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Plot and storytelling are good and worthwhile, but not necessarily what games can do best. Atmosphere and immersion, however, are every bit as artistically relevant. That's where a good game can really, really shine.
I mean, plots as they are now do tend to suck. But Portal's "plot" was "think with portals!". It had maybe 4 events total. The environment made it, not the sequence of events being super-interesting in and of themselves.
Same with SotC, actually. The plot was "kill these 16 things", but it was atmospheric and not really designed to keep you interested with plot elements.
You could probably say the same thing about, for example, Mona Lisa. It's just a portrait of a woman.
In SotC, one could just go and "kill those 16 things." Quite frankly, that is what I did for most of the game, but somewhere around the 12 colossus I have suddenly started to have doubts about what I was doing. The subtle changes in the main character's appearance are an ominous premonition of things to come. One might even draw parallels with Dr Faustus, reaching for what is beyond any mortal man's grasp - not without a price. And the realization of what that price is slowly dawns on you. Few games have made question what it was that I was actually doing. The final colossus and everything leading up to it (you know) made me a victim of fate - I wanted to win, but how could I win if that meant forsaking the rest of what remained of my humanity? And then you get an Edwards - there is no more hand to speak of.
Maybe there is too much drama in this post, but the game truly moved me.
And there is plot in SotC, but most of it is only hinted at. There is a great plot analysis over at GameFAQs, if anyone is interested to see how deep it really is.
I do love video games. And there have been several times where I have paused my game and got someone to come watch certain parts because I believed it came close to art. I couldn't play Okami or Shadow of the Collosus by myself, because I wanted everyone to enjoy it with me. But maybe one game a year comes out that could even be considered "artistic," if that. I don't think gaming in itself could ever be considered an artform. I don't believe telling your grandparents about the time you pressed the buttons to make the man on the screen not get hit by the bad guys is going to have the same effect as taking them to the Louvre. I know for a fact that the majority of the people here will disagree with me. I do enjoy a good video game as much as the next person, but I am not going to blindly defend it the same way furries defend their fetish and the South defended their slavery.
It was mentioned earlier that it is bullshit for Ebert to declare his stance on video games without devoting to them the same time he devotes to film. I don't keep up with Ebert's personal life, so for all I know he could play Halo like a motherfucker. But if his only insight into video games are what the video game industry sends to Hollywood and five minute demos to introduce him to the concept of gaming, I agree with him 100%. While some video games are able to tell deep stories with fleshed out characters, they fall short of cinematic works like Schlinder's List, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or the Godfather.
I don't read romance novels, but I know that none of them can be considered Shakespeare. From what I have been reading on this thread, I should be getting, "Well you haven't read the right romance novel. There is a really good one where a robot pirate falls in love with a human bounty hunter. Three chapters are really good, even if the other fifty chapters are mostly about the main character jumping from cliff to cliff." The simple fact remains that unless romance novels radically evolve into something as good as Shakespeare, I will always consider them a secondary form of entertainment and class. Of course, this would be even worse if I were a professor of classical literature, and my daughter kept trying to convince me her OC novellas were just as relevent to art as Dickens.
I do appreciate him saying that gaming could have a chance to become an art form at some later time. What we are seeing in video games now will be considered primitive in ten years. Maybe by then we will see something more than even Ico has to offer. I know I am looking forward to it.
Plot and storytelling are good and worthwhile, but not necessarily what games can do best. Atmosphere and immersion, however, are every bit as artistically relevant. That's where a good game can really, really shine.
That's where I believe that games can achieve artistic merit.
Shadow of the Collossus - that game is art in my mind, absolutely. Here you've got this nameless character who, with absolutely no dialogue, envelops the player into his struggle. You don't know why you're doing what you're doing or who the girl is, but you know you have to kill those titans to save her.
The entire game plays with your feelings and emotions. The desolate landscape, the loneliness, the thrill of battle, the strange sadness and guilt you feel when it's over. There's the subtle way in which your player character's appearence begins to reflect your own misgivings of his/your quest. And I consider the attachment most players develop for Agro, the only companion you have for the entire game, and the horror they feel when he "dies," to be one of the bigger artistic triumphs of the medium. There are so many ways you can read that game, and so many themes that can be interpreted from it.
I think a lot of horror games are making headway towards being artistic, too. Silent Hill has always had incredible atmosphere and some very disturbing comments on its characters/human nature. Eternal Darkness really did some great things atmosphere wise, and John Carpenter's The Thing would have been artistic in the same vein of the movie if it hadn't been for the somewhat obvious AI and scripting.
Yeah, there are a lot of games out there with no real artistic merit, and who aim solely for that visceral reflex or puzzle-solving area of the brain, but then there were MANY bad novels, films, comics, etc when those artforms were new. Hell, the novel came close to being considered a trash format by contemporaries, and was only saved from housewive-oriented romance novel oblivion by authors who decided to take risks with the format and develop it into something great. Video games are on their way there, I think.
See, even a game like Portal. It's a puzzle game, and could've been treated as such. The actual story and plot is, as has been said, remarkably simple. There are two characters (maybe 3, but you never encounter the third) in the game, and one of them just runs around shooting orbs at the wall. It's over in 3 hours, which as modern games go, is short.
But that game had atmosphere coming out of every orifice, and some of the best writing seen in a looong time.
Then there's BioShock which actually did have a really good story, but again had an absolutely standing environment and setting. Which you, as the player, then get to explore in great detail.
I think he played Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. And then some RPG. He played them specifically to experience the ir artistic value, and he said they had none, because (iirc) they felt more like really well crafted *games* (in the puzzle/brain occupier/monopoly/risk sense) than works of art.
Which, you know, is completely true. The major sticking point is that the game industry is dominated by the desire to sell lots of units. As we see in Hollywood, that means they don't want to take risks on more 'artistic' endeavours. Look at Killer7, or Okami, or Psychonauts, or whatever. They're like Orson Welles movies. Because they don't play well as games, they failed. Even though Halo's story is fuckin' shit and I have no idea what happened, it sold about a billion copies because the series were fun games.
That's the only consideration. As long as the focus is on gameplay rather than artistic elements, it's like asking why Stephen King isn't winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Waste Land isn't easy to get through by any means. It's filled with Greek, French, German, and allusions to all sorts of things, including the Grail Myth and Ovid. It's intensely rewarding if you spend a while studying it, but you're never going to sell it to Joe or Jacques Sixpack. T.S. Eliot did win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
We don't have any Waste Lands in the game industry. They don't sell well enough.
e: Even the stuff that is made by independentgamepublishers don't really qualify as art, because the focus is on gameplay instead of depth of story and experience.
As of yet, there's no real correlation between formal literary/artistic elements and video games. They're a nascent genre, and I don't think we'll get art from it until someone makes a GG. Allin simulator.
I remember the long hours spent playing Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call, which, at its heart, is Pokemon with demons, except its good. Putting the gameplay aside, I have often found myself thinking about what to say as neither option had any particular advantage, but it was like having your own little psychoanalysis (I am probably spelling this one wrong). It turned out that I am one immoral bastard (End of the World ending).
I would honestly like to have a real and fair discussion with Ebert about games, the ones he has played and dismisses as 'low art', and why. I really get the impression that a lot of the games we'd tout about as good examples (just as one might suggest something like The Godfather or Schindler's List instead of Armageddon as a good example of a quality film), are ones that he's never seen nor heard of.
You're very right. I've spoken to Ebert, he's a very fair person and a good fellow to talk to on a lot of subjects. I was just a kid at the time, so I didn't really make the best use of the time with him, but I think he would be willing to try out something if presented to him as nearing true art. Hand him Torment, and I think he'd play it better than a lot of first-timers because he would come at the experience fresh and not just go killing zombies right off the bat. He might then see something he hasn't seen before, because few games have the consistancy and emotional resonance of PS:T.
A lot of posters here are putting words in his mouth, and, while par for the course, is discouraging.
Someone else mentioned in response to my post that there's a lot of illogical stuff that happens in movies on-par with the silly stuff in video games like health powerups and random weapons lying around. Yes. This is true. In shitty movies that Ebert would call out for that exact sin. Go back to something really good, like Aliens... there was no moment in the movie that portrayed illogical standard video game-level contrivances. Not all video games are like this, but most, sadly, are (I was reading a Let's Play of the Legacy of Kain games, and Legacy of Kain: Defiance is rife with moments where you find something rare and uniquejust as soon as you realize that you need it).
Ebert isn't blind to stupidity in movies; he even has written a terribly funny expose on movie cliches called "Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary," which has gone into new editions with different titles. I advise you to look it up, since it's a hoot.
Plot and storytelling are good and worthwhile, but not necessarily what games can do best. Atmosphere and immersion, however, are every bit as artistically relevant. That's where a good game can really, really shine.
STALKER is the shining example of this. In my mind no game comes close to matching the atmosphere of STALKER
I saw a tshirt recently that said "I am Banksy". Considered getting it, except I really don't like caption tshirts.
Some prick took a photo of Banksy on a Camera phone, his identity is no longer secret
Damn you Camera Phones
Seriously? Or is that just what Banksy wants you to believe.
And Pharezon, I absolutely loved STALKER for the atmosphere. It was so stark and chilling, and beautiful for it. Same thing I loved about the Half-Life 2 style as well. City 17 was a stunning piece of design.
Critique is a double-edged sword. Without it, there would be no standards, really, and artists would likely never progress; art would stagnate. On the other hand, critique is largely arbitrary and based on arbitrary traditions and is populated with fat, full-of-themselves, conservative, elitist idiots like Roger Ebert.
You'd think Ebert killed everyone's puppy with the kind of hate and disrespect I see here.
I'd think there would be people more worthy of hatred than a movie critic, however famous or influential.
You imply that "hatred" is some kind of limited resource.
It isn't. Hatred has unlimited supply.
I abhor the "there are better things to worry/get upset about" argument. Okay, so there people more worthy of hatred than Roger Ebert. So what? I can hate Ebert and all the other chucklefucks on this planet at the same goddamn time.
You'd think Ebert killed everyone's puppy with the kind of hate and disrespect I see here.
I'd think there would be people more worthy of hatred than a movie critic, however famous or influential.
You imply that "hatred" is some kind of limited resource.
It isn't. Hatred has unlimited supply.
I abhor the "there are better things to worry/get upset about" argument. Okay, so there people more worthy of hatred than Roger Ebert. So what? I can hate Ebert and all the other chucklefucks on this planet at the same goddamn time.
You have a point. Humans can be pretty hateful.
I don't think that means I can't comment on how irrational and ill-minded that hatred is.
Maybe I'm sentimental on Thanksgiving or something. Or perhaps just hungry. We haven't eaten yet.
You'd think Ebert killed everyone's puppy with the kind of hate and disrespect I see here.
I'd think there would be people more worthy of hatred than a movie critic, however famous or influential.
You imply that "hatred" is some kind of limited resource.
It isn't. Hatred has unlimited supply.
I abhor the "there are better things to worry/get upset about" argument. Okay, so there people more worthy of hatred than Roger Ebert. So what? I can hate Ebert and all the other chucklefucks on this planet at the same goddamn time.
You have a point. Humans can be pretty hateful.
I don't think that means I can't comment on how irrational and ill-minded that hatred is.
Maybe I'm sentimental on Thanksgiving or something. Or perhaps just hungry. We haven't eaten yet.
It's not irrational or ill-minded to deem someone as influential (supposedly) as Roger Ebert a detriment to our culture and to summarily hate him for it.
What, exactly, is worthy of hatred? Where do you personally draw the line? Should I only hate murderers and thieves? Is there some threshold of malignancy that someone has to pass before it is rational and not "ill-minded" to hate them?
Once your done with all that, please let me know why I or anyone else should give any weight to your judgment of OUR judgments?
In short, we have every right to get angry about whatever we want and the fact that there are dumber assholes in the world to get upset about is irrelevant. And I mean "irrelevant" as in "not at all relevant whatsoever."
Great plots and decent writing do not turn games into art. they make good literary art inside another medium.
it's the integration of those elements into the interactive infrastructure that makes art. A masterful integration is more important than the quality of the writing, actually. refer to HL2. A completely average plot and little to no "writting", but fuck awesome interactive storytelling, and that storytelling is subordinated to the gameplay (i.e. ravenholm).
OTOH, games with lots and lots of writing that have crappy or no integration are not successful, artistically speaking. Xenosaga and MGS2 type games, with long, long cutscenes that jarringly interrupt the gameflow. That's crap, no matter how good the cutscenes are, because the cutscenes alone are a form of animated movie, not a game.
Just picture a movie with kickass script, but with very bad acting, lighting, directing, cinematography etc... That is a bad movie, for all intents and purposes. The same applies to a medium as complex and groundbreaking as contemporaneous gaming.
Edit: Oh, yeah, MGS3 was a ridiculously enormous step forward. Less interruptions, more interactivity. it's 20 years ahead of MGS2. But thy still need to fucking kill codec conversations (no matter how funny they were in MGS3) like yesterday. They're very, very, very bad interactive storytelling, and they're a MSX era fossil.
Great plots and decent writing do not turn games into art. they make good literary art inside another medium.
it's the integration of those elements into the interactive infrastructure that makes art. A masterful integration is more important than the quality of the writing, actually. refer to HL2. A completely average plot and little to no "writting", but fuck awesome interactive storytelling, and that storytelling is subordinated to the gameplay (i.e. ravenholm).
OTOH, games with lots and lots of writing that have crappy or no integration are not successful, artistically speaking. Xenosaga and MGS2 type games, with long, long cutscenes that jarringly interrupt the gameflow. That's crap, no matter how good the cutscenes are, because the cutscenes alone are a form of animated movie, not a game.
Just picture a movie with kickass script, but with very bad acting, lighting, directing, cinematography etc... That is a bad movie, for all intents and purposes. The same applies to a medium as complex and groundbreaking as contemporaneous gaming.
Bold = 100% agreement. Which is why I think Orik's concept of art is far too limiting to be of any use.
It's not irrational or ill-minded to deem someone as influential (supposedly) as Roger Ebert a detriment to our culture and to summarily hate him for it.
It is when you really have no evidence to support your deeming.
How damaging is Ebert's opinion on the subject, really? When do people look to movie reviewers for their opinions on video games as an art form? The answer: when there are movies about video games. The solution: Give him good movies about video games that are still faithful to their source material, and he'll change his tune. He already gave a good review to Hitman, who cares if he praised the non-gameplay elements? If you ask me, he (along with the other critics) serves the purpose of helping the game industry in terms of game movies by not letting them get away with bad ones. People see a good movie based on the game, they think, hey, that might be a fun thing to try! They see a bad movie based on a video game, they'll probably dismiss video games even further.
Is there some threshold of malignancy that someone has to pass before it is rational and not "ill-minded" to hate them?
Plot and storytelling are good and worthwhile, but not necessarily what games can do best. Atmosphere and immersion, however, are every bit as artistically relevant. That's where a good game can really, really shine.
STALKER is the shining example of this. In my mind no game comes close to matching the atmosphere of STALKER
Stalker really is one of my favourite games released in recent years and, I think, good enough to be considered 'art', not only for its atmosphere but for how it sort of does away with a lot of the contrivances of video games (no boss fights, no good guys/bad guys for example). However, if you were to assess Stalker as a narrative art form you'd quite frankly have to call it shit. This is the problem, a lot of people assess video games in terms of narrative structure in order to determine whether or not they are art which is of course absurd. Beethoven's Ninth isn't a great work of art because of any narrative construct and nor is the work of Salvador Dali. An opera has a narrative but it isn't the sole variable determining whether it is art, and such is the case with video games as well. To examine the story of Metal Gear Solid 2 you'd find some bullshit spy thriller crap with vampires, giant walking robot death machines and nuclear armed supercomputers. But if you examine the structural form of MGS2 you find something that, while still absurd, is absurd in the grandest, most intellectual, post-modern, metafictive sense and it's brilliant. Similarly, to examine Stalker's narrative you find some bullshit disembodied consciousness conspiracy theory shit. But structurally, it's not a small achievement how the entire thing is just made to sort of hang within the limbo of its atmosphere - where the plotline is not so much the focus, but just another tool aiding the emotional response.
What I'm saying is that because video games are a new artform, and I believe it's ridiculous to suggest otherwise, it's not necessarily wise to attempt to apply the same criteria for 'greatness' that we use with other, older, artforms. Just like when cinema was first developing people declared that it wasn't art because it didn't meet the old definitions of art.
We should look at it this way; are video games a medium through which people can express themselves? Yes? Then it's art. As for high art or 'low' art... well, I think that's a false distinction to begin with. A product of elitism and intellectual hackery.
Well, that's not fair. You're not bitches. But I am the product of a younger mentality than Mr. Ebert that would call someone "bitches" like that. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the man for what he's an expert at. I don't expect Slash to teach me about classical music, but man can he dominate on rock guitar.
I've never been a fan of that mentality.
"Sure he's a raving douchebag when it comes to this, but look at him over here!"
His views on video games demonstrate a lack of thought and consideration, which brings everything else he does in to question.
Well, it is human nature. Look at a dude like Einstein. Just because you are right about one thing doesn't mean you can't be wrong about something else.
themightypuck on
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius
Ebert is simply wrong in this case, but I actually like him. Not really as a person but as a critic, since I usually agree with what he says about movies. He's not an artsy snob like many critics, he loves action films like Die Hard and Transformers and Independence Day, even though they are corny.
Well, that's not fair. You're not bitches. But I am the product of a younger mentality than Mr. Ebert that would call someone "bitches" like that. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the man for what he's an expert at. I don't expect Slash to teach me about classical music, but man can he dominate on rock guitar.
I've never been a fan of that mentality.
"Sure he's a raving douchebag when it comes to this, but look at him over here!"
His views on video games demonstrate a lack of thought and consideration, which brings everything else he does in to question.
Well, it is human nature. Look at a dude like Einstein. Just because you are right about one thing doesn't mean you can't be wrong about something else.
There's a difference between making a passing remark about how WW3 would be fought and making bold claims about an entire genre that you aren't qualified to comment on.
Well, that's not fair. You're not bitches. But I am the product of a younger mentality than Mr. Ebert that would call someone "bitches" like that. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the man for what he's an expert at. I don't expect Slash to teach me about classical music, but man can he dominate on rock guitar.
I've never been a fan of that mentality.
"Sure he's a raving douchebag when it comes to this, but look at him over here!"
His views on video games demonstrate a lack of thought and consideration, which brings everything else he does in to question.
Well, it is human nature. Look at a dude like Einstein. Just because you are right about one thing doesn't mean you can't be wrong about something else.
Exactly. Its when he goes around proclaiming his opinions as accurate, in this case making ridiculous statements on video games.
I personally know fuck all about classical music. so it behoves me not to write a review of say eternal sonata and make a whole bunch of retarded comments about classical music when i clearly know nothing about them. ill write about the game, and mention the music. but ebert when one father and made more detailed comments that were not just a little bit inaccurate but effectively plain wrong.
It's not irrational or ill-minded to deem someone as influential (supposedly) as Roger Ebert a detriment to our culture and to summarily hate him for it.
It is when you really have no evidence to support your deeming.
How damaging is Ebert's opinion on the subject, really? When do people look to movie reviewers for their opinions on video games as an art form? The answer: when there are movies about video games. The solution: Give him good movies about video games that are still faithful to their source material, and he'll change his tune. He already gave a good review to Hitman, who cares if he praised the non-gameplay elements? If you ask me, he (along with the other critics) serves the purpose of helping the game industry in terms of game movies by not letting them get away with bad ones. People see a good movie based on the game, they think, hey, that might be a fun thing to try! They see a bad movie based on a video game, they'll probably dismiss video games even further.
.
Why the hell would you even want a movie based on a video game?
My judgement of art is based largely on the perceived skill required to make the work. Paint thrown on a canvas? A three-year-old could do that (and many have!); not art. A game in which all the pieces fit together seamlessly and every action I take plays out as if that was what the designers intended for me to do? That's art. Hell, a well written program can be art. Skill has a beauty of its own.
Well, that's not fair. You're not bitches. But I am the product of a younger mentality than Mr. Ebert that would call someone "bitches" like that. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the man for what he's an expert at. I don't expect Slash to teach me about classical music, but man can he dominate on rock guitar.
I've never been a fan of that mentality.
"Sure he's a raving douchebag when it comes to this, but look at him over here!"
His views on video games demonstrate a lack of thought and consideration, which brings everything else he does in to question.
Well, it is human nature. Look at a dude like Einstein. Just because you are right about one thing doesn't mean you can't be wrong about something else.
Exactly. Its when he goes around proclaiming his opinions as accurate, in this case making ridiculous statements on video games.
I personally know fuck all about classical music. so it behoves me not to write a review of say eternal sonata and make a whole bunch of retarded comments about classical music when i clearly know nothing about them. ill write about the game, and mention the music. but ebert when one father and made more detailed comments that were not just a little bit inaccurate but effectively plain wrong.
Which I think is the key issue. It's not that he doesn't play games, or he doesn't get them— I mean, that's excusable. It's that he has such a fucking chip on his shoulder about it that he can't bring himself to so much as read the Wikipedia article for a game.
This man is like the movie critic, and he approached this task with all the open-mindedness of a forum troll. There is absolutely no excuse for that, it makes him an asshole, pure and simple.
My judgement of art is based largely on the perceived skill required to make the work. Paint thrown on a canvas? A three-year-old could do that (and many have!); not art. A game in which all the pieces fit together seamlessly and every action I take plays out as if that was what the designers intended for me to do? That's art. Hell, a well written program can be art. Skill has a beauty of its own.
You sound like the kind of guy that is amazed by his own tennis shoes.
My judgement of art is based largely on the perceived skill required to make the work. Paint thrown on a canvas? A three-year-old could do that (and many have!); not art. A game in which all the pieces fit together seamlessly and every action I take plays out as if that was what the designers intended for me to do? That's art. Hell, a well written program can be art. Skill has a beauty of its own.
You sound like the kind of guy that is amazed by his own tennis shoes.
My judgement of art is based largely on the perceived skill required to make the work. Paint thrown on a canvas? A three-year-old could do that (and many have!); not art. A game in which all the pieces fit together seamlessly and every action I take plays out as if that was what the designers intended for me to do? That's art. Hell, a well written program can be art. Skill has a beauty of its own.
You sound like the kind of guy that is amazed by his own tennis shoes.
I'm not quite sure what that means.
"Wow, the designers of this game made it where I can jump over this wall and save the princess! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the children in Korea put this leather together in such a way that I can wear it on my feet and walk around! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the Matrix had Neo flying around going, 'Whoosh whoosh!' and beating up computers! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, my phonebook is so thick and heavy, and the words in it seem to go on forever but remain in a strange order! How do they do that? This is art."
Professor Wayne on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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BarcardiAll the WizardsUnder A Rock: AfganistanRegistered Userregular
He already gave a good review to Hitman, who cares if he praised the non-gameplay elements? If you ask me, he (along with the other critics) serves the purpose of helping the game industry in terms of game movies by not letting them get away with bad ones. People see a good movie based on the game, they think, hey, that might be a fun thing to try! They see a bad movie based on a video game, they'll probably dismiss video games even further.
It's not that he's criticizing a video game movie, or even that he's doing so because it's a game movie.
It's that he's complaining about certain parts, assuming they were ripped from the game, when they're actually the polar opposite of what the game was about.
My judgement of art is based largely on the perceived skill required to make the work. Paint thrown on a canvas? A three-year-old could do that (and many have!); not art. A game in which all the pieces fit together seamlessly and every action I take plays out as if that was what the designers intended for me to do? That's art. Hell, a well written program can be art. Skill has a beauty of its own.
You sound like the kind of guy that is amazed by his own tennis shoes.
I'm not quite sure what that means.
"Wow, the designers of this game made it where I can jump over this wall and save the princess! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the children in Korea put this leather together in such a way that I can wear it on my feet and walk around! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the Matrix had Neo flying around going, 'Whoosh whoosh!' and beating up computers! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, my phonebook is so thick and heavy, and the words in it seem to go on forever but remain in a strange order! How do they do that? This is art."
Uh, yeah. I don't really know if you'd call child labourers passionate, which is something I think is key to all art. I think at some level clockwork really can be called beautiful; it's why I'm such a sucker for Metroid games, for one thing, because designer's intent is fairly apparent all over the place (and ironically we all love fucking with designer's intent in those games)...I'll shut up now before I start embarrassing the whole forum.
Well, that's not fair. You're not bitches. But I am the product of a younger mentality than Mr. Ebert that would call someone "bitches" like that. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the man for what he's an expert at. I don't expect Slash to teach me about classical music, but man can he dominate on rock guitar.
I've never been a fan of that mentality.
"Sure he's a raving douchebag when it comes to this, but look at him over here!"
His views on video games demonstrate a lack of thought and consideration, which brings everything else he does in to question.
Well, it is human nature. Look at a dude like Einstein. Just because you are right about one thing doesn't mean you can't be wrong about something else.
Exactly. Its when he goes around proclaiming his opinions as accurate, in this case making ridiculous statements on video games.
I personally know fuck all about classical music. so it behoves me not to write a review of say eternal sonata and make a whole bunch of retarded comments about classical music when i clearly know nothing about them. ill write about the game, and mention the music. but ebert when one father and made more detailed comments that were not just a little bit inaccurate but effectively plain wrong.
He's made it pretty clear that everything he says is to be taken as only his opinion. I haven't seen him say anywhere that he's the overriding authority on video games, even when he was responding to Clive Barker.
My judgement of art is based largely on the perceived skill required to make the work. Paint thrown on a canvas? A three-year-old could do that (and many have!); not art. A game in which all the pieces fit together seamlessly and every action I take plays out as if that was what the designers intended for me to do? That's art. Hell, a well written program can be art. Skill has a beauty of its own.
You sound like the kind of guy that is amazed by his own tennis shoes.
I'm not quite sure what that means.
"Wow, the designers of this game made it where I can jump over this wall and save the princess! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the children in Korea put this leather together in such a way that I can wear it on my feet and walk around! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the Matrix had Neo flying around going, 'Whoosh whoosh!' and beating up computers! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, my phonebook is so thick and heavy, and the words in it seem to go on forever but remain in a strange order! How do they do that? This is art."
I'm not quite sure what you're going for here. You should actually state your point instead of throwing out wild analogies that don't communicate anything to anyone.
The quote said that "skill" should be the primary measure of art. He responded by giving examples of things that require "skill", such as making shoes or phonebooks, implicitly asking if shoes and phonebooks were art.
Well, that's not fair. You're not bitches. But I am the product of a younger mentality than Mr. Ebert that would call someone "bitches" like that. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the man for what he's an expert at. I don't expect Slash to teach me about classical music, but man can he dominate on rock guitar.
I've never been a fan of that mentality.
"Sure he's a raving douchebag when it comes to this, but look at him over here!"
His views on video games demonstrate a lack of thought and consideration, which brings everything else he does in to question.
I guess that's my take on it. The man's laughable inability to recognize his own lack of experience and bias regarding a subject matter denigrate his authority as a critic.
He's made it pretty clear that everything he says is to be taken as only his opinion. I haven't seen him say anywhere that he's the overriding authority on video games, even when he was responding to Clive Barker.
Other scenes, which involve Agent 47 striding down corridors, an automatic weapon in each hand, shooting down opponents who come dressed as Jedi troopers in black. These scenes are no doubt from the video game. The troopers spring into sight, pop up and start shooting, and he has target practice. He also jumps out of windows without knowing where he's going to land, and that feels like he's cashing in a chip he won earlier in the game. If you want to see what Agent 47 might have seemed like without the obligatory video game requirements ...
Et cetera. Show me the "IMHO" in that.
It's fine for him to review the movie; he's a movie reviewer, you can't expect him to know from games. But he's never played the game, he's never watched a video of the game, he hasn't even read the damn Wiki article— but he's passing judgement on the game.
That's not an opinion or an honest mistake, that's pretentious dickery.
Anyone who plays or watches the opening scenes of Half-Life 2 will instantly recognize the Wells/Orwell influences and the Eastern Bloc architecture, and may be sufficiently intrigued to give it a closer look. Players who delve deeper will quickly find a story that is rich, well-realized, and expertly presented, moving along at breakneck pace.
I've never had the urge to lime one sentence, then salmon the one right after, but here it is. Truly a day to remember.
Well, okay, the second bit is arguable. But I am playing through it again right now and, frankly, I can't think of many games with better presentation than this. Frantic action sequences lead gracefully into puzzles or exploration, and the player is consistently rewarded for succeeding with a breathtaking change in scenery, or an entertaining dialogue scene that advances the plot. The story, even if you aren't a fan, is at least written well enough that advancement really does feel like a reward, rather than an interruption. I rarely find myself getting bored or fatigued because they switch up the gameplay so frequently and rarely linger too long on any one area, and Valve further refines this carrot-and-stick formula in the Episodes, which are deliberately edited for pacing like a Hollywood thriller. This is the state of the art, and I think if Ebert were to try it he might change his opinion of our hobby.
This is probably old, but I really can't disagree with you more. I got extremely bored with Half-life 1 and 2 because of their lack of plot, and I'm really confused by people who claim that it's so well written. I would honestly NOT want Ebert to play these games, because I think he would feel vindicated.
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You could probably say the same thing about, for example, Mona Lisa. It's just a portrait of a woman.
In SotC, one could just go and "kill those 16 things." Quite frankly, that is what I did for most of the game, but somewhere around the 12 colossus I have suddenly started to have doubts about what I was doing. The subtle changes in the main character's appearance are an ominous premonition of things to come. One might even draw parallels with Dr Faustus, reaching for what is beyond any mortal man's grasp - not without a price. And the realization of what that price is slowly dawns on you. Few games have made question what it was that I was actually doing. The final colossus and everything leading up to it (you know) made me a victim of fate - I wanted to win, but how could I win if that meant forsaking the rest of what remained of my humanity? And then you get an Edwards - there is no more hand to speak of.
Maybe there is too much drama in this post, but the game truly moved me.
And there is plot in SotC, but most of it is only hinted at. There is a great plot analysis over at GameFAQs, if anyone is interested to see how deep it really is.
Wow, I'm a rabid SotC fan. Who knew?
It was mentioned earlier that it is bullshit for Ebert to declare his stance on video games without devoting to them the same time he devotes to film. I don't keep up with Ebert's personal life, so for all I know he could play Halo like a motherfucker. But if his only insight into video games are what the video game industry sends to Hollywood and five minute demos to introduce him to the concept of gaming, I agree with him 100%. While some video games are able to tell deep stories with fleshed out characters, they fall short of cinematic works like Schlinder's List, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or the Godfather.
I don't read romance novels, but I know that none of them can be considered Shakespeare. From what I have been reading on this thread, I should be getting, "Well you haven't read the right romance novel. There is a really good one where a robot pirate falls in love with a human bounty hunter. Three chapters are really good, even if the other fifty chapters are mostly about the main character jumping from cliff to cliff." The simple fact remains that unless romance novels radically evolve into something as good as Shakespeare, I will always consider them a secondary form of entertainment and class. Of course, this would be even worse if I were a professor of classical literature, and my daughter kept trying to convince me her OC novellas were just as relevent to art as Dickens.
I do appreciate him saying that gaming could have a chance to become an art form at some later time. What we are seeing in video games now will be considered primitive in ten years. Maybe by then we will see something more than even Ico has to offer. I know I am looking forward to it.
That's where I believe that games can achieve artistic merit.
Shadow of the Collossus - that game is art in my mind, absolutely. Here you've got this nameless character who, with absolutely no dialogue, envelops the player into his struggle. You don't know why you're doing what you're doing or who the girl is, but you know you have to kill those titans to save her.
The entire game plays with your feelings and emotions. The desolate landscape, the loneliness, the thrill of battle, the strange sadness and guilt you feel when it's over. There's the subtle way in which your player character's appearence begins to reflect your own misgivings of his/your quest. And I consider the attachment most players develop for Agro, the only companion you have for the entire game, and the horror they feel when he "dies," to be one of the bigger artistic triumphs of the medium. There are so many ways you can read that game, and so many themes that can be interpreted from it.
I think a lot of horror games are making headway towards being artistic, too. Silent Hill has always had incredible atmosphere and some very disturbing comments on its characters/human nature. Eternal Darkness really did some great things atmosphere wise, and John Carpenter's The Thing would have been artistic in the same vein of the movie if it hadn't been for the somewhat obvious AI and scripting.
Yeah, there are a lot of games out there with no real artistic merit, and who aim solely for that visceral reflex or puzzle-solving area of the brain, but then there were MANY bad novels, films, comics, etc when those artforms were new. Hell, the novel came close to being considered a trash format by contemporaries, and was only saved from housewive-oriented romance novel oblivion by authors who decided to take risks with the format and develop it into something great. Video games are on their way there, I think.
But that game had atmosphere coming out of every orifice, and some of the best writing seen in a looong time.
Then there's BioShock which actually did have a really good story, but again had an absolutely standing environment and setting. Which you, as the player, then get to explore in great detail.
Which, you know, is completely true. The major sticking point is that the game industry is dominated by the desire to sell lots of units. As we see in Hollywood, that means they don't want to take risks on more 'artistic' endeavours. Look at Killer7, or Okami, or Psychonauts, or whatever. They're like Orson Welles movies. Because they don't play well as games, they failed. Even though Halo's story is fuckin' shit and I have no idea what happened, it sold about a billion copies because the series were fun games.
That's the only consideration. As long as the focus is on gameplay rather than artistic elements, it's like asking why Stephen King isn't winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Waste Land isn't easy to get through by any means. It's filled with Greek, French, German, and allusions to all sorts of things, including the Grail Myth and Ovid. It's intensely rewarding if you spend a while studying it, but you're never going to sell it to Joe or Jacques Sixpack. T.S. Eliot did win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
We don't have any Waste Lands in the game industry. They don't sell well enough.
e: Even the stuff that is made by independent game publishers don't really qualify as art, because the focus is on gameplay instead of depth of story and experience.
As of yet, there's no real correlation between formal literary/artistic elements and video games. They're a nascent genre, and I don't think we'll get art from it until someone makes a GG. Allin simulator.
You're very right. I've spoken to Ebert, he's a very fair person and a good fellow to talk to on a lot of subjects. I was just a kid at the time, so I didn't really make the best use of the time with him, but I think he would be willing to try out something if presented to him as nearing true art. Hand him Torment, and I think he'd play it better than a lot of first-timers because he would come at the experience fresh and not just go killing zombies right off the bat. He might then see something he hasn't seen before, because few games have the consistancy and emotional resonance of PS:T.
A lot of posters here are putting words in his mouth, and, while par for the course, is discouraging.
Someone else mentioned in response to my post that there's a lot of illogical stuff that happens in movies on-par with the silly stuff in video games like health powerups and random weapons lying around. Yes. This is true. In shitty movies that Ebert would call out for that exact sin. Go back to something really good, like Aliens... there was no moment in the movie that portrayed illogical standard video game-level contrivances. Not all video games are like this, but most, sadly, are (I was reading a Let's Play of the Legacy of Kain games, and Legacy of Kain: Defiance is rife with moments where you find something rare and uniquejust as soon as you realize that you need it).
Ebert isn't blind to stupidity in movies; he even has written a terribly funny expose on movie cliches called "Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary," which has gone into new editions with different titles. I advise you to look it up, since it's a hoot.
Some prick took a photo of Banksy on a Camera phone, his identity is no longer secret
Damn you Camera Phones
STALKER is the shining example of this. In my mind no game comes close to matching the atmosphere of STALKER
Seriously?
Or is that just what Banksy wants you to believe.
And Pharezon, I absolutely loved STALKER for the atmosphere. It was so stark and chilling, and beautiful for it. Same thing I loved about the Half-Life 2 style as well. City 17 was a stunning piece of design.
I'd think there would be people more worthy of hatred than a movie critic, however famous or influential.
You imply that "hatred" is some kind of limited resource.
It isn't. Hatred has unlimited supply.
I abhor the "there are better things to worry/get upset about" argument. Okay, so there people more worthy of hatred than Roger Ebert. So what? I can hate Ebert and all the other chucklefucks on this planet at the same goddamn time.
You have a point. Humans can be pretty hateful.
I don't think that means I can't comment on how irrational and ill-minded that hatred is.
Maybe I'm sentimental on Thanksgiving or something. Or perhaps just hungry. We haven't eaten yet.
It's not irrational or ill-minded to deem someone as influential (supposedly) as Roger Ebert a detriment to our culture and to summarily hate him for it.
What, exactly, is worthy of hatred? Where do you personally draw the line? Should I only hate murderers and thieves? Is there some threshold of malignancy that someone has to pass before it is rational and not "ill-minded" to hate them?
Once your done with all that, please let me know why I or anyone else should give any weight to your judgment of OUR judgments?
In short, we have every right to get angry about whatever we want and the fact that there are dumber assholes in the world to get upset about is irrelevant. And I mean "irrelevant" as in "not at all relevant whatsoever."
it's the integration of those elements into the interactive infrastructure that makes art. A masterful integration is more important than the quality of the writing, actually. refer to HL2. A completely average plot and little to no "writting", but fuck awesome interactive storytelling, and that storytelling is subordinated to the gameplay (i.e. ravenholm).
OTOH, games with lots and lots of writing that have crappy or no integration are not successful, artistically speaking. Xenosaga and MGS2 type games, with long, long cutscenes that jarringly interrupt the gameflow. That's crap, no matter how good the cutscenes are, because the cutscenes alone are a form of animated movie, not a game.
Just picture a movie with kickass script, but with very bad acting, lighting, directing, cinematography etc... That is a bad movie, for all intents and purposes. The same applies to a medium as complex and groundbreaking as contemporaneous gaming.
Edit: Oh, yeah, MGS3 was a ridiculously enormous step forward. Less interruptions, more interactivity. it's 20 years ahead of MGS2. But thy still need to fucking kill codec conversations (no matter how funny they were in MGS3) like yesterday. They're very, very, very bad interactive storytelling, and they're a MSX era fossil.
Bold = 100% agreement. Which is why I think Orik's concept of art is far too limiting to be of any use.
It is when you really have no evidence to support your deeming.
How damaging is Ebert's opinion on the subject, really? When do people look to movie reviewers for their opinions on video games as an art form? The answer: when there are movies about video games. The solution: Give him good movies about video games that are still faithful to their source material, and he'll change his tune. He already gave a good review to Hitman, who cares if he praised the non-gameplay elements? If you ask me, he (along with the other critics) serves the purpose of helping the game industry in terms of game movies by not letting them get away with bad ones. People see a good movie based on the game, they think, hey, that might be a fun thing to try! They see a bad movie based on a video game, they'll probably dismiss video games even further.
Apparently not for you.
Okay, turkey time.
Stalker really is one of my favourite games released in recent years and, I think, good enough to be considered 'art', not only for its atmosphere but for how it sort of does away with a lot of the contrivances of video games (no boss fights, no good guys/bad guys for example). However, if you were to assess Stalker as a narrative art form you'd quite frankly have to call it shit. This is the problem, a lot of people assess video games in terms of narrative structure in order to determine whether or not they are art which is of course absurd. Beethoven's Ninth isn't a great work of art because of any narrative construct and nor is the work of Salvador Dali. An opera has a narrative but it isn't the sole variable determining whether it is art, and such is the case with video games as well. To examine the story of Metal Gear Solid 2 you'd find some bullshit spy thriller crap with vampires, giant walking robot death machines and nuclear armed supercomputers. But if you examine the structural form of MGS2 you find something that, while still absurd, is absurd in the grandest, most intellectual, post-modern, metafictive sense and it's brilliant. Similarly, to examine Stalker's narrative you find some bullshit disembodied consciousness conspiracy theory shit. But structurally, it's not a small achievement how the entire thing is just made to sort of hang within the limbo of its atmosphere - where the plotline is not so much the focus, but just another tool aiding the emotional response.
What I'm saying is that because video games are a new artform, and I believe it's ridiculous to suggest otherwise, it's not necessarily wise to attempt to apply the same criteria for 'greatness' that we use with other, older, artforms. Just like when cinema was first developing people declared that it wasn't art because it didn't meet the old definitions of art.
We should look at it this way; are video games a medium through which people can express themselves? Yes? Then it's art. As for high art or 'low' art... well, I think that's a false distinction to begin with. A product of elitism and intellectual hackery.
Well, it is human nature. Look at a dude like Einstein. Just because you are right about one thing doesn't mean you can't be wrong about something else.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
There's a difference between making a passing remark about how WW3 would be fought and making bold claims about an entire genre that you aren't qualified to comment on.
Exactly. Its when he goes around proclaiming his opinions as accurate, in this case making ridiculous statements on video games.
I personally know fuck all about classical music. so it behoves me not to write a review of say eternal sonata and make a whole bunch of retarded comments about classical music when i clearly know nothing about them. ill write about the game, and mention the music. but ebert when one father and made more detailed comments that were not just a little bit inaccurate but effectively plain wrong.
Why the hell would you even want a movie based on a video game?
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Which I think is the key issue. It's not that he doesn't play games, or he doesn't get them— I mean, that's excusable. It's that he has such a fucking chip on his shoulder about it that he can't bring himself to so much as read the Wikipedia article for a game.
This man is like the movie critic, and he approached this task with all the open-mindedness of a forum troll. There is absolutely no excuse for that, it makes him an asshole, pure and simple.
You sound like the kind of guy that is amazed by his own tennis shoes.
I'm not quite sure what that means.
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"Wow, the designers of this game made it where I can jump over this wall and save the princess! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the children in Korea put this leather together in such a way that I can wear it on my feet and walk around! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, the Matrix had Neo flying around going, 'Whoosh whoosh!' and beating up computers! How do they do that? This is art."
"Wow, my phonebook is so thick and heavy, and the words in it seem to go on forever but remain in a strange order! How do they do that? This is art."
It's that he's complaining about certain parts, assuming they were ripped from the game, when they're actually the polar opposite of what the game was about.
He's made it pretty clear that everything he says is to be taken as only his opinion. I haven't seen him say anywhere that he's the overriding authority on video games, even when he was responding to Clive Barker.
I'm not quite sure what you're going for here. You should actually state your point instead of throwing out wild analogies that don't communicate anything to anyone.
I guess that's my take on it. The man's laughable inability to recognize his own lack of experience and bias regarding a subject matter denigrate his authority as a critic.
One more time!
Et cetera. Show me the "IMHO" in that.
It's fine for him to review the movie; he's a movie reviewer, you can't expect him to know from games. But he's never played the game, he's never watched a video of the game, he hasn't even read the damn Wiki article— but he's passing judgement on the game.
That's not an opinion or an honest mistake, that's pretentious dickery.
This is probably old, but I really can't disagree with you more. I got extremely bored with Half-life 1 and 2 because of their lack of plot, and I'm really confused by people who claim that it's so well written. I would honestly NOT want Ebert to play these games, because I think he would feel vindicated.