The Gamer's Quarter

[SuperWes]

First he said:

[chompers po pable]

I thought that it was funny when he implied that if there were any notable videogames on par with great author's/director's works, someone somewhere surely would have brought them to his attention.

Interesting question wes.

[dhex]

who cares? who really fucking cares if something is art or not? how little does the term "art" mean now, when everyone is an artist?

(hint: very little. almost totally worthless as an identifier of value. and ridiculously different from the same word just a century ago)
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[sawtooth]

Video gaming doesn't have any "old masters" yet. There's Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, yeah, but they're simply the originators of the medium, not masters of game design. Games need figures at their helm, giving each work a vision and purpose. As an industry, gaming doesn't have enough of these figures, and more importantly not enough figures striving towards an "artistic" end.

I'm guessing that we'll start to see some of these figures after miyamoto retires.

I'm guessing there's some logical fallacy out there that can be assigned to Ebert's first statement. There must be because I guess someone somewhere who was familiar with the workings of logic would have made a convincing argument in Ebert's defense by now.

[nICO]

He's actually kinda right in that videogames probably aren't worth his time right now. There really is nothing that can compare to the best works of cinema and literature. The closest you're gonna get is SotC, Majora's Mask, and maybe Metroid Prime. As well as a few others that might be in that league.

That still gives him no reason to outright reject the entire medium of course, and is not to say that truly great games will never be made.
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Brauner: Damn you, humans... You selfishly start wars and despoil the earth. Perhaps justice wasn't on my side but I will never admit that it was on yours.

[player 2]

[dessgeega]

[dhex]

[sawtooth]

[SuperWes]

[dessgeega]

[xvs07]

[SuperWes]

[dhex]

i've seen a few directors mention that "obviously, though my name is on the credits, it requires thousands of man hours from dozens of people to do x, y and z" etc.

however, it is seen as the director's because it is his "vision," at least in the sense that ebert is probably talking about "great" film and whatnot.
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[player 2]

More than anything I think Ebert is making a challenge to gamecritics everywhere to really analyze a game and present it in a manner in which we can take it and look at it as a piece of high art.

I mean, there are at least a few games out there worthy of anyone's praise. I mean, as consumers of high culture what games would you stack up against Citizen Kane and Candid? There has to be at least one. Earthbound comes to mind. Maybe Silent Hill. Half Life? I think these games just haven't been looked at by the public with the right framework...
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[ApM]

I honestly kind of see his point. Give the player enough leeway, and your game isn't really saying anything. But what Ebert is missing is that it's entirely possible to herd the player into making the choices that the designer wants them to make.

In fact, it's really difficult not to.

[dessgeega]

i think missile command is on par with citizen kane as a work.
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[player 2]

[dessgeega]

[Dracko]

[player 2]

[Swimmy]

[dhex]

heh, poor kids.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1122/p02s02-ussc.html

as the esa has realized, they don't go away. they're merely bought off. (hence big ticket fundraisers)
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[simplicio]

You know, I've been reading Donald Richie's A Hundred Years of Japanese Film recently, in which he discusses how early movies were just existing stage plays shot on film, curtains and everything, and how early moviemakers enlisted known theater talent to give the new medium popular viability. Now, if I were an avid theater-goer of the time, I might well think of this new film thing as a novelty, an amusement with no serious artistic purpose. It has no color and no sound, first off, and generally just fails to compare to the real thing.

Now Roger Ebert, who has a career based around movies and movie analysis, why would we expect anything else out of him? Just as that theater-goer saw only an aping of the stage, Ebert sees a medium inspired by movies which is unable to comform to the system and qualities by which he's accustomed to judging them. He has a point that games are largely unartistic currently and most of the industry isn't even trying to move in a more artistic direction, but he also doesn't play them and isn't invested in trying to figure out to potentials of the medium. In his mind, games are currently like those first couple decades of film, before productions on location and featuring sound and color and camera movement and lighting tricks and all the rest.

In my mind, we're closer to all that than he thinks. I just played Shadow of the Colossus (which he didn't), wherein I controlled a man in a reprehensible, selfish quest to revive his girlfriend at the cost of the lives of innocent beings. I did not agree with his quest, yet I controlled it anyway with a sense of awe and dread and sadness, and I don't know if the language exists yet to name the precise emotions I felt about it. On a side note, my non-gamer sister saw some of it as I showed it to her almost-gamer husband. He didn't quite get the subtleties of it, and she mocked it the whole way through. So as far as games have come, they may have the longest way to go in terms of public perception, and EA and Ebert aren't helping a bit. And if you must know, Agro apparently has an enormously fat ass.

Also, Dess: if you're going compare Missile Command to Citizen Kane in a single sentence without any explanation to back up your statement, don't take offense when someone labels you contrarian. Really now.

[ApM]

[player 2]

"Fuck Washington, D.C., fuck New York, fuck Atlanta, I'm taking care of Madison, Wisconsin."
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[xvs07]

[dhex]

here's the kicker:

was missile command set up to give that particular statement - i.e. the futility of futuristic intercontinental ballistic warfare - or is it just because it makes for a compelling game at a time when design was predicated on a play until you die mode?
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[ApM]

Well, it did say "THE END" rather than "GAME OVER", once all of humanity was obliterated.

[dark steve]

Missile Command is so sparse, does the intent matter so much when the result is as clear as it is?

[dhex]

[Dracko]

So, can anyone tell me as to how modern games are misdirected as artistic compared to new ones?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[ApM]

[SuperWes]

I guess the question I have is whether a majority of movies could be classified as cultured, civilized and empathetic? Assuming not, what is it that sets the movies that fit this criteria apart from the rest of the crud?

-Wes
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[dhex]

just compare and contrast.

(or rather, ask someone who's into films to do so for you, as i would just say well, take mr. clancy here and take james j. jesus joyce there and see what they do differently, i.e. why is one the greatest gift to literature in human history etc etc and so forth and no buck mulligan isn't gay why does everyone keep insinuating that from a few dozen paragraphs at the beginning of telemachus though if i had my druthers i would sure like to live in a martello tower such old stones appeal to me)
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[sawtooth]

[Shapermc]

[dark steve]

[Swimmy]

Why did it just now hit me that videogames are the perfect medium to significantly explore the implications of game theory?

I mean. Game theory. Duh.

Can anyone think of a game with a solid prisoner's dilemma?
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Lackey]

The prisoner's dilemma?

Personally I'm quite happy with the idea that games may represent multiple perspectives and may, perhaps, use player agency as their defining feature. I don't think games have delivered any meaningful stories on a large scale yet. On the other hand, how do we determine what's meaningful when this depends largely on personal circumstances?

Funny that I feel pretty strongly about Missile Command too, whatever the intent was.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dark steve]

A lot of older games contain so many abstractions as a technical matter of course it's very easy to project onto them. See: Lucky Wander Boy.

[seryogin]

This thread reminds me of a man somersaulting off a cliff while sucking his own johnson.

[Mr. Mechanical]

[seryogin]

I'm just getting kind of sick of the whole "are videogames art?" discussion that starts up every month whenever some random cultural figure makes a statement about how videogames are inferior to other established media.

It's all bullshit, really. It reminds me of all the damn editorials I read about how "science fiction is really literature, check out these examples, and, well, you know, the Odyssey and the Bible are science fiction... so there" and all the other editorials I read that said "comic books are really art, because, dude, the first humans to draw a man stabbing a deer were really drawing the first comics."

It's waste of time and it depresses me, because it exposes a gaping hole within the soul of man.

Anyway, Toups has an article coming up that will once and for all end these discussions. It's going to be a wired Hiroshima that will answer every single damn question that you've brought up, without you knowing that you've been bringing them up in the first place. I suggest you wait for it.

[dark steve]

I have a theory that the phrase "This is/isn't art" was added to the lexicon as a snappy way to pick on Yoko Ono.

[Mister Toups]

[Tablesaw]

[Lackey]

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

but everything is inferior to literature.
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