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Comments
^Okay...?
Its vagueness makes it an inefficient communicative term, though. You can say "I had fun with X" and I'll take your word on it, but it doesn't tell me anything about the experience, the same way "that boss was cool" or "the graphics are good" communicates very little. Then we've got industries that qualify the term a little more; the film industry tends to use the word "fun" for films that thrive on the silly and excessive while maintaining quality. So in that context, I can tell what they're going for.
But the game industry, game press and gaming community as a whole have a major communication problem, and it ties up with the reliance on subjectivity. It's true that gaming experiences are subjective and that the term "fun" equally so, but that shouldn't get us off the hook when it comes to thinking of the medium in a more sophisticated and precise way. Some people just like the games they like, and that's absolutely fine, but without deepening one's knowledge and appreciation of the medium, those people prevent themselves from taking part in a lot of conversations that are going on right now. That sucks, because games and their industry are in a state of flux and change.
The worst thing about it is that there's no lack of people who ride the subjectivity argument and claim they should be part of the conversation about the changes in gaming. But to be part of any conversation, one has to express themselves clearly and know what it is they're saying. So while the term "fun" is fine in a casual sense, it doesn't tell anyone what the game actually succeeded at or the actual emotions it provoked. "Fun" will be used to describe Resident Evil as much as Zelda or Freelancer, despite the fact that these are three extremely different kinds of games designed to provoke very different kinds of responses in their audience. And from a perspective of game design, development and criticism, the word isn't good enough to communicate what really makes a game experience tick.
On the subject of fun.
@ClockworkUniverse: That could be a response to my comment about graphics. Or maybe just something totally unrelated.
Is that boat screenshot from GTA V? It's what immediately popped into my head.
It's a new screenshot of Watch_Dogs, shown on the PS4. I forgot to quote GMH.
Oh, okay.
Well, that's...high-fidelity, I guess. I'm sure it's technically better than the extremely similar stuff I've seen in publicity shots of recent games on the 360, PS3 and PC, but I can't really tell the difference aside from the water effects.
I'm not going to spend several hundred dollars on better water effects.
I never think graphics should be the main selling point for a system, but with the 8GB of Ram thing, it is quite a big deal. Also:
This is just my favorite one in particular.
But I will always favor content of games over graphics, and Watch_Dogs is up there in my top-anticipated. But dat Ubisoft, so skepticism.
So, basically, they really mean to make videogames into movies.
You're only like 15 years late to make that observation but yes.
^^How so? I mean, some developers do want to do that, but what do graphics have to do with that?
This is a problem with the entertainment industries in general. I run into this same conversation in a different outfit on music forums all the time.
It's kind of an unsolvable problem if you ask me.
Anyway, my main point about that whole thing was just that art games tend to not be very enjoyable. And I don't mean "enjoyable" or "fun" in the arcadey sense, I mean they tend to be a bore in every possible sense. Usually not actually saying anything in particular and lacking any real artistic merit in anything except maybe aesthetics. There are exceptions, but most "art games" really strike me as anything but. I speak of the soulless clones of Limbo and Braid* that flooded the indie market a few years ago, something it's just recovering from now.
I should point out that I really don't play Triple-A titles that much, since I've largely given up on consoles. So I'm probably approaching this from a rather different place than you are.
Also I should note that I consider this forum to be a place for pretty casual discussion and am sometimes miffed when it's treated as more a platform for formal debate, so I think "fun" can work as a descriptor here. I'm not trying to rock anyone's boat.
*and about a dozen other titles, I'm not going to list all of them
^Sounds like you've just been playing really shitty games.
For what it's worth, I tend to dislike "art games" as well. If someone is explicitly using the video game medium to make a point, then they ought to make the game mechanically engaging on top of whatever else it is they're doing. Video gaming is the only medium wherein creators regularly throw out its fundamental elements; you won't find any film director worth their salt ignoring the application of camera angles, or the use of music and silence.
All that said, there are also art games that use mechanics well. Maybe. Some people have a definition of "art game" that prevents a sophisticated application of game mechanics.
I guess if you mean "art games" in the sense of games that actually outright label themselves as such, then yeah, that in itself tends to indicate a developer with a massively overinflated ego.
I play a lot of games. Some are good, some are not.
That's pretty much what I mean. Even if the game's core mechanic is just "walk around and look for stuff", it has to do that well, and many of these games don't do their core mechanics justice.
More ones that tend to get touted as such by fans.
Now you can find fans of almost anything that will say it's art, but I mean games that are widely considered to be art. Sometimes this is adopted by the developer themselves, sometimes it isn't. Off the top of my head, The 4th Wall tends to get touted as some kind of 2deep4u art piece, when it's just a trippy, really short horror game.
which ijbm have you been reading all this time
There's also shit like _______ which is barely even a game.
I think there are art games out there that work really, incredibly well. (In fact, I think Journey won multiple Game of the Year awards? Not sure.)
It did indeed. As did The Walking Dead, another art-ish game (though less so than Journey, I guess).
SOTL didn't win all that many, I think, because it had the misfortune of coming out in the same year as The Walking Dead and Journey.
2012 was a good year.
" isn't a game" is the least productive thing people actually say in conversations about video games and yet it also seems to be one of the most common. It's better for the whole medium if people just stop sperging about what a video game is or is not and actually discuss whether or not the game in question is actually good at whatever it is it's doing.
My take on "art games" is rather simple:
All games are art, much the same way that a movie like Die Hard 5 is art. The only thing is that some games, much like Die Hard 5, are incredibly shallow and just keep going to the same places that, for example, Die Hard 4 went to. I'm talking about emotional and creative places here, in case uh that wasn't clear.
I also think that the notion that "Art games" have to have a meta-commentary point regarding video games in general is kinda silly. Games like Bastion (Alex no alexing) are simply about having a top-notch presentation value with a tight if simplistic game system. Same could be said about Shadows of the Colossus, although you could argue that has a point about the way we are often deceived in vidya to fulfill goals or something.
(Personally, I think Bioshock visits that idea more "clearly", while not necessarily in a better way)
It's not an argument I trot out often, but I'd say the thing I linked to is certainly only a game in the most nebulous sense of the term.
The point is that it doesn't matter if it's a game or not because whether it's effective at providing a particular experience has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it fits into an arbitrary vaguely-defined category (well, I guess except to the extent that if you're not playing a game then you generally don't feel like you're playing a game, and such, but that's about it). Certainly it doesn't make much sense to criticize it for not being a game unless you also criticize books and movies for the same reason (which would be stupid).
It doesn't matter in terms of inherent quality of a work, but it does matter in other ways. For example, visual novels being referred to as games has actively done damage to that medium's image, since someone picking up a VN hoping to play a game will hate it.
Actually, I think it's useful. Warren Spector and David Cage just gave talks at DICE 2013 about games "growing up", but they seemed to be talking about something fundamentally different from what video games are. David Cage is the guy who was behind Heavy Rain, for instance, which is notable for not having much in the way of a consistent gameplay system. Both he and Spector talked about games becoming more "relevant" and "real", seeing the current fixation on fantasy and science fiction as juvenile or adolescent.
What they absolutely did not talk about was mechanics or rules or technology, and while it was noble of them to put forth the idea that games could tell more meaningful stories (even if both of them need to pull their heads from their arses), the talks they gave will never help games to progress because there's a distinct gap between the kinds of high brow interactive films they seem to be championing and the existing paradigm of consistent systems of play.
If anything, I think now is the time to look at what games really are and what they ought to be, because the industry is being pulled in vastly different directions by different forces. Perhaps all of these directions result in "games", or perhaps only some of them do, but I can say for sure that knowing what a game actually is can only be helpful going forward.
?
I found it quite consistent. Everything is quick-time events. Probably the only way to use a quick-time event that I really like.
Okay, that's just weird, given that Heavy Rain had some weird, out-of-place sci-fi elements.
Anyway, I thought Heavy Rain was quite successful in some ways, but not in the ways Cage wanted it to be. The story, which he felt was the main point of the game, was frankly god-awful, but some of the sequences where you had to do things like crawl over glass were excellent.
I guess? But that seems like it has more to do with people not knowing what visual novels are. I'm sure you'd get pretty much the same reaction if a person who's only ever played action games and never even considered other kinds of games picked up a Dragon Quest game or something. Granted, the latter situation is a lot less likely to actually happen, but that's mostly just because visual novels are very niche outside of Japan, whereas people (at least people who regularly play video games) are at least generally familiar with most other genres. Unless it turns out that even in Japan, consumers are regularly fooled into buying visual novels, expecting lots of gameplay. But as far as I know that's not the case.
I don't think that's wrong, but basically... what I mean is that by constantly saying that certain things aren't games and implying (or even outright saying) that they shouldn't be made for that reason is not necessarily doing a disservice to games-as-consistent-mechanical-systems-etc. but it certainly is bad for whatever said not-a-game is. If it turns out that everyone agrees that things like _____ are not games but are in fact some other kind of thing that we don't have a name for yet (or maybe we do!), then that's fine, but there's no reason that those things should be discouraged from being made just by virtue of not being similar to what people expect games to be.
Yeah, but a lot of people who read them refer to them as games, which contributes to that.