I refer to whatever disaster I'm using, but here's hoping that The Finger of God will actually be a usable disaster in the next revision of SimCity. Building the cities just isn't as much fun as destroying them.
In any case, I've always found SimCity's disasters somewhat lacking, since there's fairly little control over them, and the cities just don't burn very well. With FloodRanger, I could do away with entire communities as I please just by routing drainage. Pity the game's not built with fun in mind, which leaves me waiting for SimCity 5 and the Finger of God disaster, as well as the Starbucks On Every Corner cataclysm.
I actually found this to be pretty funny, given that Mythic has probably spent a fair chunk of change on lawyers, only to have the whole basis of the lawsuit get trashed. I'm really not sure whether to be happy or sad for them. ... Actually, it all just makes me laugh, just like with every other frivolous lawsuit in the gaming-industry.
I agree that -in terms of the Star Wars canon- there will inevitably be a disparately large number of Jedi across all of the servers. Unfortunately, it seems that most classes are effectively unnecessary in the game, in that a hundred percent of the players on a server could be Jedi and, as long as one of them had a clarinet, they wouldn't have to worry about much of anything. In my opinion, it's a lack of true interdependence that would allow something like that to happen. I'm not saying that it would happen, because some people would probably then gravitate to bounty-hunting, which would then create a use for a crafter-class to make the weapons for said class, but there's no true dependency on any particular classes beyond someone having Musicianship I, just to get the battle-fatigue down.
It reminds me of a history I read of the Virginia Colony during its first years of existence: The people living there eschewed planting corn because they could make money off of tobacco, and so -as a result- a very significant portion of the population died as a result of starvation. The people who came across the Atlantic to work as iron-mongers, carpenters and various other necessary non-farming occupations chose to farm tobacco, which meant that various services were not being met, and the Virginia Colony very nearly went up in figurative smoke. However, since no one is actually truly dependent on anything in Galaxies, there is no real-world kind of check that would prevent Jedi from running as rampant as tobacco-farmers in Virginia.
All I'm saying here is that -at least to provide some sort of consistency in the Star Wars universe- something will have to get done to put the Jedi back into check. Otherwise, it won't be uncommon in a year or eighteen months to hop on a server that has a fifty-percent Jedi ratio, which is just outlandish to me. But, it ends up being a business decision in which Sony has to decide whether they want the fifteen dollars a month from the thousands and thousands of players who will moan if their Jedi lives aren't fairly comfortable. My bet is, they'll take the money.
Since release, there's been several very large patches, major revamps to several professions, and now a total revamp of the Jedi system. So, again, why would I pay $50 up front?
Let's not forget the fact that, despite these large patches, the addition of vehicles, not only are the players paying fifteen dollars a month to play, but inevitably there will be an expansion pack, which will be yet another twenty to thirty dollars; which doesn't include a free month of play (seeing how they've already hooked you). It's bad enough that the patches for some of these games are already enormous (Final Fantasy 11's install, anyone?) and are often adding significant amounts of content (vehicles in Galaxies), but often MMORPG expansion-packs come off as glorified patches. After all, in order to keep parity with the players who have bought the expansion, there is often a rather sizeable patch for the un-expanded players, just so they can see others using what they didn't buy. To me, that's considerably more insulting than the initial fifty-dollar payment for the game.
The sniper-rifle has been included in so many games because it serves a role in an infantry unit. That's one simple explanation. I think it's simpler to say that the sniper-rifle is included in these (primarily) multiplayer games because there are people out there who like to use it, and simply wouldn't enjoy -let alone buy- the game if they couldn't be snipers (poor things).
A lot of the comments have talked about the lack of realism of sniper-rifles in these games, but I think it's not so much the sniper-rifle itself or even the ones who wield it. The problem, in my opinion, lies in the level-design which empowers and elevates snipers to their godlike status. The answer is fairly simple, then: Foliage, or at least alternate means to travel from one place to another, which doesn't involve running through open fields in which they would very likely become sniper-bait. I suppose that another part of that problem is in the way that a lot of "sniper-friendly" levels place the two bases at the very ends of the map, thereby not allowing for any sort of infiltration other than of the head-on sort.
To clarify, I'm not looking to totally marginalize the sniper into a virtually useless role on the multiplayer battlefield. There have also been some very good comments on this board regarding the difficulty of sniping in certain games (America's Army, for example), which is also a valid point, though a number of the snipers out there don't want that much realism; they just want to be kill-gods, and probably will end up (figuratively) shooting down my idea as well, but I think this is a valid concept for making shooters fun again for this guy over at FiringSquad. As to whether those maps get generated and adopted for particular games is entirely up to the community.
Okay, there were supposed to be line breaks in that, but I hit Submit instead of Preview, then realized that it was HTML formatted instead of plaintext, so please excuse the utter lack of readability in what would've been an otherwise coherent post.
The inherent goodness about PC-based RPG's is that the developers continue to lay the ultimate fate of the game's longevity in the hands of its players, with reference to the mod community. After all, consoles aren't going to start handing out SDK's or development tools for modding anytime soon, and probably never will; thus all attempts at extensibility will have to be created by the developer, which -as we've seen with MechAssault- will likely carry with it an extra charge. However, as far as the PC community goes, the ability to mod a particular game is a selling point for both the player and would-be modder. Case in point: Neverwinter Nights had two strategy guides out at the time of its release. One, we'll call it the Player's Handbook, in that it was just basically a walkthrough for the as-packaged game. The other one could be referred to as the Dungeon Master's Guide, essentially spelling out how someone could develop a scenario, if not an entire module. While Morrowind certainly has an active mod community, I don't believe I've seen any other games ship with such an obvious (and well-publicized) push for community involvement as happened with Neverwinter Nights. Of course, then again, I also think they were hoping to create an enormous network of persistent linked servers, run by players, in hopes of creating some variety as a free alternative to the monthly-fee of Massively Mundane -er, Multiplayer- RPG's. Unfortunately, that lofty goal never quite panned out. I, for one, cranked through Knights of the Old Republic on the Xbox within three days of getting the game and I appear to be the only person on earth who was left wanting. In about thirty hours of game-time (yes, I know what that breaks down to), I finished the majority of the side-quests, spent another few hours to see the other ending, and it's a nice and compelling game all around, but after it was done, there was nothing left to do, and -given that Bioware created Neverwinter Nights- how I wanted some extra content.
Reading through the Dynamic Content section of the article, I came to the conclusion that this could make videogames fantastically bizarre. Imagine for a moment the Xbox processor during a game of DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball:
... nope, that didn't work. Physics Engine, we're looking for a little more jiggle, here... Now, AI, could you spike the ball a couple of times? Aha! There he is, he's back now."
"Hmm, we're just not getting the right emotional state out of this guy... Mesh Engine, can you go up a cup-size or two on that one?
America Online's apparently carving themselves a real niche in the music business, going to records as a means of publishing, rather than MP3, WMA, et cetera. I wonder if they're going to be putting some of the records out on the white vinyl, because it's totally collectible.
I, for one, can't wait to buy an LP-ROM for my computer so I can listem to them.