The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Prince of Persia: Spectator Sport?
OatsMalone
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Games like Prince of Persia or Mirror's Edge are pretty. This is pretty much a fact, and really the winning trait of both games, though especially Prince of Persia. I'm just not so sure they are improved by placing a controller in the player's hand.
I should note that these ideas are spurred by a blog post. Full text is here, but the short of the text is that some games derive their merit from "flow," which is pretty much looking beautiful in motion. Now, I am really interested in games as art, even as games as visual art. I think that games inherit a lot from filmography, which is often all about motion. But video games are about interaction; it is what sets them apart, and what makes video games worth doing (outside of just being damn fun). But the thrills of Prince of Persia are just as relevant to someone who is merely observing the game. The dialogue is still accessible, as are the gorgeous environments and animation. The gameplay is simple enough, and the consequences of failure generally light enough, that the game doesn't derive merit from challenge. "Beating" Prince of Persia is less relevant, more similar to finishing a novel than triumphing over difficult odds. The point is much more the experience, illustrated by the fact that the story never truly comes to stop. And if the point isn't challenge, why not remove the gameplay totally so that non-gamers (those who lack the skills to play the game at all) can access the story and art of the game as well?
I posit that Prince of Persia accomplishes little more than a two-hour movie using similar animation could have accomplished, and maybe less. Specifically, I'm arguing that the experience, as art, would have been better served in film format.
I should note that these ideas are spurred by a blog post. Full text is here, but the short of the text is that some games derive their merit from "flow," which is pretty much looking beautiful in motion. Now, I am really interested in games as art, even as games as visual art. I think that games inherit a lot from filmography, which is often all about motion. But video games are about interaction; it is what sets them apart, and what makes video games worth doing (outside of just being damn fun). But the thrills of Prince of Persia are just as relevant to someone who is merely observing the game. The dialogue is still accessible, as are the gorgeous environments and animation. The gameplay is simple enough, and the consequences of failure generally light enough, that the game doesn't derive merit from challenge. "Beating" Prince of Persia is less relevant, more similar to finishing a novel than triumphing over difficult odds. The point is much more the experience, illustrated by the fact that the story never truly comes to stop. And if the point isn't challenge, why not remove the gameplay totally so that non-gamers (those who lack the skills to play the game at all) can access the story and art of the game as well?
I posit that Prince of Persia accomplishes little more than a two-hour movie using similar animation could have accomplished, and maybe less. Specifically, I'm arguing that the experience, as art, would have been better served in film format.
OatsMalone on
0
Posts
Myself, I loved the gameplay of Mirror's Edge and Prince of Persia, so I disagree on a fundamental level with your assertion.
Watching an animation of someone running around doing wall jumping and crap is not that entertaining in and of itself for more than ten minutes. The true enjoyment is in being able to perform those actions (though they are really just a visual cover over a pattern of button presses) with the necessary rhythm and precision. It takes skill.
I think you missed the point of the game. The challenge is the "flow" that you were talking about.
It's not about beating the game, it's about playing it well.
EDIT: PoP could have been a nondescript figure navigating empty environments and it would still have been fun. The atmosphere, plot, and characterisation all add to it, but the game would still have been enjoyable without them.
I'm not discounting that Prince of Persia or Mirror's Edge aren't fun, nor am I arguing that they are bad experiences. I enjoyed both. I'm trying to analyze where, if anywhere, their artistic merits lie. I think that one could argue, as HamHamJ points out, that it exists somewhere in the intersection between the player's skill and the visual feedback of the game. That's interesting, and possibly valid. I'm just not convinced that it is the ideal method of experiencing the sensation of beauty that PoP evokes.
Obviously, watching an animation of somebody performing the same wall-runs and other acrobatic moves, no matter how impressive, gets boring after a while. In a non-video game format, the visual experience would have to receive more varied treatment; those expectations are already built into film.
There is a potential argument for game as dance, as well. I think what japan mentions, that the point is playing the game "well," hints at that. Certainly, even though punishment in the game is mild, it still interrupts the "flow" of the game, much as a faulty maneuver in a dance may interrupt the quality of the whole. Is it then an exercise of mastery? Essentially a very visually stimulating form of casual golf? I doubt the depth of possible mastery in the game is worthwhile when compared to dance or golf.
I'm also not convinced that Prince of Persia would be describable as enjoyable were the figure nondescript and the environments empty. It's my opinion that the experience depends very much on the vibrancy and color that the game displays, and certainly, without the narrative, the game would be unable to hold most people's interest for much more than thirty minutes.
Challenge sometimes equals artistic merit, or at least can be an important vehicle or chassis to the artistic content of a game. The same blog that got me thinking about this actually had a really good article on the topic: here. The simple fact is that challenge DOES INFLUENCE the experience a player will have with a given game. If it modifies the experience, how could it not have an effect on the overall content that the player receives? It can be barrier to experience, or it can provide something unique, such as a feeling of accomplishment not unlike what I imagine most amateur American readers experience having finished War and Peace. Alternatively, it can be important to maintain verisimilitude within the portrayed world of the game, which is important for some experiencers.
Except that you're claiming that once a video game falls below a certain arbitrary level of "challenge" it ceases to have artistic merit. If I can easily read a novel, does that mean it has less artistic merit than a novel that is more difficult to read? How would a narrative game like Prince Of Persia be better served with a more punishing level of difficulty? If we're discussing verisimilitude, player characters in a whole host of first and third person shooter games should die permanently from one gunshot wound. Is anything less than that a failure of proper realism that makes those games into artistic failures better served by the film medium
I'd say that what gives video games artistic merit is interactivity, not challenge.
I'm not claiming that there is any one appropriate level of challenge for all games, or even for a single game, merely that it can be useful or essential to a game's artistic merit. I agree that interactivity is perhaps the most unique thing about video games as art, and should thus be capitalized on, but by no means is that the only way in which games are art. Many would find art in the cutscenes of certain games, in which there is no interactivity. Perhaps one could argue that cutscenes are essentially film that accentuate the game itself, but I think there's real danger in bifurcating the experience like that. When would one stop?
Just as the some games are better when they are easy to play, others would feel wrong if too easy. I'm not even arguing that Prince of Persia would be better served by higher difficulty; instead, I am wondering whether the difficulty of manually inputting commands on a controller serves the ultimate artistic experience of the game. In other words, challenge enters into Prince of Persia in a way that is, at the very least, very different from other games. Would the game's artistic merit suffer were challenge, based on dexterity, removed completely?
Nor am I saying that verisimilitude is the end goal of gaming experience. I don't believe that for a second. Plenty of stories feature a larger-than-life hero. I merely say that some game experiences are served by greater verisimilitude, if that is what the game intends. If a game was hoping to be a horribly accurate simulation, then yes, I would find problems with the fact that my character can get shot ten times and lose no functionality. And some people really seek that level of realism in a game. But most games don't try for that, and I don't think they should, necessarily.
But I wouldn't call any of them art.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Mind if I ask why they aren't art? You don't even refer to them as "bad art," so I assume that it's not a matter of quality. Do you consider any games art, and if so, which ones?
See, that raises an interesting point.
You could actually create a gameplay experience with minimalist graphics that basically consisted of an instruction to hit a certain button at a certain time. You could set it up such that it exactly mimicked every controller action you would make in PoP. As far as your hands were concerned, it would be the same gameplay experience. Except it would pretty obviously suck. (At least, for most people.)
In video games, the visuals are tied to the gameplay in a fundamental way. Imagine instead of the above graphic-less experience, you still controlled a person. But instead of running, the character just walked slowly. Instead of jumping and swinging your sword and wall-running, you just sort of ambled in a slightly different way. This, too, would be boring as hell, because who wants to spend 10 hours ambling around city streets? Even if they were beautifully realized city streets, the game would be lame as hell, even if - again - it mimicked every button press you might need to play PoP.
It's not just gameplay, and it's not just graphics, it's the idea of creating an experience for the player. An experience that he finds inherently enjoyable. Being a dude in a city walking around is not fun; being a bad-ass prince who can run on walls and kill evil monsters is.
Good games negotiate with the player to create an experience he will find fun. The player imagines he is doing something that he actually isn't, and the game tries to meet him halfway to maintain the illusion. Even something like Tetris does this - it's not like you're really positioning blocks as they fall, you're just hitting buttons.
Basically, without graphics, every game turns into a round of Simon where you hit abstract buttons because the game is telling you to.
(Oh, and I also disagree with the OP that PoP works better as a movie, or even that it's fun to watch for more than a few minutes at a time.)
The only game I've ever played that worked better as a non-interactive experience was Dragon's Lair (and its ilk), and that's because those games are basically designed to demand money from the player in exchange for showing them pretty animations. It's like going to the movies and having an usher ask you for a quarter every 30 seconds to continue watching.
On a personal level, just because it's something that I know how to do and skills I can appreciate, I find it to be interesting to watch. On a different level, a lot of defrag maps are really nice to look at. Neither of those really coalesce in a way that makes me think "art," and I'd hardly expect someone who didn't know about what they were watching to get much out of it.
Games as art is more personal and unique for me. I can see moments that I find beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, and they're always married to gameplay and skill in the same way as the defrag example. I don't go in for games that are designed specifically to be art. I might like playing them, and I might like looking at them, but that's not the same thing.
When I watch this I can feel the actions, because I've done many of them myself (not often to the same level of skill). I enjoy the skill and precision.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAVsJI2PCiM
When I watch this I can see not just skill, but ingenuity and unique creativity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4mx6yvJadc
But I wouldn't expect anyone else to get something from them, or to sit through 15+ minutes of it.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Unless that challenge was replaced with some other form of reward for playing, yes.
Because that challenge makes up for a whole host of artistic flaws that would become glaringly apparent if that was removed.
I'm sure it'd be possible to make a compelling interactive narrative that had no real challenge or way to fail, but it'd have to take a much different form than watching a guy jump around for six hours interrupted by cutscenes.
This is a great point, I think. Games can be separated from their visual components only at great risk of losing sight of what you're actually talking about. I think that the systems underlying a game can and should be analyzed, too (any RPG's combat balance should be judged partly by the numbers), but in a discussion of games-as-art, the visual can almost never be taken for granted.
However, I am talking about art here, and not necessarily the game's fun entertainment. So while your point about the monster-killing prince versus city walker is true enough for fun quotient, it has less to say about its artistic value. I think that "fun" and "enjoyment" are different, ultimately. Some of my favorite moments in gaming were defined by a distinct sense of discomfort, and not by an over-riding sense of fun. Not that fun is bad, of course; I'm a big fan of it.
I think you've taken my hypothetical stripped down version of PoP to be more stripped down than I intended.
PoP is, at heart, a puzzle game. The fun part is negotiating the environment that the game puts in your way. The combat is meh, and the plot and characterisation are nice, and well-crafted, but not intrinsically necessary to the experience. Being able to play well enough that you can persuade the prince to make rapid, fluid, progress without ever putting a foot wrong is a deeply satisfying and intimate experience.
When I spoke of a nondescript character negotiating empty environments I was thinking more like the MGS VR missions.
See, I agree with this completely. I'm saying that, in some way, Prince of Persia can be "read" as using repetitive gameplay to patch up its artistic shortcomings. This is exactly what I'm getting at.
I'm wondering if there isn't something of artistic value within the game that might be better represented in another medium. Not at any point am I saying that Prince of Persia is a bad thing that shouldn't have happened, just that the tale, perhaps, and its artistic merit might be better represented in another fashion.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.
Of course PoP is derivative, it's effectively a remake of the early 90s Broderbund platform/puzzle games of the same name.
EDIT: Wait, which Prince of Persia game or games are you talking about?
OT: I'm not going to retread my whole article (the first one referenced in the original post), but I think one of the reasons PoP and Mirror's Edge work better as games than they would in any other medium is exactly the point made by HamHamJ: the interaction between the player's skill and the programming of the game. It seems almost that in a "flow" game like PoP or Mirror's Edge, the player becomes involved in the creation of art, and is not just participating in it.
However, (though I disagree with his specifics,) I can understand OatsMalone's point. As a different example, take Final Fantasy Tactics, one of my absolute favorite games. I frequently cite the game as excellent due to its enjoyable combat system, and (for its time) excellent characters, plot and (in the PSP port, decidedly not in the original) dialogue.
But many of the more traditional "artistic" elements of the game are more or less separate from the moments of interactivity. At no point can the player change the game's story, or even engage in non-scripted dialogue with NPCs. There is thus no particular reason that the story and themes of the War of the Lions couldn't have been communicated in a novel or film or some other medium-- perhaps even in a way which would have done them more justice and made them more interesting. Nothing but the combat and party management systems in the game really necessitates being a game at all.
Now, I'm not suggesting Tactics shouldn't have been made-- it is one of my favorite games, after all. But the fact is that it's really more like a war game separated by bits of a novel, and not really a unified artistic experience at all. This is obviously a bit of an overgeneralization-- I don't mean to say there is no art in the combat system or whatever-- that's a different discussion. But the point holds, I think.
Anyway, glad to see some discussion over this interesting point. If you like this sort of thing, I guess you should maybe check out the rest of the Ontological Geek? Or not, you know, that's cool, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS5peqApgUA
Compare that to one of the recent Prince of Persia games whee a skilled player makes no mistakes and finishes a level in record time. No one is going to get dizzy watching that. They might get vertigo with all the leaping from great heights but this 'flow' is somehow like a theme park ride on rails. You see lots of stuff but the layout of obstacles means a spectator is not overwhelmed with three or more 'things' going on at once.
The 2008 "reboot" Prince Of Persia.
Which, regardless of any gameplay concerns, is a gorgeous, gorgeous game.
And, ironically considering its reputation for being "too easy", more frustrating than the other two modern Prince Of Persia games I've played (Sands Of Time and Forgotten Sands).
Maybe I should play Forgotten Sands, anyway, though.
Forgotten Sands isn't that bad, although it lacks the wit and the stylized art style of PoP'08.
It's certainly worth playing if you can pick it up cheap and (assuming we're talking about the PC version) don't mind Ubisoft's DRM.
Fantastic.
but then I'm mostly a spectator for most video games that I know anything about, having major fail coordination, but really good at side sofa coaching
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
Another reason I enjoyed it though is why I really like giantbomb's quick look videos. Being able to see unedited gameplay to really give a good idea how the game is played.
Agreed. I mean, I don't have any real objection to Forgotten Sands, and haven't yet played it, but I really liked where we were going with PoP 2008... even with its many flaws...