Azarkon
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Posts posted by Azarkon
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Because one was made to be interpreted while the other was made to be played?
Yeah, pretty shallow argument, but look - Ebert is saying that games is an inferior medium because structurally games are not authorial in nature. Players decide what happens in games - ie whether to go into that building, from what angle to view that scene, what paths to take in the story, etc. - and Ebert is saying that games are all the less art because of it. That's not necessarily an argument as to the entertainment value of games, but rather one relevant towards the potential artistic value of games. Sure, if you stare at that image of Pong you can interpret it in as many ways as the black square, but such an interpretation never occurs to the player, whereas it does to the painting purveyor, because of the structural differences between the mediums. Art is made to be looked at, watched, read, heard, whatever - games are made to be played, and in that act of playing Ebert is saying that games become less art and more entertainment for the sake of amusement. Kind of like how Chess will never be art even though it's one of the oldest and most classic games in the world.
As fans of RPGs we tend to challenge this basic notion because RPGs are the closest thing gaming has got to films and, especially as of late, the trend has been towards making RPGs as near of a "cinematic" experiences as possible. Would it still hold true if we were talking about FPS games? Here, let me go one step further - yes, games like Torment are often argued to be art, but is it because they're games? Or is it because they have elements within them (ie the writing, the cutscenes, the graphics) that have aesthetic value in and of themselves, irregardless of whether they're part of a game? Is that why as the industry adopts more cinematic practices, more people start claiming that games are art - ie because it's not games they're judging but essentially ghetto 3D movies?
That, to me, is the critical question that Ebert raises.
Can the gaming medium, which is to say the sum of all its parts, ever be considered art?
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From another thread -
- IGNThere is art here, despite what many would say isn't possible with games, from Roger Ebert to game designers like Hideo Kojima. But it's in BioShock--it's in the gorgeously realized, watery halls of Rapture. It's in a Little Sister's expression of thanks when you choose to save her, or the utter silence if you harvest instead. It's in the way the characters develop, in the testimonials of the recording boxes you pick up along the way. It's in the way the narrative is structured, and the way it blends so seamlessly with the action. Irrational had a clear vision with this game, something pulled off with remarkable precision in every department. They didn't just deliver something that's fun to play, a criterion so often cited as the benchmark of what makes a game worthwhile. BioShock stands as a monolithic example of the convergence of entertaining gameplay and an irresistibly sinister, engrossing storyline that encompasses a host of multifaceted characters. This is an essential gaming experience.The release of Bioshock has rekindled an age-old debate (some say a shouting match) of whether electronic games as a medium will ever approah the aesthetic level of film and literature. For those not familiar with the debate and why Penny Arcade writer Tycho expressed the desire to sodomize Rogert Ebert with a copy of Bioshock, peruse the following exchange between the well-known film critic and a gaming enthusiast:
Gaming Enthusiast: I was saddened to read that you consider video games an inherently inferior medium to film and literature, despite your admitted lack of familiarity with the great works of the medium. This strikes me as especially perplexing, given how receptive you have been in the past to other oft-maligned media such as comic books and animation. Was not film itself once a new field of art? Did it not also take decades for its academic respectability to be recognized?There are already countless serious studies on game theory and criticism available, including Mark S. Meadows' Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, and Mark J.P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game, to name a few.
I hold out hope that you will take the time to broaden your experience with games beyond the trashy, artless "adaptations" that pollute our movie theaters, and let you discover the true wonder of this emerging medium, just as you have so passionately helped me to appreciate the greatness of many wonderful films.
Andrew Davis, St. Cloud, Minn.
Roger Ebert. Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.
I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.
(By the way, the reason I don't mention Hideo Kojima is because I consider his argument against "games as art" more of a semantics disjunction than anything else; his definition of "art" is very different than is commonly used by people like Ebert above, so much so as to make his contribution irrelevant to the discussion at hand.).
Of course, there are countless counter-arguments by gaming enthusiasts, academics, and developers alike as to why games do have equivalent aesthetic worth, but I am not interested in repeating the party line on why games should be considered art, particularly because a good deal of those who support the "games is art" view actually don't articulate very convincing arguments. In fact, most of the arguments I've read were simple exercises in faith-by-abstraction - ie someone would say, "Ebert is wrong because the player is the director and this element of involvement makes it possible for games to create player-driven narratives that are every bit as aesthetically involving as books and films." If you read that line carefully, you'll notice that it says absolutely nothing - all it does is reiterate the advantages of games over other mediums and stipulate that these advantages give games aesthetic appeal. But this does not answer Ebert's challenge, nor does it prove that games are art. In fact, no such proof exists because as Ebert said - no game in existence today is held in equivalence to the crowning achivements of, say, Shakespeare or Spielberg. Sure, game enthusiasts might make the comparison, and Spielberg himself might even support it given his own developer aspirations, but the bottomline is that the best games we have to offer - ie works like Planescape: Torment, ICO, and yes even Bioshock - have not been received with the same level of intellectual and aesthetic scrutiny as great works from other mediums. Perhaps time will make the difference, as it did for Shakespeare (whose works were considered popular entertainment, not timeless literature, back when he wrote his plays), but what about Ebert's structural argument?
Can player-driven mediums ever aspire to art? Let me be more concrete - part of what makes literature and, indeed, films meaningful as mediums is that they are dictatorial: you see what the writer/director wants you to see, and through that point of view mundane events are imbued with authorial depth and thus become art. For those who subscribe to the definition of art as anything that's visually pleasing and man-made, this is probably a large jump in semantic differences, but such is the frame in which Ebert is arguing: that which makes a medium "art" is authorial intent, which transcends craftsmanship through imbuing experience with personal meaning (in a way that simple "craft" lacks), which is then interpreted by the viewer in various ways. Thus, greatness in art lies in self-expression, which games lack because they play down the designers' ability to self-express in favor of player choice. In fact, the more choices the player has, the less capable the designer is of self-expression, because less is in his control. Note that the player's ability to self-express is irrelevant in this argument, because the relationship we're looking at is between creator and creation (as is typically what is looked at in criticism). What the player does - interpret and/or change the creation - does not belong to the work itself, much as you wouldn't consider Harry Potter fanfic in evaluating Harry Potter. That should give a good introduction to what I think is a viable interpretation of Ebert's argument.
How would one begin to contradict this rhetoric? There are many avenues, but I'm going to give some support to Ebert so this doesn't become too one-sided. Take a game like Torment, which is best compared to a work of literature. Now, as a book Planescape Torment would choose a single path through TNO's journey - it would hit all the important plot points, explore all the significant themes, and come to the famous climatic conclusion by a one-way route. In the process the developers have alot of freedom in what perspectives they depict, what nuances they explore, what metaphors, symbols, etc. they utilize. If their skills are up to par, Torment might become an acclaimed fantasy novel.
Now consider it as a game. MCA can be the greatest writer alive, but if the player of the game chooses to take a INT 3 kill-them-all path through the game, and chooses moreover to avoid all the nuances and themes and plot points MCA puts in (ie don't do any of the side-quests, choose "kill" every time possible, end every conversation before it begins, etc.), the game experience will not be anywhere close to being meaningful. Moreover, even if the player does not actively ignore the game's best moments, he might come to them by paths that de-emphasize their significance. For example, if the player had to spend ten reloads to figure out how to kill TTO at the end, he's not likely to be in the same emotional state as someone who just read Torment as a book. Thus, variability in choices removes control from the developer and puts it into the hands of the player, who, not being an artist/writer/director, will not create for himself the same profound experience as was intended. Thus Ebert is right to say that without authorial control games have a hard time conveying the personal perspectives of the designers, which in turn constitute the aesthetic worth of their works; instead, what we get is reduction to the lowest common denominator - the game experience is only as good as the player playing it, and if the person playing it follows a uncultured path then a uncultured experience is what he will receive. Where, then, is the art?
Discuss.
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I disagree with both Azarkon and Canto. It was by no means clear cut. In 1940 Britain had her back to the wall, but as yet there was no obvious threat that Hitler intended to reduce us to rubble. Indeed many were either for bending the knee or enthusiastically joining him against the perceived threat of communism. We are fortunate indeed that a man was available who could frame the situation so much more clearly than his contemporaries. A man with utterly outmoded (even for the time) notions of honour and courage.
With all due respect Walsh, the threat of "bending the knee" is itself an existential threat. No such thing exists within the current conflict - no one is suggesting that we bend the knee to Islam, merely that we contain it as we contained Communism and let the ideology destroy itself from within. It's similarly preposterous to argue that pockets of Islamic militants are in anyways comparable to the mighty Axis war machine. Total war is a conflict that can only truly exist between two nations mobilizing all the assets at their command. The war against terrorism - against failed states that hardly put up a fight, with half-hearted support at home, with a primarily professional army, for purpose of "making the Middle-East safe for American interests," and with the spectre of profiteering hanging over it - is very different in comparison, and total victory is this case is not only nebulous but perhaps even unachievable with regards to the demands it places on our moral conscience. Sure, everybody would like to see Al Qaeda brought to justice, but few, I think, would be willing to see the Middle-East reduced to a glass parking lot in the process. That is why Islam is not an existential threat - if it were, and if total war was in fact our mode of conflict with the Islamists, then dropping a few atom bombs on Middle-Eastern cities would not be out of the question. It would, in fact, be an act of mercy compared to what we would be obligated to do as an alternative (ie a full-scale, remorseless invasion and pacification of the Middle-East).
As far as whether Churchill was "right" to support total war against Hitler... In retrospect, of course he was - but that doesn't mean the ideology he espoused in that speech (total war) was correct, because you also have to consider Hitler, who was driven by similar principles. Ask yourself this - if Hitler did not begin a total war, would Churchill have been justified to wage total war against him? If the ideology behind total war (which was basically fascist) was not in power, would WW 2 have occured, and even if it did, would it have been as singularly destructive and brutal?
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But is our enemy truly an existential threat? Hitler was. Fascism was. But Islamic extremists?
I have my doubts. At any case, the situation has changed in other ways, too - nationalism is no longer such an important factor, the result of which is that total war against the enemy has become ineffective. Forcing an official Iraqi surrender is easy; getting the militants to give up, and getting the people to stop hating each other, however - not so much. It's true that we can still achieve total victory by completely annihilating the enemy's possible countries of residence, but such an act is not only morally reprehensible but is, in fact, self-admittedly excessive in a way WW 2 total war never was. There was the notion then that if we did not reduce Germany to rubble, Hitler would've reduced us to rubble (once the war's begun, anyways). The same, I think, cannot yet be said of Islamic extremists. The existential threat is not yet real.
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GD nailed it. NWN 2 coming so soon on the heels of NWN 1 limits the initial flurry of activity. Let's face it, modders are not professional game developers. They don't do this for a living and having done it once and gotten it off their chest, simply don't have as much incentive to do it again so soon. As for the argument that there should be new modders, understand that they're a minority compared to the throngs of itching storytellers who awaited the coming of NWN 1. There's not, relatively speaking, that many people who want to mod badly but did not have the opportunity to do it in NWN 1.
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Kaftan, I'm curious, but it seems that your argument of "not wanting to miss anything" logically rules out choice-and-consequence, as well, or more broadly any sort of branching in games. Now, personally, there are very good games out there (JRPGs, for instance) that don't branch, but then they don't exaclty allow for a great deal of roleplaying (or, to avoid that word, "choosing") either. As a result, I'm almost convinced that your preference simply precludes interest in branching games, which is a perfectly reasonable stance, but one that would make it unnecessary to argue any further. Is this correct? I'd like to know because it'd help me decide whether to respond in depth to your criticism or to simply "agree to disagree," if ya get what I mean.
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I believe the sort of cartoon that could've worked would've offended American puritan sensibilities
I've generally agreed with your assessments in this thread, Azarkon. As is so often the case, it's the fine point that comes between us. Total victory was the necessary end of the conflict because lack of concern is what allowed it to become total war. I don't disagree that it is a terrible thing, but nature can be terrible as well. Like astro, I see the pictures of the carnage and cannot help but think of myself. I see the women and think of my wife and sister. I see my mother. That doesn't change the fact that it was necessary to demand, and secure, complete and total victory. In the end, we still had Stalin, and his brutal regime. So total victory resulted in an incomplete peace. However, negotiating for victory would have brought an even more fragile peace and perhaps no peace at all. Once total war reared its massive ugly head, there was no choice but total victory.I don't think we disagree, but perhaps debating the finer points would help. I agree that in the circumstances we were given total victory was the only viable choice. I also suspect that you would agree with the assertion that we should be glad that we're past the phase of history that would produce such circumstances (at least, so it seems at the moment). I'm not decrying our decision to seek total victory, but the doctrine of total war that necessitated such a decision in the first place. But of course, it's not even total war that I'm criticizing, but the mentality that necessitated it - that being an ideology of power and domination founded upon beliefs of intrinsic superiority, and which put aside service to universal morality in the name of nationalism.
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The bomb served an expedient end, but let's not forget that the Allies were determined to force a total surrender from Japan and had plans in place for a land invasion - if the bomb failed (which General Marshall thought it would after seeing the Japanese defend their islands). Their estimates for casaulties resulting from such an invasion were far worse than was caused by the bomb and it did not sway them, and I genuinely think that they would've reduced Japan to the last man, woman, and child if that was the way it had to be (though it'd likely not have come to that, particularly with the Soviet threat brooding on the coasts). I bring this out not to downplay the effects of the bomb, but to stress that total war, as was practiced in WW 2, was brutal in a way that people today have a hard time imagining. It wasn't about morality, it wasn't about civilian casaulties, it wasn't about keeping the public happy ... It was about winning, total victory - whatever it takes. Hundreds of years of European enlightenement, of civilization building, of societal progress... And it comes down to that. I'm glad this phase of history is over.
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Sorry, let me rewrite that:
"But the enemy commander likely will have to visit parents and wives when they get home, because war will never be reduced to simulated battles between robots: the underlying causes of war are far too serious for that. I say this because some analysts believe that robot armies would, like nuclear weapons, bring an end to human warfare - because who'd ever throw their lives away fighting robots? Me, I think that's BS - not only because it's unlikely to be true, but also because it trivializes war, which is really the object of this entire project - to make war so innocuous that it can be waged painlessly. But it doesn't do that, because if a war was so trivial for both sides that they're willing to let robots decide it for them, it wouldn't have been waged under current circumstances. And if a war was serious enough that people would be willing to die for it, as is the current state of wars, then nobody would let robots decide it for them, either. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that robot armies would change nothing but the weight of technological superiority - and that's a dangerous thing should the one with the technology ever become the 'bad guy' in a war."
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I thought that debate was over, and we were just trying to get at the source of why people are dredging up old laundry in an effort to discredit the US, but you're the mod
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But the enemy likely will, which is the entire problem - regardless of what pundits think, war will never be reduced to simulated battles between robots, because the underlying causes of war are never trivial - it is, as internet goers would say, serious business.
Perhaps it's the democrat in me, but it's always been somewhat heartening to think that if enough people were willing to die for a noble cause, they'd be able to achieve it. Unfortunately, the possibility of that "noble cause" being religious and fanatical in nature has produced a modernity that increasingly looks to systematic dominance as the preferred solution. A day might come, then, when even the sacrifice of all its disciples would not allow a cause to survive. That day is frightening to imagine, because who - then - will be able to resist oppression?
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Actually, that's because of medical insurance, and Sicko criticizes plenty of that
Now, you're of course right that a disinterested foreign policy would yield certain unsavory conditions, but the gap between indifference and intervention is quite large, and even if we were "right" to choose intervention, in "principle," there's still the matter of practicalities. I don't think you can deny that US foreign policy is currently a cesspool of mismangement and failure, regardless of its stated intentions. I'm not so worried about what we say we meant to do, but about what we failed to do. Numerous still are the apologists, but fewer now are those who believe that the situation in Iraq will stabilize any time soon. While I don't agree with all of its points, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200708...eyond_disaster/ gives an argument that's increasingly harder to dispute. One cannot judge a policy merely on moral and ideological grounds - implementation is, as in all things, the most significant measure, and here the Bush administration is knee deep in sludge. Personally, all else is secondary: the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but in the end it's the results that count.
I fear Iraq will go down in history, like Nam, as yet another blow to the feasibility of US interventionism and all the bad press is just an extension of that.
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Laudable moderation, Azarkon. Things are less clear cut. Yet while the leaders may be less distinguishable* the systems have grown far more distinct. The USA of today has had the civil rights movement, and the rise of public education and welfare. Not to mention spending hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid. Similar thinsg could be said about Great Britain. While Russia is sliding back into the pit, which China never left.
Granted, but usually it's not the domestic systems that people bash but the foreign policy, and here the comparison is similar to leadership. Sure, you have Russia strong-arming the former Soviet states, and you have China propping up brutal dictatorships in Africa, but neither expressions of geopolitics are quite as visible as the wars we've got going in the Middle-East - and here you have to remember that most of the world doesn't believe the US is there for altruistic reasons. It tends to go downhill from there.
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Um... easy point, but it needs to be made. Are you seriously claiming moral equivalence between Stalin's Russia and Roosevelt's USA?
Out of the list of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, and Roosevelt, it's obvious who the two "winners" are. No, by no means were Churchill and Roosevelt "perfect" leaders, but compared to the competition, it's hard to deny that they did the least wrong, and made the most right of decisions.
Out of the list of Merkel, Putin, Hu, Blair, and Bush, however, the choice is less obvious, and I think that's the gist of the issue. The US can not ride on the surge of good leadership that led it in the past, and today the image of the star spangled knight is badly tarnished, to the extent that American exceptionalism is being challenged on a routine basis. All this bad press must be interpreted in this context - American arrogance has built up alot of pent-up rage, and given the opportunity the world is bringing us down to size. It's not so much that the US has done an inordinate amount of wrong in the past (though we've certainly done our share), but that those wrongs take on new meanings when America is no longer the hero but the accused, no longer the judge but the judged. It's been said that these days it's a fad to bash America... I don't disagree, but this has been the nature of national image for as long as it existed. We fad-bash others (ie China), and others fad-bash us. It's awfully unfair to represent a nation solely by its wrongs and mention not at all the rights and reasons, but I suppose it's only fair that other people trash us the same way we trash them.
In short, it sucks to be on the receiving end of the stick, I suppose.
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These are double-edged SWORDS, if you know what I mean...
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PST combat was simply, for the most part, bland; saying that it's great combat is ludicrous, but I can see an argument for saying that it's adequate for a game that purposefully de-emphasises combat. Maybe MCA's argument for why PST combat was fine is that combat simply isn't a big part of the game. Maybe the dull combat was supposed to encourage non-violent solutions. Maybe it's supposed to reflect numbed out violence. Maybe MCA just wanted it to be different than other IE games so as to emphasis the strangeness of the planes. Of course, this could just all be apologetics and BIS might've simply failed to deliver the combat they wanted to deliver. We don't know, but the important distinction is between whether PST should've had great combat. Would that have added to the game - made it more worthy?
Personally, it's debateable. I don't quite fall into the "if every part of the game is good, then the gane must be good" camp of game design. I think a game is more than the sum of its parts, and that at times it's necessary to sacrifice certain features in order to emphasis others. Would PST have been the same experience if it had awesome tactical combat that made TBS fans drool in ernest, or would such things have diluted the focus of the game, which was on dialogue and storytelling? It certainly might have sold better, but in terms of the game as a cohesive unit, I'd argue that it'd have been a betrayal of PST's motifs to spend more zots on combat that could've been spent on quests, puzzles, and roleplaying choices. Lest we forget, combat is not a necessary component of RPGs, and in some sense PST was an experiment in getting away from the classic mold of RPGs-as-tactical-combat-simulators, even if it's only because combat was intentionally an afterthought (which to me is the most convincing explanation since, as it's been pointed out, the BIS devs were quite well aware of what good tactical combat looked like when they made IWD).
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Interesting question. Basically it isn't the 'done thing' to be too soppy. So when expressing sympathy for others British people (and sometimes the colonials like the Aussies) toughen up a sympathetic comment with a rude-ish term or two. Hence calling the miners devils is a good thing, denoting care.
I guess. I never thought about it before.
Huh, interesting... And very British, indeed. Didn't know that before, thanks!
Yup, my dad is one of the victims here. He has many illnesses because of working in the mines.. Yet, he is still in decent shape for a near 60 year working, and volunteering.Good to hear he's doing alright. Hmm... Somehow I'm not so surprised you love dwarves now, Volourn.
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Before this thread gets shut down, let me just say this:
Amidst all the propaganda and rhetoric, two things are true: 1) America's foreign policy is the source of all the hate, and 2) despite hating America, most people outside of Europe and Japan would still like to make America their home. The complexity of national perception lies therein - it's not contradictory, for most people, to desire the life style of Americans while hating what America does on the world stage, and if you think about it just a little, the same holds in the minds of many Americans. It's at this point that you can begin to ask the real questions - such as whether the government of America (and really, any country) truly represents its people, and whether what we do on the world stage is necessary for the perpetuation of our life style.
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On-topic: Mining is not only a dangerous job, it's also a generally debilitating one. Miners expose themselves to all kinds of harmful chemical agents via fumes, dust, etc. on a daily basis. This is particularly true of coal mining, which causes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_lung, among other problems. While these occupational hazards have been reduced by improved safety standards and technology in most first-world countries, the same cannot be said, unfortunately, for developing nations (yes, China is still a developing country - don't let the facade of urban prosperity blind you to the very real poverty and exploitation that enable it). That businesses fail to comply with government regulations and aren't prosecuted due to their clout in the economy, of course, also doesn't help.
Off-topic: Err, I reckon I'm not that familiar with British vernacular/slang, but what's the rationale behind using "devil" to refer to miners? Walsh?
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I've never really liked Chinese food. I don't mean any disrespect to the cuisine. I just think it's a bit bland.
There is actually quite a bit of variety to Chinese food... It doesn't get translated very well, however. I once had a Chinese colleague remark, upon coming to America, that he pities the Americans for their food options, though I'm sure the UK has better standards
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Hey, Kipling might have coined the phrase, but it was Americans who were the subject of it. Don't hug all the infamy!
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The 231% Cholesterol doesn't scare you?
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Chinese food = bad
You don't like cardboard? Shame on you.
Seriously though if you ever visit China don't just go into any random restaurant. Stick to the expensive, foreign-catering restaurants - they usually have much higher standards and won't likely run into shady dealings like their poorer counterparts. That, or hire a local expert to guide you - they usually know the popular scams.
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Azarkon, I make a definite distinction between right wing politics, and people who teach their kids that Adolph HItler lives in their heart.
Of course, so do I
There is definitely a difference between a neo-nazi cult and what could be considered neo-fascist politics. The former is just a group of criminals venting their misguided anger at society, and will never be taken seriously by anybody. The latter... Well, let's just say that history would have been alot more pleasant to read if Hitler was simply the card-holding member of a German subculture, as opposed to Fuhrer of the Deutsche Reich.
There is definitely a difference between a neo-nazi cult and what could be considered neo-fascist politics. The former is just a group of criminals venting their misguided anger at society, and will never be taken seriously by anybody. The latter... Well, let's just say that history would have been alot more pleasant to read if Hitler was simply the card-holding member of a German subculture, as opposed to Fuhrer of the Deutsche Reich.
War with Iran
in Way Off-Topic
Posted
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH18Ak04.html
Discuss.