What about certain games is NOT art? What is?

i will say that, weirdly, this thread has made me want to replay HL2 - i think its cuz when a lot of people see amazing qualities in something i only thought was O.K. i tend to start to doubt myself and wonder if i missed something - i just played the freakin thing last year tho and idk if i wanna do those stupid vehicles levels again

Just can't be bothered to play HL2, tho my boy loves it. Vehicles were enough of a pain in the first game.

are my balls art, lets answer that

ade i was deeply worried when i opened this thread to find you disagreeing politely about the value of planescape torment and i must admit i exhaled in relief when you followed it with this ^^

HL2 has definitely dated, and is probably appreciated more by those who played it at its time. Vehicle levels were daft yes.

physics puzzles were cool at the time, dropping weights onto see-saws etc

weapons and general combat is a bit spazzy now compared to other fps games

Where it excelled for me was the way the story unfolded, just the whole polished way everything strung together. Strict paths with the illusion of openness, how'd they do that? The music score was diamond too.

Yeah, I think what I found most disappointing was how un-fun almost every gun in the game was

it's not a bad game (even tho I just said it was earlier), but it actually made me appreciate HL1 (which i never rated that highly either) more in retrospect - first HL is one of the most perfectly paced shooters ever, and the scenario is much much more compelling imo (ordinary guy trying to survive increasingly insane & horrible circumstances > messiah freeman leading a resistance or something)

Strict paths with the illusion of openness, how'd they do that?

i think the great art (craft?) of HL was this^^. like, you'd look at a pile of boxes and know that it was a little platformer bit to get to the next thing. but it did look like a legit pile of old boxes, too. when i think about 'seamless marriage between ludic and narrative elements' that's the kind of thing i think about, in the details.

idk it always just looked like another jumping puzzle to me - as a gamer that's exactly how i'd process it, while sighing at the same time

yeah all right. i enjoyed it tho! like it felt honest somehow. they were making puzzles and combat set pieces, but doing you the favor of making it all look good.

i have to say that i only really play games that try to do this. some element of simulation is impt to me for some reason, even if it's fantastical or scifi or whatev. i've never been into overt puzzle games and never much been into the classic 'cartoon' style visuals like mario

how un-fun almost every gun in the game was

this becomes even more obvious when you play in multiplayer kill boxes. although its pretty frantic and fun sometimes.

my finest moment in hl2, which i'm sure i've bored everyone with elsewhere before, was when i encountered a bug in the game and a door 'trigger' didn't activate.

the door in question was a huge wall, so i gravity-gunned a ruck of furniture from a nearby house and built myself a huge mountain of chairs/wardrobes/tables etc to climb over.

when i clambered over the other side, truman show style, the graphics weren't quite ready but were slowly rendering into life.

and the game continued on okay.

that is awesome! I've been watching youtube vids of people doing things in HL2 that i wouldnt have even thought of my first time through, makes me think i need to try it again and apply a lil more lateral thinking this time

i've been playing some cactusquid games lately. i think maybe psychosomnium could be art, but i don't think i would say that about clean asia, though both appeal to me aesthetically. psychosomnium seems to say something to me about dreams - something subjective that couldn't be communicated through direct text. on the other hand, clean asia has very stylized visuals consisting of simple geometric shapes. why are those shapes different than, say, a mondrian painting? to me they don't have any content beyond looking cool. but maybe they do for someone else - i'm sure there was the same conversation about mondrian. now hardly anyone (or anyone concerned with this question anyway) would say he didn't make art. it's a historical development. and now gamers are growing up and we want games to be respectable. i think they can be or already are, based on our actual experiences. can games be art according to the rules decided by the last generation of critics, audiences, wealthy patrons, etc? maybe not

haha, that thing about the HL2 guns sucking is totally fair. i don't even remember what the guns are; i guess there's A Pistol and A Shotgun and One That Shoots Bullets Fast and stuff. but come on there is THE GRAVITY GUN.

i don't mind that coffin part (which is nowhere near ten minutes) because it comes right after the urban-warfare kill-the-striders level, which is incredibly long and hectic and loud and which ends with you scurrying back and forth across a blasted rooftop while the striders blow up walls around you, and when i first struggled to the end of that i was basically Done with first-person shooters, and never wanted to see another medkit or shield pack or ammo box again, and never wanted to worry about how much health i had or when the last time i reloaded was, and was just thoroughly exhausted. then there was a brief riding-around-in-a-coffin interlude followed by the game taking away all my guns, giving me basically infinite health, and turning enemies into environment puzzles for a level. i don't think i even took a break.

(xp obv)

oh and "strict paths with the illusion of openness" is exactly right. i'm a nonlinear explore-and-improvise guy--that's the stuff i like in games--and HL2 is one of the most fascist, linear games i've ever played; most of it might as well be time crisis. i think it's the peak of that subcategory of level design: environments where, yes, the designers are going to manage all your experiences, but don't worry it'll be fun and you might not even notice.

in retrospect the best thing about HL was the long first day of work intro in the first one

the gradual build-up of off details and broken environments in portal was pretty great too. there's diff of opinion itt i guess, but think the valve people are really good at telling a story via moving through spaces.

xp re: "fascism" yeah i think they take their storytelling very seriously and so they do have to stage-manage your experience pretty closely, which is a tradeoff

by my lights art is a Thing that someone Makes. you don't interact with it except in an appreciative way, i.e. laughing, crying, clapping, looking, not looking. a novel doesn't change. a painting doesn't change. a movie doesn't change. even in games "on rails" where many of your experiences are managed, you can die at almost any moment. you can decide to shoot or not to shoot. which is why it's so difficult for game designers to create a sustained sense of narrative and tension. so no, insofar as games are games, they're not art. it's the least game-like aspects of games that i would consider, and obviously are, art: the graphics, the cutscenes, the dialogue, the soundtrack. but they combine to create something that's not a finished product, something that doesn't unfold with the same considered effects for each and every person.

(and of course, this might make them better than art, depending on your point of view)

i'm fine with the "art is non-interactive" objection. it's of course a tautology (games are not art because games are not art) but then so is mine (games are art because games are art). that's why i don't like the question much.

telling a story via moving through spaces -- yeah. which is how a game should tell a story, really: not with a page of text or five minutes of video but with environments. that's what they can do that the others can't.

(not that i don't love a million games w/ pages of text and lots of cutscenes and so on, plus games that don't tell stories at all, or tell stories in different ways.)

I do! (think they are better than art, when they are not afflicted by art)

I don't think it's possible to build a controlled, pre-conceived, cinematic, coherent story the way that artists want to with games without sacrificing its essential gameness, or being completely ancillary, and in attempting to do so, they usually make something that is bad at being a game and bad being art.

Tracer what about architecture? some buildings may be more workmanlike than built for the aesthetics, sure, but there's a similar open-ness and purposive (?) constraints on a building. you can't determine whether someone will sit here or there, look up at the high ceilings, go to the top floor or not, or even walk through the door

doesn't unfold with the same considered effects for each and every person.

This is straight-up wrong. Even taking away cutscenes, you still get FPS set pieces where it's fully interactive but you're still being affected in the exact way as intended. Game design is fundamental to creating the desired affect too - most recently Amnesia.

yeah goole that's why architecture ain't art! (imo)

gtfo!

it's telling that the most "Art"-like examples of architecture are kind of terrible places to live in, work in, interact with.
(e.g. that frank lloyd wright house that's always leaking, that gehry piece that melted people's eyes)

MAYBE THAT MEANS THEY'RE BAD ART

gehry is metal maybe

you still get FPS set pieces where it's fully interactive but you're still being affected in the exact way as intended

no that's totally true. (overriding theme of intended effect: anxiety, usually.) but if you take the game as a whole, it just doesn't hang together with the kind of precision that a novel or a movie or a sculpture does. you can look THERE or HERE or just STOP.

i'm reading "norwood" right now and man, i would love to be able to swing the camera over and check out some other details from time to time

ppl always blame the wright houses' problems on materials and building techniques from the 30s, you can argue either way whose fault that was really

i think this is (usually) true though:

I don't think it's possible to build a controlled, pre-conceived, cinematic, coherent story the way that artists want to with games without sacrificing its essential gameness, or being completely ancillary, and in attempting to do so, they usually make something that is bad at being a game and bad being art.

and my only argument is that there is a different way of being good art that has nothing to do with narrative and is totally suited to the characteristics of video games.

the urban-warfare kill-the-striders level, which is incredibly long and hectic and loud and which ends with you scurrying back and forth across a blasted rooftop while the striders blow up walls around you, and when i first struggled to the end of that i was basically Done with first-person shooters, and never wanted to see another medkit or shield pack or ammo box again, and never wanted to worry about how much health i had or when the last time i reloaded was, and was just thoroughly exhausted.

i feel like this sums up HL2 + ep1 and ep2 pretty well for me - exhausting. it made them very hard games for me to finish, because i knew the game was dead set on putting me through the ringer at every turn. from a design perspective i can see that it's a carefully planned, carefully balanced game that tries to make every set piece really involving and anticipatory of your actions - maybe that kind of micromanagement is what im responding to wrt my dissatisfaction - it doesnt have the freewheeling playground feel that i love in games like DX or duke nukem, which is why you're otm about how the coffin sequence and the subsequent grav gun craziness feels so welcome and exhilarating. HL1 has kind of a 'now we're throwing a curveball at you' rhythm to it too, but being looser and less tight-assed than HL2 makes it a more comfortable fit for me, i think

in retrospect the best thing about HL was the long first day of work intro in the first one

very otm - HL1 is an epic ~journey~, HL2 is more like a theme park ride.

somewhat ott, but i'm really surprised that no one has borrowed the director mechanic from l4d for other games. you would think that scaling difficulty based on your play would work for a lot of these games that often get tagged as 'exhausting'

there is a different way of being good art that has nothing to do with narrative and is totally suited to the characteristics of video games

no! this kind of open-mindedness IS UNACCEPTABLE

"ppl always blame the wright houses' problems on materials and building techniques from the 30s, you can argue either way whose fault that was really"

it's wright's house, we're just living in it.

DX or duke nukem

haha well (assuming you mean DN3D, not that the platformers weren't fun) these are both totally fantastic and i could talk about them with pleasure for much longer than i could talk about HL2. they're also both extremely sloppy. "tight-assed" is the right adjective for HL2, and usually that bores me too. let's just say that if you're going to make a tight-assed game HL2 is what you should shoot for.

yeah goole that's why architecture ain't art! (imo)

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, February 8, 2011 12:47 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

i was about to agree w/this and be like lol architecture its just roofs and chairs and shit, its art like a nice car is art, and then i thought about the curb your enthusiasm bit where larry's selling cars and he goes 'this is a fuckin... work of art!!!!'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2i-MJoeVQg

yeah i meant 3D xp

"my only argument is that there is a different way of being good art that has nothing to do with narrative and is totally suited to the characteristics of video games."

every artistic overture I've seen so far in games is dedicated to subverting those characteristics. which ones don't?
For example, I think where something like the wii took a step forward is allowing users to create their own avatars to work across games (in other words surrendering artistic duties to the player), but I can't imagine a game as artistically-minded as metal gear would be gracious enough to let you play as your mii instead of solid snake.

i think most "artistic overtures" are definitely misguided, because this is a young medium and an insecure one and one practiced by people who maybe do not realize that their talent for design and mechanics is what they should be looking to, instead of the trappings of the other media adults have learned to discuss solemnly. but when game designers aren't acting like social climbers and getting in their own way, they can do all kinds of stuff. gonna be totally gross here and quote myself, but here's a description of some art i like in a game, made by a guy to whom i guarantee you the word "art" did not occur:

It’s a testament to Miyamoto’s imagination that SM64’s characters, which do not inhabit anything like a coherent universe and exist only in their relationship to Mario—which aren’t characters at all, really, but collections of hindrances**—nevertheless have personality. The ghosts who shrink and vanish when Mario faces them but swell with malevolent glee when he looks away are first and foremost a problem, a dynamic to master: the player has to exploit their shyness to keep them away, and make sure he doesn’t turn his back for long. There’s nothing excessive or ornamental in the mechanic. But it’s fundamentally human, and when it’s introduced the player doesn’t think of it as a dry piece of design but understands it immediately, subconsciously: Oh, I see. They're shy.

that footnote (lol david foster wallace stanning) goes to:

** (See also the Bob-ombs, Platonic bombs with metal feet, rotating wind-up keys and blinking anime eyes, who putter in pointless circles until Mario approaches, whereupon their fuse ignites and they barrel after him in kamikaze desperation.)

like, i guess we could make up a New Word to describe a person who makes up stuff like that, who invents elegant intersections of abstract mechanical problems and human emotion and then renders those intersections with absolute clarity in about two seconds, but we could also just call him an artist.

or we could just call him a 'designer'

http://www.givememyremote.com/remote/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/time_gunn.jpg

i think miyamoto has been subject to the dread New Yorker Appreciation

not that you're wrong!

hahaha, he totally has! not his fault though.

besides, as that excerpt probably shows, i'd be unspeakably happy writing about miyamoto for the new yorker.

i didn't read it, but the caption to the art was something auteurist. he has near total control over the mario brand, or something?

i didn't read it either because it was too upsetting that someone else got to do it.

this is what i always like to point to when discussing miyamoto's genius:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-gP7sSR458

the miyamoto article in the new yorker wasnt really that good or interesting, it was written by a 'video game skeptic' & was mostly biographical detail & some investigation of 'how he thinks' but no real critical appraisal of his work.