What about certain games is NOT art? What is?

Another gamez = art thread. Started reading Tom Chatfield's _Fun Inc._, and got to thinking about certain titles. We all have our games we know to clearly vault over the shovelware->art expanse, but I'm curious about which mechanics of each game really "does" it for us, and which fail miserably like a bad Evel Knieval jump.

For example, two games im thinking of, separated by genre, platform, and decade: Angry Birds and System Shock 2.

Angry Birds has its art in the experience, as it lacks it in narrative. There's a feeling of satisfaction in the real-time flinging of one bird into a giant tower of wood and smirking piggy, where the whole edifice comes crashing down like the climax of an 80's "snobs vs slobs" movie, with shit blowing up and crap flying everywhere.

Also, as a corollary question, what is it about shovelware that makes them _not_ art?

i dont think any games are art.

I think they're all art.

Not all games are art in the same way as not all films are art. Heavy Rain is more art than Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. I think art, at it's heart, tells you something about something familiar that you hadn't thought of or noticed before, and sends your thoughts down those alleyways of contemplation. Mario games are probably not art, while some FPSs probably are.

Course, if you're with Duchamp, it's all art and it's then just a question of how affecting the game is.

wtf more art in 5 mins of any mario game than the whole 10 hr heavy rain borefest can muster

games arent art, but art is stupid anyway

games cd be Art if it mattered what Art was, but the artistic qualities of games ought to be measured in terms that are unique to games and I wd want to mostly exclude narrative from that, in the same way that music criticism that treats music like Literature is almost wholly wrong and terrible.

also zappi big otm

I think there is a difference between Art and artistry. You may as well argue that Lional Messi is an artist, or James Naismith for that matter. Awesome game design != art imo.

also, plz to give specific examples in this thread

narrative as art is perfectly useless for most of the things considered art. portentous DO YOU SEE? story-telling is perfectly useless even in narrative arts. art has to reside at least partially in the formal qualities of its medium otherwise it might as well not exist. which might be true.

vague example of what I'm thinking: Morrowind's depiction of post-colonial politics and its near-neutral POV in terms of the motivations and desires of its protagonists is way deeper than almost any other RPG, but if I wanted to call it art what I wd be pointing out is the way the game develops its complex narrative as a game, thru its own gameplay, rather than just "oh man deep story".

Video game companies sure do employ a lot of artists! I guess they must all be receptionists or something?!

Façade is an interesting non-game and it's fun for a while but I don't feel it's especially good art, more like an experiment in pseudo-AI or something? Because it doesn't have enough game in it.

this looks like a dece article... http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm

noodle otm talking about games being judged on their own terms. what makes a good game good? for me, not art or narrative, but 2 things:

1) Mechanics/interface - the game has to feel satisfying to play - eg Little Big Planet's floaty jumping was a deal-breaker, Mario is always a pleasure
2) Challenge/novelty - the game needs to develop, in new environments or more difficult challenges, and the difficulty curve must be smooth and fair. The best games introduce new elements at *exactly the right time*

Can these factors be described as art? or just good design principles? is design art? buggered if I know.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6280/a_philosophy_that_extends_.php

A lot of traditional game people sort of recoil from this idea, this sense that their creativity is being shut down, but I think if you look at it as, "I have some ideas. Now I can find out which one's right, which one people respond to," it's more appealing.

AT: Exactly. That's exactly right. Everything can be improved, because you're not doing a painting where everyone can just sit back and appreciate it. What you're building is a consumer product. Users have to use it, have to touch it, have to play it. As soon as that happens, you're in a different category than how creative an artist is.

And this is why I say game building is a craft; it's not painting. To build a cool looking bowl, first of all it has to be a bowl first. It has to be functional first. And different people have different ways of using that bowl, of looking at it. And you take that feedback and continue to improve it.

Everyone's creative. I have 10 million ideas if you ask me today. But whether or not users will like those ideas, well, let's ask the users. And metrics is a way to ask the user in the right way. They'll give you the answer to pick which creative idea, and once you've implemented that idea, how to keep iterating, keep on improving it.

I think in the traditional and console mobile industry... new releases are very, very expensive. New sequels are very, very expensive. But for us, we're Flash-based, PHP-based. We can change like that. That enables to continually improve an idea.

the whole video games are not art question comes about because we look at traditional (pre video game) games and they are clearly not art. a chess game is not art. the board and pieces may be art and a particular style of play could be called artistry, but we recognize that chess as a ludic mechanical thing suspended in platonic form is not itself art. the thing is tho that painting + literature + film also have artistic and non-artistic elements. a lot of the vocabulary is just not making the transfer weirdly and so we have this kinda bizarre question wrt video games. like if we're talking about artistry, it seems to me that a great game developer technique has just as much artistry as a great painter's stroke. and if we're talking about the object d'art, then why can't a video game be as artistic as an album (both of which have elements you would certainly consider art and ones you would consider craft). but then this all gets collapsed with another conversation which is that for lots of people 'art' is not the opposite of 'techne' (which is generally how it is used in my experience in video game academia) but rather art is what happens when techne raises to a certain level. ie: when the object d'art is being created by some sort of auteur figure. in which case the argument tends to be, "oh, well there isn't a game as great as citizen kane." it's a silly argument, particularly bc if you can find a game that isn't as great as citizen kane, but still has a POV that is reflected (hopefully masterly) in the mechanics + narrative + other elements, then why shouldn't that be art?

tl;dr version, when ppl (ebert) say that video games aren't art, they are really having a couple different discussions and failing to measure them out.

angry birds is not just a digital version of mancala. it is also an aesthetic somatic (sensual) experience, a colorful visual experience (and if a painting can be art then a beautifully designed image in a video game can be too), a auteuristic experience, etc. I've never heard an argument that really satisfied for me why video games aren't art, esp if you consider films art.

NV otm except:

games cd be Art if it mattered what Art was, but the artistic qualities of games ought to be measured in terms that are unique to games and I wd want to mostly exclude narrative from that, in the same way that music criticism that treats music like Literature is almost wholly wrong and terrible.

is wrong imho. i think the best games support their POV on ludic + narrative levels and the two reinforce each other. deus ex is a great example of this -- a game narratively about making choices, freedom + free will that supports that narrative on almost every ludic level (from the RPG elements in character design to the multiple pathways thing).

aw dammit i'm on my way out the door.

there are a very few games whose narratives intertwine with their interfaces in a way that makes them narratively artistic, but for me most of the games i think are Great Art are all about mechanics. i wrote a gushing and sorta rickety piece about "super mario 64" that gets into the Art Question near the bottom.

anyway as for the just baseline "are games art" question, well why wouldn't they be; they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people. the only real question is "which games if any are really good art". i think the best mario games are intensely artistic. i thought the mechanics (but not the undergrad "story") of "braid" were as well. i haven't played "heavy rain" but from a distance it looked like exactly the kind of thing game designers make because ebert gets to them, and exactly the kind of thing that doesn't help them argue with him.

xp

also out the door but I did think better of it, later. Narrative is a part of the artistic element in the game like it is in cinema. Am using "narrative" in a loose literary sense here to try and rule out poor games with "deep" plots as being the only repository of worth.

It's also weird that years after the reader response revolution in literature ppl are still trying to isolate objective criteria for judging texts.

"they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people."
this definition seems to be the opposite of art, or a recipe for bad art, art commissioned to pander to the tastes of an audience.

The ideal art is an expressive representation of its creators, and the ideal games are the expressive vehicles for its players, and
so the answer to the question "which games are great art?" is "the ones that are terrible at being games"

"we recognize that chess as a ludic mechanical thing suspended in platonic form is not itself art."
and chess is a great game -- the idea that definitional constraints we apply to games like chess don't apply to video games seems ludicrous to me.
the "video" in video games really denote a platform distinction rather than a medium that is wholly unique from the general umbrella of things we call games.
I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles.

that is totally ridiculous

Angry Birds played with actual birds might be Art though in the Damien Hurst sense.

first of all "the ideal art is an expressive representation of its creators" is a helpful definition for discussing art but definitely not the be-all end-all and certainly other definitions, like how people respond to it, and the impact it has on groups, is just as important if not more so. lots of scholars like to use the 'productivity' of a piece of art as one of its variables for discussing how great it is (ie: how much thought/scholarship/ideas/culture has it produced) and that has almost nothing to do with the expressive representation of its creators. in fact, the who auteur representation thing is just repackaged new criticism and imho totally passe bullshit if just evaluated on its own without any other input.

and

I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles.

productivity is surely an important subject of study, but is a faulty criteria of art because many productive things born without a conscious expressive act (e.g. the Earth, evolution) aren't considered art, at least not without presuming a creator.

the problem is the 'faulty criteria of art' thing. it's not 1920 anymore

we've had a few revolutions in this discussion over the last 100 years

Did these revolutions address how productivity applies to memes in general rather than art in particular?

They address that the 'what is art' conversation isn't particularly productive

I'm not trying to be difficult -- it's just that to use the impact of a piece as an arbiter of what makes great art doesn't seem to hold up when someone can point out similar or greater impacts of other things that consensus holds isn't art at all, so in that sense all I'm really getting is that what productivity addresses is that productivity itself isn't productive in the 'what is art' conversation, but this doesn't negate linguistic or survey approaches, for example.

I mean, people built up philosophical conceptual models of how the brain processes color that was valuable in designing experiments that helped our current understanding of the phenomenon, so I don't see why a similar conceptual framework of what art isn't worth pursuing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller's_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus

"[conceptual framework of what art is] isn't worth pursuing" I mean.

also:
'"I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles." is just provocative nonsense'

Why is it nonsense to point out that sandbox video games are sometimes played in actual sandboxes?

"they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people."
this definition seems to be the opposite of art, or a recipe for bad art, art commissioned to pander to the tastes of an audience.

i mean, WHAT IS ART???? is a pretty impregnable question if history's anything to go by, but as far as i'm concerned, "created for other people" is not the same as "pandering to an audience". nor is the ideal art an expression of its creator. the ideal therapeutic breakthrough is an expression of its creator. the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone. it's collaborative, and empathic. in a video game, a person creates an environment designed to be navigated by another person. it's designed to be challenging but helpful, hostile but survivable; it teaches the player some rules, and asks him to apply them in clever ways. the experience of the played game is a collaboration between the player and the designer, the same way the experience of pale fire is a collaboration between you and nabokov. "self-expression" is paltry and arid by comparison.

on the chess question: it's now so commonplace and ancient it definitely feels weird to say it, but i would call chess a terrific piece of art. not as terrific as go.

civilization IV, meanwhile, is powerful art.

chess as a performative act can be art, but chess the game is just a board, pieces, and a rulebook.

"the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone."

this breaks down in the case of chess where the creator is ... is there an actual creator of chess? It feels like a game arrived at through iterative evolution.

the problem is in trying to nail a specific definition of Art, i think

I don't think it's impossible to nail it down. It's certainly a fuzzy category, but there are generally things we consider as art and things we don't and it is totally possible to build a working model of how we define the concept. It's not purely arbitrary -- there's a mechanism behind it.

there is, but a thread like this is demonstration of how undefined the art/craft definition still is, i reckon. or how disparate people's definition of art can be whilst still being recognisably related to the dictionary definition.

I mean, take something maybe more philosophically fraught than Art -- What are things that are Alive?
and ultimately, you can make some sense of it in that things that move constitute life, because as a mode of survival, it's useful to foreground moving objects versus stationary ones, and from this simple principle you can build a framework of how we think of certain things as living and other things as not-living.

But, for the most part, we can agree basically what is a living thing and what isn't, and with a little work, I think we can do the same for Art.

I just don't believe that. I think definitions of Life have historically been circling around the same measurable characteristics, but Art is demonstrably a different idea in 2011 than it was in 1711. And if we maybe want to argue for a coherent definition of Art today then there's no dominant authority that we could refer to for convincing support.

art sucks the big one

so do games

vanquish 4 lyfe

fuk u

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.

much respect to miyamoto, but character design is window dressing over the game.
for example, dream factory and super mario 2 USA are essentially the same game.

what makes miyamoto a great designer to me is he keeps his art impulses in check,
and his process is much more discovery than creation. A dude who optimizes for fun
is performing engineering rather than artistry, like a bicycle repairman who can
squeeze and tweak the sweetest ride from your bike.

well, we're not just talking about the way the characters look; we're talking about how they behave, how they present themselves to the player, how their "personalities" are connected to the mechanics of the game, how their behavior elucidates those mechanics, the coy way they show the player what he ought to do without outright telling him.

aren't these called affordances in the UI world? there's an art to it, but it's definitely a discipline of design rather than art, and it is also an aspect that is conceptually divorced from the game. For example, the wii controller (which Miyamoto also likely shepherded) affects all these things as well, and in much the same way. Actually the more I think about it, Miyamoto's games themselves are not nearly as satisfying as the level of polish he brings to the mechanics.

miyamoto's games are about mechanics. that is practically his entire medium. it's one of the reasons people make such a big deal of him: he's an unusually pure game designer.

anyway, we've hit the inevitable wall again: i don't think it's of any use to distinguish between "design" and "art". we can however talk about what games we love and why.

"affordances" is a really good word though--i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games.

damn, this thread is really scary to open. gonna have to set aside time to read the whole thing.
But sight unseen and undoubtedly repeating others: Games are art insofar as they are the product of creative people working on music, sound, visuals, rules of play, design, etc. They are commerce too, but they don't have to be. They HAVE to be art though, almost by definition.

miyamoto's games are about mechanics

I remember reading an interview, I think, where Miyamoto was like (and I paraphrase) "We came up with a demo version of SM64, which was literally just the mechanics of how Mario moved and jumped. And controlling Mario was so satisfying an experience in and of itself that I was content to leave that as the "game". But others at Nintendo persuaded me that we actually needed levels and stuff."

Probably tongue-in-cheek, but interesting nevertheless and kind of backs up what you are saying regarding his interest in mechanics.

are games fart

"i don't think it's of any use to distinguish between "design" and "art". we can however talk about what games we love and why."

broadly speaking, the fundamental difference between design and art is that designers will use affordances to make the game-playing experience a joy, artists will use affordances to mess with you, and depending on your tolerance for being messed with, that's going to affect the kind of games you love and why.

"i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games."
the problem with this idea is that the affordances are tied into the interface elements, not necessarily the game itself. going back to the chess example, you can play chess in multiple modalities (using live people, a marble chess set, on an ipad, in your head), each with its own sets of affordances, but the game itself remains constant.

When you say miyamoto is all about mechanics, then does it make sense to speak of him as primarily a game designer rather than an interface designer? He'd be the guy making sure the chess pieces have a good weight, that they slide across the board at just the right speed, and spending maybe less time figuring out the implications of adding an en passant rule.

"i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games."
the problem with this idea is that the affordances are tied into the interface elements, not necessarily the game itself. going back to the chess example, you can play chess in multiple modalities (using live people, a marble chess set, on an ipad, in your head), each with its own sets of affordances, but the game itself remains constant.

this is a new word that you just taught me so i defer to you, but wiki sez: "An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action." so while all those interface things you list are indeed affordances, isn't it also an affordance that a knight moves in an L and can jump over pieces? that the knight has a quality which allows a chess player to perform L-shaped jump moves with it? and this quality is granted to the knight by the game designer (in chess obviously kind of a diffuse concept as we've already been over). if i'm misusing the word then just forget it, but either way, that's part of what i mean by design, and i think it's artistic.

miyamoto does make sure the pieces have a good weight and slide across the board right, but he also designs the en passant rule: he designs how the things in the game interact with each other. like, here's a "rule" of super mario 64: if you jump against a wall and press A at the instant of contact, you fly off the wall at a 65-ish-degree angle. this is simultaneously a visual/auditory/tactile experience, a "move" in various puzzles, and one of many means by which the player can improvise interaction with the world. the en passant rule is all of these things except the first one; that's the province of people who design pieces and boards. one of the ways video games are different from chess (and maybe why people classify them differently?) is that a video game designer designs the game and the board. miyamoto's good at both--i remember reading someone somewhere enthusing just about the way mario's jump feels, about how unnaturally high it is while still having limitations, about the pleasure of the sound it makes, etc..

anyway. again, i think the best way to talk about this stuff is to talk about what works or doesn't work in specific games, and why.

(should be noted here that i'm using "miyamoto" as synecdoche for "miyamoto's team", if necessary; i don't actually know the credits on any of the games i'm talking about)

'Miyamoto was like (and I paraphrase) "We came up with a demo version of SM64, which was literally just the mechanics of how Mario moved and jumped. And controlling Mario was so satisfying an experience in and of itself that I was content to leave that as the "game". But others at Nintendo persuaded me that we actually needed levels and stuff."'

I think I'm with Miyamoto on this one, but this makes his work great neither as art nor game, but rather more like a well-crafted instrument, like a knife that's a pleasure to wave around even if you have nothing to cut. But maybe he's uniquely good at this? Every other game seems quite clumsy by comparison, or requires a ridiculous learning curve before you can appreciate its mechanics. (the button combinations on fighting games never made much intuitive sense, but obviously there are dudes who can become jedis at it)

Every other game? c'mon.

If you look at sonic, which has about the simplest interface possible (1 button), there's still a certain rigidness to the controls that make it less joyous than mario.

Every other game? c'mon!

oddworld was pretty cool

so was boy and his blob

the first serious sam was kind of art right because it made me all lollllllllll at the concept of fps

just the name 'croateam' brings a smile.