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"Games" are such a wide category that it may not be valid to apply the same analytical standard to all of them. There is more variation in design and content between, say, Dwarf Fortress and Deus Ex, or Fallen London and Doom, or World of Warcraft and Tetris, than there is between any two books or films you might name.
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:52 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 13:50
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Guy DeBorgore posted:The Bible, Finnegans Wake, the latest edition of Gray's Anatomy, and a generic swords-and-sorcery fantasy novel aimed at teenagers: would you really judge all four the same way? Video games at least share the common goal of being "fun to play" even if they appeal to drastically different senses of "fun," but it's not like they're trying to teach you anything new about human nature. Books can be written for any purpose under the sun, whether it's exploring the depths of the human experience or the limits of fantasy, whereas video games have a way more limited scope. Right, but games also have a much more varied structure / form. A Faulkner novel and a Clifford the Big Red Dog book have more in common, structurally, than Tetris does with World of Warcraft (for example, all novels involve characters of some kind). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:23 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 16:15
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Bast Relief posted:One guy at work tries to talk about this one game he plays all of the time. He's pretty nerdy, but a not-gross functioning adult nonetheless. Anyway, he goes on about how real the environments are and how they are strictly modeled on xxth century Spain or something. Maybe it was Italy. So he tries to engage the rest of us in this conversation about that place and era and what he's learned from the game (you can tell I paid a whole lot of attention to him) but no one is really into it. I don't know if it's just the topic that is boring or the fact that the information he's sharing comes from a video game somehow disengages us. He'll be talking about some famous bridge that was recreated in the game, and then interject how fun it was to jump off of it and stab someone in the neck from the bridge. To be fair I have been getting very similar groans lately when I try to talk to my friends about Hamilton Why does SA not have a musical theater subforum
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May 17, 2016 16:17
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Hahahah christ
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May 17, 2016 23:53
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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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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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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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computer parts posted:Nah, there's usually significant overlap. The key factor is that they think if "games are art" then that means they won't be called a weirdo for playing them. They don't think about actual art criticism. Well, there is an interesting property of games as interactive art. Normally a critique of a work of art is read as a critique of the creator. This work of art is implicitly racist, poorly structured, etc. With interactive, participatory art, though, where the participant "creates" part of the experience, some of that criticism can redound onto the participant. It's one thing to say that, for example, Marvel objectifies female superheroes. It's another to say Diablo objectifies women because the player is stabbing sexy succubi all day long, especially if the player bought the game in part because of the hot succubi. Counterpoint of course is that the comic buyer bought the comic to stare at superheroine rear end too, bit that's still not better.
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May 26, 2016 18:52
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N. Senada posted:If you look at completion rates for games, I think you're absolutely right. Unless everyone's getting their fill from the first three hours of a game, not a lot of people are actually enjoying the content they're buying. There are lots of games I have hundreds of hours in that I never fully completed, though. I have 209 hours in Divinity: Original Sin and I never actually finished it, for example. 426 hours in Pillars of Eternity and I did finish the main game but never finished the expansions. 136 hours in X-Com 2 and I didn't finish it either. I still had fun with all three of those games and don't regret the purchase (I'll get around to finishing them at some point). I bought Portal 2 on steam sale years ago and I only started actually playing it this week -- it's a blast but I'm only rarely in the mood for a puzzle game. So i think completion statistics don't necessarily equate to enjoyment statistics. There's a tendency to assume that people don't enjoy games they haven't yet finished but I don't think that's valid.
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May 30, 2016 06:57
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bewilderment posted:
Goddam that's cold dude. Daikatana is the Avatar of gaming.
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May 31, 2016 03:35
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Pyromancer posted:People don't even know what "Citizen Kane of X" is supposed to be anymore, it originally stood for landmark separating cinema from theater by employing new techniques, so whatever was "Citizen Kane of games" was probably released 20 or more years ago. By that standard it was Deus Ex, as the first first person shooter - which is the type of game where this discussion tends to focus -- game to really embrace interactive storytelling and choice in a meaningful way. That said, the thing with DX isn't that it itself is the pinnacle of the form. Rather, as Raymond Chandler said of Dashiell Hammett, quote:. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius, but an art which is capable of it is not "by hypothesis" incapable of anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the pedants will deny that it could be even better. DX is flawed and even silly in parts, but it tells a complex narrative with deep themes effectively, using interactivity and choice as storytelling tools. Once DX happened, we could imagine a game that was better. So DX is the Maltese Falcon of gaming. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 18:18
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That's been a problem since forever with all kinds of reviewing, though; everyone brings their own personal lens filter. I mean, Ben Johnson and Milton criticized Shakespeare for having too much magic and fantasy and wildness in his plays ( http://www.tor.com/2016/06/02/the-fantastical-strangeness-of-william-shakespeare/ ) . It probably is worse now due to the internet as you say but most reviewing has always been crap because very few reviewers have ever been capable of reviewing the actual work in front of them, from the perspective of the audience rather than from their own. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 19:03
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:among other things wrong with that article, anyone who uses "geek" and "nerd" to imply a hierarchy where being the first is better deserves to be fed live gerbils That's a totally fair response. Just linking for the factual content.
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Jun 3, 2016 20:44
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Reviews can be as wrong as any other opinion statement is. Plenty of people have opinions s that are "wrong" in the sense that everyone with a lick of sense disagrees. Opinions can also be morally or ethically wrong (for example, racist opinions), can be ruled wrong by someone else with a different opinion and more authority (judicial opinions that are overturned), or can be premised on facts that are demonstrably false (don't sail to China! You'll go over the edge!)
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 23:26
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rkajdi posted:We're talking about the guy who made Man of Steel, Suckerpunch, Watchmen, and of course Superman vs. Batman, right? I wouldn't call any of those "pretty good". Hell, the only thing that he did that was halfway okay was 300. I thought watchmen was a decent interpretation of the source material. On the other hand, he deserves relatively little credit for 300. 90% of that was just the visual strength of Miller's underlying work, just like with Sin City.
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Jun 3, 2016 23:40
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