/lit/ - Literature

>>11508839
Hi Ian! I hope you have some good luck with this thread and the mods go easy on you today.

>>11508839
None yet because vidya right now is a non-artform

>>11508946
Any books on why it's not an artform?

Videogame Art volume I
Videogame Culture volumes I & II
On the Genealogy of "Art Games": A Polemic
Orgy of the Will

>>11508839
There aren't even 100 games that are truly worth playing in existence, let alone fucking 10001

>>11508839
Gameboys - Micheal Kane
He followed two pro 1.6 teams for about a year. Author was a sports writer who saw a tournament as a joke, but then was astounded at how many similarities (good and bad) there was with real pro sports. Author doesn't play video games, and the book was written for an audience that doesn't even know what an FPS is.

>scummy rich all-star team is cheating, and trying to poach star players from the underdog team
>underdog team financed out of pocket by one good natured family man, who wants to be a coach and father figure to the players
>the all girl team getting money, sponsorships, and attention despite being awful. They do it on purpose though
>scummy tournament organizers and tv producers just trying to make a quick buck
>guys snorting adderall before matches
>guys swearing at each other in various languages
>guys hooking up with other pro's sisters in hotels
>team practice getting interrupted so one player can go fight a tattoo artist who offered his gf a tattoo for a bj

Pretty good read if you like dramatic sport stories or want to get a snapshot of competitive gaming in NA from the early 2000s, from before it became a more legitimate and wealthy industry.

>>11508995
This

>>11509181
Wtf, sounds amazing.

>>11508839
That one by Martin Amis, probably.

>>11508839

>>11508946
neither is browsing 4chan

>>11508946
Vidya is unironically one of the most under explored and interesting mediums for storytelling. See (play) games like Stanley's Parable, Stories Untold, and What remains of Edith Finch. The medium is begging for a storytelling genius to put it to good use.

>>11508921
IANPOSTERS GET OFF MY BOARD REEEEEE

>>11508995
>implying there are box worth reading except the Bible

>>11509305
>>11509368
>>>/v/

>>11509368
What do you think of the stuff Arcane Kids have been doing?

>>11508995
This, there's hardly 1001 books that are genuinely worth reading.

>>11508995
>implying anyone here has read anything that isn't on /lit/s top 100 chart

Has anyone read any of the Warcraft books? Are they any good?

>>11509384
ANTI-IAN POSTERS GET OFF MY BOARD REEEEEEE

>>11509368
>>11509387
brainlets never fail to bring the cringe

>>11508839
metro 2033

>>11509240
>good

>>11508839

Masters of Doom

if you're looking for traditional art critique done on video games, read anything by jeremy parish.

there are plenty of writers and critics who offer more than a consumer review on the internet but parish is actually in print. check out "the anatomy of castlevania"

>>11509368
>Stanley's Parable, Stories Untold, and What remains of Edith Finch

See, the problem with trying to tell stories in games is that having a story that isn't "Are you a bad enough dude to stop the villain?" almost always ends up with games that aren't actually fun to play.

>>11509240
>the legg

Alright /lit/ give me one good reason why video games aren't an art form. Of course games are in their infancy and developers are still figuring out how to make things not suck but some games really feel like they make a good case for it being a worthwhile artform.

>>11509816
>Of course games are in their infancy and developers are still figuring out how to make things not suck
All games worth playing that could even remotely be conaidered art were made 10 years ago

AAA games are not art, they are commodities and money-making ventures. AAA games are not art like hollywood superhero movies aren't art, zombie formalist paintings aren't art, stock music isn't art, etc. there is a fine line between something you use to block out space and time and something you can extract emotions and feelings out of

idk. im just being silly

gone home, the stanley parable, and edith finch, what a lot of critics call 'art games' are not necessarily the only ways a game can strive for artistic values. art is what you make of it. art can be extrapolated out of anything regardless of what the author intends

>>11509766

silent hill 1-4, castlevania (pre-lords of shadow), and the metal gear solid series are all games that use satisfying mechanics to both create atmosphere and tell a story. you can have both, it just takes creativity and the luxury of development time

>>11509914
>using MGS as an example of a good vidya story

>>11509931
it has its flaws for goddamn sure but its at least a little bit nongeneric and researched. i can appreciate the labor that went into writing it and can come away with some unique thoughts about my surroundings however trivial. thats all you could really ask for from a story

>>11509899
DOOM is art.

>>11509973
yes and so is .wad making, doom rules

>>11509518
WRONG. The prose is atrocious. Far and away the worst book I've ever read.

Video games are not a new medium. Video games are not an artform in their infancy. Video games have been around since the 1960s. Writing and film produced an abundance of works of genius IMMEDIATELY after their invention. The reason video games have produced nothing of any worth is because they're video games.

The only good games are virtually undiscovered no-budget Indies on the bottom of sites like itch.io and gamejolt

>>11508839
None

>>11509816
I actually agree that games are an art form; the problem is that gamer brainlets think that in order to qualify as art a game must be cinematic and emotional, whereas the real artistry comes from game design and mechanics. Tetris is one of the greatest artistic achievements in the medium because its design is flawless (evidenced by the fact that no subsequent version of the game has changed the mechanics beyond the minor (hard drops) or aesthetic). Other games I would consider art in a similar sense are Super Monkey Ball, WipEout, and Riven (while this game approaches the feel of a traditional 'art game', the real art is that of the environmental design and how it feeds into puzzle solving).

>>11510146
I think videogames have been plagued with a few problems.
>>11509860
Is the obvious where most of what is produced is commercial studios productions.
>>11510448
This too is a problem where there's the foolish belief that the way for videogames to "mature" is by having complex narratives or some derivative of that.
The main problem is that the word videogame implies, well, video and game. The original Oregon Trail is obviously a videogame but was played on a printer-like device. So you don't need video for a videogame. And a lot of videogames wouldn't qualify as a game under most definitions (i.e. visual novels), so an argument can be made that some are not even games. So I believe that the main problem videogames face is that the bounds of the medium aren't being challenged because we don't even know what they are.

Really fascinating tale

>>11509914
I don't think those games have great mechanics. They are fun, for the most part, and their stories are interesting, except SotN, but they play like video games and the play itself tells no story. Papers, Please is king, obviously.

>>11510242
You'd like to believe that, but nobody who makes video games as a hobby is trying to make art
see:
>>>/vg/222217727
it's the same nostalgia bait over and over and over with no thought put into why they're doing it or what the point is

>>11508978
...and just reading the replies in this thread proves that /lit/ needs to read these, praising indieshit like stanley parable and papers please as art seriously lol?

>>11510505
>believing that what is to any person with a couple of firing neurons videogames' greatest strength is actually their greatest weakness

>>11508839
Conspicuous consumption: the paper listicle.

>>11510938
I'm curious as to how the rigidity of the medium is videogames' greatest strength. I'd say it needs to be pushed further to be considered an artistic medium.

>>11508921
Who?

>>11510775
the mechanics of silent hill lend to the terror and dread felt while going through its environments, the guilt felt by james as his sins envelope him. you are not entirely in control, this is on purpose (but if it isn’t, having it any other way would be a detriment)

the added mobility in the castlevania games post-sotn is purposeful, because you no longer play exclusively as belmont family members. the map is no longer linear. parallels could be made to the old and new testament of the bible, the old following the abrahamic bloodline and being very stern in its writing and the new testament being full of parables and emotion and all that. the mobility in the metroidvanias communicates the power and command of the protagonist

>>11511032
>He doesn't know about Ianposting
Lurk more.

>>11510806
where is the line between hobby and art practice drawn for you

Pic relevant

>>11509816
>Alright /lit/ give me one good reason why video games aren't an art form

things are art when you treat them like art ie engage with them in a thoughtful, literate way. this is obviously not happening: the people who make these things are primarily interested in them as platforms for monetary scams and psychological manipulation with the game serving as filler for in-app purchasing, achievements, "reward scheduling" and so on. meanwhile the more of a video game fan you are the more hostile you seem to be to the idea that games mean anything and the more involved you are in hilariously stupid "consumer rights" debates about framerate caps and the dollars to hours ratio. next, the people paid to write/speak intelligently about games are generally hilariously inept and illiterate and will talk about anything but the game that's in front of them. even the "games are art" crowd always struck me as hilariously misguided and mostly motivated by the desire to not get laughed at at dates when they mention their love of the marios. so you get these campaigns to engineer "respectability" by organizing museum exhibits where you can look at mario kart or whatever. it's a sad joke.

tl;dr: nothing is stopping video games from being art other than the people who like them. they treat them like pointless garbage and so they are pointless garbage.

>>11508839
I can only think of non-ficiton

>>11511074
> lurk more on /lit/ for a /v/ meme

epic simply epic

I exclusively play classic RPGs such as Planescape: Torment and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines.

Is this okay?

>>11511373
i mean they're still equivalent to trashy genre fiction but i guess trashy genre fiction is okay?

>>11508995
rayman, final fantasy 6, secrets of mana, chrono trigger, 999, ghost trick, hotel dusk room 212, fatal frame, silent hill 2, resident evil 4, super Mario brothers (all-stars is a good collection), euro truck simulator, farming simulator, Xcom Enemy Unknown, Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld, Wasteland, Fallout, Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey, Oddworld: Abe's Exodus, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (memes aside it's the best GTA game), Braid, Super Metroid, Metroid Prime 1, 2, 3, Fire Emblem, Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity 3000, SimCity 2000, StarCraft, StarCraft 2, Diablo 2, Broken Sword 1, 2, Half-Life 1, 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Doom and Doom 2 (post-Doom 2 is just enjoyable), Fable: The Lost Chapters (the Molyneux lies are bollocks but it's a solid game nonetheless), Clive Barker's Undying, Thief 1, 2 and Deadly Shadows, Deus Ex, Metal Slug 3, Another World, Heart of Darkness, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Beneath a Steel Sky, Jak & Daxter, Zork, System Shock, System Shock 2, Myst, Riven
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
Age of Empires
The Sims classic
Simon the Sorcerer
Machinarium
Nox
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Sid Meier's Civilization IV
Beyond Good and Evil
Little Big Adventure
Loom
The Dig
Baldur's Gate
Legend of Grimrock
Star Wars Episode 1: Pod Racer/Racer whatever the fr*ck it's called
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines
Tetris
Neverwinter Nights
Pillars of Eternity
Populous
Populous: The Beginning
Dungeon Keeper
Theme Park and Theme Park World
Theme Hospital
2002-era Runescape
Sam & Max Hit The Road
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Toonstruck
Unreal Tournament
Quake II
Dark Souls and Demon's Souls
Bayonetta
Metal Gear Rising
Metal Gear Solid 2 (my personal favourite but you're in safe hands with any of them really)
Colin McCrae's Dirt
Gran Turismo 5
Project Cars
Grandia
Jade Cocoon
Hitman Blood Money
Akalabeth: World of Doom
Alone in the Dark (the controls are clunky by today's standards but if you're patient it's a very enjoyable, short game that delivers on the comfy eeriness you'd expect from weird fiction from Lovecraft)
Pokemon Gold
Art Academy (genuinely useful way to learn how to draw and Art Academy on the WiiU is incredibly versatile allowing you to use a variety of tools and textures to create great illustrations)
Ni No Kuni
Monster Hunter 3
Fatal Frame 2
Gitaroo Man
Rule of Rose
Bloodborne
Persona 4
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2

How many games is that? Tried to highlight a variety of good games that will appeal to people with varying tastes - they all stand alone with their own set of positive merits. There's plenty of other games I've probably forgotten while trying to type this out and I'm sure there's disagreement too about the ones I've suggested, but I'd defend that they're all at the very least "above average" vidya

>>11511441
>no Forklift Simulator
Shit list

>>11511441
>they're all at the very least "above average" vidya

that's a lot of effort to fail to answer the question. it's not about listing some okay videogames but justifying the "you must play before you die" part. why must i play myst, farming simulator and colin mcrae's dirt before i die? what is this unique value they offer?

>>11511514
I thought the anon was asking for at least 100 games worth playing. Sorry I misunderstood.

Farming Simulator is a very relaxing and therapeutic experience that gives some insight into the process that most of civilization relies on - cultivation of land and growing of crops. It's the satisfaction of a hard day's work from the comfort of your own home.

Colin McCrae's Dirt is just unpretentious good driving fun with smooth controls, great physics and great racing courses. I know that many driving games have that, and I partly recommended it to give a representative look at driving games, but also because the element of physical damage your car takes when you fuck up is absolutely devastating in its realism.

>>11511511
I'm sorry, I've never played it

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters : How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives Are Taking Back an Art Form

>>11511514
oh sorry I didn't see you also mentioned Myst. Myst is obviously one of the classic point and click puzzle games and in its intricate design of the puzzles, the design of the locations in which the game takes place as well as its atmosphere and its attention to detail in narrative and lore shows a lot of imagination that really does match some of the better genre fiction out there. At the very least it's an interesting curiosity you could play for five to ten minutes.

>>11511441
> Toonstruck

my nigga

>>11509914
>MGS
>good story on level with even the lowest of YA literature

This is what /v/-tards really believe.

I only play paradox games

>>11508946
Only a truly retarded brainlet could say that games arent art, its simply about how many of them are *good* art and how exactly do they achieve that, something that retarded boomers will not even begin to understand because they are the exact same idiots that claimed film isnt art and will never be seen as such

The closest video games have come to art and literature is the work of small teams or auteurs. Silent Hill was produced by a small team of Konami reject programmers with nothing left to lose, and they ended up pouring themselves into the game and creating something unique on many levels.

Kojima is the usual example of a video game auteur. Another is Shigesato Itoi (Mother series). Did you know Itoi is personal friends with Murakami, and that they used to write short stories together? I wouldn't call Murakami's work the highest form of literature, but his influence was a step in the right direction for video games.

>>11511959
>The closest video games have come to art and literature is the work of small teams or auteurs.

Except that youre retarded, and this isnt how it fucking works. Read>>11511894

You arent measuring whether or not literature is art by how many good books there are, you simply measure the quality of the piece

>>11509240

>>11510773
>Carmack using thermite as a teenager to break into his school and steal computers, only to tell the juvie officer that he would have done it again if he wasn't caught

>>11511066
Sounds a bit dumb and theoretical, but I suppose that stuff is there.

only brainlets think videogames are art, embarrassing!

>>11508978
^

No other books on the matter suffice.

>>11508839
https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/

You can easily find the link to the latest PDF.

>>11509368
The problem is effort. At least with film you have people who are passionate about film all working together, whereas with a game you potentially need to write three times as much story, and meanwhile the group you'd be working with may only be passionate about the soundtrack or the gameplay, coding, or even the end result of a finished video game, and not the story.

>>11511441
You forgot the greatest game of all time, Pathologic

>>11512443
based Trumposter

>>11511356
It's a /lit/ meme. You must be new here.

>>11508978
Holy kek what garbage. This guy must post on /lit/

>>11511441
>No Lisa: The Painful, in the whole thread
Tsk tsk, and I thought you guys were supposed to have some taste.

I only play Pharaoh (1999)

>>11508995
http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth.html
http://insomnia.ac/one-minute/

The owner of the site is the ultimate curator for games, and you can find even more of his recommendations on the front page, his GOTY page, and his Steam curation pages. Everything he and his editors recommend is guaranteed to be quality and there's well over a hundred games recommended.

>Game Over. Do you want to continue?

>>11512997
Sounds totally unpleasant!!

>>11509514

>>11512997
>pay us money to read these videogame reviews!
>find some essay on doom on there that's free
>it's just a rambling autobiography of a boring person

>And if it isn't sunny where you are (in Greece it usually is) there's always a hundred other less inane games one can be playing. I can stay in a room for days playing Baldur's Gate or Civilization or GTA, regardless of what the weather's like, but for Eye of the Beholder and Doom, I am sorry, but I can't do it.

who wouldn't pay money for this level of piercing critical insight?

but seriously, where is this idea that "criticism" is supposed to be meandering autobiographical blogging that says next to nothing about the work being analyzed? every time someone links me some "amazing" new video game article it's the same horseshit where the guy alternates paragraphs like "in mario, the mushroom makes you bigger..." and ones like "when my father was diagnosed with cancer..." and it's supposed to be, like, a poignant contrast or something? what the fuck is the point?

>>11513342
So you skimmed a random article, barely understood it, and then decided to dismiss the entire site which has hundreds of articles on it because you didn't like that the critic is an opinionated person (which critics are supposed to be) and also a human being rather than a robot churning out some journalist schlock. Well, keep being a clueless brainlet I guess.

>>11513342
Read Videogame Culture
vol 1: http://insomnia.ac/commentary/videogame_culture_preface/
vol 2: http://culture.vg/features/art-theory/on-set-theory-and-the-bastardization-process.html
Videogame Art: http://culture.vg/reviews/videogame-art.html
Plenty of these are free.

>>11508839
Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession from the Virtual Frontline

>>11513661
how can you (i assume you are alex kierkegaard) claim to have any authority on art when the covers of all your pieces are so ugly

what is this?

I think there were some simple flash games made back when those were popular that had artistic merit.

Aether, for example.

>>11509368
>animated choose-your-own-adventure books are examples of the untapped potential of video games
Yikes.

>>11514490
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HntT81eDYKw

heres the actual, very much so tapped potential

>>11511441
Lisa isn't even there.

>>11509181
>What I expected
>What I got

>>11515204
Explain

>>11511959
>Kojima is the usual example of a video game auteur
In a 2006 interview with US Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, game designer Hideo Kojima agreed with Ebert's assessment that video games are not art. Kojima acknowledged that games may contain artwork, but he stressed the intrinsically popular nature of video games in contrast to the niche interests served by art. Since the highest ideal of all video games is to achieve 100% player satisfaction whereas art is targeted to at least one person, Kojima argued that video game creation is more of a service than an artistic endeavor.

I read this. The prose was pretty basic bordering on bad. I still read it. This work is relevant /important because the game world is the real world (in contrast to Daemon etc. where the game is separate from real life) and the RPG elements are elucidated faithfully (the character development is tied to his RPG skills progression). Well, there are a lot of video games which also have bad writing.

>>11512843
>>11511074
W-what. This is the first I've seen of this

>>11509181
>Recommending tabloid trash tier commentary
Unironically neck yourself.

>>11514212
0/10, apply yourself

>>11508839
Planescape Torment

Video games aren't art. There's something unsettling about calling something mechanical like a series of 1s and 0s art.

>>11511420
This too. Everyone who goes on about 'muh storytelling' and 'muh setting and lore' don't know what art is if it would fuck'em in the ass. The writing in vidya is the same simple and hackneyed shit you'll find in YA and genre fiction, and any ethical, philosophical, or hard scientific topics it attempts to discuss are never more sophisticated than what you read in a wiki article.

>>11515416
que?

>>11508839

>>11515327
Then you've been going to all the wrong threads. How does it feel to be out of touch gramps?

>>11513661
>Brace yourselves, because here comes the mind-blowing part. It means that music, novels, paintings, sculptures, photographs, movies and the like are TYPES OF VIDEOGAMES. The issue therefore is not so much that videogames are art, but that ART IS VIDEOGAMES. Hahahaha. Ebert must be turning furiously in his grave right about now. But, thankfully for us, no amount of turning in a grave can change reality.

holy, want more, etc

Bloodborne and The Talos Principle are art.
DOOM wads are impressive feats of level design but are unfortunately trapped within the same container.
I wish devs could into level design.

>>11513661
>using set theory to determine that art is video games
Based

who's going to this?

>>11516377
>a comic book has pictures AND text therefore literature and fine art are mere subsets of the GRAPHIC NOVEL. science proves it, mom!

>>11516427
A comic book is a work of literature that consists mostly of pictures with a certain delivery style. Removing the pictures leaves one with a janky script, and removing the text leaves one with a series of images, i.e. a picture book. I actually disagree with the article based on the fact that none of the subsets class as games but agree in the sense that the superset video games he describes is absolutely a thing that exists, and his assertion that this superset is the highest form of art due to its ability to incorporate all other lower art forms is also a valid argument.
Your tautology is a nice attempt at criticism but doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Read Ulillillia's books.

>>11509702
>>11510773
>>11516463
These are the true and very correct answers to this thread.

>>11508839
If reading about the process of how video games are made, then I recommend Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Other than that, Empire of Eve is also an entertaining read.

>>11511213
By this reasoning books and television cannot be art either because people consume some types of them like insubstantial garbage (YA, popular fiction, tabloids, etc)

>>11516460
>the superset video games he describes is absolutely a thing that exists, and his assertion that this superset is the highest form of art due to its ability to incorporate all other lower art forms is also a valid argument

oh boy. i didn't expect anybody to actually fall for that garbage essay but i guess /lit/ has really gone to the dogs, huh?

when you get past the fact that like half of the article is hyperbolic self-praise (is that a comedy shtick or is this guy actually this much of a cunt?) his actual argument is a basic sleight of hand that i'm embarrassed to say you totally fell for. he assigns a value judgement to an abstract mathematical relationship and hopes you're dumb enough not to notice. a set is not "inferior" to its superset. rectangles are not "better" than squares. he just implicitly inserts this unjustified notion that anything in reality that can be described as a subset of X is worse than X because it fails to be X. this is nonsense.

try for yourself to replicate his moronic thought process in any other context and see what you get. remove the liquid from a soup: there could be meat in there, potatoes, veggies, anything... therefore it is, as the cunt says, "simply a mathematical fact" that any dish is actually soup, and that pizza is a bad soup because if fails to be submerged in liquid. all these subsets of soup are worse than soup because by not adding liquid you are "not using all the tools" and a thing made with more tools is superior because, as mathematics tell us, three is a higher quality number than two. a symphony is a music video, but a bad one, because i can't see anything. this is literally the guy's thought process.

so all the superiority/inferiority claims are blatantly invalid but even this basic observation about subsets is dubious. the claim is that a medium is composed of "channels": text, audio, video etc and a medium is a subset of another medium if its channels are a subset of that other medium's channels. this is ignoring the fact that a given medium will structure what goes through these channels in ways specific to itself and will expect its audience to interpret it using knowledge of the conventions and traditions of the medium; all of that is also part of the medium and would need to be contained in a hypothetical "superset" medium. a newspaper has the text and picture channels and epic poetry has the text channel but subtracting the pictures from a newspaper does not produce an epic poem. and then there's the fact that the channels are designed to work in concert, making his whole "subtraction" method invalid: a song is a unified work and not a poem plus music, closing your eyes does not make a movie into an audiobook, and despite his bizarre claim in the article, all text that happens to be embedded in a videogame is not a novel.

honestly some of this shit is just so aggressively stupid it makes me think it's a parody except there seem to be entire books of the stuff.

>>11516828
Oh his assertions about math are garbage, but the fact is that more technologically advanced art forms like film and vidya are composed of several lower elements. Clearly this idiot thinks (and outright states, in his reviews) that complexity makes more better art.
That said, I agree with the assertion that more available elements gives greater potential to a medium and I also like the idea of a greater artistic set from which various multi-discipline artworks and art forms can be conceived.
He is absolutely that much of a cunt though.

>>11516828
based

>>11516828
>remove the liquid from a soup
Shit example retard, set soup would be a member of the superset liquids not the other way around.

>>11516773
no, these things are simply art to the extent that they're treated as art and not art when they're treated like garbage. you're stuck in this mode where there is some "artness" in the complete works of shakespeare that an alien who doesn't speak english could measure with a tricoder, but "literature" is not a substance but a collaborative phenomenon that requires both writers and readers. give that tome to a dog and it will just shit on it and no "art" will be taking place.

of course over time people have noticed that certain books are more conductive to being treated seriously, more rewarding to be read carefully etc and so they live on as we urge one another to read them, discuss them, read the opinions of others who have talked about them and so on. this community is what keeps "literature" as a phenomenon alive, what makes reading worthwhile and respectable, because of course some of the readers will become writers and write for careful and literate people like themselves.

video games have no such tradition of careful engagement. they have a "fandom" instead, and a fandom is, paradoxically, never that interested in whatever it's built around. fandom is all about waiting for trailers, side-activities like cosplay, manufactured outrage, brand loyalty, memes... the actual video games are almost vestigial. when you start paying attention to it it's very obvious that the most basic activity of talking insightfully about a game you've played is almost nonexistent in video game culture. but i can watch a 30 minute youtube by CynicalGameCritic420 or something as he babbles on about who wrote what on twitter without ever saying anything substantial about a video game.

look at that article discussed above for an example. some guy obsessed with video games being art tries to prove it but somehow his proof does not mention a single video game and is instead a cheap piece of sophistry designed to convince people already in the video game fandom that games naturally "should be" seen as the highest art but "the subhumans" are just to stupid to see it. so just go back to grinding for achievements bro! it's mathematically superior to reading. of course by encouraging this sort of illiteracy the "games are art" guy is actively undermining whatever chance games have to be an environment in which "art" can take place.

>>11517099
>set soup would be a member of the superset liquids not the other way around.

nope. i'm talking about soup as a dish made of solid ingredients submerged in a liquid. therefore in that guy's approach a steak dinner would be a bad soup that fails to include liquid like a movie would be a bad video game that fails to include button pressing.

>>11517213
>some guy obsessed with video games being art tries to prove it but somehow his proof does not mention a single video game
Read this, which is his actual main work on videogames as art:
http://culture.vg/features/art-theory/on-the-genealogy-of-art-games/

>>11509240
Im not even remotely interested in video games but found this book a fun sci-fi adventure. Also what the fuck is wrong with Wade's leg.

>>11517213
>argues that games aren't art
>because of his perception of the image surrounding game culture
True that consumerism has to some degree ruined what could be a much more intense artistic medium, however it's just as easy to argue that the Harry Potter fandom ruins literature as it is to state that game fandoms do the same to their much younger medium. It's nonsensical to state that video games have no tradition of careful management because video games have very little tradition whatsoever given how much they have changed since their inception. Besides, game developers at the very least notice each others game and will borrow, copy, steal and adapt from each others games in an attempt to make what they believe will be good, so this process does actually take place.
also
>youtube complaint
Maybe try watching less shit and watching somewhat more substantial content like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmSBIyT0ih0

>>11517213
>video games have no such tradition of careful engagement. they have a "fandom" instead

You obviously have no clue on the subject and are on the level of some /tv/ retard coming in to scream that books have no such tradition because harry potter has a fandom

>>11517213
>>11517385
ill add to this that you should probably at least make an effort to understand games on a deeper level if you want to talk about the medium, here are a couple of (off the top of my head, I'm sure that there is far better out there too) videos that you should watch if you have the time, as they do a pretty good job showing off the type of things that games can do, in a completely unique way without downplaying it as some "grinding for achievements" libel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0beVkxu--M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0jKJNXYEWg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGypYyDkC8o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glP-gH_n3Yc

>>11508839
The absolute STATE of lit of my fucking god

>>11517237
no. the previous article already shows him to be both completely insufferable to read and either a cretin or a bad conman. if you're his fan or something then defend him by defending the points he makes in that other article instead of dumping more crap on me because i'm done with that guy.

okay no wait i scrolled a bit into it and found this part which i just have to post:

>Even worse: it is indecent! It means to spit in the face of all the grand masters of game design, those of the past as well as the present, when one proceeds to sweep all their hard work under the table so as to praise to heaven one's own little abortions of mini-games and screensavers, and to reserve for them, and for them only, the highly coveted, and rightly coveted, appellation of "art". To say that [here follows a list of about 50 names of video games], and countless others — to say that all these games, the very best games we possess — the results of half a century of effort by innumerable extremely dedicated and talented individuals from across the world — are not art — to summarily dismiss the entire history of videogames — to dump it in the trash — and all their designers along with them, in order to raise high above them the piddling, the ludicrous, the contemptible little abortions of platformers and screensavers of a bunch of incorrigibly incompetent lazy bums — is the most vicious, most insolent, most insulting gesture imaginable against our hobby and all those individuals who have poured their souls and lives into it.

you're just providing me with examples of the exact sort of garbage that i pointed out before. all this retarded OUR BELOVED LADY THE VIDEO GAMES IS BEING RAPED MY BRETHREN shit is exactly the sort of fandom "nerd identity" garbage i was talking about. i guess i can no longer say he "mentions" no games because he lists the names of like 50 of them but he discusses exactly ZERO of them in this fucking behemoth of an article. i told you i was not going to read this shit and i won't but i skimmed it enough to know: i said that people in the video game fandom will do anything other than say anything substantial about a video game and you give me this fucking thing in which a guy writes, as far as i can tell, about everything but a video game.

the only thing you have to do to prove that games are art is to treat them like art by engaging with them like art and talking about them as art but the fucking "games are art" joe platohegel cunt writes 45000 words (!) on why video games are art WITHOUT DISCUSSING A SINGLE VIDEO GAME. you cannot tell me i am not onto something here.

>>11517435
Yeah I know, disgusting how people want to talk about books on a non-political subject instead of shitposting about Peterson for 8th time today.

>>11517443
if you want to see his opinions on the particular read the damn reviews
like maybe the Videogame Art reviews:
http://culture.vg/reviews/videogame-art/let-the-games-begin.html

>>11517443
Please respond to my reply instead of reading the reviews, he has terrible taste in video games and writes just as horrifically in his reviews.

Why haven't you started writing for video games yet /lit/? It's not like you have much (good) competition.

>>11517457
>the only alternative to baby shit is political shit

summerfaggotry is killing us.

They wrote some novels about a few games. Sometimes I get curious to see how is the prose.

>>11517495
>calls other people summer when posting like this
If you cared about board quality and have an IQ in triple figures you'd make quality threads instead of shitposting in threads you don't like and adding to their longevity.

>>11517526
>a bloo bloo bloo bloo why don't they take my vidyas serious-like

>>11509821
Make that 20

>>11517553
>this is the argument posed by /lit/erate
holy mad

>>11517460
Not that guy but I feel like you're missing the point. If you can't defend videogames as an art form without appealing to emotion and trying to build a weird "gamers rise up" subtext then your arguing skills are shit. If he doesn't talk about the supposed artfulness of the vidya in his magnum opus debate piece then, frankly, he's failed at his goal.

>>11517564
>forsooth indubitably thou cannot match my gamer intellect I have vanquished thee

>>11517574
Lol? Actually read the text and not just one paragraph out of context.

>>11517443
Honestly, I teach art history (on a high school, but still, I studied it), would like to one day work in critic / curating, I don't think vidya should worry itself about being art. People need to stop pretending art is a qualitative status, shit art exists and so does good art, and what happens to be art to any given individual will hardly be the same as any other.
I don't really consider culinary an art but it sure is much more difficult than watercolor

Simply put, games can't be art because the main draw of a game, by its very nature, is to be entertaining in its interaction. A game with shitty gameplay but good writing will always be rated as a bad game. A game with good gameplay and shitty writing will always be hailed as a great game. So called "art games" aren't usually very "artful" at all, just interesting in their unique take on a videogame. I'll use Stanley Parable as an example. Stanley Parable didn't receive praise because it posed a deep philosophical question, or tell a great story, or reveal to the audience something new and groundbreaking. It got praised because it poked fun at videogame tropes, had lots of endings and some good attention to detail, and had Stephen Fry narrating. So it was hardly a great piece of art, it was just a unique game. And of course, in the hugely oversaturated videogame market, anything that tries something new will be hailed as 10/10, a masterpiece, and a poster boy for videogames as art, until a few years later when the next huge, must play "art game" arrives.

>>11517615
literally all of your nonsense is BTFO'd in the genealogy of art games
can't be art because it's entertaining, LOL

>>11517615
What is art if not entertaining? If not in the conventional sense of entertainment for pleasure then perversely or by catharsis?

>>11517376
>>11517407
back when i still cared about this stuff people wrote blogposts instead of making these goddamn interminable video essays (and i'm including the six minute one in this because it takes six minutes for it to say "minimalism exists") and i'm not really going to watch two hours of this stuff right now but here's what i've got to say from skipping around these videos: yeah, it's a start i guess? they're still very, i dunno, tame? mostly a plot/lore summary or walkthough with an occasional point being made about why something works a certain way, which if you have experience with more take-no-prisoners movie and literary criticism seems extremely watered down and... safe? like, everyone is walking on eggshells and limiting themselves to stuff like "oh look how this game we all like uses this one mechanic to produce tension", because if you made any claim that is at all controversial the fandom would tear you a new asshole. i feel that if anything it's a step back from the blogposts that i used to read like 10 years ago because now everyone has to worry about subscribers.

and then there's the fact that these videos do not really represent what actual mainstream video game culture is like, do they? all i've said is, basically, that the biggest obstacle to games being art is the people who like them and i stand by that.

>>11517460
no, fuck off. i'm done with billy "feurebach" schopenhauer-aristotle.

Videogames can't be art because they weren't conceived as, or rather, weren't born out of it. If you consider them born simply from toys and physical games, toys and games occupy a separate sphere from art, if they came from technological progress, they came from the industry, and so on.
Something like design, while not being art, for example, will always have the right to TRY to be art. Photography (and video), arising as forms of engraving / etching, meanwhile, were barey questioned on their entrance into the art ranks.
Performance, meanwhile, very clearly presented itself as theater while actually being closer to a game and cheated it's way in. Besides, there are people in digital art doing "art games", they are just completely shit because those people don't care about videogames as themselves and can only see them as a commentary (as weird as it sounds).

>>11517624
>>11517634
It can't be art because its raison d'etre is to entertain. Would you call Monopoly art?

>>11517647
>"oh look how this game we all like uses this one mechanic to produce tension",

In other words, you also think that the written word, paintings, films or music arent art either in terms of their format and only the actual subject matter/ content matters, which brings it back around and automatically means that games are art if you suddenly dont even care about the medium and how it achieves whatever it tries to achieve

>>11517615
1) art and entertainment are not mutually exclusive
2) just because the most vocal critics analyze games based on their entertainment value doesn't mean entertainment value is all games have to offer
That being said, the closest I've ever played to what I would consider video games raised to an art form in itself is The Beginner's Guide - the same guy who made Stanley Parable, but it's much more focused on exploring human nature and less on exploiting video game tropes. I would recommend highly.

>>11517679
The type of entertainment videogames offer- the interaction- is mutually exclusive with art. Take GTA 4. Good story, right? Interesting characters, interesting main character? Deep moral battles, a bad man trying to do right, doing bad things just to survive? That all falls flat on its face when I take control of Niko and stab an old woman for the 5 bucks in her purse. You can apply this same concept to most games.

>>11517692
I don't think vidya is art but interactive art exists and is pretty common.

>>11517692
>You can apply this same concept to most games.

Except that it doesnt, youre either retarded or havent played enough games to not appear otherwise. The concept is called ludonarrative dissonance which is particularly strong in sandbox styled toys like GTA which let you do whatever you want in a big open city

>>11517648
>Videogames can't be art because they weren't conceived as, or rather, weren't born out of it.
By the same logic neither can film given its gimmicky beginnings. Games were born from dicking around with technology (NOT from toys), same as film in the beginning and later editing. Video games were quickly scooped up by the consumerist explosion of the 80s and otherwise have been born into a time where postmodern ideas of art exist and are thoroughly discussed and argued over, which leads more thoroughly to arguments on video games' status as an art form.

>>11517661
All art entertains me with its beauty therefore nothing is art?
Please define what art is rather than what it is not.

>>11517648
There was a period of history where most B&W photographers seriously believed color photography would never be art. They thought color was a distraction and a photograph did not benefit from color in any way.

>>11517700
Yeah, so the only way to make a good art game is to strip player interaction, and then you're left with a shit movie game where the only player input is dialogue choices that all lead to the same shit anyways, like a TellTale game.

>>11517703
Literally in my post, not only film, but photography had gimmicky beginnings too, but their closeness to engraving gave them an air to breathe. Since them, both have actually kind of demoted engraving and etching to non-existence (I say this as someone who specialized in woodcutting in college btw), that's how close they were.

>>11517692
>Interesting characters, interesting main character? Deep moral battles, a bad man trying to do right, doing bad things just to survive?
All of these were already defeated by trying to turn GTA into a serious game series when its mechanics and world still resemble a crude parody of elements of reality. Asides from the aforementioned ludonarrative dissonance, your example is thoroughly lacking any artistic integrity in the first place.

>>11517716
How fucking retarded are you? Something like DMC3 has far more, far more engaging, far more complex and far more difficult gameplay than something like GTA4 and it only serves the narrative, never causing dissonance with it. Maybe play more games instead of scraping the very bottom of the barrel consumerist mcdonalds toys the equivalent of the transformers films in an attempt to "prove" how games arent art

>>11517692
The failing of GTA in making art is that the elements of the game are unaligned. This is not a failing of the medium as being capable of making art. Contemporary artists have been trying for years to create interactive, immersive art as it opens up an entirely new aspect of art by changing the "viewer" into a "participant". Video games do this intrinsically.

>>11516828
>(is that a comedy shtick or is this guy actually this much of a cunt?)
>a set is not "inferior" to its superset.

t. didn't read Nietzsche very well.

>Most men represent pieces and fragments of man: one has to add them up for a complete man to appear. Whole ages, whole peoples are in this sense somewhat fragmentary; it is perhaps part of the economy of human evolution that man should evolve piece by piece. But that should not make one forget for a moment that the real issue is the production of the synthetic man; that lower men, the tremendous majority, are merely preludes and rehearsals out of whose medley the whole man appears here and there, the milestone man who indicates how far humanity has advanced so far.

>The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

When he describes how the forces which make up the world behave, Nietzsche says that "out of the simplest forms" they will strive "toward the most complex" and "out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance".

One does not simply reach this conclusion overnight. It requires a lot of thinking. You're quick to dismiss his work due to his tone, but he has done the reading and meditated for many years before writing anything and has been writing for well over a decade now.

>>11517713
Yeah, and the use of perspective is satanic, the use of diagonal composition is immoral, blah blah blah
Art has always been kinda reactionary, but this isn't what excludes vidya from being art.

>>11517729
I frankly can't name a game where you can't do something that your character, as written, would never do.
>>11517732
>weebshit
Thanks for letting me know that you're literally not worth talking to further.
>>11517733
The problem is that the more freedom the player has, the more potential for ludonarrative dissonance there is. They can't possibly account for all the stupid shit a player might choose to do past a certain extent, so you either cripple player choice or accept that your gameplay and story won't align at all.

>>11517740
It is precisely why the old guard wants to exclude vidya from being art. They are afraid of technological progress, of increased complexity. Why? Because they are masters of their simpler artforms--like B&W photography--so now that color comes into play, there is potential for far more complex (and therefore greater) art, yet this comes at the price of being even harder to make, so of course the old masters who have become complacent in the safety of being at the top of their game in B&W photography react toward color as just some commercial anti-art phenomenon. They don't want to deal with that stuff, the increased complexity.

>>11517747
>weebshit

well argued mouthbreather, daily reminder that literally everything made in muh japan is "weebshit" regardless of its subject matter and content

>>11517754
Daily reminder that everything made in Japan is literal trash.

>>11517747
>I frankly can't name a game where you can't do something that your character, as written, would never do.
I hate to say it but you aren't really in a position to be discussing games as art if you literally can't conceive of that. Metroid, SOTC, Souls series, Quake, any Zelda would be easy to pick high profile examples.
Thinking of DMC as weebshit is quite the tautology as well but ok.

>>11517762
>calls all japanese games "weebshit"
>talks about GTA and comes off as a retarded mouthbreather

Couldnt have embarrassed yourself any worse really, if youre so desperately clinging onto exclusively western games, go ahead and explain to me all of the ludonarrative dissonance you can cause in system shock that will ruin le narrative

>>11517767
So the way out of the "players doing stupid shit" pit is to just not write a main character.

>>11517771
>MOMMY MOMMY HE MOCKED MUH PRECIOUS JAPANESE VIDYA

Saying the possibility of ludonarrative dissonance excludes vidya from being art is like saying theater isn't art because you have to suspend your disbelief.

>>11517747
>The problem is that the more freedom the player has, the more potential for ludonarrative dissonance there is. They can't possibly account for all the stupid shit a player might choose to do past a certain extent, so you either cripple player choice or accept that your gameplay and story won't align at all.
Who said a game has to have a story? Who said a game has to give the player choice? Does all art have a story? I'd sooner argue that what disqualifies these games from being art is the fact that they have a narrative at all. Narratives are anti-art, and any "art" that has a narrative only does so because the more obscure the purpose is, the more they can hide behind "they just didn't get it". The interactive aspect of a video game does not preclude art in the same way that a book being composed of paper and ink doesn't.

>>11517775
All of those characters are written through their mandatory or chosen actions.

>>11517753
Man, you are kind of clueless, honestly. No one is afraid of technological progress in art, there's people working with everything from nanotech to DNA manipulation in art, this is not what separates vidya from art. There's any number of reasons, like the aforementioned origin of vidya, the point made by Kojima that videogames need to please the maximum amount of players, the production (and consumption) logic of it being completely different from the production and consumption of art.
What you have to understand and that something being or not being art doesn't say shit about that thing's quality. The new Kraken commander that just got spoiled isn't art but it sure as fuck is a great card that I want to have. It wasn't made to be art, it was made to be a good card that I can dump my Simic goodstuff at, which makes me like and cherish it much more than say, Bouguereau's paintings, which I always found kind of tacky.

>>11517787
>who said a game has to give a player choice?
Anon, please.
>does all art have a story?
All art tells a story. Even a painting tells a story.

>>11517782
Well deflected kiddo, I see you conveniently ignored the new option I provided since youre legitimately retarded

>>11517785
What did you expect from literal retards

>>11517213
>video games have no such tradition of careful engagement.
Why are you trying to talk about something you obviously have NO clue about? Don't you realize how unbelievably wrong this is? So you're saying no one at all has bothered to chart the history of game development or preserve the cultures it has produced? The culture.vg site and its many channels prove you wrong. There are a number of other sites that prove you wrong, and you will come across them by browsing the culture.vg site more. There are communities committed to exactly this, and they treat games as art, or at the very least with as much seriousness as the most enthusiastic art lovers treat their art. If you deny this, you're making some form of an appeal to popularity; that it's not valid because the communities are too small to be worth acknowledging. But the communities are deftly serious and well-organized and their efforts at preservation are well-articulated and passionate regardless of what you think of them.

And if you need something tangible to grasp, then you should read his Arcade Culture essay, an essay that should have been posted in the thread already:

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

I mean, you say this shit yet I doubt you've ever even been to a Japanese arcade. That should tell you right there that you have no business commenting further on the subject.

>>11511959
>smaller more cohesive skilled creative teams/individual auteurs working for themselves first and foremost tend to produce overall stronger works
No fucking shit.

I personally don't think games have much depth to them.

But I enjoyed the story telling mechanic of Amnesia.

>>11517816
>But I enjoyed the story telling mechanic of Amnesia.
Well, that explains your first statement then.

>>11510773
Fucking love this book. Its amazing how first person shooters came to be. Makes me adore id software even through the bullshit

>>11517795
>the point made by Kojima that videogames need to please the maximum amount of players,

If this is even close to being in line with your "argument" then youve already lost. This applies to literally all commercial art (which is, anything that was intended to be sold, aka its ultimate goal to reach the widest audience possible) which echoes across the "greats" of literally every single medium out there. Are you fucking retarded? Are you LITERALLY fucking retarded? Do you think your epic le greeks and classics were written for free and fun? That Da vinci and picasso painted for le fun and for the sake of expression?

Saying that games are made to sell has fucking nothing to do with whether or not games themselves are art

>>11517801
>All art tells a story. Even a painting tells a story.
There are anti-narrative movements in basically every form of medium that traditionally has a narrative. A narrative and "art that tells a story" are significantly different - narratives are a structured progression of events that relate and build on one another towards an ending event that has a desired effect on the viewer/reader. Art can have a story insofar as everything that has ever existed has a story - sure - but art rarely, if ever, has benefited from a narrative.

>>11517824
Dada isn't art. Post modernism isn't art. Gas yourself.

>>11517842
Paintings necessarily telling a story is a pretty wacky postmodern perspective desu, so gas yourself first.

>>11517842
>humanity peaked a hundred years ago and since then every advancement has actually been a degeneration
alright, there

>>11517853
Even an abstract painting tells a story. What colors does it use? Warm or cool? Are the shapes smooth or linear? What emotion does it evoke? This is art 101 anon.

>>11517823
What the fuck is commercial art, are you implying publicity is the same as painting? If yes, you're the one who lost.

>>11517870
Are you fucking retarded?

>>11517867
>story
>What colors does it use?
>Are the shapes smooth or linear?
>What emotion does it evoke?
is your definition of story "anything that can have thought put towards it"? Just because your thoughts technically have a beginning, middle and end doesn't make them stories.

>>11517867
What the fuck? Why don't you take storytelling 101 instead anon? holy shit

>>11517880
Define story.

>>11516422
where

>>11517878
Do you not understand how patrons work? Editors? Museums? Artists need to sell their shit to one person, this has always been the case. Literature and cinema maybe not so much, but still largely so. No one expects David Lynch to turn a billion dollars.

wow this bait really got taken.

>>11517665
jesus christ, what? i feel you're not arguing in good faith here. my point is that compared to fields like movie and literary criticism where very strong and controversial claims are made (whether about form or content) all the points made in these videos seem, while valid, very milquetoast, limited to a certain well-trod ground ("here's how the game teaches you to pick up rocks...") and buried somewhere in an hour-long plot summary or whatever. i believe this is because video game fandom is very hostile to the idea that games even mean anything. given that my whole concept of art relies on the existence of a community that practices and encourages literate engagement with a medium the fact that video game criticism is so subdued in the face of a hostile fandom that revels in illiteracy doesn't exactly discourage me from thinking video games are a very bad environment for "art" to take place.

>>11517912
Youve already admitted that not only do you not understand the content, but you didnt actually even watch any of it properly. "argument" invalidated

> i believe this is because video game fandom is very hostile to the idea that games even mean anything

Because youre clearly an idiot, its the exact opposite, as in people who dont play or know anything about games act like they couldnt possibly mean anything simply because its the newest one of the big mediums

>>11517919
yeah sorry this is not a conversation, you're talking past me at some imaginary oppressive force. not interested.

>>11517933
None of those had anything to do with videogame "criticism", they were very directly focused on a much more deeper analysis that doesnt focus on reviewing the work in a commercial manner. It completely goes against the bullshit idea of games being about pure thrill or "grinding for fake achievements" when you start to demonstrate how it pulls off its unique art just like how literature or movies do

>>11516828
how will icycalm ever recover?

>>11517807
>The culture.vg site and its many channels prove you wrong. There are a number of other sites that prove you wrong, and you will come across them by browsing the culture.vg site more.

are all the "you must read Him", "you must accept Him", "here is some more of the wisdom of Him" posts itt yours or does jimmy descartes have multiple followers here? i for one always cherish discovering a new internet cult formed around an incredibly verbose cretin but i have to admit He does not seem anywhere as fun as eliezer yudkowsky.

>>11517968
read orgy of the will pleb
http://orgyofthewill.net/

>>11517443
icycalm is a retard but this argument is silly mate
he's making a generalized, abstract point. it's supposed to be grasped via intuition, not game-specific details.
i'm sure this nerd has hundreds of video game specific reviews on his website, but you've got to have a theoretical foundation -- let's say model -- to understand those specific reviews.

>>11517887
An account of a real or imagined event or series of events.

>>11518003
So imagine the event that lead to the creation of the painting dumbass

>>11517951
when i say criticism i do not mean "reviewing the work in a commercial manner" but precisely "analysis" and my complaint was that the examples of video game analysis posted at me were extremely timid and limited compared to movie and literature analysis and even some video game analysis that i used to read back in the day. i ascribe this timidity to the fandom being hostile to analysis. what you describe as the "bullshit idea" is not what i believe games are but what i believe typical video game fans believe games should be, which brings us back to the idea that the biggest enemies of games being art are the people who play them.

"grinding for fake achievements" is not an outsider impression of gaming. it is what gamers actually want. when a game on steam does not have achievements or trading cards, there is a revolt. the gamers are the enemy of games being art.

every anti-icycalm post in this thread is laced with so much raging fat-fingered ugliness & sloth that i almost want to give the man another shot and change my opinion of him. almost.

>>11517997
answer my question. all the followers of Him of the 45000 word screed about videogames without videogames please respond to this post.

>>11518011
who is icycalm? i thought his name was ken epicurus?

>>11518008
So the painting isn't art until I invent a story behind it? What the fuck?

>>11518023
So the game isn't art until I define my character through my actions? The fuck???

>>11517692
this is the only legitimate refutation itt
but i imagine this depends more on the interactor than the videogame itself

>>11518010
>i ascribe this timidity to the fandom being hostile to analysis
See this is where we have an issue, because instead of just realising that video games are too new to have a formalised set of rules on ways to make them effectively you "ascribe" the "fandom" attributes to infantilise them. There's just as many people that hate achievements and trading cards as who like them, if not more, and if artistic integrity is what the dev is after why would that dev care?

Dwarf Fortress.

>>11518029
The actions are defined by the developer who creates the space in which you are able to interact with the game. The character is either already defined through mandatory actions or is written in a scope such that the character of the player depends upon the actions of the player, but to avoid ludonarrative dissonance the developer should keep the scope of available actions in line with the tone and themes of the game.
This has been such a ridiculous tangent that I have no idea what you're trying to prove anymore.

>>11518092
Yeah so games lacking ludonarrative dissonance just replace it with linearity. The result: a bad game.

>>11518108
found this pic of you

>>11518124
Nice refutation.

>>11518108
Dark Souls has non-linear explorations of its themes and various optional events and character interactions whilst avoiding ludo-narrative dissonance.
Scope does not imply linearity, only that there is a direction. GTA4 clearly has conflicting directions in that the gameplay is coded to be a wacky parody of real life and the story is written to be serious. The result: ludonarrative dissonance.

>>11518134
Your retardation has already been perfectly refuted via pic related, the game is 100% linear, missions sometimes taking place within a single room but its mechanically more complex, engaging and difficult than any open world game you can cite. Not only that, but the better and more in tune you become with the mechanics of the game up to the point of breaking it, youll simply become more in tune with the story rather than separating from it because the gameplay and exploration is simply an extension of the story and Dante as a character doesnt become different in gameplay

>>11518050
>because instead of just realising that video games are too new to have a formalised set of rules on ways to make them effectively you "ascribe" the "fandom" attributes to infantilise them.

what a tangle. firstly, i know the fandom is infantile because i observe them acting in an infantile manner. there is no way that you can argue in good faith that the video game fandom is not prone to extreme outbursts of comedically intense hostility over trivial matters. secondly "being too new to have a formalised set of rules" would not cause analysis to be timid but precisely the opposite: not having ossified rules means you can make bold claims and crazy assertions, thirdly i think game analysis became more and not less timid over time as it moved from consequence-free blogs to "you can make money here if you don't piss off people" youtube and as it became obvious that saying the wrong thing about a beloved video game brand can get you drowned in death threats whereas saying pleasantly meaningless things can allow you to make serious money.

>>11518020
He's the "Alex Koerkegaard" that wrote all of the articles the "read this" faggot in this thread posted. I didn't know who he was either until reading this thread, and I had to look him up. He is literally a con artist who thinks he's the Ubermench and the world's number one leading authority on video game criticism and art.

>https://kiwifarms.net/threads/anthony-zyrmpas-icycalm.17863/
>https://lolcow.wiki/wiki/Icycalm

>>11518154
>there is no way that you can argue in good faith that the video game fandom is not prone to extreme outbursts of comedically intense hostility over trivial matters.
I argue that they are irrelevant in the face of game developers, who usually do as they please, and that they are irrelevant to anyone pursuing game dev as an art form. Relevant games sell no matter how controversial or asinine their fans are: see MGS, Smash, Zelda, Souls games.
Analysis of video games is usually timid because the medium is approached in so many ways and constantly changing so much that making a formalised set of rules on a whim would easily end up with plenty of outside cases. Video games are also a collaborative medium, but unlike films their directors (with a few notable exceptions) are not the primary visionaries behind the work, it's a group effort. This means that there's very few people with enough knowledge behind the full process of making games who would even have the experience to come up with such rules.
Finally, professional post-mortems are usually done in the same sort of small focus style, which encourages others who analyse video games to follow the same kind of pattern.

>>11517968
>>11518013
There's multiple readers of his here, but that has nothing to do with anything. If you don't read the material you can't hope to ever contend with it properly. And I love how you replied to my post continuing your bullshit when I flat out proved you wrong.

>>11518243
>And I love how you replied to my post continuing your bullshit when I flat out proved you wrong.

i have no interest in talking seriously to you because you're a weirdo follower of some wacky internet guru that i've already determined, by reading a suggested article, to be a cretin and a conman half a thread ago, and your horrible posts keep insisting that i must read another 100000 words of off-topic ramblings before i "truly see". besides you already told me i can never "truly see" what the guru means because "i have never even been to a japanese arcade". please kindly fuck off.

>>11515327
mods delete ian threads very fast so if you dont spend a lot of time here youre likely to miss them entirely so its probably a gfood things that you donmt know about thame because it means yoy dont spend a lto sof time here sorry fortmyspeliongs

>>11518234
i don't think you know what analysis is because you keep confusing it with "writing a universal game design textbook" which means we're talking past each other. hint: movie analysis does not involve figuring out rules for a movie crew to follow. you do not need to know how movies are produced to analyze the final product.

>>11518299
>off-topic
You said that "video games have no such tradition of careful engagement". An entire website of many such articles that disprove this notion are presented to you, and you dismiss it as "off-topic". You're either a troll or a retard, probably both.

>>11518340
i also wrote that the 45000 word behemoth article from that website that you insist i must read does not actually discuss a single video game. this makes the article "off-topic" for careful engagement with video games as not a single video game is carefully engaged with in the whole enormous article. please don't treat this as an invitation to post more links because i don't want to read them. please instead consider this an invitation to fuck off. the fact that you can't stop advertising your guru after i've said repeatedly that i don't want to read his shit just makes you look more cultish and deranged. please fuck off.

>>11518329
OK, you want more broad analysis of games that touch upon how their themes are conveyed throughout the game and how they achieve that instead of smaller analysis of single mechanics or design philosophies and other such similar aspect of game development then?

>>11518373
no, i want a community of gamers that encourages literacy, therefore making such and other kinds of analysis happen in the normal course of playing and discussing a video game, whether or not one makes a youtube out of it later. instead, i see a community that discourages literacy and promotes stupidity and mock outrage. this prevents art from taking place.

this is also not really what i want, because i am way past caring about what happens to video games, but this is what i would want if i wanted video games to be art.

>>11518369
>does not actually discuss a single video game
That's what the individual reviews are for, genius. There's hundreds of them on there. The article linked before was about arcade culture, not a specific game; but that culture is still highly related to video games and the article along with the all of the others on there are part of the "tradition" which you think doesn't exist. And that article does name many games, by the way, and even talks about arcade game design, because it goes into rather great detail about his experience in Japan's arcades.

>i don't want to read them
Then YOU can fuck off from the thread because the thread is about literature on games. See how that works, dumbass?

>>11518410
you literally cannot stop replying, can you?

>>11518408
That would also be neat, although not necessary to the development of games as an art form. I disagree fundamentally with the notion that art "takes place" as opposed to being a thing created with a certain intent and then interpreted by the audience. To some extent the discussion you want does occur, but you won't see it online without searching really hard because the big companies are all banking on vitriolic tribalism to their brands and loyalty to them.
>i am way past caring about what happens to video games
Entirely fair.
>>11518410
If they weren't written by a jackass with a God complex they might get taken seriously, stop posting this like anyone gives a shit, it was interesting for a giggle the first time but even if I did agree with his points his reviews show his total lack of taste or subtlety.

>>11518443
>I disagree fundamentally with the notion that art "takes place" as opposed to being a thing created with a certain intent and then interpreted by the audience.

read this sentence and tell me that your definition is not of a thing that "takes place". if there is no interpretation, there is no art, in your definition as well.

I never thought I'd see followers of icycalm coming out of the woodwork to raid /lit/.

>>11518408
>i want a community of gamers that encourages literacy
That's what culture.vg is. What you want is a community that also shares your philosophical views, which I'm sure does exist if you look around more. It's just that they likely won't have good taste in games and consequently won't have very interesting discussions because the philosophy of culture.vg is the best suited for games and everything else is just beating around the bush.

>>11518473
hello friend! fuck off.

>>11518452
Ok I can understand why that would appear confusing. I take a composite approach that some of the value and quality of the art is held in the interpretation by the audience, but that fundamentally the status of the art piece is determined by its creator.

>>11518473
No, it's a cult created by an amoral sophist conman, where you have pay $50 just to post on the forum, and even then, if you criticize icycalm or any of his blogposts, he will ban you without a refund.Hell, he literally calls his following a cult, and unironically believes himself to be the Ubermench and only pure successor of Nietzsche and the top authority of video game critique. Go back where you crawled from and suck icycalm's cock some more!

>>11517888
V&A museum, london

>>11518555
So in other words, what you want is a community that also shares your philosophical views, like I just said. His site certainly does encourage literacy, just not the kind that you approve of.

>>11518593
When I said "amoral sophist conman" it wasn't hyperbole, nor ad hominem. See >>11518200

>>11518640
He's not amoral, he's immoral. But I won't say anything further to you because it's clearly pointless, just wanted to correct you on that part.

>>11518496
i just thought of a poem. is it art?

if you want me to tell you the poem first, then art must be a form of communication that does not exist without an interpreter. if art does not require communication then just give me the steps so i can determine it's artness by myself.

>>11518593
are you actually dumb enough to confuse posters even when they write and capitalize differently? no wonder you fall for that cult shit.

>>11518693
What I said applies to either of you.

>>11518702
no, you clearly thought that other dude wrote my posts about literacy. jesus you're thick.

>>11518713
Believe what you want, not like you address a single fucking thing said to you anyway.

>>11518722
haha you can't even type "yeah i made a mistake" when the mistake is right there for everyone to see. is this the sort of quality posting i can see more of if i register for $49.99 at gameballs.cx? are you a moderator there or just another soldier in His army?

>>11508839
My diary

>>11518779
You're a clown. I have no problem owning up to my mistakes. I didn't make one here. I'm well aware you were this idiot >>11518488

It's a real shame that so many people are turned off by a writer simply because they possess an immoral character (although from their perspective, they are certainly not immoral; everyone else is just too herd-like to cope with their demands). There are droves of fantastic nuggets of insight all over his work that won't get discussed anywhere probably until the dude dies and someone commits plagiarism on him in a more "moralistic" style like numerous people did to Nietzsche decades after his time. For example, I'll drop a passage in the next post since it's kind of long.

>>11518908
Here's a brief highlight:

>It should be clear to anyone with half a brain that these people (meaning Tim Rogers, Eric-Jon Waugh, Kierron Gillen, Stephen Poole, the entire Edge magazine staff, and their by now innumerable imitators in journlolistic and (pseudo-)academic circles, as well as in the blogo- and forum-spheres) are not reviewing games per se, but textures. Colors, shapes, forms. Perhaps even sounds and music: atmosphere at the very most — and nothing more. [...]Imagine Wanda to Kyozou (Shadow of the Colossus), only with the colossi replaced by giant zombie Nazis with swastikas tattooed onto their foreheads, and the protagonist with an Israeli special forces agent. [...] Would all those reams of text written by the pseuds (journlolists, academics, blogoroids, and forumroids) still remain valid? Would they still have anything to do with the new versions of these games, or would they all be immediately rendered invalid by these simple substitutions? Note that the only thing we’ve done to the games is replace a bunch of textures — in other words a bunch of colors. We’ve only touched the colors — not the system, nor the controls, nor the physical properties of the player’s avatar or those of his adversaries, nor the level design, nor the difficulty curve. [...] What makes Ico Ico, above all, is the concept of a 3D action-platformer, in which the player has to fend for an A.I.-controlled partner. This is what must be analyzed first and above all — what deserves analysis more than anything else in this game! Similarly, what makes Wanda Wanda is not the “moral” dilemma of whether the colossi have “harmed” anyone and whether they therefore “deserve” to “die”, and the “pangs of conscience” that the gays feel when they “kill” them — but the concept of a 3D action game in which popcorn enemies are eliminated in favor of boss battles, and the boss battles are structured like elaborate platforming challenges. It is these concepts and mechanics which form the essence of these games (and around which the textures have been draped, and without which these textures would have been practically meaningless; no more effective than a light-display show — i.e. a movie, a mere cutscene), and it is precisely these concepts and mechanics which the pseudo-reviews either do not address at all, or skim over with an unpardonable frivolity compared to their gushing and sickening sentimental effusion over trifles. [...] What all these deliberations can help us appreciate more, is the primacy of mechanical over aesthetic considerations in videogames. For if a mechanical change essentially necessitates the complete scrapping and rewriting of our review (i.e. of the work’s complete evaluation), whereas an aesthetic change can be accounted for by simply changing a couple of lines, this is clear and irrefutable evidence that the vast majority of the work’s value resides in its mechanical part, and not the aesthetic.

>>11518408
https://youtu.be/XMNwClWqexA?t=1

>>11518912
I can't take anyone seriously who unironically uses the words "pseudo-intellectual" "pseuds" "fagots" and "artfags" in their screed and call it high level discourse.

>>11519017
Pseudo-intellectual, pseud, fagot artfag detected.
Attack the arguments not the man.

>>11519019
>Seperating the man from the arguent

>>11519017
Why not?

>>11518682
It's still art assuming you consider it art, but your art might gain more value from being interpreted.

>>11518908
>people are turned off by a writer simply because they possess an immoral character
for a lot of people, consuming art is a way in which the consumer empathizes with the artist.

>>11519495
This isn't art though, this is philosophy / critical theory.

>>11517585
This.

Ian's diary.

>>11509816
They are an art form, as much as film, music, and novels are an art form that have also been exploited for profit. Like this anon>>11511213
pointed out, games are a much bigger and longer term investment than any of those when it comes to the price/longevity ratio, which makes it easy for big companies to sucker cash from degenerates and addicts.

The second part of the problem is to do with the casual gamer who has probably read three or four novels his entire life and so is surprised when a game like Detroit: Become Human comes along and puts a measly little iota of hamfisted metaphor in its story. Since I started reading the classics, I can barely touch newer media because so much of it is recycled without adding anything new to the mix except a newer, 'modernized' setting. Why would I, a successful game dev, try to push the envelope or try to advance the Western canon via video games when no one will give a fuck either way as long as my game lets you take your mind off how shitty your life is with frivolous and arbitrary in-game milestones and tasks?

There have been great video games, great relative to other video games, but not to the best books, portraits, and symphonies. F:NV is unironically the closest a game has gotten to completely utilizing the potential of its artform, because the developers had money and existing resources. Their only goal was to tell the story and integrate the game mechanics into it. But even then again, as much as I like it, it was basically
>dude, political theory lmao
Metal Gear Solid is another example of an ideal form of video game, and it has only succeeded so well because I assume Kojima must have dirt on everyone in the video game industry to be allowed to make something so great and so fantastically retarded. And even then, MGS 2 is the only one in the franchise that said something about the internet, memetics, and modernity in way a book could not have done, because it actually CRITICISED the player, which is like a taboo since the player is always meant to be right.