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The over analysis of a great game
Advenger
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Before I start, yes this is my first post, and a first post on any forum is usually a first impression with said current community. Hoping to form a sort of 'bond' with a place I so fondly lurk, I am attempting not to sound like a complete retard in my first post. The same cannot be said for any subsequent posts hereafter.
Moving on, The title suggests that this post should probably go in the Gaming and Technology forum, but I am not sure it completely fits the criteria. This lovely article comes from GamesRadar (but I found it on digg... Sorry). They seem to think that Portal is a sort of "feminist masterpiece", to steal the digg articles title. They claim that a gun is a 'phallic symbol', a first person shooter is "easily identifiable by its specific perceptual presentation of game events, and the presence of a gun or other weapon" and that the portals oval shape has something to do with female sex organs.
As you can(or can't) imagine, this struck me as odd, mostly because I (as stated) think it's being over analyzed, but also because I feel a lot of this is contradicted when completing the game with the developer commentary on; listening and understanding how the game became what it is from user feedback. The url to the article follows, please read and respond as you will.
Click Here to View the Article
Moving on, The title suggests that this post should probably go in the Gaming and Technology forum, but I am not sure it completely fits the criteria. This lovely article comes from GamesRadar (but I found it on digg... Sorry). They seem to think that Portal is a sort of "feminist masterpiece", to steal the digg articles title. They claim that a gun is a 'phallic symbol', a first person shooter is "easily identifiable by its specific perceptual presentation of game events, and the presence of a gun or other weapon" and that the portals oval shape has something to do with female sex organs.
As you can(or can't) imagine, this struck me as odd, mostly because I (as stated) think it's being over analyzed, but also because I feel a lot of this is contradicted when completing the game with the developer commentary on; listening and understanding how the game became what it is from user feedback. The url to the article follows, please read and respond as you will.
Click Here to View the Article
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Move along.
That was hilarious !
Really? Seemed fairly sincere to me.
I don’t generally go in for phallic/vaginal symbology, unless there’s some other context which would support that analysis, but I do think there is some merit to what the author says about Portal’s presentation of the female heroine, and how using a woman as the main character in an FPS is an important step forward for the medium
Thank you, sir, for your wonderful propagation of anti-intellectualism
Good to see that's still going strong
Thanks also for your obviously enlightened grasp of the nature of art and what is "in" it
There's a very large amount of art criticism which really just boils down to forced associations. Certainly, many of the associations ARE true, especially when the work was written by someone who is trained in the traditions, but a very huge amount of criticism is "these words could be taken as meaning this within reason" rather than "these words actually mean this."
Art analysis is a creative art in and of itself, not a scientific analysis.
I’d lime you, Multi, but I’m lazy.
Seriously, I can’t stand this nonsense whenever I hear it. It’s like people have never heard of post-modernism, or Derrida, or written something of their own, or used their brains.
And of course, there is always the question of who determines what the words "actually" mean, beyond the most literal sense. In a lot of contemporary criticism, the artist has no more control over the meaning or interpretation of a piece than the audience, and attributing such control is a fallacy. After all, art is an act of communication, of dialogue, which always goes two ways.
That said, the Portal article does seem to be at least in part parody; if not, it's just a poor attempt at critical analysis. The author yokes together ideas without any support or rigour, in what seems to be an attempt at absurdity.
No it's not.
The achievement is called 'fratricide' not 'sororicide'
I'm digressing rapidly.
After all, we are talking about video game journalism.
If anything, video games are much more ripe for some forms of analysis (especially psychoanalytic ones, although that's really out of style), since they're a pretty young and unsophisticated art form right now. Literature is ancient and it's gotten really complex and multilayered (arguably), but in video games, just like in pulp lit, you can really see the raw detritus of the human mind floating around - throbbing urges for violence and destruction and power, sexuality exaggerated to absurdity, character and plot archetypes, etc.
I think analyzing the differences in how video games evince these characteristics and how other art forms do so could be enlightening, with regard to the nature of games as art. And I do think they're art. Even analyzing shallow art can be productive, something like Duke Nukem for example.
Yep.