For instance, I have an uncle who is getting married in the semi-near future. In Japan. My parents will be going to Japan as a result. I think the invitation extends to family (though an invitation doesn't pay for the trip).
I'm giving a conference presentation this weekend. And one next Wednesday. And one at the beginning of May. I'm excited to have so many things to put into my CV, but I'm a bit overwhelmed.
For instance, I have an uncle who is getting married in the semi-near future. In Japan. My parents will be going to Japan as a result. I think the invitation extends to family (though an invitation doesn't pay for the trip).
This is sort of an awesome SUCCESS and also kind of terrible. See, it's April right? Yeah, my school is canceled today due to heavy snow. Here's the kicker, to cancel school normally in my district it has to be -25 degrees fahrenheit or colder, and wind chill doesn't count..
I like April, they lower the standards a bit for snow in April, we still got 6 or 8 inches though.
Snow? I was half expecting to get dumped on sometime in March but it never happened and now they are talking rain and storms. Winter was oddly short this year.
Matt heard my Texas reaction to snow over the phone one time, ask him; when it snows here, everyone FLIPS OUT and gets super excited about it. It only happens about once a year, if that, so people tend to make a big deal out of it.
he odds of the cargo being lost, based on weather and piracy records for the last twenty years, then I add on a bit, then you pay me some money based on those odds...
That sounds like a pretty bad gamble to me, though to be fair it probably doesn't have a place anywhere else on the forum.
Edit: Also assuming all of this spambot's posts are all part of one story there's a wizard that bleeds gold, so that's fun.
Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.
What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken. I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It's only 15 minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly. She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.
Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may be closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.
She then says speech began as a form of warning, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, speech probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even now filming in 3-D. Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France should only be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.
Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition. Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."
But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once. One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).
Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.
Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.
Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Branch Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery.
"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a great game, but as potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, She defends the game not as a record of what happened at Waco, but "as how we feel happened in our culture and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in contrast award the game a Fail in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing it as art. Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie. We come to Example 3, "Flower" (above). A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower?
These three are just a small selection of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into artistic expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Braid" has had a "great market impact," she says, and "was the top-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclaim." Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.
These days, she says, "grown-up gamers" hope for games that reach higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already being made) "are being rewarded by audiences by high sales figures." The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.
The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."
Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.
Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.
I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.
Obviously I disagree with him, but he makes his points very well and I could ALMOST agree except for a few small details which are of paramount importance. But I don't want to just stand on my soapbox... what do you all think?
I disagree with his comparison of video games to games like baseball. Videogames can have beautiful visuals and music and deep stories, while baseball, obviously, cannot. Those are the same things that can make movies or television art, why not video games? And video games can give you even more reason to feel involved with the story, because you're in control of at least some of the characters actions, sometimes enough to alter the story dramatically.
I completely agree with both of you. Any game that fully takes advantage of the medium will be much different when you're playing or watching it. And yes, he thinks that it's like chess or football, but chess and football cannot have narratives.
Well, okay, let me restate: football does have a narrative, perhaps in a broader sense of the word. But there's essentially a limited number of possible "stories" that can come out of a football game because each game is played with essentially the same rules. Not only do different games have different rules, but with the addition of visuals, text, and interactive situations, the different permutations of video games is limitless.
Agreed, though I think the analogy is a little flawed to start. It would make more sense to compare a genre of video games to a type of sport (including chess and other competitive board games). That being said, video games trump them all since you can play chess, checkers, shougi, go, mahjong, football, basketball, hockey, and baseball on the Nintendo.
Now with the loose definition of art that is applied at times to performance art (people doing boring stuff in public) to films as art, I think you could easily say some video games already qualify as art. If 'A Clockwork Orange' can be art because of its social commentary, then 'Smash TV' is art for its social commentary. It's a statement about human greed, the devaluing of human life, desensitization to violence and the moral degeneration of the media.
I completely agree with both of you. Any game that fully takes advantage of the medium will be much different when you're playing or watching it. And yes, he thinks that it's like chess or football, but chess and football cannot have narratives.
That's incredibly incorrect, considering that there is a human element involved. You know those stories about the players overcoming adversity, etc? Yeah, that's a narrative.
In any case, I think Ebert's off his rocker a little bit, on the topic of whether or not video games "will ever be considered art". Art is subjective, and therefore anything at all could be considered art, just as anything considered art can be considered crap. It's the nature of subjectivity.
Not to say that criticism in general is irrelevant, but well... it doesn't do a lot of good for someone to critique an entire medium they have no connection with.
Well, while I did recant a bit, are stories of players overcoming adversity part of the "medium" of football? I understand that there are certainly stories that happen through football, but I'm not sure that they're directly the result of the game itself.
And really this is all borne upon Ebert's comparison, anyway. But I guess for this discussion, I DO see football and chess still having a very limited narrative because the game itself doesn't have variable narrative elements built into it. Stories like overcoming adversity may relate to playing the game and those who play the game, but it's not threaded INTO the game in the ways that story can be such a big part of the internal workings of video games.
Really, this is probably splitting hairs, but this was my original thought process.
You made me have a thought. In most story-heavy games, you can skip over the story sections and just get on with the gameplay completely oblivious to the narrative context. That'd be like watching the football games without knowing any of the players' stories. The player information comes about as you watch the game from the announcers and in the pre-game and post-game. Both the video game story and football story are optional to learn.
I'm not sure the discussion of what is art or not is even relevant or no. The entire idea of art is subjective, as Ebert admits. He's not making any authoritative statement on the definition of art; to me all he's saying is that he doesn't think games are art. That's fine. I don't think abstract art is art. Like, I saw one art exhibit in Japan a long time ago that had a giant canvas that was just entirely black. After I snidely commented to someone much later back at college that it's something anyone could do, they told me, "But that's the point! The art makes you think that, and the experience is the art!"
To which I replied, "No, that's fucking retarded, and you're fucking retarded. The art museum lost thousands of dollars to a douchebag. That's not art, that's a con."
All I know is what I personally define as art. I define art as something that required genuine talent to create. To me, Vivaldi's Four Seasons is art. Crank dat Soulja Boy is not. The Mona Lisa is art. Random splotches of ink on a canvas smeared with your cock is not. And to me, many video games that include any combination of an emotionally moving story, engaging game play, and overall enjoyability can be considered an art. It's a template for considering art to be art, but in the end it's entirely subjective. My definition is not a comprehensive definition. It's just my definition.
Penny Arcade had a good, yet simple response to the Ebert thing. They just said he's one of those people who want to criticize and debate what is/is not art, instead of just sitting back and enjoying it.
Money quote from the comic: "If a hundred artists create art for five years, how could the result not be art?"
Comments
i love japan period
I like April, they lower the standards a bit for snow in April, we still got 6 or 8 inches though.
Matt heard my Texas reaction to snow over the phone one time, ask him; when it snows here, everyone FLIPS OUT and gets super excited about it. It only happens about once a year, if that, so people tend to make a big deal out of it.
That sounds like a pretty bad gamble to me, though to be fair it probably doesn't have a place anywhere else on the forum.
Edit: Also assuming all of this spambot's posts are all part of one story there's a wizard that bleeds gold, so that's fun.
Obviously I disagree with him, but he makes his points very well and I could ALMOST agree except for a few small details which are of paramount importance. But I don't want to just stand on my soapbox... what do you all think?
Now with the loose definition of art that is applied at times to performance art (people doing boring stuff in public) to films as art, I think you could easily say some video games already qualify as art. If 'A Clockwork Orange' can be art because of its social commentary, then 'Smash TV' is art for its social commentary. It's a statement about human greed, the devaluing of human life, desensitization to violence and the moral degeneration of the media.
That's incredibly incorrect, considering that there is a human element involved. You know those stories about the players overcoming adversity, etc? Yeah, that's a narrative.
In any case, I think Ebert's off his rocker a little bit, on the topic of whether or not video games "will ever be considered art". Art is subjective, and therefore anything at all could be considered art, just as anything considered art can be considered crap. It's the nature of subjectivity.
Not to say that criticism in general is irrelevant, but well... it doesn't do a lot of good for someone to critique an entire medium they have no connection with.
And really this is all borne upon Ebert's comparison, anyway. But I guess for this discussion, I DO see football and chess still having a very limited narrative because the game itself doesn't have variable narrative elements built into it. Stories like overcoming adversity may relate to playing the game and those who play the game, but it's not threaded INTO the game in the ways that story can be such a big part of the internal workings of video games.
Really, this is probably splitting hairs, but this was my original thought process.
To which I replied, "No, that's fucking retarded, and you're fucking retarded. The art museum lost thousands of dollars to a douchebag. That's not art, that's a con."
All I know is what I personally define as art. I define art as something that required genuine talent to create. To me, Vivaldi's Four Seasons is art. Crank dat Soulja Boy is not. The Mona Lisa is art. Random splotches of ink on a canvas smeared with your cock is not. And to me, many video games that include any combination of an emotionally moving story, engaging game play, and overall enjoyability can be considered an art. It's a template for considering art to be art, but in the end it's entirely subjective. My definition is not a comprehensive definition. It's just my definition.
And such is Ebert's definition too.
Money quote from the comic: "If a hundred artists create art for five years, how could the result not be art?"