David Jaffe Dumps on "Art Games"

[Elesar]

*deleted*

 

[Jumplion]

(if you actually read to the bottom of this, I salute you)

I did, do I get a cookie? I honestly couldn't really tell what the hell Jaffe was arguing about due to the ranty nature of it, but if there's anything I can agree with your own rant it would be the final paragraph.

Well played good sir.

It's ma'am, actually, but thanks. *grins*

Darn, I was reading through that rant with the voice of Morgan Freeman, now what do I do?

 

[Jumplion]

Praise you, David Jaffe. That's everything I've been trying to say for the longest time...

And what did he say? Seriously, I have no idea what he was yappin' and rantin' about, so could someone give a short, concise summary of what he went on about?

 

[drummond13]

I might be more inclined to weigh in on his statements if he mentioned even a single game he's referring to. How can anyone agree or disagree when we don't even know what titles he's referring to?

 

[Jumplion]

Praise you, David Jaffe. That's everything I've been trying to say for the longest time...

And what did he say? Seriously, I have no idea what he was yappin' and rantin' about, so could someone give a short, concise summary of what he went on about?

http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2011/03/shit-or-get-off-pot.html

Check it out for yourself., Better to hear in his own words, than in mine.

Yeah yeah, I read it, I just have no idea what he was talking about.

From what I understand, Jaffe doesn't like "poser art" games that people praise, claiming that it is detrimental to the developers (though he did not give any examples, which I think he did to save himself from the wrath of the games fanbase). Jaffe said something about chess and mancala, then said something about "traditional" games suffering because of all this, and there was a picture with the Thinker statue on a toilet.

Jaffe's rants are good for a laugh, though it's hard for me to take them entirely seriously when they slip off on a tangent.

 

[fierydemise]

Praise you, David Jaffe. That's everything I've been trying to say for the longest time...

And what did he say? Seriously, I have no idea what he was yappin' and rantin' about, so could someone give a short, concise summary of what he went on about?

I think the best summary of his argument is "Just because your game's surface elements shout from the rooftops that 'this is important and artistic and meaningful' doesn't make it so."

Basically the objection is not the concept of games as art on principle but rather to how the gaming community has been going about it. A very similar viewpoint was expressed by someone interviewed by the EC team at GDC (I saw it at PAX I suspect it will be up this week or so), something like art games cannot be their own genre and use that to hide their lack of gameplay. An artistically worthwhile game is not one that eschews gameplay to make an emotional or philosophical point but rather one that embraces gameplay to use it to tell that point. Consider Bioshock, it told an engaging story with heavy philosophical ideas almost entirely through gameplay and through visuals.

The other part of his argument is that many indie developers push the games as art line and proclaim their game high art to excuse the gameplay flaws. Good art doesn't need trumpeting, the power of an artistic work should be self evident. Jaffe isn't saying that games should not attempt to be art but rather that games should drop the beret wearing pretentiousness of art school grads and focus on making good games that happen to be artistic not artistic games that may happen to be good.

 

[Jumplion]

I think the best summary of his argument is "Just because your game's surface elements shout from the rooftops that 'this is important and artistic and meaningful' doesn't make it so."

Okay, would have been helpful if he had listed an example, though I'm sure he wanted to spare himself the fan rage of the game.

Basically the objection is not the concept of games as art on principle but rather to how the gaming community has been going about it. A very similar viewpoint was expressed by someone interviewed by the EC team at GDC (I saw it at PAX I suspect it will be up this week or so), something like art games cannot be their own genre and use that to hide their lack of gameplay. An artistically worthwhile game is not one that eschews gameplay to make an emotional or philosophical point but rather one that embraces gameplay to use it to tell that point. Consider Bioshock, it told an engaging story with heavy philosophical ideas almost entirely through gameplay and through visuals.

I'd be interested to see how the panel responded. I doubt the entire thing would be posted here.

The other part of his argument is that many indie developers push the games as art line and proclaim their game high art to excuse the gameplay flaws. Good art doesn't need trumpeting, the power of an artistic work should be self evident. Jaffe isn't saying that games should not attempt to be art but rather that games should drop the beret wearing pretentiousness of art school grads and focus on making good games that happen to be artistic not artistic games that may happen to be good.

Right now I don't think any developer is skilled enough to deliver both "high art" and "entertainment" to their games on a consistent basis. This medium still has a lot of room to grow, so we're bound to get our version of those "pretentious" foreign films with random symbolism and imagery.

The notion that "art" must somehow mean "pretentious/arty/high concept" or whatever is something that the industry will need to overcome sometime. Art in a game could easily be getting the central theme in the game across to the player. Whether or not games like The Path, Flower, or Braid are "art" doesn't really concern me, but I am always grateful that games like The Path, Flower, and Braid are being made. The Morrigan's response at the end of page 2 says it well, most innovations are going to be crap, but some will really push the envelope.

 

[Something Amyss]

Does it bother anyone else that our "industry giants" cant agree amongst themselves on the whole are games art thing?

I think that's probably the least concerning part. To me, it bothers me more that guys like this are our industry "giants," as I think Jaffe's response does quite a bit to trivialise mainstream games in and of itself.

But again, that could just be me.

 

[The Morrigan]

*snip*

Oh yeah, I definitely agree with all of your points (and you expressed them much more clearly and succinctly). I just think that if that's what Jaffe was really going for, he did not express it well.

 

[realslimshadowen]

I think he's confusing cinematic polish on presentation with marketing departments screaming "This is art! I swear it's art! If art were people, the Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa would be on their knees blowing the massive throbbing paintbrush tool of this art!" And, as mentioned, he cites no examples. He just says that there are people screaming at the top of their lungs that they have created ART! while they have in fact created a mere game.

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.

So why haven't we arrived? Here's a hint: take a look at films produced in any given year. I guaran-damn-tee you don't get better than 10% films that are a) original (i.e. not a sequel or adaptation) and b) actually worthy of the term "art". And of those, I'd guess 1% do well in box office.

We have arrived. But the games industry has the same pitfalls with regards to producing art as the film industry. Profit first, quality and innovation second. You would think someone working on the latest Twisted Metal game might realize that. That he somehow unironically compares "his" side to scientists and the "opposing" side to fundamentalist Biblical literalists, when he's the one resting on his laurels and saying he doesn't care if games ever become art, almost fucking offends me. And you do not want to know what kind of shit it takes to offend me.

Oh, and he adores Marvel comics. Now I'm a bit of a Marvelite myself, but if you adore Marvel after the past four years or so, your privilege to have opinions on what is and isn't art have officially been revoked.

In short: he managed to go on for pages without actually saying anything. Kind of like how he accuses game developers trying to make art of doing (oh dearie me, I think the kids would call that a burn).

 

[KafkaOffTheBeach]

Slightly off topic, but related to the thread and other posts, but I can't believe that there are still people arguing about "are games art?"
Grow the fuck up.

 

[Jumplion]

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]

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]

...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]

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]

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]

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]

"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.

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.

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]

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]

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.