David Jaffe Dumps on "Art Games"

Jumplion

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Sir John the Net Knight said:
If you think about it, this is why JRPGs are failing. They've become too heavily focused on story and not enough on gameplay. This is something you could do around the time of the big three Final Fantasy games(FFVI, FFVII and Chrono Trigger.) because the medium hadn't evolved yet and story based gaming was a new interesting idea back then. Gameplay in JRPGs back then was simple and elegant, but it never bothered to evolve beyond that. JRPGs continue to scale back gameplay in favor of story, so much so that Final Fantasy XIII could more or less play itself and thus no one really liked it so much. I think if you took a game like Braid or Flower and tried to market it on equal scale as FFXIII it would have probably gotten similar results.
It's not that they focus on story more than gameplay, it's that they focus on bad storytelling rather than gameplay, and the gameplay is stagnant across the entire genre. Why mess with the wheel if people still play with it the way it is?

There's a certain, elegant balance with story and gameplay. You can easily have extremes on either side which is perfectly fine if that's what you're going for. Some games can gravitate towards the middle, but few games are able to balance the story and gameplay equally and to the degree they want to.

I'm not saying people shouldn't do it this way. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to assume that it's the correct way.
Nobody is really saying that it's the "correct" way. We all just want more diverse games with more diverse aspects to them. Wherever games will evolve to next I'm sure we'll all be in for a treat.
 

fierydemise

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realslimshadowen said:
Also, he mention Birth of a Nation. We've already had our Birth of a Nation--i.e., a game that was both incredibly un-PC and didn't even have the excuse of being a good game. It's called Custer's Revenge. We may have even had our Citizen Kane, but I had a long period of not playing new games that only ended last year, and much as I love, say, Planescape: Torment, it didn't really use the medium to its best advantage to tell its amazingly inventive and in-depth story.
To say that Custer's Revenge is like Birth of a Nation is to entirely miss what makes Birth of a Nation so influential. It wasn't the blatant racism involved (actually no that is part of it but only tangentially), it was the fact that is basically wrote the book on how to shoot movies. From Roger Ebert,
Griffith assembled and perfected the early discoveries of film language, and his cinematic techniques that have influenced the visual strategies of virtually every film made since; they have become so familiar we are not even aware of them.... He did not create the language of cinema so much as codify and demonstrate it, so that after him it became conventional for directors to tell a scene by cutting between wide (or "establishing") shots and various medium shots, closeups, and inserts of details. The first closeup must have come as an alarming surprise for its audiences; Griffith made them and other kinds of shots indispensable for telling a story...One of Griffith's key contributions was his pioneering use of cross-cutting to follow parallel lines of action. A naive audience might have been baffled by a film that showed first one group of characters, then another, then the first again. From Griffith's success in using this technique comes the chase scene and many other modern narrative approaches. The critic Tim Dirks adds to cross-cutting no less than 16 other ways in which Griffith was an innovator, ranging from his night photography to his use of the iris shot and color tinting.
Read the whole thing [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030330/REVIEWS08/303300301/1023] its very interesting.
 

Owyn_Merrilin

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Elesar said:
...The fact that he created Gears of War invalidates everything he ever says about games as art. He could say that Shadow of the Colossus is the greatest artistic achievement of all time, or say that games can never be art. Doesn't matter. All anyone has to say to invalidate his opinion is 'You made Gears of War.'

Because Gears of War is the artistic equivalent of PORN!
Except the guy behind Gears of War was CliffyB, not David Jaffe. David Jaffe made God of War, which is pretty frequently brought up as an example of a fun game that still has artistic merit.
 

Space Jawa

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I may not like God of War at all (wouldn't play it even if you paid me), and I may not care much about Twisted Metal, but right now I want to give this guy a high five.
 

realslimshadowen

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fierydemise said:
To say that Custer's Revenge is like Birth of a Nation is to entirely miss what makes Birth of a Nation so influential. It wasn't the blatant racism involved (actually no that is part of it but only tangentially), it was the fact that is basically wrote the book on how to shoot movies.
It was a poor comparison, that I will grant you. And given my earlier post this may sound hypocrtical...but a film basically codifying the basic tools of the medium doesn't mean a damn thing to me if it's a bad film otherwise (see also Citizen Kane). Hell, Ayn Rand codified an entire school of philosophy and I've shat out better prose than Atlas Shrugged after a late-night Taco Bell run.
 

fierydemise

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realslimshadowen said:
fierydemise said:
To say that Custer's Revenge is like Birth of a Nation is to entirely miss what makes Birth of a Nation so influential. It wasn't the blatant racism involved (actually no that is part of it but only tangentially), it was the fact that is basically wrote the book on how to shoot movies.
It was a poor comparison, that I will grant you. And given my earlier post this may sound hypocrtical...but a film basically codifying the basic tools of the medium doesn't mean a damn thing to me if it's a bad film otherwise (see also Citizen Kane). Hell, Ayn Rand codified an entire school of philosophy and I've shat out better prose than Atlas Shrugged after a late-night Taco Bell run.
Well Birth of a Nation is also supposedly a very emotionally powerful movie as well. I can't vouch from personal experience since I haven't seen it but Ebert makes a good case in that article I linked previously.

In general however I agree being influential is not the same as being good although both a good work and an influential one should be recognized.

Finally, yes on Atlas Shrugged, when I first got to "This is John Galt speaking" I wish I'd known to skip the next 90 pages of narrative nothingness.
 

mjc0961

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Nov 30, 2009
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Jumplion said:
"Yeah! Games are about fun man! We don't need no stinkin' pretentious dickweed art games! We just want to blow shit up, who gives a crap about story, it's the game part of Video games, man! GO JAFFE!"
Augh, I hate the "fun = explosions" crowd. Fun means you are enjoying yourself, and yes, all games should try to do that. Fun does not mean explosions everywhere, with a side of blood and maybe tits.

Metalhandkerchief said:
Lovely, another shovelware creator with opinions that makes me want to punch them in the face.
Do you even know who David Jaffe is and what game's he made? Do you know what shovelware means? Your statement is completely illogical. If you don't like his games, fine. But shovelware? No, his games are not shovelware.

Jumplion said:
It's not that they focus on story more than gameplay, it's that they focus on bad storytelling rather than gameplay, and the gameplay is stagnant across the entire genre. Why mess with the wheel if people still play with it the way it is?
There's nothing wrong with focusing on story over gameplay, but it still becomes a problem if the game can nearly play itself. At that point, the creators ought to step back and ask themselves one simple question: are they trying to make a game, or are they trying to make a movie? Both can have a focus on story if that's what is wanted, but for a game, there needs to be a certain level of player interactivity as well. That's what makes it a game.
People can make fun of the Metal Gear Solid series for being more game than movie or whatever all they want because the game does have a lot of cutscenes (many of which are quite long), but in between them there is still some pretty solid gameplay in there.
Then there is Heavy Rain, which is all about the story and decides to use prompts and quick time events for everything to keep things simple for all actions and all characters you will do and play as in the game, which works very well for telling the story it came here to tell and keeping the player involved.
And then we have Final Fantasy 13, which decided the best use of the person holding the controller should basically be to make the characters walk in between cutscenes, pausing occasionally to make them hit what might as well have been a "let the AI fight for me" prompt so we can kill some monsters or something. Regardless of the quality of the story, there's a problem there. It seems to want to involve the player so little that they might as well have just said "screw it, let's just make this a movie" and it could have been an improvement over the really bland corridor walking and auto-fight option selecting.

So yeah. Focus on story is fine, but like anything else, there are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways. Doing it the right way keeps the game enjoyable for the player; doing it the wrong way makes them wonder why they paid $60 for a game that would have provided a better experience if the creators had decide to just make a movie.
 

Mouse One

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Gah. What on Earth is he upset about? It's not as if it's impossible to find any number of Big Guy with Big Gun/Sword games out there because all the art games are crowding them out of the market.

And, yeah, games like The Path/Braid/Flower/The Void, etc DO speak to ideas that we don't see in most videogames. So what? If you don't like that sort of game, don't buy it.

Really, this is like hearing Stephenie Meyer whinging about Salman Rushdie.
 

Tomo Stryker

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Onyx Oblivion said:
This man is a one man controversy machine. He should team up with Pachter, Kanye West, and Yahtzee to make the most controversial gaming statement of all time.
Excuse me good sir, but what do you have against Pachter? I'm not defending the guy, but he does seem to be 50/50 most of the time.

OT: Sounds like this developer had a bad day and just decided to go to his blog and rant. Pfft, the way he sounds it makes it sound like he is making adult games for kids. Who would do such a thing. Honestly it sounds like he is resolved to keep the industry immature.
 

Tomo Stryker

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Metalhandkerchief said:
He's behind God of War. A generic consoley game with as much quality narrative as a re-enactment of sesame street by drunken Icelandic sailors. A game with as much mechanical complexity as an IKEA bought cheese grader, and an art direction so populistic it could give Joseph Goebbels a run for his Deutsche Mark.
Where is the +respect button, you sir deserve it.
 

Saelune

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I think I understand what he is saying, but he is taking it to the extreme. If I am right, he is saying a game's merits is not its visuals, but its mechanics. Sort of saying he prefers games to have personallity, not just a pretty face.
 

mjc0961

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Nov 30, 2009
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Metalhandkerchief said:
He's behind God of War. A generic consoley game with as much quality narrative as a re-enactment of sesame street by drunken Icelandic sailors. A game with as much mechanical complexity as an IKEA bought cheese grader, and an art direction so populistic it could give Joseph Goebbels a run for his Deutsche Mark.
And if that's what you think about God of War, fine. I won't try to tell you that you're wrong to think that about the game. I will however tell you that none of what you just said makes the game shovelware, because that is not what shovelware is.

These are examples of shovelware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Coach
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_%28video_game_series%29

The point being piles and piles and piles of low quality crap. Piles so big that you need a shovel to dig through it all (hence the term shovelware). There are 5 God of War games (2 on PS2, 1 on PS3, 2 on PSP), and Jaffe only had a hand in the PS2 titles. Thus, God of War does not qualify him to be called a "shovelware creator", because he has done no such thing.

Tomo Stryker said:
Onyx Oblivion said:
This man is a one man controversy machine. He should team up with Pachter, Kanye West, and Yahtzee to make the most controversial gaming statement of all time.
Excuse me good sir, but what do you have against Pachter? I'm not defending the guy, but he does seem to be 50/50 most of the time.
I'm not Onyx, but while we're talking about Pachter, let me tell you my problem with him. It's that he's either stating the obvious, or he's completely missing the point and making a very stupid and incorrect statement. Take today's "EA & Activision Dismiss NDP Data [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108459-EA-Activision-Dismiss-NPD-Data]" article. It talks about how EA and Activision feel that the NDP's monthly reports that only discuss retail sales and not digital sales are misleading and possibly irrelevant. Pachter, in his eternal idiocy, says "EA saying physical game sales don't matter is like Best Buy saying television sales don't matter." Okay, that's nice Pachter. Except EA didn't say that physical game sales don't matter, so what the fuck are you talking about?! They said that physical sales aren't the only kind of sales out there and only talking about those sales is misleading (which is true). But does Pachter care? No. He just wants to see his name in more articles so he can get a few +1's toward his e-peen.
 

Tomo Stryker

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mjc0961 said:
I'm not Onyx, but while we're talking about Pachter, let me tell you my problem with him. It's that he's either stating the obvious, or he's completely missing the point and making a very stupid and incorrect statement. Take today's "EA & Activision Dismiss NDP Data [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108459-EA-Activision-Dismiss-NPD-Data]" article. It talks about how EA and Activision feel that the NDP's monthly reports that only discuss retail sales and not digital sales are misleading and possibly irrelevant. Pachter, in his eternal idiocy, says "EA saying physical game sales don't matter is like Best Buy saying television sales don't matter." Okay, that's nice Pachter. Except EA didn't say that physical game sales don't matter, so what the fuck are you talking about?! They said that physical sales aren't the only kind of sales out there and only talking about those sales is misleading. But does Pachter care? No. He just wants to see his name in more articles so he can get a few +1's toward his e-peen.
You got a point, but that wasn't the exact impression I got from him. But I mean what are you going to do? There will always people like him, he just seems less like a douche than others ya know?
 

Aurgelmir

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emeraldrafael said:
Does it bother anyone else that our "industry giants" cant agree amongst themselves on the whole are games art thing?
No



I personally do not think games needs to be art, for that reason. Nobody can decide what it means for games to be an art, because art is subjective.

I just want the developers to make games I want to play, just as I want movie makers to make good movies. I could care less about if it is art or not.

Besides my favorite game of the past few years, StarCraft2, is more or less considered a sport. So can a sport be an art? and if not what happens to e-sports the day games become only art?

I know those questions are silly, but my point stand: Why does games NEED to be art?
 

mjc0961

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Tomo Stryker said:
mjc0961 said:
I'm not Onyx, but while we're talking about Pachter, let me tell you my problem with him. It's that he's either stating the obvious, or he's completely missing the point and making a very stupid and incorrect statement. Take today's "EA & Activision Dismiss NDP Data [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108459-EA-Activision-Dismiss-NPD-Data]" article. It talks about how EA and Activision feel that the NDP's monthly reports that only discuss retail sales and not digital sales are misleading and possibly irrelevant. Pachter, in his eternal idiocy, says "EA saying physical game sales don't matter is like Best Buy saying television sales don't matter." Okay, that's nice Pachter. Except EA didn't say that physical game sales don't matter, so what the fuck are you talking about?! They said that physical sales aren't the only kind of sales out there and only talking about those sales is misleading. But does Pachter care? No. He just wants to see his name in more articles so he can get a few +1's toward his e-peen.
You got a point, but that wasn't the exact impression I got from him. But I mean what are you going to do? There will always people like him, he just seems less like a douche than others ya know?
No I don't know. He seems like a total douche to me. He's the kind of douche that should be sent a copy of this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_QDGdbg-QQ] and be forced to watch it repeatedly until he has a Grinch-style change of heart and decides to stop saying things, no matter how inaccurate or irrelevant, just to get his name mentioned in more news articles.
 

SL33TBL1ND

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I tend to agree with him. The art of making a game is making the game enjoyable to play. It is an interactive medium, remember? If you manage to do that in an innovative way props to you, but if you're just making the game look "arty" and not playing to the medium's strengths, you're still making art, just not video game art.

Aurgelmir said:
emeraldrafael said:
Does it bother anyone else that our "industry giants" cant agree amongst themselves on the whole are games art thing?
No



I personally do not think games needs to be art, for that reason. Nobody can decide what it means for games to be an art, because art is subjective.

I just want the developers to make games I want to play, just as I want movie makers to make good movies. I could care less about if it is art or not.

Besides my favorite game of the past few years, StarCraft2, is more or less considered a sport. So can a sport be an art? and if not what happens to e-sports the day games become only art?

I know those questions are silly, but my point stand: Why does games NEED to be art?
Let's take that back a step even further and say "Nobody can decide what it means for anything to be an art".