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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Well, at least D&D has a higher quality of reflexive shitposting when this topic comes up than Games does. I believe we must secure a future for anime titties. A thousand curses upon Nintendo Treehouse. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 17, 2016 21:49
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I really think "Gamers" are the biggest obstacle to game criticism out there because they don't want either to look at their games in a critical manner like one would do with other story telling mediums or want negative reviews. The recent story of a well known contrarian game reviewer receiving death threats comes to mind on that front . Or a month or so bad I shared this video from Extra Credits about Tom Clancy's The Division on my facebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jKsj345Jjw and at least one over wheliming reaction it got was one friend saying how he didn't care about the criticism and why do we have to talk about it he just wants to enjoy his game. We see this same thinking happening whenever you bring up issues of sex or race in the Games forum and hints of that here already.
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May 17, 2016 23:08
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Gamers are indeed terrible. They rallied against Ebert with his "video games are not art" spiel, as they totes are art guys this old dude doesn't know what the the gently caress he's saying Then when it's widely accepted that video games are indeed art, applying the most basic concepts of criticism and discussion to them that is applied to EVERY OTHER ART FORM is suddenly not necessary because They're Just Games So which is it?
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May 17, 2016 23:13
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There are at least two ways to think of game criticism. One would be to comment on the way gaming reflects or reinforces messages from other areas of society. There's plenty of this kind of criticism already, mostly coming from lefty progressive types who are unhappy with the portrayal of women, violence, etc. in gaming. One could also imagine a more critical community of game reviewers who discuss the mechanics of game play, what makes a game "fun" or engaging, and what uniquely defines video games as an artistic medium. I get the impression that this kind of commentary is much rarer. Since game reviews and commentary are ultimately a product that requires an investment of time and energy in exchange for some kind of payoff, I think you have to ask: where does the demand and the supply for critical game commentary come from? The supply is easy. A certain kind of nerdy geek who enjoys video games but wants to think and talk about them even more would clearly be very eager to discuss the mechanics of game-play or the problematic portrayals of their favorite characters. So these people are going to be eager to provide commentary on their favourite games. The real issue is demand. Other than a small niche community who exactly wants this kind of in depth game commentary? Certainly not the average gamer. Eventually I'm sure that geeks will rise to positions of sufficient social influence to force their preferred hobby into respectability. Pretentious magazines and university programs will start to pop up and a community of overly serious and focused people with obnoxious tatoos and piercings will probably develop into the nucleus of a new gaming commentariat. For the moment, though, the average gamer probably couldn't care less about the game community and the pretentious art world is, for very understandable reasons, inclined to see games as a distraction for (man)children.
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May 17, 2016 23:22
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To continue what Tuxedo Catfish is talking about, there's a microgenre of games we might call "didactic games" where the explicit purpose is to teach a lesson to the player. Hidden Agenda, Stalin's Dilemma, King of Dragon Pass... The first two are meant to be replayed frequently, so they're relatively short games. Stalin's Dilemma, in particular, can be played through to completion in less than five minutes if you're slow. Both of them are also unwinnable games. The solution you must find in Stalin's Dilemma is to minimize deaths, reach a certain level of industrial output, and be able to fight off the Nazis. And you can't. You can kill fewer than Stalin, but you won't have enough workers freed up or industrial production or armaments. You can't even free up enough workers to achieve the industrialization goal period, no matter what you do. It's easy to conclude that this is apologetics for Stalinism, but the message is undeniable without it explicitly saying the message.
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May 17, 2016 23:24
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KomradeX posted:I really think "Gamers" are the biggest obstacle to game criticism out there because they don't want either to look at their games in a critical manner like one would do with other story telling mediums or want negative reviews. The recent story of a well known contrarian game reviewer receiving death threats comes to mind on that front . Or a month or so bad I shared this video from Extra Credits about Tom Clancy's The Division on my facebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jKsj345Jjw and at least one over wheliming reaction it got was one friend saying how he didn't care about the criticism and why do we have to talk about it he just wants to enjoy his game. We see this same thinking happening whenever you bring up issues of sex or race in the Games forum and hints of that here already. the fact that the reddit nerdvoice fedoralord guy in that youtube series represents the reformist wing of "gamers" as a self-identified group is about all you need to know
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May 17, 2016 23:29
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Errant Signal was linked earlier but he happens to do very insightful, well-reasoned criticism and theories about video games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_tdztHiyiE I mean, once again it's very, very basic criticism but as a medium that's about all it can handle at the moment, if the fans are anything to go by.
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May 17, 2016 23:34
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Yeah, it's always bugged me how “games criticism” has become synonymous with “games cynicism,” and the critics with the biggest platforms seem to be the ones most incapable of critical analysis. Totally agree about Errant Signal, too. His videos are some of the few on the subject that come across as nuanced and academic.
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May 17, 2016 23:39
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Hahahah christ
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May 17, 2016 23:53
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Videogames are not art because art is paintings of horses.
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May 18, 2016 00:33
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This is how you talk about video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecVDzKzLrhk
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May 18, 2016 00:56
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Volcott posted:Videogames are not art because art is paintings of horses. Only if the horses are part of a foxhunt
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May 18, 2016 01:14
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icantfindaname posted:It's really not, though. The SNES came out 26 years ago, and the PS2 16 years ago. Comparably, film was more or less a developed medium by the 40s/50s, which was maybe 15 or 20 years after it was viable technologically  . And even then, games are still feeling out what is possible in the medium, and what games can do well that other media cannot. We can only say that "games CAN BE art", not so much that "games ARE art".There are going to be people who strongly identify with the AAA games more than the indie games, just like there are people who go to tons of movies but dislike the kinds of "serious" movies that tend to win the awards. Those two groups can and do coexist in the same medium, and the optimistic reading of the recent troubles is that they're part of the process of building that coexistence.
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May 18, 2016 06:22
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Maybe video games are a sport? Not many people would say sports are art, excepting maybe certain olympic competitions. While I don't often find people who hate all sports, I do encounter people who don't like the sport I like.
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May 18, 2016 09:53
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Incoherence posted:Video games got trapped in the same sort of protracted adolescence that comics spent an even longer time in: the "games as product" aspect was by far the biggest force, and because of the way the distribution channels worked, it was difficult (albeit not impossible) for the less commercially successful "art games" to squeeze in. This only really changed a decade or so ago, when the tools to make a decent-looking game became more accessible, and when distribution platforms like Steam became popular as a way to distribute such games. My favorite game of last year was almost entirely built and self-published by a single guy, whose previous experience was "a lovely romhack" and "some music for loving Homestuck of all things", and whose self-insert in the game is a "lovely dog" That is in part due to them spending a good chunk of their history predominantly made and sold by toy companies. As these companies were predominantly experienced in developing and selling products to children and thus not well equipped in either skill or desire to produce things of a serious nature. Arcade machines by their very nature encouraged design philosophies that emphasize challenge over anything else, and while they were a decline by the 90's, the design philosophy they promoted naturally was engrained for longer. I say this to point out it was not merely technological limitations that were an issue (the ease at which someone could produce games for consoles in the early 80's is what in part caused the crash), but also a lack of talent and interest in designing games of that sort. Freakazoid_ posted:Maybe video games are a sport? Not many people would say sports are art, excepting maybe certain olympic competitions. While I don't often find people who hate all sports, I do encounter people who don't like the sport I like. If we're going to begin a conversation on the games/art business, I think it might be a good idea to begin by being coming to some consensus as to what is meant by art, and how video games fit within it. The statement "games are art" or "some games are art" is used in a way that indicates that art is a category to which games must fulfill the criteria of in order to for the ascription to make sense. As art is a term used to describe the creative expression of individuals in a medium (commonly to engage the view aesthetically or emotionally), we could easily just end things there are declare video games as art. However, some people argue that sports are art (although probably not as strongly as those who do for games), and I would say that this is mistaken; the argument relies on the skill demonstration of individuals or groups to make it work, but therefore conflates the demonstration with the sport more generally. The phrase used is that "so-and-so makes (sport) an art form", which is really saying something about the demonstrators than anything else. For video games, the particular game can be considered both a medium of its own (since it provides a context for potential artistic expression, in that a player might play with finesse, or produce artful work in it), but at least on surface feels like it ought to belong to a larger medium category, which could be considered by platform (or maybe control scheme? For example, an arcade cabinet with pac-man versus a home console), or the language or program used to design the game. We also have game designers as potential artists, as they are making the game which is consumed people. However, merely creating a game is not itself an artistic act (else we would describe the creator of chess or basketball an artist for the same reason), and the production of artistic elements as part of creating a game does not necessarily confer artistic status to the final product. An interesting conundrum: Many games put forth as good examples of artistic games (Gone Home, Dear Ester) seem to better fit the category of interactive story. It would seem as though moving further from being a game and closer to other media forms inclines us to think of a game as being more artistic. However, something that has no challenge component has a very tenuous grip on being a video game, and it seems to me that we are willing to confer this status upon these examples more because they fall into the same medium (both in platform and programming) rather than whether it makes sense to describe them that way. They also demonstrate the weak grip that video games have to the art class, as some of our best examples lean more towards other art forms while having a much weaker kinship to other games.
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May 18, 2016 13:17
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Just going to name drop Papers,please as an artgame that manages to effectively express itself mostly through game mechanics and player interaction rather than guided narration.
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May 18, 2016 13:30
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If we're nominating games that qualify as "art", but without just being visual novels with some interactivity, I'd nominate Dwarf Fortress. Dude is following his vision. Toady is the Henry Darger of gaming. (As to what effect it achieves, it's brilliant in the way it makes narratives emerge out of the interaction between the player and the thousands of random elements that are the game engine. There's no predetermined written narrative, but there is generation of narratives.) Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:45 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 13:43
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I should have developed that a bit more, and I ultimately agree with Incoherence in that there are few games that really fit the bill. It seems to me that it both takes substantially greater effort and vision to produce a truly artistic work within this field (made more difficult by the expectations of publishers), and that the industry lacks the sort of talent capable of making that sort of thing happen. Note that another common feature of the examples put forth so far is small development teams, which makes management aspects much less complex. e: vvvvv Pros: no commentary on a game that quite readily speaks for itself, sufficient playtime to get a sense of the game Cons: Extremely obvious controller user that jerkily pans the camera about Coolwhoami fucked around with this message at 14:36 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 13:54
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Video games criticism, done right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yYp8ZeQ-I8
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May 18, 2016 13:59
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Ddraig posted:Gamers are indeed terrible. They rallied against Ebert with his "video games are not art" spiel, as they totes are art guys this old dude doesn't know what the the gently caress he's saying i'm not sure you'd find the same people arguing both sides of that coin. as with film/literature audiences, "gamers" aren't a a unified body speaking through a single figurehead or anything
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May 18, 2016 14:45
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KomradeX posted:I really think "Gamers" are the biggest obstacle to game criticism out there because they don't want either to look at their games in a critical manner like one would do with other story telling mediums or want negative reviews. The recent story of a well known contrarian game reviewer receiving death threats comes to mind on that front . Or a month or so bad I shared this video from Extra Credits about Tom Clancy's The Division on my facebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jKsj345Jjw and at least one over wheliming reaction it got was one friend saying how he didn't care about the criticism and why do we have to talk about it he just wants to enjoy his game. We see this same thinking happening whenever you bring up issues of sex or race in the Games forum and hints of that here already. This isn't unique to games at all, though. Film critics get plenty of death threats, and god forbid someone on TV makes an insulting joke about a popular movie. Even random people who write book reviews on Amazon sometimes find themselves subject to death threats. Authors aren't immune either. And of course anyone remotely connected to the production of a movie or TV show, from actors to the author of the original book, is a potential target for threats from enraged fans. Inability to accept criticism is a common feature of fandoms, regardless of media or medium, although it manifests in slightly different ways depending in the particular demographic targeted by the work.
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May 18, 2016 14:59
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Defcon has no story, narrative, or dialogue and still effectively sends its anti-nuclear proliferation message. The goal of the game is to get the best kill:death ratio. However, any victory generally rings hollow. Missile defense is unreliable, so a few nukes are going to slip through. The nuclear trifecta of subs, planes, and ICBMs assure that your resources are spread too thin to spare your nation from devastation. Combine this with the fact that each nuke hit on a city kills half the population, and victory is just a race to kill slightly more people than your opponents, with diminishing returns for each nuke. It doesn't really matter though, every nation is effectively ruined.
unwantedplatypus fucked around with this message at 15:20 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 15:17
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Coolwhoami posted:An interesting conundrum: Many games put forth as good examples of artistic games (Gone Home, Dear Ester) seem to better fit the category of interactive story. It would seem as though moving further from being a game and closer to other media forms inclines us to think of a game as being more artistic. However, something that has no challenge component has a very tenuous grip on being a video game, and it seems to me that we are willing to confer this status upon these examples more because they fall into the same medium (both in platform and programming) rather than whether it makes sense to describe them that way. They also demonstrate the weak grip that video games have to the art class, as some of our best examples lean more towards other art forms while having a much weaker kinship to other games. It shouldn't be surprising that games are starting out mostly by imitating other media (mostly movies), especially because making maximal use of the interactive element in a AAA game is fairly expensive, but there's a potential there for something unique.
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May 18, 2016 17:17
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One of the undertapped aspects of games that I think gives them a very potent potential to be art is in their fundamental reliance on systems. Video games especially are in a unique place from other media in that they provide an easily-accessible, consequence-free zone to explore those systems, and I'd be very interested to see more games that hold up a mirror to our interactions with them, games that make us examine the roles their systems – or similar systems – play in our day to day lives. I've been playing this game over the last week called VESPER.5, and I love how the scope of its system expands beyond the software itself. There's no story it needs to tell, and there's no emergent narrative that comes out of its systems, but I'd still consider in art in the sense that it has made me look at the ways in which systems can encourage the development of rituals and habits over time.
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May 18, 2016 18:07
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Freakazoid_ posted:Maybe video games are a sport? Not many people would say sports are art, excepting maybe certain olympic competitions. While I don't often find people who hate all sports, I do encounter people who don't like the sport I like. Personally I think games are diverse enough to be both. For sport you've got fighting games and MOBA's + RTS games. You want art you've got things like the Witcher 3, Nier, MGS2 and a whole bunch of indie games that seem to be made just so they can be art.
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May 18, 2016 19:12
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Incoherence posted:The challenge component isn't really as fundamental to games to me as the interactive component: the thing that is most unique about games is that you are making decisions while playing them. The story the game is telling intertwines with the story of you playing it. The key question is whether there's something about those games that uniquely works because of the interactive element. You could probably make a Gone Home movie with a similar impact, although you'd probably structure that movie differently. Undertale's narrative wouldn't really work as a movie. I'd use Gone Home and, weirdly similarly, Mass Effect 3 as games that couldn't be replicated as movies or most other media because they rely upon the player unknowingly making decisions on how the narrative presents itself during the focused engagement with the game, and at conclusion present narratives that are somewhat unique to the player and without requiring post-engagement reflection. They're like CYOA books but the choice elements are obfuscated or expanded enough (not referring to Mass Effects obvious choices but some of the longer term decisions that are not obvious until hours later) that the comparison in media breaks down. Gone Home intentionally doesn't require me to engage with all the content to reach the end, allowing for a sort of Fatality of the Author. ME3 is a tougher one but I think similar results arise from the level of obfuscation in outcome. The closest I've seen in other media is Building Stories by Chris Ware, which is a comic story told over 10 or so other comics of varying shapes and sizes, which all come in a single box (which also contains comic panels) and no instructions on reading order, so how you literally build your story shapes your interpretation of characters and events.
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May 18, 2016 19:37
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Incoherence posted:
With every new iteration of the Deus Ex franchise they get closer and closer but somehow never quite there, like an artistic version of xeno's tortoise
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May 18, 2016 19:38
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Examples of games as art: Shadow of the Colossus, the Soulsborne series. Both are action games, both have gorgeous scenery and settings, both have a deeper story that is largely not fed to you directly choosing instead to give you hints at what's happening under the surface and letting you connect the dots together yourself. They're not experiences that could be conveyed as books or movies or any other medium.
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May 24, 2016 00:55
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Zachack posted:I'd use Gone Home and, weirdly similarly, Mass Effect 3 as games that couldn't be replicated as movies or most other media because they rely upon the player unknowingly making decisions on how the narrative presents itself during the focused engagement with the game, and at conclusion present narratives that are somewhat unique to the player and without requiring post-engagement reflection. They're like CYOA books but the choice elements are obfuscated or expanded enough (not referring to Mass Effects obvious choices but some of the longer term decisions that are not obvious until hours later) that the comparison in media breaks down. Gone Home intentionally doesn't require me to engage with all the content to reach the end, allowing for a sort of Fatality of the Author. ME3 is a tougher one but I think similar results arise from the level of obfuscation in outcome. You could totally make a short film about someone coming home to an empty house and finding out their gay sister hosed off to China or whatever the plot to Gone Home was.
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May 24, 2016 02:59
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Volcott posted:You could totally make a short film about someone coming home to an empty house and finding out their gay sister hosed off to China or whatever the plot to Gone Home was. You could, but what you'd come out with wouldn't be Gone Home. The game relies on the player inhabiting its space to drive its narrative, and stripping those elements of interactivity and self-pacing from it fundamentally change the experience, probably for the worse.
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May 24, 2016 03:44
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Undertale would be loving sick done with Dark Crystal/Where The Wild Things Are-style puppetry. As someone said above me: the FROM Soul's games only really work if you play them vs. watching them. The designer himself quotes growing up super loving poor and as a child had to make due with reading books in languages he didn't know from a library. He would have to fill the gaps himself, mentally. This is demanded of the player - the whole story is actually right there in all three game intros. There's gaps missing, though, because you need to learn the 'language' for the rest. You basically get the story of Souls from interchangeable terms/evolved and changed mythologies and names with 3000 years of time passing between the games. It really gets across the idea of something like a religious tale just getting watered down/changed for (in this case, literally) shifting landscapes that require you to continually try and conquer The Grand Quest that you and a million other suckers got turned to ash for. And it has an in-game marriage to end all of them. Eat your heart out, Bioware.
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May 24, 2016 11:54
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Armani posted:And it has an in-game marriage to end all of them. Eat your heart out, Bioware. There are no good in-game romances. They're all terrible.
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May 24, 2016 12:15
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Ratoslov posted:There are no good in-game romances. They're all terrible. This is addressed in DS3.
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May 24, 2016 12:37
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Brass Key posted:The other part of the problem is that a lot of video game writing is just really, really bad. I honestly don't get it. It's like the entire industry saw Avatar with its pretty scenery and paper-thin story and went "yes, this is perfect". Hiring a couple of writers to fix your poo poo can't possibly cost more than modelling all those fancy particle effects and snake monsters with boobs. don't worry, the writer will do something
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May 24, 2016 13:40
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i only accept political discourse in the form of rambling asides in gamefaqs txt documents
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May 24, 2016 13:53
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AriadneThread posted:don't worry, the writer will do something This is loving magical, thank you.
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May 24, 2016 15:49
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AriadneThread posted:don't worry, the writer will do something This is really not bad. And I hadn't realized you could do something like this with Twine.
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May 24, 2016 16:15
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I'm surprised that no one has brought up Spec Ops: The Line in regards to using the uniquely interactivity of the medium for art. I know the story has been done before in movie and print but the game gives a totally different experience in that it's you getting hosed up and turning into the bad guy and believing you're right, not you watching someone else go through that.
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May 24, 2016 16:21
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Jarmak posted:I'm surprised that no one has brought up Spec Ops: The Line in regards to using the uniquely interactivity of the medium for art. I know the story has been done before in movie and print but the game gives a totally different experience in that it's you getting hosed up and turning into the bad guy and believing you're right, not you watching someone else go through that. There was quite a bit of debate on it a while back and while I think it does ok as a satire of Call of Duty, but in terms of gameplay and interactivity, it was woefully lacking since you are basically railroaded down a path and the game starts to admonish you for it. I guess if you consider the act of playing the game as the art of it, then it works. But for me, it didn't.
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May 24, 2016 16:38
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On another note, that I find intriguing with this topic, is how little options there are to play past games if you ever wanted to. I can probably find most VHS movies on DVD at the very least nowadays, but with video games, if you want to play anything obscure on a previous console, you are out of luck unless you dig out the original hardware. Add to that that hardware stops being produced over time, and you might be out of luck if you want to play a certain game. That part separates it from a toaster because the toaster will still toast in 10 years time, provided that its still functional and I can replace the toaster with a new one that will perform the same function.
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May 24, 2016 16:48
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