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Posted this earlier in the Games forum, but I was told the discussion would probably be better suited for this one: I was listening to a great episode of this podcast called "Shall We Play a Game?" and they had game critic/developer/academic Ian Bogost on to talk about his new book, "How to Talk About Video Games." Over the course of the interview, Bogost discusses the current state of games criticism, specifically the focus many critics seem to put on games as a narrative medium analogous to film and literature. Bogost argues that games are "a kind of encounter that we have, that sits uncomfortably - but delightfully - between the domain of art and the domain of appliance." He draws a comparison between a game and a toaster, in that both serve a similarly absurd purpose (the toasts exists solely to brown bread, and games exist to fill similarly specific niches in our lives), and both involve familiar interactions that we return to again and again. This isn't to say that being "toaster-like" is an inherently bad thing; part of the whole draw of sports is watching a set of very familiar rules play out again and again, hoping that a particular game will bring about an exciting break from the repetition. This idea of games as part-art and part-appliance is an incredibly interesting perspective to me, since it seems a large number of games critics and players seem to hold well-executed narrative as some kind of holy grail for games as a medium of art. If games exist in this limbo between form and function, between art and product, where does that leave critical discourse? How can we embrace the "in-between"-ness of video games in our criticism of them? HighwireAct fucked around with this message at 21:47 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 16, 2016 06:35
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Ddraig posted:Games don't have to be fun, and some of the best games I've played have been the opposite of fun. Pathologic is the classic example. There's absolutely no way you can present that game that even seems remotely fun, but it doesn't need to be. I think that the more important qualifier in thinking about art is that any piece of lasting value should be engaging at the very least. There are plenty of “art games” I've played that I didn't have fun with necessarily, but whose content or premise intrigued me enough to engage with them.
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May 17, 2016 19:07
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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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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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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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