Treblaine said:
What if that is the artist's intention?
In the Metal Gear Solid series you can rank up a huge body count, to spite the game being all about stealth you can end up with a lot of blood on your hands to the point that killing becomes almost routine. Then Kojima pounces and uses that against you in a poignant and I'd say artistically significant way.
I'd say is it snobbery to say "You can't do this very general thing and still be artistically significant".
I think a good example of this would be in the movie Kick-Ass where it's used to create a comical effect. It can be done and it can be done well, but I don't think that in most cases it's a conscious decicion by the developer.
I assume the moment you're talking about is the river dream sequence in MGS3. I admit that I think it was a clever move, but the rest of the game (and in fact, the whole series) is so batshit fucking insane that any point that the game is trying to make is rendered moot under all the bullshit.
Well books do the same, it's just that the gaming press give more emphasis to the form.
For example books are described as written from First or Third person perspective. And a game that is described as a "sandbox" how is that different from books being described as a "saga"?
True, but I've never heard anyone call "Lord of the Flies" a third-person survival. I think that in general, games should have a bigger emphasis on storytelling and narrative. At the moment, the genre of a game is defined by the mechanics you are given to resolve the conflicts in between the story sections (in most cases at least), and I think that this is very crippling to the medium. A lot of people who could potentially do great things with games are turned off by the way games represent themselves.
Also, I don't think you know what saga means.
That's the principal but DO NOT MAKE UNFAIR COMPARISONS! There is no escaping the fact that books are EXTREMELY different from games, so that they must be categorised by how they are played.
I honestly don't think that books and movies are so extremely diffrent from each other. A story is a story, it doesn't matter if you read it, hear it, see it or experience it, it will always be a linear succession of events (well... you know what I'm talking about). Of course there are multiplayer games or toybox games like Call of Duty and Minecraft that canno't be replicated in any other medium, but I don't play those games and therefore am not qualified to talk about them.
All books are essentially consumed the same way, if you can read one (barring translations) you can read them all. Games not so much. They are categorised for very practical reasons as not everyone can play RTS games, and not everyone can play FPS games.
Okay, so this is what I think is the problem. Most games make you resolve conflicts by testing your reflexes. Games relay way too heavily on gunplay, because that's the easiest way of making a sequence interactive in their minds. Developers already have the toolsets to create a functional shooter, so a first-person shooter where you only kill ten people would not be worth the effort because you'd have to create new ways to make scenes interactive and a new engine to make them work. Why do that when it would be much easier to just put a horde of bad guys between you and the next plotpoint.
Look games do not HAVE to be in a clear genre to be accepted or successful.
I mean what the hell genre is Portal in? A first-person Puzzler? You don't have any guns to fire.
You describe a situation that could exist but IT DOES NOT!
There are so many good games that defy the "rules" with no detriment, like Condemned, Portal, Mirror's Edge, AAAaa Reckless Disregard for Gravity.
Portal is a puzzle game because you have to solve all the conflicts the protagonist faces by solving puzzles. Mirror's Edge is a platformer because you have to solve all the conflicts the protagonist faces by platforming (Mirror's Edge was a horrible game, though). Condemned is an action game because you have to solve all the confilcts the protagonist faces by beating up hobos and junkies. Of course there are crime scene investigations, but those are awful, and it's still mostly about beating up poor people. I haven't played Reckless Disregard for Gravity so you might have me there. But nevertheless, there was a pattern forming up.
That's just petty, that's like saying "look at the best movies ever made, they can't hold themselves up to the greatest books ever written"
It's nothing like that, because that your statement is false. My point is that I've seen and read countless of pieces of art that have had an emotional and intellectual impact on me, but there are only two games that have had any sort of impact on me.
Pointless comparisons. Deus Ex - like many games - defies your arbitrarily strict genre rules though could be described as a First-Person-Shooter though it is much more than that.
You have to understand that I don't hate games. I love games, why would I be on the Escapist if I didn't. I'm actively looking for games that had meaning and depth to them. Deus Ex is one of these games. But still Deus Ex is flawed in many ways. My point is that there is nothing worng in demanding more, It's what we humans do. If we would've never had any sort of ambition, we'd still be hairy and bare-assed, picking berries in Africa. Games could very well become a meaningful part of our culture. But for that to happen games must evolve, and they never will if developers keep making the same games over and over again. People say that if there were only art and no entertainment it would be horrible, but I think that no art and only entertainment is much more horrible.
But neither Half Life or Deus Ex are you a "god-like murder machine" no more so than the typical protagonist of the great literary and motion picture works.
I don't think "Commando" and "Rambo" count as great motion picture works.
