faetal on 12/12/2015 at 13:57
All of my bits about quality fo the game as literature followed from GMDX's carrying the conversation that way. Games are good or bad in their capacity as games, not as works of art. It can be argued that games are art and I personally think that it's a Venn diagram between art (engaging the senses to evoke human experience) and games (objective driven pastime based around rule sets). I was also addressing the "Golden Age" idea by saying that I didn't feel gaming had had its Lawrence of Arabia or Godfather yet and was still developing as a medium. I'm massively optimistic about the development of gaming, Sure we're getting a lot of worryingly template-driven stuff (Ubisoftitis), but I think that while the AAA titles drive the tech forward, this leaves the risk-takers to work within the space they've created to give us that first game where people literally have to played it in order to be considered knowledgeable about contemporary culture.
Gaming hasn't had that moment yet, because it has only recently been considered a ubiquitous and non-niche form of entertainment and a lot of people still regard it as a stupid pastime, or somehow juvenile - how many people here have downplayed their interest in gaming in social situations? A large part of this for me is that it is such a diffuse medium - you largely need different people doing different things - each one of these is going to make it more difficult to achieve an overall vision, especially if decisions are made by committee (or worse, by focus groups). This doesn't seem to affect cinema so much, perhaps because it's a static medium where you are working from a script rather than creating a world in which the script exists and the player can have a dynamic effect - film audiences have no effect on the film. My guess is this adds an order of magnitude more complexity to the outcome.
Because of this diffuse nature, the quality of certain things is compromised. The voice acting in a lot of games is till way below their cinematic equivalent (consider animated cinema since it's essentially voice-overs), the overall stories are often very lame compared with actually good stories, or the engine hampers immersion or obstructs gameplay freedom etc etc etc.
In my opinion, Deus Ex was great because there was enough overall vision to pull all of the disparate elements together and there were enough disparate elements (all of them relatively mediocre quality in themselves) to provide an experience where you felt in control and part of the world you were in, while still adhering to the rule-set of the game.
A game I would consider to be very close to classic is Dark Souls - that game feels like a work of art and its gameplay elements are solid. It's a shame that it loses its sparkle somewhat in the latter stages of the game, but seeing New Londo ruins for the first time or trying to explore it, felling that sense of dread, hopelessness when you realise you have to go there at some point - all achieved by not telling a story at all in direct terms, but letting the lore of the story you are in permeate into the places, objects, enemies etc...
Right, I feel like I'm rambling a bit, so I'll leave that there.
(Ha - "post quick reply")
faetal on 12/12/2015 at 14:02
Quote Posted by Dev_Anj
Also I think you need to give more credit to Deus Ex's story. Indeed it can't compare directly to cyberpunk books, that's because it's written around the needs of player interactivity and so most of it is conversational dialogue or some short snippets of in game books. This further follows with the characters not being fleshed out; the intention here is to give some stand out attributes to the characters while still covering a large number of them, which again stems from the need to let the player interact with many people in the game world. Personally, I find the cheesy action film lines of Deus Ex a part of the charm, as often I think they work well to provide a light moment without breaking the overall atmosphere.
I don't give it much credit precisely because it is a mosaic of ideas lifted from elsewhere. It's like they tried to tie together all of the most trite conspiracy theories into one place just to build a big enough target for you to throw your superhero at. Pretty much every idea in there was lifted from popular fiction.
Thirith on 12/12/2015 at 14:26
I don't think that in itself is a problem. There's nothing wrong with using pop culture. Something like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum doesn't make up its material, though it remixes it in interesting ways (if you like Eco), and Alan Moore has written several works using ideas from popular fiction that I'd consider up there with some of the greats of literature . Deus Ex doesn't do anything particularly interesting with the conspiracies it incorporates; it just adds them all up, as in "Shadowy organisation X is responsible for this... and that... and the other. And it's all in order to control people, since we all know that power corrupts. Mwhaha." It simply accumulates. Again, this is effective enough for the story it tells and doesn't diminish it as a game, but it doesn't tell a particularly complex or subtle story.
froghawk on 12/12/2015 at 14:31
I agree entirely that game writing needs to be in service of the gameplay and never argued otherwise, but that doesn't mean the writing itself has to be so damn cringeworthy and bad most of the time. You can have unremarkable writing that isn't downright awful, delivered by good voice actors, and that's probably enough - but the industry standard is way below that. It's actually insulting.
Quote Posted by Dev_Anj
Froghawk and faetal, I think you put too much emphasis on innovation. I think innovation is overrated in art, and what's more important is in how art manages to grab someone's attention and feel fresh. Because if we were to judge media by innovation alone, all art would fail as art by itself is a derivative of real life when we come down to it, no matter how good or bad, ambitious or not it is. I also don't think high art is about having a message, I don't consider government run public service announcements to be high art. High art to me is things that inspire people beyond just entertaining them.
You're confusing innovation with total originality. Yes, total originality is impossible, but to write off innovation entirely because 'all art is derivative of real life' is utterly absurd.
I want you to take a look at classic musical artists in a number of genres. They are classic and we hold them in high regard because they both innovated and had something to say. No one was writing pieces that travelled through every key before Bach. No rock artist had broken away from the blues framework and experimented with texture so much before The Beatles. No one took came up with as many new styles of jazz as Miles Davis. They all innovated on a technical level, but they all had something to say on an emotional level so that their work resonated with people.
The same is true of classic literature and film. If you look at what we still hold in high regard today, almost all of it was both technically innovative and emotionally relevant - that's the mechanism behind inspiring people beyond entertaining them, because the innovation makes people ask 'how did you do that?' or 'how did you think of that?'. So yes, both are very important to creating high art - you need to have something to say, but you also need to strive towards something and try to break some boundaries. Yakoob's friend is entirely right. You don't need to reinvent the medium to do something new with it.
And I agree with everything faetal just said (though I haven't played Dark Souls).
Malf on 12/12/2015 at 15:05
Quote Posted by faetal
I don't give it much credit precisely because it is a mosaic of ideas lifted from elsewhere. It's like they tried to tie together all of the most trite conspiracy theories into one place just to build a big enough target for you to throw your superhero at. Pretty much every idea in there was lifted from popular fiction.
Yeah, even though I like the game, I've never seen the story as more than X-Files Fan Fiction.
Starker on 12/12/2015 at 15:12
Quote Posted by faetal
A game I would consider to be very close to classic is Dark Souls - that game feels like a work of art and its gameplay elements are solid. It's a shame that it loses its sparkle somewhat in the latter stages of the game, but seeing New Londo ruins for the first time or trying to explore it, felling that sense of dread, hopelessness when you realise you have to go there at some point - all achieved by not telling a story at all in direct terms, but letting the lore of the story you are in permeate into the places, objects, enemies etc...
I think even more important is that it forms a cohesive whole, or at least tries to (stuff like covenants are somewhat iffy). The world is connected and there's an effort put into explaining even abstract game mechanics like XP in terms of the lore of the game world. It has very consistent themes and most of the game and the story help to reinforce them. Also, its mythology draws quite a lot from Greek mythology and Arthurian legends cough*Artorias*cough*Gwynevere*cough. The backstory itself is basically a mishmash of Titanomachy and the rise and fall of King Arthur.
PigLick on 12/12/2015 at 15:21
Froghawk your point about music is interesting, as I was thinking of something quite similar. Lets say that the span of gaming starts around 1980. So thats 35 years of games being made and evolving.
Now lets take rock music, which we shall say started around 1950. So thats 65 years of stuff being made etc. 35 years on from that and we have 1985, so what is the golden age of rock? Most ppl would argue the 60's and 70's, which were only 20 years after the initial period.
Of course comparing music and video games is a bit hard, but there are similarities. Rock music was driven by technology, in fact all pop music could fall under the same. Games are driven by tech as well, obviously.
I have a point that I am trying to make but not articulating it very well (its late and wine). Might have to try again tomorrow
froghawk on 12/12/2015 at 16:26
Well, I think the problem is you're trying to compare a genre to an entire medium. It's a tough comparison, because music existed far before recording technology and games existed far before video games. I guess you could compare recorded music (~160yrs old) to video games (~35yrs old), or perhaps a genre (rock & roll vs 1st person shooters).
faetal on 12/12/2015 at 16:43
Yep. By the time rock music arrived, everybody had a clear idea of what music was - it's was 100% burned in, we just had different ways to achieve it and broaden the palette. I think games haven't even finished becoming what they can be yet. There are plenty of disruptive innovations yet to be made I think. Also, I think games are so much more complex a medium as they essentially combine all of the facets of cinema, music and literature into something different and that something different is more or less defined as being interactive. I think gaming will be a defining medium in the next 50 years, maybe even longer.
PigLick on 12/12/2015 at 16:46
Yeh you guys are on point, but the idea I was heading toward was a little more abstract, but as I said before, I cant quite get there.
The thing is there is a huge difference between "games" and "interactive entertainment".
edit - ya know maybe there isnt such a large gap. Chess is a game , in the truest sense of the word, but yet, you are interacting with the ruleset and your opponent, for enjoyment right?
