What about certain games is NOT art? What is?

Another gamez = art thread. Started reading Tom Chatfield's _Fun Inc._, and got to thinking about certain titles. We all have our games we know to clearly vault over the shovelware->art expanse, but I'm curious about which mechanics of each game really "does" it for us, and which fail miserably like a bad Evel Knieval jump.

For example, two games im thinking of, separated by genre, platform, and decade: Angry Birds and System Shock 2.

Angry Birds has its art in the experience, as it lacks it in narrative. There's a feeling of satisfaction in the real-time flinging of one bird into a giant tower of wood and smirking piggy, where the whole edifice comes crashing down like the climax of an 80's "snobs vs slobs" movie, with shit blowing up and crap flying everywhere.

Also, as a corollary question, what is it about shovelware that makes them _not_ art?

i dont think any games are art.

I think they're all art.

Not all games are art in the same way as not all films are art. Heavy Rain is more art than Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. I think art, at it's heart, tells you something about something familiar that you hadn't thought of or noticed before, and sends your thoughts down those alleyways of contemplation. Mario games are probably not art, while some FPSs probably are.

Course, if you're with Duchamp, it's all art and it's then just a question of how affecting the game is.

wtf more art in 5 mins of any mario game than the whole 10 hr heavy rain borefest can muster

games arent art, but art is stupid anyway

games cd be Art if it mattered what Art was, but the artistic qualities of games ought to be measured in terms that are unique to games and I wd want to mostly exclude narrative from that, in the same way that music criticism that treats music like Literature is almost wholly wrong and terrible.

also zappi big otm

I think there is a difference between Art and artistry. You may as well argue that Lional Messi is an artist, or James Naismith for that matter. Awesome game design != art imo.

also, plz to give specific examples in this thread

narrative as art is perfectly useless for most of the things considered art. portentous DO YOU SEE? story-telling is perfectly useless even in narrative arts. art has to reside at least partially in the formal qualities of its medium otherwise it might as well not exist. which might be true.

vague example of what I'm thinking: Morrowind's depiction of post-colonial politics and its near-neutral POV in terms of the motivations and desires of its protagonists is way deeper than almost any other RPG, but if I wanted to call it art what I wd be pointing out is the way the game develops its complex narrative as a game, thru its own gameplay, rather than just "oh man deep story".

Video game companies sure do employ a lot of artists! I guess they must all be receptionists or something?!

Façade is an interesting non-game and it's fun for a while but I don't feel it's especially good art, more like an experiment in pseudo-AI or something? Because it doesn't have enough game in it.

this looks like a dece article... http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm

noodle otm talking about games being judged on their own terms. what makes a good game good? for me, not art or narrative, but 2 things:

1) Mechanics/interface - the game has to feel satisfying to play - eg Little Big Planet's floaty jumping was a deal-breaker, Mario is always a pleasure
2) Challenge/novelty - the game needs to develop, in new environments or more difficult challenges, and the difficulty curve must be smooth and fair. The best games introduce new elements at *exactly the right time*

Can these factors be described as art? or just good design principles? is design art? buggered if I know.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6280/a_philosophy_that_extends_.php

A lot of traditional game people sort of recoil from this idea, this sense that their creativity is being shut down, but I think if you look at it as, "I have some ideas. Now I can find out which one's right, which one people respond to," it's more appealing.

AT: Exactly. That's exactly right. Everything can be improved, because you're not doing a painting where everyone can just sit back and appreciate it. What you're building is a consumer product. Users have to use it, have to touch it, have to play it. As soon as that happens, you're in a different category than how creative an artist is.

And this is why I say game building is a craft; it's not painting. To build a cool looking bowl, first of all it has to be a bowl first. It has to be functional first. And different people have different ways of using that bowl, of looking at it. And you take that feedback and continue to improve it.

Everyone's creative. I have 10 million ideas if you ask me today. But whether or not users will like those ideas, well, let's ask the users. And metrics is a way to ask the user in the right way. They'll give you the answer to pick which creative idea, and once you've implemented that idea, how to keep iterating, keep on improving it.

I think in the traditional and console mobile industry... new releases are very, very expensive. New sequels are very, very expensive. But for us, we're Flash-based, PHP-based. We can change like that. That enables to continually improve an idea.

the whole video games are not art question comes about because we look at traditional (pre video game) games and they are clearly not art. a chess game is not art. the board and pieces may be art and a particular style of play could be called artistry, but we recognize that chess as a ludic mechanical thing suspended in platonic form is not itself art. the thing is tho that painting + literature + film also have artistic and non-artistic elements. a lot of the vocabulary is just not making the transfer weirdly and so we have this kinda bizarre question wrt video games. like if we're talking about artistry, it seems to me that a great game developer technique has just as much artistry as a great painter's stroke. and if we're talking about the object d'art, then why can't a video game be as artistic as an album (both of which have elements you would certainly consider art and ones you would consider craft). but then this all gets collapsed with another conversation which is that for lots of people 'art' is not the opposite of 'techne' (which is generally how it is used in my experience in video game academia) but rather art is what happens when techne raises to a certain level. ie: when the object d'art is being created by some sort of auteur figure. in which case the argument tends to be, "oh, well there isn't a game as great as citizen kane." it's a silly argument, particularly bc if you can find a game that isn't as great as citizen kane, but still has a POV that is reflected (hopefully masterly) in the mechanics + narrative + other elements, then why shouldn't that be art?

tl;dr version, when ppl (ebert) say that video games aren't art, they are really having a couple different discussions and failing to measure them out.

angry birds is not just a digital version of mancala. it is also an aesthetic somatic (sensual) experience, a colorful visual experience (and if a painting can be art then a beautifully designed image in a video game can be too), a auteuristic experience, etc. I've never heard an argument that really satisfied for me why video games aren't art, esp if you consider films art.

NV otm except:

games cd be Art if it mattered what Art was, but the artistic qualities of games ought to be measured in terms that are unique to games and I wd want to mostly exclude narrative from that, in the same way that music criticism that treats music like Literature is almost wholly wrong and terrible.

is wrong imho. i think the best games support their POV on ludic + narrative levels and the two reinforce each other. deus ex is a great example of this -- a game narratively about making choices, freedom + free will that supports that narrative on almost every ludic level (from the RPG elements in character design to the multiple pathways thing).

aw dammit i'm on my way out the door.

there are a very few games whose narratives intertwine with their interfaces in a way that makes them narratively artistic, but for me most of the games i think are Great Art are all about mechanics. i wrote a gushing and sorta rickety piece about "super mario 64" that gets into the Art Question near the bottom.

anyway as for the just baseline "are games art" question, well why wouldn't they be; they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people. the only real question is "which games if any are really good art". i think the best mario games are intensely artistic. i thought the mechanics (but not the undergrad "story") of "braid" were as well. i haven't played "heavy rain" but from a distance it looked like exactly the kind of thing game designers make because ebert gets to them, and exactly the kind of thing that doesn't help them argue with him.

xp

also out the door but I did think better of it, later. Narrative is a part of the artistic element in the game like it is in cinema. Am using "narrative" in a loose literary sense here to try and rule out poor games with "deep" plots as being the only repository of worth.

It's also weird that years after the reader response revolution in literature ppl are still trying to isolate objective criteria for judging texts.

"they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people."
this definition seems to be the opposite of art, or a recipe for bad art, art commissioned to pander to the tastes of an audience.

The ideal art is an expressive representation of its creators, and the ideal games are the expressive vehicles for its players, and
so the answer to the question "which games are great art?" is "the ones that are terrible at being games"

"we recognize that chess as a ludic mechanical thing suspended in platonic form is not itself art."
and chess is a great game -- the idea that definitional constraints we apply to games like chess don't apply to video games seems ludicrous to me.
the "video" in video games really denote a platform distinction rather than a medium that is wholly unique from the general umbrella of things we call games.
I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles.

that is totally ridiculous

Angry Birds played with actual birds might be Art though in the Damien Hurst sense.

first of all "the ideal art is an expressive representation of its creators" is a helpful definition for discussing art but definitely not the be-all end-all and certainly other definitions, like how people respond to it, and the impact it has on groups, is just as important if not more so. lots of scholars like to use the 'productivity' of a piece of art as one of its variables for discussing how great it is (ie: how much thought/scholarship/ideas/culture has it produced) and that has almost nothing to do with the expressive representation of its creators. in fact, the who auteur representation thing is just repackaged new criticism and imho totally passe bullshit if just evaluated on its own without any other input.

and

I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles.

productivity is surely an important subject of study, but is a faulty criteria of art because many productive things born without a conscious expressive act (e.g. the Earth, evolution) aren't considered art, at least not without presuming a creator.

the problem is the 'faulty criteria of art' thing. it's not 1920 anymore

we've had a few revolutions in this discussion over the last 100 years

Did these revolutions address how productivity applies to memes in general rather than art in particular?

They address that the 'what is art' conversation isn't particularly productive

I'm not trying to be difficult -- it's just that to use the impact of a piece as an arbiter of what makes great art doesn't seem to hold up when someone can point out similar or greater impacts of other things that consensus holds isn't art at all, so in that sense all I'm really getting is that what productivity addresses is that productivity itself isn't productive in the 'what is art' conversation, but this doesn't negate linguistic or survey approaches, for example.

I mean, people built up philosophical conceptual models of how the brain processes color that was valuable in designing experiments that helped our current understanding of the phenomenon, so I don't see why a similar conceptual framework of what art isn't worth pursuing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller's_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus

"[conceptual framework of what art is] isn't worth pursuing" I mean.

also:
'"I mean people play out Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto on the streets as well as on consoles." is just provocative nonsense'

Why is it nonsense to point out that sandbox video games are sometimes played in actual sandboxes?

"they're sets of aesthetic stimuli created by people for other people."
this definition seems to be the opposite of art, or a recipe for bad art, art commissioned to pander to the tastes of an audience.

i mean, WHAT IS ART???? is a pretty impregnable question if history's anything to go by, but as far as i'm concerned, "created for other people" is not the same as "pandering to an audience". nor is the ideal art an expression of its creator. the ideal therapeutic breakthrough is an expression of its creator. the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone. it's collaborative, and empathic. in a video game, a person creates an environment designed to be navigated by another person. it's designed to be challenging but helpful, hostile but survivable; it teaches the player some rules, and asks him to apply them in clever ways. the experience of the played game is a collaboration between the player and the designer, the same way the experience of pale fire is a collaboration between you and nabokov. "self-expression" is paltry and arid by comparison.

on the chess question: it's now so commonplace and ancient it definitely feels weird to say it, but i would call chess a terrific piece of art. not as terrific as go.

civilization IV, meanwhile, is powerful art.

chess as a performative act can be art, but chess the game is just a board, pieces, and a rulebook.

"the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone."

this breaks down in the case of chess where the creator is ... is there an actual creator of chess? It feels like a game arrived at through iterative evolution.

the problem is in trying to nail a specific definition of Art, i think

I don't think it's impossible to nail it down. It's certainly a fuzzy category, but there are generally things we consider as art and things we don't and it is totally possible to build a working model of how we define the concept. It's not purely arbitrary -- there's a mechanism behind it.

there is, but a thread like this is demonstration of how undefined the art/craft definition still is, i reckon. or how disparate people's definition of art can be whilst still being recognisably related to the dictionary definition.

I mean, take something maybe more philosophically fraught than Art -- What are things that are Alive?
and ultimately, you can make some sense of it in that things that move constitute life, because as a mode of survival, it's useful to foreground moving objects versus stationary ones, and from this simple principle you can build a framework of how we think of certain things as living and other things as not-living.

But, for the most part, we can agree basically what is a living thing and what isn't, and with a little work, I think we can do the same for Art.

I just don't believe that. I think definitions of Life have historically been circling around the same measurable characteristics, but Art is demonstrably a different idea in 2011 than it was in 1711. And if we maybe want to argue for a coherent definition of Art today then there's no dominant authority that we could refer to for convincing support.

art sucks the big one

so do games

vanquish 4 lyfe

fuk u

there are discoveries and developments of edge cases on what constitutes life that must have changed its borders somewhat over the past 100 years or so (artificial life, discovery of microorganisms, etc...), so the fact that borders change doesn't present too high a threat for a coherent Art consensus.

the lack of a dominant authority isn't a problem either, if you suspect as I do that art as a concept has as much evolutionary basis as the concept of life/non-life.

let's approach it this way -- can non-human animals make art? which ones and why those and not others?

this breaks down in the case of chess where the creator is ... is there an actual creator of chess? It feels like a game arrived at through iterative evolution.

there are presumably a whole bunch of creators. the point is that's a set of rules, and an environment, created by some people (in this case over a very long period without knowing each other personally) for the express purpose of being played in by other people, who will bring themselves to it.

chess as a performative act can be art, but chess the game is just a board, pieces, and a rulebook.

sure, but ulysses the book is just pulp and ink. it only flares up when someone reads it. in chess, the interpretive act is to play.

xp

We could formulate a lot of conditions that we would probably agree were Not Art. I don't think you can come up with a set of conditions that we would agree defined Art? And by "we" I mean a significant majority of authorities qualified to grant a definition.

oh well no there is never going to be an Authoritative Definition of this. but my appeal-to-authority for mine would be the brittanica definition: "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others". i think that's the most useful definition possible. in which case the are-games-art question is trivially easy.

the problem with folding appreciation of a piece into the defining quality of art is that it necessarily eliminates neglected art from the table.

I can totally neglect ulysses and be comfortable on the hearsay that joyce was really serious about the thing when considering its arthood,
but do people honestly think of the accumulated mass of chess creators when considering the arthood of chess, or rather kasparov and fischer's idiosyncrasies?
who is the artist in a basketball game? Naismith or Jordan?

it's the notion of Art as needing a single, unified Artist that's historically shaky I think?

the problem with folding appreciation of a piece into the defining quality of art is that it necessarily eliminates neglected art from the table.

well, the definition is that it "can" be shared with others. now, if it is never shared with others, that's a shame. call it "potential art", like an egg is "potential life". (under a nonscientific but popular and here more analogous definition of "life".) when it actually is shared with others--even if with only a few others! even if only with one--it comes into artistic life.

who is the artist in a basketball game? Naismith or Jordan?

well i mean the obvious line here would be, who is the artist in hamlet? shakespeare or olivier?

the fact that we largely don't give a shit about naismith but we do about shakespeare isn't just a cultural accident, I think, but speaks to some fundamental aspect about how humans produce the concept of art.

but let's try attacking this from a game-to-game perspective:

miyamoto vs. naismith -- what does miyamoto do that qualifies him as an artist more so than naismith?

I don't think it's impossible to nail it down. It's certainly a fuzzy category, but there are generally things we consider as art and things we don't and it is totally possible to build a working model of how we define the concept. It's not purely arbitrary -- there's a mechanism behind it.

― Philip Nunez, Saturday, February 5, 2011 8:57 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

would be interested in this, I mean hasn't this been a Big Question since forever, if you are really able to answer this conclusively once an for all, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

There was a recent scientific paper on the question why people laugh when other people tickle them but not when they tickle themselves, and the answer was because they're surprised. I think figuring out what Art is will be about that level of breakthrough, and might require the same amount of MRI scans.

i'm not necessarily convinced miyamoto does qualify more than naismith but yeah it's def true that most people would say he does. so, why? well the amount of his input has something to do with it--all naismith has control over in a game of basketball is (an earlier version of) the rules, but miyamoto (and his team) have control over the rules and images and environmental details of every level of every copy of the game. so it's easier to talk about what he does.

i would say that naismith is one of a series of people who were part of the development of jordan-era basketball, which was an artistic process. some of those people were players! which makes basketball, and sports in general, an odd kind of art because they are endlessly being revised and contributed to by people who are also receiving and interpreting them, but a lot of people would label such a thing as Art were it a visual artifact or a piece of architecture, so i figure you might as well plug it into games too.

basically i want the broadest possible definition of art and the reason i want it is this: because it minimizes the danger of having protracted arguments about the definition of art. much more useful is to talk about whether this or that game is or isn't good, and why.

What are people really worrying about when they debate this question?

I can't help thinking that there's an undercurrent of "Why isn't there a meaningful discourse about the cultural value of games?" when people mention the games as art issue, which is a problem that sure seems to be fixing itself these days.

Don't really think there's much underness to that undercurrent.

I mean if people could just agree that games where culturally valid/useful/powerful/just as good as film have a pat on the head then about 80% of the games as art discussion would stop.

where = where
i = idiot.

i give up.

selfpwned

the worst is all the thousands of people who wrote ebert letters about that and recommended he play games that have "incredible stories" that "match the best literature" and he took all the recommendations as votes, so i think the only video game ebert's played recently is "clive barker's the undying".

which is nothing against "clive barker's the undying" it's just not exactly a conversion tool.

I feel the goalposts of 'what is art' get moved around all the time, let's revisit this question in 10 years

"much more useful is to talk about whether this or that game is or isn't good, and why."

the art question is still something to be wrangled with because by and large the things that make for a great game also make it terrible, or anti-art, and vice versa. It's not a coincidence that the kinds of games that make it into museum exhibits are absolutely no fun to play.

"all naismith has control over in a game of basketball is (an earlier version of) the rules, but miyamoto (and his team) have control over the rules and images and environmental details of every level of every copy of the game."
This issue of control I think is one of the keys to figuring out the game/art distinction. There are kinds of games in which the creator has a great deal of control while the player has very little, such as crossword puzzles, but as great as crossword puzzles can be, they don't leap to mind as being very good exemplars of the best that either games or art can offer. What makes individual crossword puzzles deficient as a game or as art?
On the game-side, I feel like the lack of replay value, the inability of the player to alter the outcome in a meaningful way (other than getting the solution wrong) seem like deficits most people would agree on. What's missing on the art-side?

Are you positioning this as art vs. ludus, with ludus = fun and art = no fun?

One-time puzzles (crosswords, sudokus etc, as opposed to replayable puzzle games like Tetris) are interesting because they don't really fit in with ideas of ludic gameplay or creative / narrative play; you have to stretch the definitions to consider a crossword puzzle a 'game' at all. They are clearly gameplay-deficient because they have only one solution, and aren't replayable. What makes them artistically deficient is impossible to say without defining art, which is a question I still feel can't be answered.

the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others

...is a good start but fails to exclude design and decoration, and maybe even entertainment depending on how you define 'aesthetic'.

the ideal art is a method by which a creator communes with an audience, lets them into him, tries hard to get into them, helps people notice connections and implications and ideas they might not have found alone.

...I think this is closer to it, particularly the last clause. I'd go further, and add that art doesn't just help you to notice things, but aspires to present those things in a way that creates resonance, gets in behind your intellectual defences, and changes you / your understanding. I could spend all day elaborating on that, but let's move on.

So a crossword puzzle could be art if it was designed by, say, a poet, and the experience of completing the crossword puzzle was such that it touched you emotionally or changed your worldview. I have not encountered such a crossword puzzle but I can imagine it. I think it could be enjoyable, even entertaining, but it's unlikely that it would be fun.

Fun can't be your sole criteria for a good game though?

i dont even understand why its an important question... i thought ebert nailed it when he asked the nerds why they even care if Games Are Art... maybe you could think of a great Gale Sayers run as a work of art, but does it in any way change how you appreciate the run? of course not... its exciting and beautiful, that's all u need 2 know.........

I don't think it's an important question, but it can be an interesting way of looking at games and appreciating them. Looking for some kind of wider artistic approval is a load of old bollocks, yeah.

if games being fun are important to you, then this question is important, because the cultural establishment of game creators as artists threatens to change the distribution of what kinds of games get made -- basically you should expect to see more money and talent siphoned into games that are less game-like.

"Fun can't be your sole criteria for a good game though?"

I think fun is as essential to what a game is as motion is to life. Certainly you can have life that is mostly inert, but we would considered such life abstracted away from the primary exemplars of life.

"you have to stretch the definitions to consider a crossword puzzle a 'game' at all. "
the way around this problem is to treat the crossword form itself as a game, with the constructor not in the role of the author, but rather the opponent.
suddenly the crossword game becomes endlessly replayable, and the artistry is de-coupled from the game itself, which is only a series of rules governing
how one is allowed to construct the puzzles.

So ideally, if you wanted to buy a videogame version of crossword puzzles, you'd get one that simply embedded the rules, which you could then play against opponents of various degrees of artistry. The videogame-as-art paradigm would package and sell each individual puzzle as a different game. So you can see how on a purely $ level, gamers lose out.

"So a crossword puzzle could be art if it was designed by, say, a poet, and the experience of completing the crossword puzzle was such that it touched you emotionally or changed your worldview. I have not encountered such a crossword puzzle but I can imagine it. "

What is it about crossword puzzles that prevent this from thus far happening? You can view the general act of writing poetry as a kind of game involving wordplay, so what is it about the generalized game that affords artistic expression more easily than in the specific wordplay game of crosswords? I suspect it is something in the structure of the game itself.

the games as art 'debate' is marginally harmful in that it encourages ppl to underappreciate or maybe just obscures how best games really work - physically, aesthetically, neurologically - in favour of highlighting aspects of 'games' that are tangental to the most appealing parts of 'gaming'

super mario bros. 3 isnt any more 'art' than pale fire is a game - you can be a reader or a consumer or a critic but you cant be a player of 'art' this distinction matters

Pale Fire doesn't strike me as the best counter-example :D

haha it just came to mind because nabs once referred to it as 'a kind of game', which it sort of is, but not really

it's kind of telling how audiences will turn terrible or deficient art into a kind of game
(e.g. rocky horror, MST3K, garfield - garfield)

xp

It belongs to a kind of PoMo fiction that generates meaning almost without limit tho which is kind of game-y, kind of crossword-y too.

I only think about this on a semantic level really. What are the reasons why gamers wd want their hobby to be considered Art? Except to have a snappy comeback when yr parents are mocking you?

if games being fun are important to you, then this question is important, because the cultural establishment of game creators as artists threatens to change the distribution of what kinds of games get made -- basically you should expect to see more money and talent siphoned into games that are less game-like.

Like the way the cultural establishment of some film-makers as auteurs has siphoned money and talent away from Hollywood blockbusters and into art-house cinema?

I don't think there's any danger here.

the games as art 'debate' is marginally harmful in that it encourages ppl to underappreciate or maybe just obscures how best games really work - physically, aesthetically, neurologically - in favour of highlighting aspects of 'games' that are tangental to the most appealing parts of 'gaming'

Which is why, if we're going to have this conversation, NV's argument about having a definition of art that's appropriate to the medium is important. Nobody criticises a Henry Moore for its lack of character development. We just aren't there yet with games, either as critics or creators.

What are the reasons why gamers wd want their hobby to be considered Art?

I don't. But I am v. v. interested in the cultural impact of games, just because it's massive and until recently, relatively unexplored. As a writer, I'm fascinated by the apparent conflict between ludus and narrative play. Not to mention there's a dire need to address the issues of sexism and violence & the potential impact of both on an immersed player (not that I mind the violence personally, but if one more developer expects me to identify with their male appetites I'm a gonna shoot them in the neck until their heads done fall off.)

seems pretty simple to me.

A lot of people work on one game. A lot of these people are artists proudly contributing to the game their 'artistry'.

all this art is strung together with code and other non-art type seriousness, to make a game.

So a game is a form of entertainment, but uses art to portray itself.

Anyway, LBP has a tonne of lovely art but it's jumping mechanism (not art) sucks major balls.

zora why do u keep talkin about ludacris

b/c I am ludicrous

"Like the way the cultural establishment of some film-makers as auteurs has siphoned money and talent away from Hollywood blockbusters and into art-house cinema?"

1. Auteurism afflicts Michael Bay as much as it does Lars von Trier
2. Auteurism doesn't make movies less movie-like, but it does make games less game-like.

The New Yorker profile of Miyamoto certainly plays up the auteur aspects of his role, but he has clearly subordinated these impulses to the benefit of the game remaining a game. Is this something the current crop of game designers will feel bound by?

As a business model, treating games as art is a great proposition -- spend less money developing the game rules and engines that can more or less be copied by your competitors, spend more money on the trademarkable, copyrightable, merchandizable art-trappings.

"all this art is strung together with code and other non-art type seriousness, to make a game."
This doesn't speak well of games (or coding) as an artform, and makes it sound as if games are no more a vehicle of expression than someone's meticulously arranged record collection, but that does seem to be the way the industry is heading.

w/r/t Angry Birds, the game itself is something that's been around for awhile in the form of various catapult-type games, a few versions of which have nearly identical controls and gameplay as Angry Birds, but as popular as those versions were, none of them made the amount of money as Angry Birds, which is disheartening if you want to see people encouraged to make newer and better games rather than newer and more marketable trappings around existing ones, or worse, things that are not games at all.

i dont even understand why its an important question... i thought ebert nailed it when he asked the nerds why they even care if Games Are Art... maybe you could think of a great Gale Sayers run as a work of art, but does it in any way change how you appreciate the run? of course not... its exciting and beautiful, that's all u need 2 know.........

― My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Princess TamTam), Sunday, February 6, 2011 7:55 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is basically my opinion

there was a time when Art wasn't even "art" and so, by that criteria, sure games are art. but since the time when great masters wore the livery of servants while covering up bare walls, art has taken on a lot of other narrower and heavier expectations so it's not really a question that can be answered without really digging into the premises. we know what games are, asking whether those experiences and products are artistic is basically to ask, what is art these days?

i think this question comes up more and more these days because video games are now becoming technically advanced enough to make them compare directly to the last big "are they art?" artform: cinema.

and frankly, as much as i love them, as movies, games are routinely really shitty. there isn't a game yet where i wouldn't have gladly done a rewrite of the scripted elements, a re-take of all the v/o and a re-edit of all the cutscenes. even your well-regarded rockstar titles are sub-direct-to-dvd horseshit.

Seriously? You'd rewrite or re-record stuff like Grim Fandango or PS:Torment? How?

i never played grim fandango. i remember liking planescape except for the goofy skull which was a little too princess bridey

the video game equivalent of "show, don't tell" would be the elimination of cutscenes altogether.
but to give props to rockstar, the radio DJ stuff is onion-level comedy.

yeah that's otm

but you can't escape the "narrative element" (if we're dividing things up that way). half-life was a gold standard imo, told a pretty great story with no cutscenes and a character who didn't talk. every now and again people talked to you (more in HL2 obv) but most of it is just details in the changing environment.

this is really hard to pull off in open world games cos you can kind of go everywhere and do what you want. it's hard to write around that convincingly cos things so easily stop making sense in that context. "so, you're new in town? let me give you this intro mission" no i've been tooling around doing side shit for 70 hours already thx.

half-life is a false grail, all the not-a-cut-scenes are just cut scenes where you can look around a little bit during them... and they're unskippable, making them worse than real cut scenes

yeah except they were better!

ya'll want a real game that's ART... well

http://www.toy-tma.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/TIE-Fighter2.jpg

half-life doesn't hold up well for me these days (except for that absolutely beyond badass multiplayer level where you can press a button in a bunker to slowly close the bunker door and then nuke the entire level, killing anyone who can't get into the bunker before the door closes), but half-life 2 i still replay. it's the most boring masterpiece ever; it is nearly flawless but it's not that fun to talk about. except for the last two levels, which are the absolute high point of old-school FPS story-mode design and which i could do half a page on.

planescape: torment i've tried several times and i never really get anywhere; i always end up bored. for reference, i loved fallout, never finished fallout 2, never played any of the other D&D games except for the VERY old-school pool of radiance, and my favorite CRPG is probably this thing.

it's the most boring masterpiece ever; it is nearly flawless but it's not that fun to talk about.

not fun to play either

nah HL2 is probably as close to perfect game art as its going to get

except for the last two levels, which are the absolute high point of old-school FPS story-mode design

does that include the bit where you climb into the coffin thing and then are shuttled around for like ten mins on rails? LITERALLY ON RAILS! with no interaction at all.

half-life 2 is A Bad Game... its just not fun or interesting at all. the first HL probably holds up better, actually.

though the citadel sequence is mostly pretty good, esp with the super grav gun - not worth playing the rest of the game to get there though

I feel like Planescape is actually pretty irrelevant to the whole games art thing - there's nothing inherent to videogames about the way that it's art - you could print all the good bits, stick covers on it, and it's a book. I can't think offhand of any way in which the actual medium actually furthers things in that game and in a couple of ways it actually works against it. Its role in this debate is basically that you still inexplicably have to deal with nuts who claim that the economics and market of videogames actually prohibit anything intelligent having been made at any point in past or future history of the medium which uh, basically it is not worth arguing with these people.

I feel like there's a continuum of video games re art that goes something like Tetris---Civ---Mario---Half-life. I'm not sure what its a continuum of tho. Maybe it's to what extent are the games dealing in abstracts, so Bejewelled has got nothing to do with the real world, while an FPS at least pretends to model it?

Abstraction is often regarded as the purest form of an art form tho. Unless that's what you're saying, i.e. Tetris is artier than Half-Life.

Not necessarily saying that one end is more artier or Art than the other end, more that all points on that scale can be considered art, the way that Deus Ex is different to how Tetris is artistic. Maybe akin to the difference between the Lascaux cave paintings and Goodfellas?

certainly from the aristotelian position that art is mimesis there's no reason why video games aren't art

Gravel - disagree totally about planescape. from a design perspective p:t actually does a lot of little things to subvert genre expectations and attempts to reward players for doing things differently from D&D Campaign #597367. all those conventions it plays off of are essential to its existence as a ~game~, and of course it offers tons of metagaming opportunities like any infinity engine game

avellone talks about it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUIuQUtCRq0

skip to 2:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wv0Ob-xG-s

are my balls art, lets answer that

do they get a lot of visitors coming to look at them?

can i hang them on my wall?

if I had a pair of nuts on my chin, would they be chin-nuts?

tetris is probably the ultimate art video game - for one thing, the game never ends...theoretically

i will say that, weirdly, this thread has made me want to replay HL2 - i think its cuz when a lot of people see amazing qualities in something i only thought was O.K. i tend to start to doubt myself and wonder if i missed something - i just played the freakin thing last year tho and idk if i wanna do those stupid vehicles levels again

Just can't be bothered to play HL2, tho my boy loves it. Vehicles were enough of a pain in the first game.

are my balls art, lets answer that

ade i was deeply worried when i opened this thread to find you disagreeing politely about the value of planescape torment and i must admit i exhaled in relief when you followed it with this ^^

HL2 has definitely dated, and is probably appreciated more by those who played it at its time. Vehicle levels were daft yes.

physics puzzles were cool at the time, dropping weights onto see-saws etc

weapons and general combat is a bit spazzy now compared to other fps games

Where it excelled for me was the way the story unfolded, just the whole polished way everything strung together. Strict paths with the illusion of openness, how'd they do that? The music score was diamond too.

Yeah, I think what I found most disappointing was how un-fun almost every gun in the game was

it's not a bad game (even tho I just said it was earlier), but it actually made me appreciate HL1 (which i never rated that highly either) more in retrospect - first HL is one of the most perfectly paced shooters ever, and the scenario is much much more compelling imo (ordinary guy trying to survive increasingly insane & horrible circumstances > messiah freeman leading a resistance or something)

Strict paths with the illusion of openness, how'd they do that?

i think the great art (craft?) of HL was this^^. like, you'd look at a pile of boxes and know that it was a little platformer bit to get to the next thing. but it did look like a legit pile of old boxes, too. when i think about 'seamless marriage between ludic and narrative elements' that's the kind of thing i think about, in the details.

idk it always just looked like another jumping puzzle to me - as a gamer that's exactly how i'd process it, while sighing at the same time

yeah all right. i enjoyed it tho! like it felt honest somehow. they were making puzzles and combat set pieces, but doing you the favor of making it all look good.

i have to say that i only really play games that try to do this. some element of simulation is impt to me for some reason, even if it's fantastical or scifi or whatev. i've never been into overt puzzle games and never much been into the classic 'cartoon' style visuals like mario

how un-fun almost every gun in the game was

this becomes even more obvious when you play in multiplayer kill boxes. although its pretty frantic and fun sometimes.

my finest moment in hl2, which i'm sure i've bored everyone with elsewhere before, was when i encountered a bug in the game and a door 'trigger' didn't activate.

the door in question was a huge wall, so i gravity-gunned a ruck of furniture from a nearby house and built myself a huge mountain of chairs/wardrobes/tables etc to climb over.

when i clambered over the other side, truman show style, the graphics weren't quite ready but were slowly rendering into life.

and the game continued on okay.

that is awesome! I've been watching youtube vids of people doing things in HL2 that i wouldnt have even thought of my first time through, makes me think i need to try it again and apply a lil more lateral thinking this time

i've been playing some cactusquid games lately. i think maybe psychosomnium could be art, but i don't think i would say that about clean asia, though both appeal to me aesthetically. psychosomnium seems to say something to me about dreams - something subjective that couldn't be communicated through direct text. on the other hand, clean asia has very stylized visuals consisting of simple geometric shapes. why are those shapes different than, say, a mondrian painting? to me they don't have any content beyond looking cool. but maybe they do for someone else - i'm sure there was the same conversation about mondrian. now hardly anyone (or anyone concerned with this question anyway) would say he didn't make art. it's a historical development. and now gamers are growing up and we want games to be respectable. i think they can be or already are, based on our actual experiences. can games be art according to the rules decided by the last generation of critics, audiences, wealthy patrons, etc? maybe not

haha, that thing about the HL2 guns sucking is totally fair. i don't even remember what the guns are; i guess there's A Pistol and A Shotgun and One That Shoots Bullets Fast and stuff. but come on there is THE GRAVITY GUN.

i don't mind that coffin part (which is nowhere near ten minutes) because it comes right after the urban-warfare kill-the-striders level, which is incredibly long and hectic and loud and which ends with you scurrying back and forth across a blasted rooftop while the striders blow up walls around you, and when i first struggled to the end of that i was basically Done with first-person shooters, and never wanted to see another medkit or shield pack or ammo box again, and never wanted to worry about how much health i had or when the last time i reloaded was, and was just thoroughly exhausted. then there was a brief riding-around-in-a-coffin interlude followed by the game taking away all my guns, giving me basically infinite health, and turning enemies into environment puzzles for a level. i don't think i even took a break.

(xp obv)

oh and "strict paths with the illusion of openness" is exactly right. i'm a nonlinear explore-and-improvise guy--that's the stuff i like in games--and HL2 is one of the most fascist, linear games i've ever played; most of it might as well be time crisis. i think it's the peak of that subcategory of level design: environments where, yes, the designers are going to manage all your experiences, but don't worry it'll be fun and you might not even notice.

in retrospect the best thing about HL was the long first day of work intro in the first one

the gradual build-up of off details and broken environments in portal was pretty great too. there's diff of opinion itt i guess, but think the valve people are really good at telling a story via moving through spaces.

xp re: "fascism" yeah i think they take their storytelling very seriously and so they do have to stage-manage your experience pretty closely, which is a tradeoff

by my lights art is a Thing that someone Makes. you don't interact with it except in an appreciative way, i.e. laughing, crying, clapping, looking, not looking. a novel doesn't change. a painting doesn't change. a movie doesn't change. even in games "on rails" where many of your experiences are managed, you can die at almost any moment. you can decide to shoot or not to shoot. which is why it's so difficult for game designers to create a sustained sense of narrative and tension. so no, insofar as games are games, they're not art. it's the least game-like aspects of games that i would consider, and obviously are, art: the graphics, the cutscenes, the dialogue, the soundtrack. but they combine to create something that's not a finished product, something that doesn't unfold with the same considered effects for each and every person.

(and of course, this might make them better than art, depending on your point of view)

i'm fine with the "art is non-interactive" objection. it's of course a tautology (games are not art because games are not art) but then so is mine (games are art because games are art). that's why i don't like the question much.

telling a story via moving through spaces -- yeah. which is how a game should tell a story, really: not with a page of text or five minutes of video but with environments. that's what they can do that the others can't.

(not that i don't love a million games w/ pages of text and lots of cutscenes and so on, plus games that don't tell stories at all, or tell stories in different ways.)

I do! (think they are better than art, when they are not afflicted by art)

I don't think it's possible to build a controlled, pre-conceived, cinematic, coherent story the way that artists want to with games without sacrificing its essential gameness, or being completely ancillary, and in attempting to do so, they usually make something that is bad at being a game and bad being art.

Tracer what about architecture? some buildings may be more workmanlike than built for the aesthetics, sure, but there's a similar open-ness and purposive (?) constraints on a building. you can't determine whether someone will sit here or there, look up at the high ceilings, go to the top floor or not, or even walk through the door

doesn't unfold with the same considered effects for each and every person.

This is straight-up wrong. Even taking away cutscenes, you still get FPS set pieces where it's fully interactive but you're still being affected in the exact way as intended. Game design is fundamental to creating the desired affect too - most recently Amnesia.

yeah goole that's why architecture ain't art! (imo)

gtfo!

it's telling that the most "Art"-like examples of architecture are kind of terrible places to live in, work in, interact with.
(e.g. that frank lloyd wright house that's always leaking, that gehry piece that melted people's eyes)

MAYBE THAT MEANS THEY'RE BAD ART

gehry is metal maybe

you still get FPS set pieces where it's fully interactive but you're still being affected in the exact way as intended

no that's totally true. (overriding theme of intended effect: anxiety, usually.) but if you take the game as a whole, it just doesn't hang together with the kind of precision that a novel or a movie or a sculpture does. you can look THERE or HERE or just STOP.

i'm reading "norwood" right now and man, i would love to be able to swing the camera over and check out some other details from time to time

ppl always blame the wright houses' problems on materials and building techniques from the 30s, you can argue either way whose fault that was really

i think this is (usually) true though:

I don't think it's possible to build a controlled, pre-conceived, cinematic, coherent story the way that artists want to with games without sacrificing its essential gameness, or being completely ancillary, and in attempting to do so, they usually make something that is bad at being a game and bad being art.

and my only argument is that there is a different way of being good art that has nothing to do with narrative and is totally suited to the characteristics of video games.

the urban-warfare kill-the-striders level, which is incredibly long and hectic and loud and which ends with you scurrying back and forth across a blasted rooftop while the striders blow up walls around you, and when i first struggled to the end of that i was basically Done with first-person shooters, and never wanted to see another medkit or shield pack or ammo box again, and never wanted to worry about how much health i had or when the last time i reloaded was, and was just thoroughly exhausted.

i feel like this sums up HL2 + ep1 and ep2 pretty well for me - exhausting. it made them very hard games for me to finish, because i knew the game was dead set on putting me through the ringer at every turn. from a design perspective i can see that it's a carefully planned, carefully balanced game that tries to make every set piece really involving and anticipatory of your actions - maybe that kind of micromanagement is what im responding to wrt my dissatisfaction - it doesnt have the freewheeling playground feel that i love in games like DX or duke nukem, which is why you're otm about how the coffin sequence and the subsequent grav gun craziness feels so welcome and exhilarating. HL1 has kind of a 'now we're throwing a curveball at you' rhythm to it too, but being looser and less tight-assed than HL2 makes it a more comfortable fit for me, i think

in retrospect the best thing about HL was the long first day of work intro in the first one

very otm - HL1 is an epic ~journey~, HL2 is more like a theme park ride.

somewhat ott, but i'm really surprised that no one has borrowed the director mechanic from l4d for other games. you would think that scaling difficulty based on your play would work for a lot of these games that often get tagged as 'exhausting'

there is a different way of being good art that has nothing to do with narrative and is totally suited to the characteristics of video games

no! this kind of open-mindedness IS UNACCEPTABLE

"ppl always blame the wright houses' problems on materials and building techniques from the 30s, you can argue either way whose fault that was really"

it's wright's house, we're just living in it.

DX or duke nukem

haha well (assuming you mean DN3D, not that the platformers weren't fun) these are both totally fantastic and i could talk about them with pleasure for much longer than i could talk about HL2. they're also both extremely sloppy. "tight-assed" is the right adjective for HL2, and usually that bores me too. let's just say that if you're going to make a tight-assed game HL2 is what you should shoot for.

yeah goole that's why architecture ain't art! (imo)

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, February 8, 2011 12:47 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

i was about to agree w/this and be like lol architecture its just roofs and chairs and shit, its art like a nice car is art, and then i thought about the curb your enthusiasm bit where larry's selling cars and he goes 'this is a fuckin... work of art!!!!'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2i-MJoeVQg

yeah i meant 3D xp

"my only argument is that there is a different way of being good art that has nothing to do with narrative and is totally suited to the characteristics of video games."

every artistic overture I've seen so far in games is dedicated to subverting those characteristics. which ones don't?
For example, I think where something like the wii took a step forward is allowing users to create their own avatars to work across games (in other words surrendering artistic duties to the player), but I can't imagine a game as artistically-minded as metal gear would be gracious enough to let you play as your mii instead of solid snake.

i think most "artistic overtures" are definitely misguided, because this is a young medium and an insecure one and one practiced by people who maybe do not realize that their talent for design and mechanics is what they should be looking to, instead of the trappings of the other media adults have learned to discuss solemnly. but when game designers aren't acting like social climbers and getting in their own way, they can do all kinds of stuff. gonna be totally gross here and quote myself, but here's a description of some art i like in a game, made by a guy to whom i guarantee you the word "art" did not occur:

It’s a testament to Miyamoto’s imagination that SM64’s characters, which do not inhabit anything like a coherent universe and exist only in their relationship to Mario—which aren’t characters at all, really, but collections of hindrances**—nevertheless have personality. The ghosts who shrink and vanish when Mario faces them but swell with malevolent glee when he looks away are first and foremost a problem, a dynamic to master: the player has to exploit their shyness to keep them away, and make sure he doesn’t turn his back for long. There’s nothing excessive or ornamental in the mechanic. But it’s fundamentally human, and when it’s introduced the player doesn’t think of it as a dry piece of design but understands it immediately, subconsciously: Oh, I see. They're shy.

that footnote (lol david foster wallace stanning) goes to:

** (See also the Bob-ombs, Platonic bombs with metal feet, rotating wind-up keys and blinking anime eyes, who putter in pointless circles until Mario approaches, whereupon their fuse ignites and they barrel after him in kamikaze desperation.)

like, i guess we could make up a New Word to describe a person who makes up stuff like that, who invents elegant intersections of abstract mechanical problems and human emotion and then renders those intersections with absolute clarity in about two seconds, but we could also just call him an artist.

or we could just call him a 'designer'

http://www.givememyremote.com/remote/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/time_gunn.jpg

i think miyamoto has been subject to the dread New Yorker Appreciation

not that you're wrong!

hahaha, he totally has! not his fault though.

besides, as that excerpt probably shows, i'd be unspeakably happy writing about miyamoto for the new yorker.

i didn't read it, but the caption to the art was something auteurist. he has near total control over the mario brand, or something?

i didn't read it either because it was too upsetting that someone else got to do it.

this is what i always like to point to when discussing miyamoto's genius:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-gP7sSR458

the miyamoto article in the new yorker wasnt really that good or interesting, it was written by a 'video game skeptic' & was mostly biographical detail & some investigation of 'how he thinks' but no real critical appraisal of his work.

much respect to miyamoto, but character design is window dressing over the game.
for example, dream factory and super mario 2 USA are essentially the same game.

what makes miyamoto a great designer to me is he keeps his art impulses in check,
and his process is much more discovery than creation. A dude who optimizes for fun
is performing engineering rather than artistry, like a bicycle repairman who can
squeeze and tweak the sweetest ride from your bike.

well, we're not just talking about the way the characters look; we're talking about how they behave, how they present themselves to the player, how their "personalities" are connected to the mechanics of the game, how their behavior elucidates those mechanics, the coy way they show the player what he ought to do without outright telling him.

aren't these called affordances in the UI world? there's an art to it, but it's definitely a discipline of design rather than art, and it is also an aspect that is conceptually divorced from the game. For example, the wii controller (which Miyamoto also likely shepherded) affects all these things as well, and in much the same way. Actually the more I think about it, Miyamoto's games themselves are not nearly as satisfying as the level of polish he brings to the mechanics.

miyamoto's games are about mechanics. that is practically his entire medium. it's one of the reasons people make such a big deal of him: he's an unusually pure game designer.

anyway, we've hit the inevitable wall again: i don't think it's of any use to distinguish between "design" and "art". we can however talk about what games we love and why.

"affordances" is a really good word though--i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games.

damn, this thread is really scary to open. gonna have to set aside time to read the whole thing.
But sight unseen and undoubtedly repeating others: Games are art insofar as they are the product of creative people working on music, sound, visuals, rules of play, design, etc. They are commerce too, but they don't have to be. They HAVE to be art though, almost by definition.

miyamoto's games are about mechanics

I remember reading an interview, I think, where Miyamoto was like (and I paraphrase) "We came up with a demo version of SM64, which was literally just the mechanics of how Mario moved and jumped. And controlling Mario was so satisfying an experience in and of itself that I was content to leave that as the "game". But others at Nintendo persuaded me that we actually needed levels and stuff."

Probably tongue-in-cheek, but interesting nevertheless and kind of backs up what you are saying regarding his interest in mechanics.

are games fart

"i don't think it's of any use to distinguish between "design" and "art". we can however talk about what games we love and why."

broadly speaking, the fundamental difference between design and art is that designers will use affordances to make the game-playing experience a joy, artists will use affordances to mess with you, and depending on your tolerance for being messed with, that's going to affect the kind of games you love and why.

"i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games."
the problem with this idea is that the affordances are tied into the interface elements, not necessarily the game itself. going back to the chess example, you can play chess in multiple modalities (using live people, a marble chess set, on an ipad, in your head), each with its own sets of affordances, but the game itself remains constant.

When you say miyamoto is all about mechanics, then does it make sense to speak of him as primarily a game designer rather than an interface designer? He'd be the guy making sure the chess pieces have a good weight, that they slide across the board at just the right speed, and spending maybe less time figuring out the implications of adding an en passant rule.

"i might think affordances are the primary medium, the paint, of artists who make games."
the problem with this idea is that the affordances are tied into the interface elements, not necessarily the game itself. going back to the chess example, you can play chess in multiple modalities (using live people, a marble chess set, on an ipad, in your head), each with its own sets of affordances, but the game itself remains constant.

this is a new word that you just taught me so i defer to you, but wiki sez: "An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action." so while all those interface things you list are indeed affordances, isn't it also an affordance that a knight moves in an L and can jump over pieces? that the knight has a quality which allows a chess player to perform L-shaped jump moves with it? and this quality is granted to the knight by the game designer (in chess obviously kind of a diffuse concept as we've already been over). if i'm misusing the word then just forget it, but either way, that's part of what i mean by design, and i think it's artistic.

miyamoto does make sure the pieces have a good weight and slide across the board right, but he also designs the en passant rule: he designs how the things in the game interact with each other. like, here's a "rule" of super mario 64: if you jump against a wall and press A at the instant of contact, you fly off the wall at a 65-ish-degree angle. this is simultaneously a visual/auditory/tactile experience, a "move" in various puzzles, and one of many means by which the player can improvise interaction with the world. the en passant rule is all of these things except the first one; that's the province of people who design pieces and boards. one of the ways video games are different from chess (and maybe why people classify them differently?) is that a video game designer designs the game and the board. miyamoto's good at both--i remember reading someone somewhere enthusing just about the way mario's jump feels, about how unnaturally high it is while still having limitations, about the pleasure of the sound it makes, etc..

anyway. again, i think the best way to talk about this stuff is to talk about what works or doesn't work in specific games, and why.

(should be noted here that i'm using "miyamoto" as synecdoche for "miyamoto's team", if necessary; i don't actually know the credits on any of the games i'm talking about)

'Miyamoto was like (and I paraphrase) "We came up with a demo version of SM64, which was literally just the mechanics of how Mario moved and jumped. And controlling Mario was so satisfying an experience in and of itself that I was content to leave that as the "game". But others at Nintendo persuaded me that we actually needed levels and stuff."'

I think I'm with Miyamoto on this one, but this makes his work great neither as art nor game, but rather more like a well-crafted instrument, like a knife that's a pleasure to wave around even if you have nothing to cut. But maybe he's uniquely good at this? Every other game seems quite clumsy by comparison, or requires a ridiculous learning curve before you can appreciate its mechanics. (the button combinations on fighting games never made much intuitive sense, but obviously there are dudes who can become jedis at it)

Every other game? c'mon.

If you look at sonic, which has about the simplest interface possible (1 button), there's still a certain rigidness to the controls that make it less joyous than mario.

Every other game? c'mon!

oddworld was pretty cool

so was boy and his blob

the first serious sam was kind of art right because it made me all lollllllllll at the concept of fps

just the name 'croateam' brings a smile.