What is the point of Video Games and other media...
By
80sBaby,
Posted on: 2011-11-29 24:43 in Comic and Hero-Villain Culture
Everything you listed is all subjective.
Whats "fun" to someone may not be to someone else.
You specifically talk about plotlines/story elements as enhancing the game for you. I know of a few gamers who could care less about the in-game content and are all about the controls or gameplay.
Bottom line, different strokes for different folks.
Games are purely for entertainment. If I wasn't having fun then they didn't really fulfill their purpose. Fun is entirely subjective, which is why you have so many diverse genres to pick from. That's not saying that games can't be art just like movies, but trying to get approval from the actual arts has been a long road. Just look at all the trouble comic strips and comic books have had trying to break into the literary awards. And games are even less commonly accepted.
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Part of the question is, "isn't fun the wrong word?"|
Originally Posted by Frostbiter
Games are purely for entertainment. If I wasn't having fun then they didn't really fulfill their purpose. Fun is entirely subjective, which is why you have so many diverse genres to pick from. That's not saying that games can't be art just like movies, but trying to get approval from the actual arts has been a long road. Just look at all the trouble comic strips and comic books have had trying to break into the literary awards. And games are even less commonly accepted.
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Because when we say something is bad or good we almost never look at how entertaining it is. Again I point out "The Room" which people find massively entertaining but technically it is wrong on so many levels.
If something is Entertaining, and the point of games/movies is to be "Fun" then isn't something that is entertaining technically good?
Also "fun" is such the wrong word imo...because I can be amused, enthralled, interested, challenged, etc. I wouldn't consider doing something challenging entertaining... I mean you'd never say "I entertained myself with fighting..." because it doesn't quite work. I also wouldn't consider playing a game that somehow expresses philosophy or teaches a concept as "fun" per say.
Its almost like you want people to view entertainment and fun the way you do. There are a lot of "I"'s in your posts and I think we get your perspective. However, with entirely subjective things like this as stated its "ALL" in the eye of the beholder.
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I wouldn't say "I entertained myself by fighting." It's more like "I entertained my self by fighting huge waves of enemies and listening to the music of my chaingun."
Still, if you find something entertaining then you enjoyed some part or aspect of it. And that says "fun" to me. Enjoyment.
I think for all media the point is to entertain. That is a broad thing and as others note, is very subjective.
Some etymology is helpful here. You know what entertain means, but it comes from old french, to hold together. And the meaning still holds true if you think about it. What entertains might be fun, scary, funny, or move other emotions, but if it doesn't hold your attention, it will fail as media.
That is not to say as art. I think that many would agree that people with a profound appreciation of art often admire works that never reach mass appeal.
Roger Ebert (the movie critic) once wrote a blog saying that video games could not be art. In his response to the initial blog by his estimation of "4,547 comments" "300 supported [his] position."
I certainly agreed with the overwhelming majority. Video games can be art. It was an embarassing thing for him to say. It confused objective 'art' with subjective 'art I like.' Games have all the components of various media considered art forms, including Ebert's own, writers, visual artists, actors.
But I did agree with some comments that some games may only be for entertainment and did not try to be (intent argument) or result in being (objective criteria argument) art.
See, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010...n_my_lawn.html
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The problem I have with Ebert's post is that it seems that he thinks art must be static and in which case I don't think he has much ground to stand on. But more to the point it raises a question that if the major problem with games is their interactivity and their ability to be changed by the player, what makes them any different than a play or something like that? I think perhaps the problem is not that it's not possible to create a piece that is "art", but rather the times we live in art isn't really a high priority and so people aren't trying.|
Originally Posted by Count_Scottula
I think for all media the point is to entertain. That is a broad thing and as others note, is very subjective.
Some etymology is helpful here. You know what entertain means, but it comes from old french, to hold together. And the meaning still holds true if you think about it. What entertains might be fun, scary, funny, or move other emotions, but if it doesn't hold your attention, it will fail as media. That is not to say as art. I think that many would agree that people with a profound appreciation of art often admire works that never reach mass appeal. Roger Ebert (the movie critic) once wrote a blog saying that video games could not be art. In his response to the initial blog by his estimation of "4,547 comments" "300 supported [his] position." I certainly agreed with the overwhelming majority. Video games can be art. It was an embarassing thing for him to say. It confused objective 'art' with subjective 'art I like.' Games have all the components of various media considered art forms, including Ebert's own, writers, visual artists, actors. But I did agree with some comments that some games may only be for entertainment and did not try to be (intent argument) or result in being (objective criteria argument) art. See, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010...n_my_lawn.html |
The question still remains is the point to entertain or to communicate or to follow some sort of rule set that makes it "technically good." If it's to be entertaining then how can anyone say that a game/movie that is "entertaining" in some way is anything but good...
And that leaves us with is something good because it entertains us or because it follows rules that someone says make things "good"
One of the reasons I like games is because they can be so many things at once.
"Games" is a huge word, encompassing everything from tic-tac-toe to Mass Effect 2.
However, it is certain that some games try to be art, and to engage the player on multiple levels.
They are stories.
They are movies.
They are video art, which often incorporates traditional art, like paintings.
They are musical compositions.
They contain unfamiliar perspectives and philosophies and histories.
They contain people, both real and authored, living and dying and emoting.
They contain architecture and set design.
They contain performance and audience participation.
Most games incorporate a host of arts in various capacities: the best ones become more than the sum of their parts and become a work of art made up of many pieces of art.
Some theatre presentations incorporate the audience in an improvised, unscripted way.
This is that on a worldwide scale, and it is not diminished by being electronic.
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Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
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It comes down to expectations and intentions. A person making a movie generally has certain intentions: they want to tell a story, they want to visually evoke, etc. A person watching a movie generally has certain expectations: they want to be visually entertained, they want a certain movie-going experience. There's usually an implied agreement between the producer and consumer of entertainment that the intentions and expectations roughly align. When they don't, there's usually problems.|
Originally Posted by Durakken
The question still remains is the point to entertain or to communicate or to follow some sort of rule set that makes it "technically good." If it's to be entertaining then how can anyone say that a game/movie that is "entertaining" in some way is anything but good...
And that leaves us with is something good because it entertains us or because it follows rules that someone says make things "good" |
When we see a boom mic show up in a movie, we usually groan. We don't expect it, and we see it as a sign of bad production quality: the movie makers didn't care enough to edit it, so why should we care about watching it. When we see a stage play, we think nothing of seeing the staff move set pieces around: we can even marvel at their efficiency. We have a different expectation with stage plays than major motion pictures, and we judge accordingly.
Ultimately, we engage in entertainment media to be entertained. But we generally choose *which* media to serve certain desires or expectations on our part, and we presume the producers are correctly signalling their intent. We play games for the interactivity: we expect gameplay in an actual game. And if a game has little gameplay, but lots of QTEs, its fair for us to start to say "if they want to throw a movie at me when I wanted to play a game, then fine, I'll judge this as a movie not a game, starting with comparing the quality of the movie as a movie relative to all other movies I've seen." You start off in the hole because you basically violated the implied social contract to provide a game when you claimed to produce a game, and then you also get judged not based on how good your movie is compared to other games, but compared to other real movies. That's a tough bar to get over.
You could say this about other areas besides entertainment media. You could say the objective of going to a restaurant is "to eat" but its fair to say people tend to have a different set of expectations if they eat at a diner as opposed to a high end restaurant. We can expect hearty inexpensive comfort food at the diner, and be disappointed if we get expensive appetizers. Conversely, we can be disappointed if we get inexpensive comfort food at the high end restaurant, even if the food is otherwise completely delicious. Sometimes we want one thing, sometimes we want something else, and we have a right to have certain expectations based on what the producers of our content signal they intend.
You could order a hamburger and get a chicken sandwich instead. It could be a perfectly delicious chicken sandwich, and it could fill you up. In the grand scheme of things, you could say that's all that counts, but I think most people would still be upset they didn't get what they ordered.
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Actually Durakken, I don't mind it when a game's sequal is everything like the original and only different because of the story (you know if I like the story).
I've said it before, I'll say it again, the best console game in my opinion has been Devil May Cry, it played exactly how I liked it to be played and let me do all the things I wanted to do!
Pokemon, I love it, and in fact, when they come up with new innovations for it, I tend to only wish they didnt get rid of an older one.
I of course must like the visual graphics of the game to really enjoy it.
Comics are a bit different. I can enjoy a visually pleasing (to me) comic with a terrible story. I can enjoy a terrible story with displeasing art. I can't enjoy the comic when it has both. Though admittedly, when it comes to comics, I can overlook a bad story more than bad art.
But comics are a visual medium with a hint of story imo. They're not something you go into expecting to read a novel's worth of words. It just doesn't work (imo anyways) for comics.
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I will point out that if you want an Abstract Game, I'd recommend The Path, it's about as close as your going to get to an 'arthouse' type genre game.
As for the complaints against MSG4, well...put it this way, there's actually more hours of cutscene footage than there is in gameplay from what I've been told although I imagine it's about equal.
There's 8 hours worth of cutscenes and about the same in gameplay, meaning 50% of the time, you're watching a cutscene of some sort. That is the point where you go "if you wanted to make a TV series/Movie...just go and make a damn TV series/movie".
Games are there to be played, if the person wanted to watch something passively they'd have picked up a movie/tv boxset.
Now don't get me wrong, Cutscenes done well, absolutely fine, they explain what they need to, don't detract from the action and generally tell a story. However I think ever since the first Half-life (which showed that cutscenes don't need to take you 'out of the game' since everything was done with the ingame engine) the need for cutscenes has been getting less and less.
I know that approach works for a game like Half-Life 1 and 2 which aren't amazingly story heavy like say...a JRPG but Jesus, 8 hours of cutscenes?
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I haven't played MGS4, but I have played other games in the series and also XenoGears and XenoSaga.
To me it comes down to whether you enjoyed the final product. I did not particularly like XenoGears, but I greatly enjoyed XenoSaga and MGS. Some of the cut scenes do hit 'get on with it already' lengths (a single cut scene in excess of an hour? With a save point in the middle? Really?) but in general they actually increase immersion and the cinematic feel of the gameplay.
To me, it feels like a movie you control.
More importantly, for good or ill, I think the makers hit the mark they were aiming for. Of course, 'visual novels' and similar works with minimal gameplay which primarily consist of choosing which story branches to follow are more popular in the East.
It's hard to make a good movie/series that is also a good game. But I don't see any reason one shouldn't try, just to stick to some arbitrary definition of what one or the other is.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
Since a little before I started reviewing the New 52 of DC I've been thinking... What's the point of all this media? This thought largely occurs because when i listen to other reviewers I hear about a game not being fun or a movie like "The Room" being so bad it's good. I've never heard someone say a Book isn't a good book because it isn't fun and when I think about art (drawings/paintings) there are things we call abstract art which are graded more against each other than they are as a part of "all art".
Where is Abstract Film? Abstract Games?
Does a game need to be "Fun" to be good?
Can a game be purely about story and not so much about how much "fun" I'm having or mechanics?
Is "Fun" the right words for "Games"? Is "games" the right word for that? And can the medium ever evolve if these words are maintained as the appropriate vernacular to use with this medium?
This has arisen in my mind due to questions about certain games...
Mass Effect 1 & 2...and 3... I'm hearing a number of people pre claiming that the game is "just like 2 except it takes place on earth" as if it were a bad thing... Don't you want consistent game play? If the game is doing it right shouldn't the mechanics be right from the previous 2... so why change it... IE why should a developer be forced to innovate to tell a story? I mean if I like how Pokemon plays, but have a different story to tell why is it a bad thing if I take every thing from it save for those particular elements I like?
Xeno Saga & Gears... One is heavy in dialog and the other in movies. You get that it's more of an interactive story book, but this always brings up people disliking this fact... Same with Metal Gear Solid 3(? or is it 4? I don't play MGS games) why is it that being panned for having long cut scenes? Same with Quick Time events... Yes they are simplistic and such, but is it truly the point to give you something to play with or is it to give you a story that gets you interested in it and the action just gives you another way to connect with that world?
MMOs in general... I have never understood how people skip over the story of MMOs. Is the game play that fun that you've played it for years and years? Seriously? Isn't the world and the story the interesting, exciting, enthralling part of the game? Is it that the game is "fun" that your still around or is it that your friends play it or there is a social aspect to it that is interesting or a story and world you want to keep reading (hearing about as it's now becoming)? There are two things that get brought up time and time again with MMOs and they aren't how "fun" the game is. It is content and community...
So my question is, why are games and film so limited in it's expression to some degree with people focusing on "fun" or "how it all works"... With games and films isn't the point to entertain? Does it really matter if they aren't "technically good" if you find them entertaining? Does it matter if they are "technically bad" but tell a good story that is deep and engaging?
and... Do you think this outlook on games needing to be "fun" and movies needing to be "technically good" restricting them from becoming more fulfilling media?
I don't know if i expressed what I meant well enough...hope you guys understood.