Agreed, though for me I want to see more Terminator/Terminator 2/Aliens-era James Cameron action instead of Michael Bay action. Action is complimented by a good script, intelligent direction and likable characters.
films like that..and dark knight and inception have action but are also great films in their own right
albino boo said:
For a start lets add the last 2 sentences from my post Now I'm sure theres going to half dozen posts saying that this games has a great story or that game, but lets be truthful they aren't. Most games plots are rather clichéd and run along the rails of expectation. I'm not saying they are bad and I don't enjoy them, I'm just saying they are not great.
As I predicted, some comes along with long list of titles without reading what I wrote. Every single game you list has bog standard plot that has been in films for decades. Even Assassins Creed has a long DNA in movies, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Foxes_%28film%29 and say there is no similarities. Deus Ex Human Revolution is rehash of the 1st game which in turn was William Gibson crossed with Escape from New York and Escape from LA. One of the endings in Deus Ex is identical to the ending of Escape from LA. As for God of War there are half dozen films with similar plots. The Italians produced a load in the 60s of sword and sandals verity before changing to make westerns.
not saying you (or the guy in the article) doesnt have a point
but I think your being a bit harsh in terms of originality...nothing is orignal, to me its less about originality and more about how well its done
now granted games havnt reached that certain "level" but personally the best of what weve seen games do will always trump some shitty action movie (you know..micheal bay fair)
No way, man, Blow is a genius! His vague narrative is brilliant because I don't understand it, and his downer storytelling is good because downer beats happy and is artistic and stuff! And time mechanics! He has a different one for each world! Genius!
I wonder if he's aware that film did get where it was by trying to be theater.
yes..the more depressed somthing makes you the more BEAUTIFUL AND ARTISTIC IT IS
and if its somthing you can understand ,then what is this? fucking kindergarten? true art is incomprehensible motherfuckers!
hahaha joking aside, while bleak sad endings can be powerful, a happy ending does not make it less "deep" somtimes its nice to feel uplifted and empowered..rather than depressed and confused
I'll freely admit that I didn't get much out of playing Braid, but I like the man & his ideas. I really wish they'd finally make a serious effort at procedurally generated story-telling...
Okay, having read the article here, I thought of Blow as some asshat, trying to validate himself by comparing his game to Citizan Kane, and other games to shitty Bay action movies. Having read about half of the article linked (I couldnt finish it due to the smell of shit), I now thinking its largely a equal distribution of asshat between Blow and Clark.
I cant find anybody in my circle of friends or family that care for Citizan Kane. I myself can see whats made it so amazing, but that doesnt mean I enjoyed it. Games are just like movies in one very particular aspect: People will like what they like. As much as I hate various aspects of COD, those games sell because there are people that like them. I liked Alpha Protocol and by most accounts, that game was pretty shitty.
People may make games like Dear Esther, Braid, and others, but just because they are "more artistic" than games like COD or GOW doesnt mean they're better.
Sounds like he has some serious entitlement issues when it comes to his entertainment. I feel sorry for him that he can't take in the simple pleasures in life.
Some of the people in this thread make me want to tear my eyes out.
Anyway, to my mind, gaming took a wrong turn after Deus Ex was released and everyone went, "nope, that's not making the best use of the medium; people want more limits, not anything reactionary".
Thankfully, it would seem that we are ever so slightly trending back towards that method of design, but I do wonder where we'd be now if we hadn't pretty much abandoned it for 10 years.
What the guy's talking about (based on the two quotes the Escapist's picked out) is making sure that game developers understand the medium's inherent strengths and weaknesses (which many don't), and by extension I'd add that many gamers don't know the inherent strengths of the medium because they're very rarely shown them.
The big problem is that gamers, like movie goers, prefer action moives and shooters rather than Citizen Cain. For every one person who watches a Visconti film there a 1000 that watch a Michel Bay film.
Not arguing with you, but picking up a point here. This is not about Citizen Kane vs. Transformers. This is about the necessity that game creators fucking understand the inherent strengths and possibilties (and weaknesses) of the medium/the artform they're working with.
I like action games, I like to shoot stuff. Very much so. But I'm seeing a development where, yes, I more and more have to watch a shitty action movie story that just happens to have inter-, uh, re- active(?) shooting galleries in between.
_____
I remember the first Call of Duty where...
...there is a point during the Russian campaign where you singlehandedly had to defat a whole enemy platoon from advancing. And the game left you choices to do so. You had the freedom to try out stuff, to look for the sweet spot that would give a tactical advantage.
Nowadays...
... in every freaking encounter you are only allowed to precisely follow the instructions the director is giving you. Go to X, hold out for 5 minutes and/or 25 enemies. Proceed, rinse and repeat. I remember this scene(!) in Black Ops, where for 10-15 minutes the only thing that you are playing/controlling is your character's head. And even here the game fucking takes control to make sure you stare at the butt of that pretty secretary passing you in Pentagon's hallway. wtf.
And this complete neglect of what an interactive medium/artform can and imho should be about is indeed quote troubling unquote.
...speaking of Citizen Kane. (And I mean that .gif in the "bravo, well done!" sense it's used on the internets for as opposed to it's original context in the movie.)
I'll freely admit that I didn't get much out of playing Braid, but I like the man & his ideas. I really wish they'd finally make a serious effort at procedurally generated story-telling...
Crusader Kings II apparently does a good job at it - it's on the top of my "games to play once I have enough time for a slow-burn strategy game" list.
Also, check this out [https://cultrl.wordpress.com/]. It's probably overambitious, but it might also be insane genius of the Nikola Tesla variety. If it accomplishes 10% of it's design goals, it will be incredibly epic.
Thing is, Braid is only as artistic as the viewer/player interprets it to be.
I played Braid and thought the visuals were ok - but painting artwork is not the same as art. Surely art is about the emotional response you get, not how it looks. Is Blow saying that because his game has painted sprites, it's more artistic than other games?, that's pretty dumb.
What if I got a load of paintings, scanned them and made a jigsaw game, wouldn't that be the artsiest art game any artist could hope to art? Especially if I make the pieces stupidly small, so the game is really difficult - damn I could make a fortune in Blow's world. Artists should never try and define art, nobody should - art is only art if it's percieved to be art by the person looking at it. If it conjures emotions just by looking at it, if you long to look at it when you can't, that is true art. No pixel artist ever made a true work of art, it takes a whole game experience to bring it all up to that level, a graphical style does not qualify art.
I guess my point is that Braid is no more or less artistic than other games, there is as much art in COD as the player feels, maybe throwing a knife in the back of someones neck is art, maybe getting shot in the face and having the screen covered with blood is art... both those effects can conjure more emotion than Braid can ever hope to. Frustrating and tedious do not equate to an intelligent game, I'm afraid to say that I can expect more dull, lifeless but 'artistic' games... the struggling sort of artist though, all moody and no substance, just empty, kneejerk emotions spoon fed to me by someone who might cheer-up if he could just feel the true warmth of a woman.
How depressing, it's enough to make you jump into a 500% ticket game of BF3 and unleash some torment on other people for a change. It might not qualify as videogame art, but its better than cutting up the Mona Lisa into a jigsaw and proclaiming yourself a genius.
I get Jo-Blo's message (if people don't already call him Jo-Blo they totally should) but the way he comes across when conveying that message makes me want to kick his pretentious teeth down his throat give him a stern talking to. Then I see this and laugh:
The Atlantic article actually trashes Skyrim just as much as COD:
"THERE?S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they?re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they?re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series."
There's so much anti-gaming sentiment in the article, it feels like it was written 20 years ago.
Yeah, to be fair Skyrim is precisely "dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb."
And it's totally better than a Michael Bay movie, in no small part because you can see what is going on.
Now, if you want to find a "latex elf ears Gandalf poem dumb" tentpole release game, look no further than some of the more recent Bioware offerings trying to tell mature srs bsns stories.
I don't know. This is a little harsh and overly focused on Call of duty and it's clones (C'mon, we all know what he was talking about). When he says citizen Kane, I think of videogaming's anti-capitalism magnum opus, "bioshock", but the thing is that in the cinemas, bioshock would essentially be a "s***ty action movie", only one with a message, and a unique stylised setting. Point is, games can be those action movies whilst still being works of art.
The magnum opus that is filled with ham-fisted symbolism and juvenile attempts at philosophical analysis? Don't get me wrong, I like most of Bioshock's plot, but its attempt at philosophical criticism is based on strawmen and is hardly intellectual (as Shamus Young pointed out in the Spoiler Warning season for Bioshock, political theorists and even Objectivists don't even take it seriously its analysis is so laughable). This is where I partially support Blow's 'artistic backwater' comment, namely that even when the medium is trying to discuss something complex it comes off very shallow. This is the defining issue with games, when they try to discuss complex themes often times it's eroded by numerous factors, be it an improper division from gameplay, poor writing, etc. I mostly think that's the result of the quality of writing overall in the industry, along with the typical interests of video game writers (most are not reading complex works of philosophy). Either way, the comparison between Citizen Kane and Bioshock somewhat stresses the issue here: Citizen Kane offers up a complex and detailed look at a man's rise and fall, and Bioshock does it similarly but far more poorly due to worse writing and ham-fisted philosophizing.
One can see similar issues with the new Deus Ex, which says it's about transhumanism when it's really just some abstract and shallow (but well presented) argument about the role of technology in human lives (Campster did an excellent job pointing this out).
The magnum opus that is filled with ham-fisted symbolism and juvenile attempts at philosophical analysis? Don't get me wrong, I like most of Bioshock's plot, but its attempt at philosophical criticism is based on strawmen and is hardly intellectual (as Shamus Young pointed out in the Spoiler Warning season for Bioshock, political theorists and even Objectivists don't even take it seriously its analysis is so laughable).
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the way Bioshock took on Objectivism, either. I mean, there are a variety of crippling flaws in that philosophy that the game could have used to poke holes in the concept of an Objectivist society, but instead it opted to show the society as falling apart essentially because everyone involved threw their ethics out of the window. It's a complicated philosophy that arguably shafted the global economy, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan] and deserves better than that.
I get Jo-Blo's message (if people don't already call him Jo-Blo they totally should) but the way he comes across when conveying that message makes me want to kick his pretentious teeth down his throat give him a stern talking to. Then I see this and laugh:
The Atlantic article actually trashes Skyrim just as much as COD:
"THERE?S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they?re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they?re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series."
There's so much anti-gaming sentiment in the article, it feels like it was written 20 years ago.
Yeah, to be fair Skyrim is precisely "dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb."
And it's totally better than a Michael Bay movie, in no small part because you can see what is going on.
Now, if you want to find a "latex elf ears Gandalf poem dumb" tentpole release game, look no further than some of the more recent Bioware offerings trying to tell mature srs bsns stories.
The Atlantic article actually trashes Skyrim just as much as COD:
"THERE?S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they?re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they?re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series."
There's so much anti-gaming sentiment in the article, it feels like it was written 20 years ago.
Yeah, to be fair Skyrim is precisely "dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb."
And it's totally better than a Michael Bay movie, in no small part because you can see what is going on.
Now, if you want to find a "latex elf ears Gandalf poem dumb" tentpole release game, look no further than some of the more recent Bioware offerings trying to tell mature srs bsns stories.
The magnum opus that is filled with ham-fisted symbolism and juvenile attempts at philosophical analysis? Don't get me wrong, I like most of Bioshock's plot, but its attempt at philosophical criticism is based on strawmen and is hardly intellectual (as Shamus Young pointed out in the Spoiler Warning season for Bioshock, political theorists and even Objectivists don't even take it seriously its analysis is so laughable).
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the way Bioshock took on Objectivism, either. I mean, there are a variety of crippling flaws in that philosophy that the game could have used to poke holes in the concept of an Objectivist society, but instead it opted to show the society as falling apart essentially because everyone involved threw their ethics out of the window. It's a complicated philosophy that arguably shafted the global economy, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan] and deserves better than that.
Alternatively, see Bioshock 2's attempt to criticize collectivism, which was even worse.
The most decent analysis of political themes in a game I can think of is probably the original Deus Ex. The arguments of a lot of the characters throughout the game are based on 18th century Enlightenment concepts based on what role the government should take in society. Concepts like Helios as 'benevolent dictator' of the people comes from Hobbes' Leviathan, Thomas Aquinas' City on the Hill plays a major role in Bob Page's justification for his actions, even libertarian and anarchist themes emerge from NSF conversations. Deus Ex manages to portray a complex political and philosophical question intellectually and I think that's a product of an well-informed writing team that knew what they wanted to convey but didn't take shortcuts.
Kahunaburger said:
The point of what, exactly? The oh-so-subtle-and-tasteful "tranquil solution" line?
And Braid isn't a Mario clone - it's a Mario clone with a really good time manipulation gimmick and some iffy pseudo-deep writing
This is my favourite quote of the day. I don't even know why but it just made me laugh.
(I might get a low content warning if thats all I say, crap)
Uh...this Jonathon Blow guy seems like an asshole, and games are fun before all else.
I don't pay attention to every little detail in a game and if I have to in order to enjoy it then that's a bad thing.
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