The Gamer's Quarter

[GSL]

(Hint: It's Roger Ebert).

I know the "Roger Ebert thinks games aren't art" thing has been done to death here, and generally results in the usual wankery over Ico or Shadow of the Colossus (not that I'd disagree, especially since I've played neither of the games, they just seem to be the one-trick ponies paraded out most often for this argument) and/or dismissal of Roger Ebert's opinion in general, but still I thought I'd share the latest in Roger Ebert, Game Critic:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070721/COMMENTARY/70721001

It's basically Ebert taking extremely petty swipes at Clive Barker's address at the Hollywood and Games Summit held this past June. I don't care about the games as art debate; I enjoy my gaming much more without worrying about how cultured I feel because I totally 'get' Metal Gear Solid 2 (i.e.), but I seriously want to know what Ebert's problem is. What's the point of getting aggressive about the whole games as art movement? I wonder if he feels like his chosen medium--or his self-appointed position as tastemaker and fine critic for said medium--are under attack by these newfangled games, and so needs to reassert himself. I never cared much for Ebert's heavy-handed pretensions toward movie culture from the beginning, but now it seems like he's almost actively working to firmly limit the possibilites of games in the public mind. While I can't say that gaming has yet produced its Citizen Kane or Great Gatsby, I've read enough decent stories and played through enough cinematic presentations to see the potential.

I wonder if Ebert's opinion is even relevant anymore. He still seems to be held in some regard in the film world; do his gaming comments even register with the general public, or is he just flailing into a vacuum where only people interested in games take note?

[Dracko]

He's a critic.

That makes him just about worthwhile as excrement on a shoe.

And Christ, we get it: He's old and unwilling to enter an actual debate, taking shots at the lowest, yet more public, figures in game development. His opinions of films is worthless, what makes people think those of a medium he has no interest whatsoever in engaging with are any better?

Gaming has had soaring heights of inspiration already. We don't need a Citizen Kane or a Great Gatsby (What? Is that when novels started being considered an art or something? It's a pretty boring book.), we've had our Half-Life 2, our Metal Gear Solid series, our Tetris, our Gradius...

I doubt Ebert or my parents consider modern music or comics art, and that's okay, because I don't feel the need to have them validated as such either.
_________________
"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Cycle]

[Dracko]

Yeah, Touch of Evil or The Trial were better, perhaps.
_________________
"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[ApM]

[Dracko]

If I took all the books, films, music or games I love, then took into account the intent behind them, I'd probably have them burned. I really don't see how intent is important. The only thing that matters is what the audience gets out of something. "Art", or IPs as it were, may answer only to their maker, but that doesn't mean I have to take their opinion into account at all.
_________________
"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[GSL]

That's what really bugs me about the whole thing, I suppose, is Ebert's lack of willingness to engage any of the more reasoned responses on the subject. He just sits back and says, "I'm Roger Ebert, I know art, now let me tell you what it is." The only time he seems open to any sort of debate on the idea is when it's at the expense of someone like Clive Barker. I don't know the guy's work and have nothing against him, but his defense of the possibility of art in gaming wasn't the most articulate or convincing piece of rhetoric.

[Dracko]

It's great that only critics get to determine what's art or not. Where would their careers be without the concept?
_________________
"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

seriously dude let it go. critics criticize.

i really don't get it. unless you're involved in the industry do you give a shit what's art and what's not? shit man. stop fucking caring what people think about your off hour activities. be more like people into amputee porn (half out and proud).

i mean everyone's all zomgpunkdiygamez and all that shit but did people sitting in vfw basement halls all across this great land of hours watching their friends play 1,001 myriad variations on american hardcore stand around wondering what the living fuck anyone but some shmoe in the town over with a regionally popular fanzine thinks of their pastime? i'm sure they do now, with the internet and all that. its easy to forget we are social animals, and obsessing over relative social standing is what we do when we're not pursuing the maintenance of the body.

the problem is games don't get you laid like music does, and sensing this truth of truths implicitly - but denying it on its face - is where this ridiculous current comes from.

and when you're 70 or 80 you won't give a fuck about a whole bunch of shit too. it is my hope you'll remember these days with a degree of wistfulness.

sorry i just had a turbo ice and i have to go to karaoke tonight (don't ask) so i figured i'd cut to the chase and lay down god's own medicine.
_________________

[table_and_chair]

what if your authorial intent is to subvert art through interactivity
_________________
BUT I HATE COMICS

[Furious George]

[dessgeega]

i actually enjoy ebert's writing, though i couldn't care less about movies.

i think the debating what's art is like running in circles. assume nothing's art; let's talk about craft instead.
_________________

[ApM]

Pardon me, I'm an idiot and I meant to say "Authorial control".

[table_and_chair]

I enjoyed that. I just have to say I think it is very important to talk about things like this, that it is not running in circles. Similar to videogames, street art is not very respected in daily life, but someone like banksy can rise to prominence by basically taking the art-world on directly. This can ONLY be done by talking about it and being at least somewhat knowledgeable. Least of all, I like to hear about it.
_________________
BUT I HATE COMICS

[helicopterp]

I just wanted to throw out some opinions now that I'm a little late to the party:

1.) ApM, your last post was wonderful.
2.) Citizen Kane is not boring.
3.) Touch of Evil is better.
4.) Draco, I think your position on art as only worth what the audience gets out of it is selfish and limited. I won't argue that what people bring to a piece of art isn't a huge part of what art actually does, but someone still made it. Someone had to make thousands of choices in creating x-piece of art, and it is fascinating to evaluate anything from that perspective.
_________________
Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Dracko]

I think your position is only as interesting as you, as a consumer of other people's art, allow it to be. An author can guide me by the hand and show me all he wants, and that's well within his right, but by the end of the ride, I get out of it what I want. Whether this means I'm going to write an essay on what he intended, or just get on with it, that's entirely within my own hands. I fail to see how this is selfish, as it's outright natural. If I wanted to be bashed over the head, I'd browse propaganda.

Ebe-art can fuck off, then. His opinions are of no importance in light of how well the industry is doing. The debate of control can do well enough without him butting in, and has already.
_________________
"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[SuperWes]

[parkbench]

Wait, ebert seriously said Spiderman 2 is "non-artistic?" I hate the movie, but before I say anything else, what exactly did he say? Did he say it was "not art" or just..."low art?"

[Swimmy]

Low art. He's basically revised his thesis to say: "Games can never be 'high art.'" Which is also nonsense, but it's not like he can really know that anyway, having been exposed to far more movies about / based on videogames than just videogames. If he weren't so smart, I'd say I can't blame him, but I totally can.
_________________

"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[table_and_chair]

LOWERCASE a = craft. I believe that's what dessgeega wanted to talk about.

[dessgeega]

[table_and_chair]

And I didn't mean that disparagingly. A want to talk about the crafting of videogames, and it coming up in a thread about "art", I see that as a productive thing and "getting somewhere".
_________________
BUT I HATE COMICS

[dmauro]

[player 2]

[dhex]

planescape?

yeah i could make a case for planescape being one of the few games that actually cares about the human condition enough to say something about it. (silent hill 2 would be the other major candidate) oddly enough both deal with regret, sorrow and loss, topics that are probably more easily appreciated by older rather than younger players. planescape deals with the weight of terrible, deliberately evil choices over the course of years, and actually explicitly asks "what can change the nature of a man?"

(i also see this desire to ask questions of this nature as being somewhat symptomatic of the jpn/na developer split as seen most heavily in rpgs but that's another dead horse for another thread.)
_________________

[GSL]

[helicopterp]

[table_and_chair]

I wholeheartedly feel Tetsuya Mizuguchi is an artist with a capital A.
_________________
BUT I HATE COMICS

[Harveyjames]

This is impossible to discuss on a videogames forum because to truly make any progress with this topic you first have to accept that nearly all videogames are junk (yep, even that one) and not worth defending.

I think for this medium to reach its potential as an artform it needs to realise and fully take advantage of its similarities to sculpture and installation art- where the experience is defined by how you move around and interact with the piece. Great work is done in this field, where you're basically just a person moving around a thing, discovering shit the artist wants you to find- there's no reason videogames can't achieve these heights too, since they're basically the same medium, with the added dimension that they don't have to adhere to the laws of physics or reality.

You can also throw in the dimensions of time and consequence, too. I think there's some truly amazing work to be made in the videogames field. It's got such amazing potential. Actually, I'm just starting to appreciate what a crappy and limiting term 'videogames' is.

[table_and_chair]

If not here, then where? Let some art fag talk about this crap and feel important?

Anyhow, one thing I have gained from this thread is that the common 'videogame' is not any more junk than all of visual art. Either one I could take or leave on a good day, yet obsessively partake in.

That there IS, or can be, a distinction between high or low videogame has made me feel that it is OK.

Additionally, Katamari Damacy strikes me as being the closest thing to what you mention, HarveyJames, as a straight-forward art installation, and maybe alot of the ire it's creator faced when he decided to go off and make playgrounds was misdirected. Probably to him it seemed necessary to create things in a real space, an installation, and it was due to a pretty big misinformed audience that it seemed an outrage. One can imagine the monacles falling from their eyes.

I guess what I`m trying to say is, you can't play art installations disguised as videogames and say art is intangible and unknowable and impossible to talk about.
_________________
BUT I HATE COMICS

[Shapermc]

You know, if anything what Ebart has done is good more than bad. It's going to push that damn kid to make the medium evolve to what it needs to be (Jon Mak?) or just push that publisher to defend their medium (Rockstar). I mean, it's not like Ebart is teh lawz or anything. He just has a good eye for film.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[fish]

but...but...he wrote beyond the valley of the dolls!
_________________
you cant spell selfish without fish

[dhex]

i've said this before and i'll say it again, beyond the valley of the dolls is fucking awesome.
_________________

[Harveyjames]

I like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, too! Don't make the mistake I made and buy the book 'Valley of the Dolls', though. I got it thinking it'd be a groovy Russ Meyer-style cult thing, and was disappointed to find it was in fact a Jackie Collins-style bonkbuster about small-town girls who move to the city to do unspeakably erotic things to musclebound tycoons : /

It does however feature the immortal chapter-closing line 'and she fell to her knees and made love to him', so it was worth it in the long run. If ever someone wants me to proof-read something that line gets slipped in somewhere. Also I told my friend it was the last line of the new Harry Potter.

[The Soviet Onion]

Games, in the generally used sense of the term, is a category that is mutually exclusive with art. The issue at hand arises because games as used to mean, roughly, "interactive computer mediated entertainment" covers a lot of things that aren't strictly elements of the former category (or that include sub-elements belonging to both). What makes it so utterly awful to figure out is that the two kinds of sub-element don't necessarily conflict, but can actually support each other’s aims.

I think a practical approach to investigating the issue would be looking at how text adventures shade into interactive fiction. The area isn't my speciality but people seem to be using the same tools to do entirely different things. Something like Shrapnel may have the form of a game, but its content is conventional literature.

I'm not saying that the appreciating the sculpture of the chess pieces is wrong, but videogame criticism does have a history of getting distracted from the purity of the rules of chess itself. Maybe it's just easier to focus on the familiar. However, people have been arguing that a something can be a good videogame without being, in the strictest sense, fun for a long time now. The example I'd personally use here is System Shock 2. Is it a good game? Is it a good game compared to Gridrunner++? Are they even the same thing?

[table_and_chair]

Since I know how much you gals like lists....

Best Indie Art Games as compiled by indygamer.

I don`t know. It worries me that people think art has to be obtuse.
Damien Hirst covered a skull with 25 mil. worth of diamonds. Anyone can appreciate that.
_________________
BUT I HATE COMICS

[Harveyjames]

Yeah, everyone knows the true definition of 'art' is 'weird and faggoty'.

(the quotes are what I think they think)

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

[dhex]

[Dracko]

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

Simply the part where she asked "What can change the nature of a man?" and you were given fifteen plausible choices.

There was no technical reason for it to be voiced, for control to be removed when she said it, but it was a profoundly perfect moment. My heart was pounding, yes POUNDING in my chest as I carefully weighed my choices!

[Cycle]

_________________

[Swimmy]

I think of that comic every time this comes up. Thank you.
_________________

"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Talbain]

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.
Ansel Adams

Also, Kojima doesn't think games are art.

[parkbench]

god i LOVE calvin and hobbes. how did it manage to exist and flourish in mainstream newspapers? it still boggles my mind.

[helicopterp]

I think you underestimate the mainstream. I don't believe that most people are dead wrong about everything all the time.
_________________
Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[vision]

--

[Mr. Mechanical]

[dhex]