Are there any books on video games as art?
How would you feel if your school's literature course had replaced all novels/plays/poems and replaced them with video games?
Have video game surpassed literature and cinema as the best expression of the human experience? I guess the generation after zoomer will never even read books or watch movies - just play vidya and VR.
GAMERS RISE UP
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i hate games where the story matters. chess has no story. street fighter 2 has no story. counterstrike has no story. we're reaching the stage where we need to separate games from interactive tv.
I like it when people connect Daigo to Ryu, like a living parallel
It's beautiful
>chess has no story
yeah it does. it's a retelling of the eternal fight between the winter court and the summer court.
his is what darksouls does to man
Games that focus on story are essentially game designers surrendering and admitting their medium can never be art and they have to rely on the narrative, which is the lowest common denominator. Good films use cinematography and composition. Games should rely on interactivity.
This. The best games that use story make you experience the story by playing the game.
I find it strange when people talk about the narrative in games when it’s just: gameplay -> cutscene -> gameplay -> cutscene, when a cutscene is really just a short film/animation.
Like others have said, the gameplay should express the narrative. I don’t know how. I heard Ico was good at that, but I’ve never played it.
Pathologic 1, 2 and the Void do a good job combining narrative with gameplay that's specifically made to reinforce the narrative.
Yume Nikki is actually good at this. The game is just wandering, but all the odd shit you see builds up to hinting at something traumatic happening to her, and by the end, we confirm her feelings.
Yeah, but there's no mechanical skill. A game requires a win/lose condition and skill. That's important. If skill isn't an element it's not a game, just a slideshow. Compare it to Undertale/Deltarune or Gris, and the experience is fundamentally different despite them all sharing very similar themes, visual motifs and plot points. The key difference is skill, which equates to play.
Mechanical mastery is one pursuit that might constitute a form of engagement, but to suggest that it's a necessary component of what we call "games" is obviously wrong. Just because games that don't include mechanical mastery as a fundamental form of engagement are boring to most people doesn't make them invalid. It is engaging to set up blocks and watch them fall. It is engaging to uncover a story. There are plenty of things that we find worthwhile in rule-based interactive experiences that are certainly games and walking backwards into a no-true-scotsman definition is a semantic waste of time.
Disagree. Validity isn't a component in delineation. Dear Esther and Gone Home aren't games, and never will be. They're narrative experiences, interactive theatre would be the most complimentary description. Skill is a broad catch all criterion, but it's important for classification.
The only concrete way to define a game experience is in the willingness of the player to play. The only necessity on behalf of the game is that it provides a set of rules that both player and game agree on. If you go a theater and are told at the door "it is expected of you to heckle the performers" I would consider that a game as long as the participant was willing to engage in heckling—it's collaborative storytelling, like social deduction games or choose-your-own-adventure games.
Sure, but using the heckling example - you have to define a successful heckle, if you were to shout out a random sequence of words, you haven't really "heckled" - the definition can be construed mechanically by assigning a numeric score based on criteria subsumed by the definition, this creates a scoring system which implies skilled play. That some heckle more aptly is a natural consequence of observed participation. This principle generalizes. I agree that games are collaborative.
There's nothing really different between a story-driven game and a game like Journey. The player is being drawn through the experience by the desire to consume more highly-authored content. Whether it's narrative (The Last of Us) or space (Journey) or performance (Portal), it doesn't really matter. It's a different kind of engagement than the mastering of some mechanical device, but it's still interactive and it's still engaging in a way that's different from a film. It feels more like collective storytelling—like PnP games or even like dreams. You take ownership of your experience even when what you're experiencing is authored fairly strictly.
Games like Journey are innovative and push the medium. But when it’s just play, now watch this, now go back to playing and the story only happens through the watching rather than playing it doesn’t really use game as a medium to tell it story, its just gameplay stitched together with narrative scenes.
Sure, and I would say that makes them bad games which are not elevated above other storytelling mediums into their own forms of art. A good game knows that you get momentum from gameplay—given a set of rules and being asked to explore them, the player is pulled forward by the challenge against their intellect or skill—they recognize that the connective tissue is gameplay/exploration and there's no need for narrative momentum. You only need to litter the game space with those nuggets of gold that are normally tucked into paragraphs and on their own justify the existence of the story itself.
Video games can have a narrative in a similar way literature can while a sculpture has. I thing of the sort. A better analogy would be a poetry class focused on song lyrics and making music. I agree with your point, they are not the same.
Videogames aren't literature, so it's a stupid course to begin with. It's like having literature as sculpture.
Uhhh
lewd
>Are there any books on video games as art?
I'm sure there are.
>How would you feel if your school's literature course had replaced all novels/plays/poems and replaced them with video games?
That would be stupid, and I would consider it a waste of time.
>Have video game surpassed literature and cinema as the best expression of the human experience?
Absolutely not, most of the best vidya creatively and storytelling wise came out in the 90s and early 00s.
Kojima's games have literary themes. So maybe, but most people don't play vidya for the narrative so it's a waste. They won't be able to write 500 words on exisistential themes in MGS 1.
I hope they play Dante's Inferno.
They targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.
We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know every little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed in frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challenge when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competitive, hard core, by nature. We love a challenge. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challenge us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.
Based, as a speedrunner and a convicted rapist this really resonated with me
The original person who wrote that copypasta must be walking around with undiagnosed bipolar disorder
Can someone now write Ganker's version? "They targeted readers... We have carried the ring of power to my doom. We have hunted white whales and giants disguised as windmills as a pass time..."
I went to a STEM uni that didn't give a frick about its English department. The only classes they offered were the two bare minimum intro courses required to get a degree from a public school in the state.
All of their English 1102 courses had some kind of gimmick, and I signed up for mine as a freshman unaware that my section was Folklore in Videogames. It was taught by two weird 30 year old hipsters that were pretty moronic and spent half the time hitting on the few girls in the class. A complete waste of time. I had to write multiple essays about the shitty indie games they were obsessed with and they assigned me an entire 15-minute presentation on the "cultural impact" of Civ II.
Why didn’t they just make it a mixed media and creative storytelling type class. That seems to make more sense than trying to analyse Vidya storytelling.
mothmen 1966 looks p dank tho if the price is right i might cop it
Looks interesting, I'm a John Keel fan. Might cop it.
This fills me with sadness. The kids don't realise what's being taken. The obes that actually want to take the class seriously will realise how vad it is.
Pinball as Literature
>GAMERS RISE UP
>Have video game surpassed literature and cinema as the best expression of the human experience?
Yes
Absolutely.
Books you just have words. Movies you can at least see. But with games, not inly do you see, but you interact. In essence, you become a character within the story and your actions influence it. Other arts forms can’t compete.
Embarrassing.
"You can major in Gameboy if you k ow how to bullshit."
Only 30 years for this quote to come true.
PCU is a criminally underrated movie.
The only words you need to read on the subject are here: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/video-games-can-never-be-art
To this day, no one has managed to prove him wrong despite all the seething. Why do gamers want their hobby to be considered art anyway? So that they look less pathetic?
games as an art form are closer to architecture than anything else
OH
MY
SCIENCE!