Ulukai on 3/1/2013 at 11:30
Yawn. Yes, we all know you like Journey about as much as I like Alan Wake, now stop telling us ad infinitum.
I like To The Moon, but that's because I have a fondness for bedtime stories and not because I'm trying to rank up on Dungeon Master Derek's cool scale or feel that I'm superior to anyone who doesn't.
faetal on 3/1/2013 at 12:08
In this thread, things zajazada doesn't like are objectively wrong/bad and people who disagree are flawed.
The fact that this is a thread about something which is largely deemed to be subjective should set the irrelevance of this attitude in sharp relief to the topic.
Sulphur on 5/1/2013 at 17:45
Quote Posted by fett
Additionally, the audience has the opportunity to change the work by interacting with it - something that cannot be said of any other art form.
Sure, it's a unique characteristic, but it doesn't modify the argument any. You could even say it hurts it a bit, because interactivity is what Ebert predicated most of his rebuttal on.
He may have a point, but he's not the most informed video game savant out there, so it's easy to ignore large swathes of his part of the debate. But the key point is, surely, for something to be art, the degree to which its interactivity allows it to deviate from the author's vision must be limited at best. Emergent possibilities still need to be guided towards or at least curtailed to a level that allows them to not compromise the integrity of the work itself.
Any work of art that is malleable, and allowed to be freely modified by the audience, invariably gives rise to penises. For instance, if all of our posts were editable by everyone without a controlling influence, this entire post would be PENIS PENIS PENIS. As a matter of fact, I'm battling with myself right now to not simply replace this entire post with PENIS PENIS PENIS, which, being a guy, is as fundamental and natural an impulse as breathing.
It's an inscrutable evolutionary imperative that seeks to trample over art in all its forms, and even when if we succeed in wresting it to the ground, it sneaks its way in through more covert means. The Greeks realised that this was a battle that was fundamentally Sisyphean in nature, and so sidestepped the issue entirely by incorporating penises into all of their art regardless of subject matter. And now, millenia later, we recognise them as the progenitors of modern civilisation.
I'm not arguing that this would be the most successful approach for video games. It probably wouldn't be, given that current day levels of social stigma around the penis would be something completely alien to ancient Greek society. But it is the zenith, and the nadir, of most cultures everywhere, and there's something to be said for covert commentary when most games are about perforating hundreds of intricately articulated simulacrums of the human body with just as elaborately simulated high-velocity projectiles ejected from the red hot barrel of a virtual weapon, that over a long enough distance, resolve into fiery parabolic arcs.
It's enough to make you shake your head and wonder some times, you know.
nicked on 5/1/2013 at 19:20
Well I don't know about videogames, but that post was art.
june gloom on 5/1/2013 at 21:34
i think he meant to spell it inscroteable
demagogue on 6/1/2013 at 04:41
By the way, a lot of surrealists intended their art to be interactive. Joseph Cornell's boxes had little levers and cranks for people to pull that'd do little things inside, and he'd have showings just for kids to come to play with them. Also some of DuChamp's pieces were interactive, you'd spin them, or one had an outdoor scene you'd look into through a peephole (nevermind one of his most famous pieces was a urinal stall that I wouldn't doubt was "used"). They'd play "art games" like folding up a painting & passing it on for the next person to do a section, or the way they made collages by picking elements out of a bag at random and trying to fit them in, and of course the method itself (inducing dreams & random visions) was kind of game-like.
After reading a history of the movement, I sincerely think if gaming had been in their age, they would have leapt to it as part of the surrealist art movement in the same way they did with cinema. It's a wonder not many modern artists have taken that up. There are some surreal games out there, but I wouldn't say they are from surreal artists, just people wanting that style in their game; and the ones actual artists do make that I've seen are too coarse IMO.
zacharias on 6/1/2013 at 08:50
Yeah i was gonna also add, Sulphur's penis bit is hilarious and true but I'm not sure about the limited interactivity argument as a definition (I accept it may have some bearing on quality but that's really another debate). I've seen plenty of interactive art pieces in Modern Art museums, it seems almost fashionable now (not saying they were great art mind you).
