[ SECRET POST #3798 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3798 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #544.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

it sucks that you don't like it. genuinely.

I don't think being metafictional is the only way for video games to be good, and I agree that there are times when people use that approach as a shorthand for "intelligent and artsy and worthwhile"

at the same time, I do think that video games are distinctly good at doing metafictional and complex things. even if metafictional approaches aren't distinct to video games, there are genuinely things you can do in video games that just aren't possible in books. and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with games trying to be cinematic, I also think it's true that most games that try to be cinematic are aggressively bad at it. It's not that being cinematic is bad for video games, but most cinematic video games are bad. I mean this is a medium where people take the fucking Halo storyline seriously. no offense if people like it, horses for courses and all that, but if you're talking about What Games Can Do As Art - if you're talking on that level - the Halo storyline is a load of hot garbage.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

I try to stay out of Games as Art, because it digs too much into the question of what kind of books qualify as Art. If I can point to a game that's equivalent to The Deed of Paksenarrion, does that count, or is the game not really Art because Paks isn't really Art? How about if I can point to a Lovecraft equivalent, or something that's modeled on '60s comic books? I would say that all of those are at least potentially as creative and insightful as a work of Art, but I'm aware that a lot of people would disagree.

In terms of my standards, a lot of what I value is empathy. Not just portraying the emotions that characters feel, but trying to make the player feel the same emotions. That's been "feminine" since long before I was born, though, and Art tends to be something that's defined and categorized by men.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

I completely get where you're coming from with all of that, and I share a lot of the ambivalence with regards to the idea of Games As Art.

at the same time, even if you don't want to use the particular conceptual framework of Art, I think you're inevitably going to have to deal with a lot of the issues and ideas that underly the concept of Games As Art if you're going to talk about this kind of thing. Like, what should games try to do? What are games actually doing? If you're going to talk about whether or not games should be cinematic, it's going to end up being important whether games are doing things that are the equivalent of Deeds of Paksenarrion, and how worthwhile it is to be doing things that are the equivalent of Deeds of Paksenarrion. If you want to talk about the importance of empathy, that requires looking at how a game creates empathy and deals with empathy and whether that's successful or not. Art doesn't need to be the framework for whether or not that's successful but it's a set of issues that's going to come up.

Or, to put it another way, if you're going to try to evaluate games on the basis of whether they're creative and insightful, even if you frame it in a way that has nothing to do with Art, you're still going to have to look at games and see whether cinematic games succeed at being creative and insightful, and whether non-cinematic games succeed at being creative and insightful. All that getting rid of the concept of Art accomplishes is getting rid of one particular approach to determining those questions (which, admittedly, is an approach that carries an enormous amount of garbage with it).

Which is kind of what I was trying to drive at by invoking the idea of Games As Art as a kind of shortcut for that whole mindset. Really I think the only way to avoid those particular issues is by just throwing up your hands and saying everything is 100% down to personal taste.