Games have better emotional control of the audience. A series of action-ish segments climaxing in a difficult boss gives a player a feeling of exhaustion a movie can't match. How about the upswing in emotion when the harassed hero happens upon a cache of weapons / power-ups? The impact is magnified because it's not just Ash Ketchum who suddenly got a new psychic pokemon that can turn the tables, it's the player as well. A movie, being passive can't give the same feeling of triumph because the movie-goer is always on the outside looking in. Perhaps the best feeling is the "door-opening" feeling you get when Link stumbles across the hook-shot, feather or bombs, as a whole new world opens in front of you.
This is very true. Games can evoke emotion in the player. However, each and every person may have a different reaction. See why this is troubling if you're playing as the hero? How is the hero supposed to grow and change, if YOU are the hero, and the game designers have no control over your thoughts and feelings? Good stories involve characters who change and make tough moral decisions. That's sort of difficult when each time the game is played, the 'main character' i.e. you, has a different set of motivations and morals. So either you make a boring hero with no motivations (the silent protagonist), or you give the hero a personality and risk having it clash with the priorities of the player.
Of course, you could always have the player NOT play the main character, so maybe there is yet a way to do it.
From the perspective of storytelling, videogames are in fact a poor medium for doing it, for reasons Ebert describes. The physical interactivity with a game world that videogames provide add nothing to a story, and in mediums such as film, the director and editor use decisions to guide the audience. Any story you can think of telling will always be more effective as a novel, play, or film, than as a videogame. Nearly every videogame story involves violence or physical conflict. Why? Because the story has to motivate the gameplay, and guess what the gameplay entails! Interaction is limited, so the stories are as well. Unless you want to use cutscenes or text... in which case you're using another medium.
So it depends on what you consider a videogame. Games like MGS3 are pretty artistic, but it's all conveyed through cutscenes. Nothing wrong with that, but the emotion and depth brough tforward there isn't possible using only interactive elements. It seems to me like the games that are the most artistic, are also the games that are least like GAMES.
Mouse -- keeps on pushing the minimalist single button. I detest this, and know many people (linux, mac, and pc users) that feel the same. Another button simply adds to the functionality -- I right click several hundred times per day, and don't want combo presses or holding down to approximate this. Overall, I view this as a bad move.
The new apple mighty mouse (which comes with macs) does in fact come with two buttons, and the right one can be enabled my going into the system preferences and telling os x that it's a right click. It's there, so don't complain!
Upon concluding the first Metal Gear Solid for PS1, I thought to myself: "Holy crap! It's been ages since I've watched anything coming from Hollywood of this scope." I remain true: the twisted story, top-notch narration, razor-sharp dialogues and voice acting, the soundtrack... there seemed to draw straight from Hollywood's best in the genre. There were some slippery spots here and there in which the drama sounded to be gearing towards the corny side, but the sheer scope of the thing far outweighted it...
Everything you described there comes from the cinematics. It's film. The more a game becomes high art, the less of a GAME it becomes. The non-interactive elements take over.
keep in mind, I enjoyed all the games you listed. But to include them in a list of "high art" is a bit ridiculous.
Metal Gear Solid- Could be included, but driven almost entirely by cutscenes and codec conversations, with intermittent periods of interactivity. Dangerously close to watching a movie.
Half Life- Equivilant to an action movie with no characters, and all run and gun action. The sequel adds one deminsional characters. Hardly a good story.
Super Metroid- The opposite of metal gear solid. Pretty much all game and no story.
Deus Ex- Full of clichés, ridiculous bugs and scenarios that instantly break immersion. The choices you make at the end can have serious moral consequences, but this is never explored in the game. Your character is emotionless, and the NPCs one dimentional.
etc etc etc. These are great games, because they are fun. The best videogame stories pale in comparison to the best film stories. How could one make Casablanca the game? You can't... because the story is about internal conflict, something you can't control in a videogame. Citizen Kane the video game? Catcher in the rye for wii? Other artforms can capture the human spirit in ways videogames can't. And the video games that do, do it by defering to these artforms (film, radio, theatre), usually through non interactive cutscenes.
The more a game becomes high art, the less of a game it becomes.
Because then there would be no reason for it to be a videogame. If the outcome were determined, it might as well be a play or film. Ever wonder why videogames either default back to radio (metal gear solid codec), film (any game with cutscenes), or the stage (FFVII or half life 2) to advance the story? Because the medium of videogames can't do it.
The bottom line, the video game is never the optimal way to get across your artistic point, or a story. The only advantage videogames have over film or theatre is the immersion that controlling a character can create. But there are so many downsides. You can only interact physically with the world, thus most game stories are about physical conflcit. The best stories involve emotional conflict. Since there is no way now, or quite possibly ever, to interact with a game character in an emotionally maningful way, as AI like that is way beyond reach, games will either be devoid of emotional conflict, or will defer to other artforms to present it. It's this serious shortcomming that I think makes creating 'art' out of a videogame very difficult.
This is from a leaked EGM issue written over a month ago. Online co-op has been in and out of Halo 3 for a while, and it just so happens that at the time of the issue (a month ago), it was out. Maybe there's hope.
Hasn't anybody read Dreyfus? It seems to me his critique of AI is the nail in the coffin for humanlike behavior. The basis for his arguments are that much of the human brain's calculations are non-representational, while everything a computer does is representational. Since computers must bind representations to things in order to manipulate them, they must contextualize the situation in order to determine how to apply representations... but in order to contextualize the situation you need to bind representations... and so we have an infinite regress. The human brain doesn't do this, instead, it responds to stimulus by strengthening nerve connections, in finely tuned discriminations unique to the individual shaped by circumstance. Instead of binding representations to a situation, the situation invokes the neural pathway. One cannot simply program this neural pathway in, snce it is finely tuned to the individual based on past circumstance, their omotion, personality, and physical body amoung other things.
Right now yes, it is. It's not so much in the so called "gimick", but just that it hasn't been utalized in a way that is deep. Many of the ways the wiimote is being used are cool on the surface, but lack any sort of real impact on the way we play the game. The wiimote did not add much to Zelda. Games like wiisports are fun initally, but they are so simple that you reach a level of mastery very easily. Even games like trauma center are the same way. It's cool at first, but once you get the hang of it there's nothing more to explore.
Maybe not, but it worked the other way around. Half Life for the PS2 was awful, but Half life 2 for the xbox was spectacular. The controller did not limit you as much as you'd think, and even made the driving parts easier.
You shouldn't have. All he said was that DVDs can show compression artifacts, while VHS does not. Depending on how you look at it, blocks in the picture can be more distracting that analog noise.
Now, Zeno's paradoxes really aren't worth that much, it turns out.
Yes actually they are, and you're missing the point of why they're perplexing. It takes a certain time to move from any point to another point. There are in infinite number of points on any given line (this is evidenced by zeno's half way argument, the distance can be divided smaller and smaller always). The real question becomes, how does Achilles cross an infinite number of points, in a finite time? Since it takes a finite amount of time to move between any two points, it should take him an infinite amount of time to travel any given distance. As a result of this, there is either a unit of distance that cannot be divided further, or a unit of time.
Re:This is like saying the biggest rival to Ford i
on
Wii, DS, Not Cannibals
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· Score: 1
Not nessesarily. I clearly remember as a kid my parents telling me "You can get a Genesis, OR a GameGear, but not both".
What was said is absolutely true: game depth is really the driving question. Much of the length of games today is derrived through repitition. Levels are drawn out longer than they need to be, in order to afford the player extra play time. However the extra time isn't really that valuable, since it consists of the player either doing repetitive or boring tasks, or places the player in the same situation repeatedly. A game with 10 hours play time, where every encounter and situation is utterly unique, seems much more fun than a 20 hour game with areas and levels mostly the same.
Games like Stubbs the Zombie I think fit this mold as well. The game itself is quite short, yet every minute is utterly enjoyable. It's not perfect, but the experience is far from repetitive.
Look at puzzle games. Mean Bean Machine, which is based on Puyo Puyo, takes all of about 30 minutes to 'beat'. Yet the game itself is so good, and adicting, and especially with the two player mode, just plain fun to play. Wario Ware can similarly be beaten quickly, however it's still fun to play the minigames just for minigame's sake.
RPGs are definately the biggest offenders in my opinion. A Link to the Past or Alundra is an example of what to do right. Final Fantasy is not. Much of the 'gameplay' in final fantasy involves looking at cutscenes, wandering around, or battling random monsters over and over. This is not to say that the game isn't fun, it's simply that it could easily have been half the length and not suffered at all.
I'm more concerned with playtime beyond the first playthrough. A game could have 20 hours of playtime, but be totally and utterly unreplayable. Yet that 10 hour game is so compelling, I go back for a second, third or even fourth try. If people come back to play it again, THAT's when you know you have a winner. Ideally, the game would be short and very replayable.
More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?
I think it would be useful to somebody who has a P.O. Box, and doesn't want to go down to the post office to pick up their mail. That way, it could be even more private, since they won't have to be seen opening their box.
This quote is extremely Hypocritical if you ask me. This was one of them men who helped found our government. Government is one of the biggest ways to give up freedom for security. In the state of nature, you have every freedom in the world. Not so under a government. However, we glady do this because the government promises to protect us. So Franklin himself gave up liberty for security. Had he really believed what he said, he would have been an anarchist.
Some freedoms are simply worth giving up for security.
If we look at baseball for example, it's a timeless sport. People did, do, and will continue to play the game. It's a part of our culture, the great american past time. It's going to be with us for a long time. But what about Starcraft? Can it last 100 years like baseball? Or will the crowd move on to the newest RTS or Starcraft 2, perhaps leaving these players out in the cold when their skills don't carry over? There will always be a great deal of people who would go to a baseball game. In 15 years, will there even be anybody still interested in Starcraft?
I think it's great that they are able to achieve fame, but they should enjoy it while it lasts, for they will never be as remembered as baseball legends, like Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they know what a fine line they're walking between 'do no evil' and survival here, I wonder which will pervail?
How exactly is automatically removing copyrighted content that shouldn't be posted in the first place evil?
Games have better emotional control of the audience. A series of action-ish segments climaxing in a difficult boss gives a player a feeling of exhaustion a movie can't match. How about the upswing in emotion when the harassed hero happens upon a cache of weapons / power-ups? The impact is magnified because it's not just Ash Ketchum who suddenly got a new psychic pokemon that can turn the tables, it's the player as well. A movie, being passive can't give the same feeling of triumph because the movie-goer is always on the outside looking in. Perhaps the best feeling is the "door-opening" feeling you get when Link stumbles across the hook-shot, feather or bombs, as a whole new world opens in front of you.
This is very true. Games can evoke emotion in the player. However, each and every person may have a different reaction. See why this is troubling if you're playing as the hero? How is the hero supposed to grow and change, if YOU are the hero, and the game designers have no control over your thoughts and feelings? Good stories involve characters who change and make tough moral decisions. That's sort of difficult when each time the game is played, the 'main character' i.e. you, has a different set of motivations and morals. So either you make a boring hero with no motivations (the silent protagonist), or you give the hero a personality and risk having it clash with the priorities of the player.
Of course, you could always have the player NOT play the main character, so maybe there is yet a way to do it.
From the perspective of storytelling, videogames are in fact a poor medium for doing it, for reasons Ebert describes. The physical interactivity with a game world that videogames provide add nothing to a story, and in mediums such as film, the director and editor use decisions to guide the audience. Any story you can think of telling will always be more effective as a novel, play, or film, than as a videogame. Nearly every videogame story involves violence or physical conflict. Why? Because the story has to motivate the gameplay, and guess what the gameplay entails! Interaction is limited, so the stories are as well. Unless you want to use cutscenes or text... in which case you're using another medium.
So it depends on what you consider a videogame. Games like MGS3 are pretty artistic, but it's all conveyed through cutscenes. Nothing wrong with that, but the emotion and depth brough tforward there isn't possible using only interactive elements. It seems to me like the games that are the most artistic, are also the games that are least like GAMES.
Mouse -- keeps on pushing the minimalist single button. I detest this, and know many people (linux, mac, and pc users) that feel the same. Another button simply adds to the functionality -- I right click several hundred times per day, and don't want combo presses or holding down to approximate this. Overall, I view this as a bad move.
The new apple mighty mouse (which comes with macs) does in fact come with two buttons, and the right one can be enabled my going into the system preferences and telling os x that it's a right click. It's there, so don't complain!
Upon concluding the first Metal Gear Solid for PS1, I thought to myself: "Holy crap! It's been ages since I've watched anything coming from Hollywood of this scope." I remain true: the twisted story, top-notch narration, razor-sharp dialogues and voice acting, the soundtrack... there seemed to draw straight from Hollywood's best in the genre. There were some slippery spots here and there in which the drama sounded to be gearing towards the corny side, but the sheer scope of the thing far outweighted it...
Everything you described there comes from the cinematics. It's film. The more a game becomes high art, the less of a GAME it becomes. The non-interactive elements take over.
keep in mind, I enjoyed all the games you listed. But to include them in a list of "high art" is a bit ridiculous.
Metal Gear Solid- Could be included, but driven almost entirely by cutscenes and codec conversations, with intermittent periods of interactivity. Dangerously close to watching a movie.
Half Life- Equivilant to an action movie with no characters, and all run and gun action. The sequel adds one deminsional characters. Hardly a good story.
Super Metroid- The opposite of metal gear solid. Pretty much all game and no story.
Deus Ex- Full of clichés, ridiculous bugs and scenarios that instantly break immersion. The choices you make at the end can have serious moral consequences, but this is never explored in the game. Your character is emotionless, and the NPCs one dimentional.
etc etc etc. These are great games, because they are fun. The best videogame stories pale in comparison to the best film stories. How could one make Casablanca the game? You can't... because the story is about internal conflict, something you can't control in a videogame. Citizen Kane the video game? Catcher in the rye for wii? Other artforms can capture the human spirit in ways videogames can't. And the video games that do, do it by defering to these artforms (film, radio, theatre), usually through non interactive cutscenes.
The more a game becomes high art, the less of a game it becomes.
Because then there would be no reason for it to be a videogame. If the outcome were determined, it might as well be a play or film. Ever wonder why videogames either default back to radio (metal gear solid codec), film (any game with cutscenes), or the stage (FFVII or half life 2) to advance the story? Because the medium of videogames can't do it.
The bottom line, the video game is never the optimal way to get across your artistic point, or a story. The only advantage videogames have over film or theatre is the immersion that controlling a character can create. But there are so many downsides. You can only interact physically with the world, thus most game stories are about physical conflcit. The best stories involve emotional conflict. Since there is no way now, or quite possibly ever, to interact with a game character in an emotionally maningful way, as AI like that is way beyond reach, games will either be devoid of emotional conflict, or will defer to other artforms to present it. It's this serious shortcomming that I think makes creating 'art' out of a videogame very difficult.
This is from a leaked EGM issue written over a month ago. Online co-op has been in and out of Halo 3 for a while, and it just so happens that at the time of the issue (a month ago), it was out. Maybe there's hope.
A great deal of games for the NES were so ridiculously hard, it's amazing I ever finished them. If that's not 'hardcore', I don't know what is.
You know, all this is comming out on the xbox 360... which doesn;t require the internet at all to play!
Hasn't anybody read Dreyfus? It seems to me his critique of AI is the nail in the coffin for humanlike behavior. The basis for his arguments are that much of the human brain's calculations are non-representational, while everything a computer does is representational. Since computers must bind representations to things in order to manipulate them, they must contextualize the situation in order to determine how to apply representations... but in order to contextualize the situation you need to bind representations... and so we have an infinite regress. The human brain doesn't do this, instead, it responds to stimulus by strengthening nerve connections, in finely tuned discriminations unique to the individual shaped by circumstance. Instead of binding representations to a situation, the situation invokes the neural pathway. One cannot simply program this neural pathway in, snce it is finely tuned to the individual based on past circumstance, their omotion, personality, and physical body amoung other things.
10% offtopic and 90% funny? Looks like you LOST karma!
Right now yes, it is. It's not so much in the so called "gimick", but just that it hasn't been utalized in a way that is deep. Many of the ways the wiimote is being used are cool on the surface, but lack any sort of real impact on the way we play the game. The wiimote did not add much to Zelda. Games like wiisports are fun initally, but they are so simple that you reach a level of mastery very easily. Even games like trauma center are the same way. It's cool at first, but once you get the hang of it there's nothing more to explore.
Maybe not, but it worked the other way around. Half Life for the PS2 was awful, but Half life 2 for the xbox was spectacular. The controller did not limit you as much as you'd think, and even made the driving parts easier.
Jobs is pretty arrogant, yet he completely saved Apple. His distinct "my way or the highway" attitude turned the company around.
This would be awful for holywood. Film is either color balanced for incadescant light, or sunlight.
You shouldn't have. All he said was that DVDs can show compression artifacts, while VHS does not. Depending on how you look at it, blocks in the picture can be more distracting that analog noise.
I've read about this in various skydiving publications. He was actually able to generate enough lift to ascend. So yes, he really is flying.
Now, Zeno's paradoxes really aren't worth that much, it turns out. Yes actually they are, and you're missing the point of why they're perplexing. It takes a certain time to move from any point to another point. There are in infinite number of points on any given line (this is evidenced by zeno's half way argument, the distance can be divided smaller and smaller always). The real question becomes, how does Achilles cross an infinite number of points, in a finite time? Since it takes a finite amount of time to move between any two points, it should take him an infinite amount of time to travel any given distance. As a result of this, there is either a unit of distance that cannot be divided further, or a unit of time.
Not nessesarily. I clearly remember as a kid my parents telling me "You can get a Genesis, OR a GameGear, but not both".
What was said is absolutely true: game depth is really the driving question. Much of the length of games today is derrived through repitition. Levels are drawn out longer than they need to be, in order to afford the player extra play time. However the extra time isn't really that valuable, since it consists of the player either doing repetitive or boring tasks, or places the player in the same situation repeatedly. A game with 10 hours play time, where every encounter and situation is utterly unique, seems much more fun than a 20 hour game with areas and levels mostly the same.
Games like Stubbs the Zombie I think fit this mold as well. The game itself is quite short, yet every minute is utterly enjoyable. It's not perfect, but the experience is far from repetitive.
Look at puzzle games. Mean Bean Machine, which is based on Puyo Puyo, takes all of about 30 minutes to 'beat'. Yet the game itself is so good, and adicting, and especially with the two player mode, just plain fun to play. Wario Ware can similarly be beaten quickly, however it's still fun to play the minigames just for minigame's sake.
RPGs are definately the biggest offenders in my opinion. A Link to the Past or Alundra is an example of what to do right. Final Fantasy is not. Much of the 'gameplay' in final fantasy involves looking at cutscenes, wandering around, or battling random monsters over and over. This is not to say that the game isn't fun, it's simply that it could easily have been half the length and not suffered at all.
I'm more concerned with playtime beyond the first playthrough. A game could have 20 hours of playtime, but be totally and utterly unreplayable. Yet that 10 hour game is so compelling, I go back for a second, third or even fourth try. If people come back to play it again, THAT's when you know you have a winner. Ideally, the game would be short and very replayable.
More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?
I think it would be useful to somebody who has a P.O. Box, and doesn't want to go down to the post office to pick up their mail. That way, it could be even more private, since they won't have to be seen opening their box.
This quote is extremely Hypocritical if you ask me. This was one of them men who helped found our government. Government is one of the biggest ways to give up freedom for security. In the state of nature, you have every freedom in the world. Not so under a government. However, we glady do this because the government promises to protect us. So Franklin himself gave up liberty for security. Had he really believed what he said, he would have been an anarchist. Some freedoms are simply worth giving up for security.
I'm thinking, if you combine this with BASE jumping, you'd have the ultimate thrill with ultimate danger!
If we look at baseball for example, it's a timeless sport. People did, do, and will continue to play the game. It's a part of our culture, the great american past time. It's going to be with us for a long time. But what about Starcraft? Can it last 100 years like baseball? Or will the crowd move on to the newest RTS or Starcraft 2, perhaps leaving these players out in the cold when their skills don't carry over? There will always be a great deal of people who would go to a baseball game. In 15 years, will there even be anybody still interested in Starcraft?
I think it's great that they are able to achieve fame, but they should enjoy it while it lasts, for they will never be as remembered as baseball legends, like Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson.