jacog

ESPN seems to think Poker is a sport too. Spelling bees too.

The Wikipedia entry for art goes thus: "The term art is used to describe a particular type of creative production generated by human beings, and the term usually implies some degree of aesthetic value. An artist makes a work of art for various purposes, such as creating an experience for others or as part of a ritual. There is no general agreed-upon definition of art, since defining the boundaries of "art" is subjective, but the impetus for art is often called human creativity."

My opinion is that anything created to be admired is art. People do it, animals do it. From building skyscrapers, to forging carefully planned schemes to destroy them. From a bouquet of flowers, to a dung beetle's ball of poop. It's all art.

So yes... in my own personal opinion... Tetris is art. A painting might be art because it's there to be visually pleasing, but a game like Tetris is there to appeal to different senses. Massage is a form of art too. Learning to fight... it's called martial arts. Art art art... it's everywhere.

Your next argument is going to be that some things are created to be functional, therefore it's not art. But even something as butt-ugly as buildings in housing projects have to be designed... then people move in and start decorating them... wallpaper on the inside, graffiti on the outside. You should see shanty towns in South Africa... the poorest of poor people, living in shacks built out of tin sheets... but they cover the walls with things... magazine covers, newspapers etc. The end result is still art. My Swiss Army knife is defrinitely a work of art.

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MoriartyL

That's a very interesting view of art.

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Kurufinwe

I don't want to get involved in this thread because, well, been-there-done-that etc. Nevertheless, I just have to point out that this:

is ridiculous. Just because you don't enjoy, or even "get", the gameplay of adventure games doesn't mean everyone thinks the same. There are scores of adventures that had very little story, and/or whose story was terrible, and which were extremely popular nonetheless (starting with the original Adventure). What you're doing (and After a brisk nap as well, in a way) is assume that there's only one way to enjoy something -- and that's wrong. Some people are going to be interested in puzzles, others in exploration, others in characters, others in plot, etc. -- and one person can have different interests depending on his/her mood (for instance, I can play both Faust for its story and characters and The Sacred Rings for the pretty graphics and the puzzles -- and enjoy both, for different reasons).

It's just like you can't decide what someone who enjoys, or doesn't enjoy, a movie should focus on. You can't say: "never mind the characters, what matters is the camera movements" or anything of the sort. And any discussion that does that, that assumes that there's only one angle to look at something from, is never going to go anywhere -- especially when it pretends to discuss art.

Thanks for listening, you can now go back to your conversation.

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After a brisk nap

As I said, I used Okami as an example because it combines platform gameplay and adventure gameplay, and we can therefore see whether or not they "feel" similar or different, all things being equal. I posit that they do, and that similar design considerations go into creating good platform gameplay and good adventure gameplay. In my opinion, you can draw parallels between Super Mario Bros. and Monkey Island, even though the gameplay mechanics are quite different.

Incidentally, as far as I can tell "metalude" (as a word to describe Zelda-style games, not a term in psychology or literature) is a made-up term. Indeed, this thread is the top Google hit, and the second one is a blog comment signed "Mory".

Just because you say that challenge/reward just has to do with learning, not games specifically, doesn't mean that I agree. What makes games fun? Well, a lot of people think that it's because they very effectively (over)stimulate certain reward centers in our brain. That similar techniques are useful in teaching isn't the point. It's not exactly a secret that games can be useful to teach, anyway.

What you say I'm saying bears no relationship to anything I've actually said. For starters, what's this obsession over whether the controller is a real guitar? That's truly irrelevant.

I'm just saying that the game of Guitar Hero is more than, different than, just a guitar, or just playing on a guitar. Just like the game of basketball is more than and different from a basketball, or playing with a basketball.

This is pretty elementary stuff. Just sitting there strumming a guitar isn't a game. There's no right and wrong, no challenge, no reward. OK, now if you have notes (I believe the guitar notation uses tabs, but never mind), there's at least an implicit "right" and "wrong" way to play, and a challenge involved in following the tabs. That's a bit closer, but you can still break off, try the same bit multiple times, play at your own speed, and so on, and there's nothing to stop you. Now if the tabs scroll by, or come at you, then you implicitly need to play the right thing at the right time, and we're a bit closer still. Of course, the system still doesn't enforce that. But now say that it keeps track of when you play the right tab and when you get it wrong, and maybe keeps score. OK, now the challenge isn't just something in your head, it's embedded into the system. Now let's say that you have to get above a certain score to "complete" the song/level and move on to the next, or that if you make a certain number of mistakes you have to start over again, or that you have multiple people playing, and the person who gets the highest score is declared the "winner".

At the end of this process we have a game very much like Guitar Hero (we could have made different choices and got a somewhat different game). At the beginning we just had an instrument. Somewhere along this process, we reached a point where we could call what we had a game. Exactly where is somewhat subjective, as it's a gradual process. In my opinion, looking only at what's defined in the system itself and not additional rules or assumptions the players might bring to it (e.g. "it's about getting the highest score possible"), we don't have a complete game until the very last step. We have equipment for a game (i.e. a toy), but until the rules define what the object of the game is, it's not a real game. (Of course, there are many games where the "win" state or other ultimate goal is implicit, so I would say that the game consists of the system + that assumption.)

(There are a few additional steps beyond this to make it a good game, such as choosing the songs to have a reasonable difficulty curve, making the payoffs satisfying, and so on. That brings us back to challenge/reward...)

What would it take for Mario Paint to be a game? Well, one obvious answer is some kind of painting challenge. One possibility is something like the celestial brush mechanic in Okami. Another is some kind of art show, if we could get AI to a level of art criticism, or through human judges, maybe in an online play format. Maybe you could start out with only the pen tool, and as the game progresses you unlock the other tools? That sounds kind of fun, actually. Anyone wanna give me $15 mill to make Photoshop Hero?

Pinball. Don't know that it's an artform as such, but I've never seen anyone deny that computer pinball is a computer game.

OK, I've got to go. Will respond to the rest later.

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MoriartyL

Which is precisely why I prefaced what I said with "In my personal opinion,". And based on those opinions about what an adventure is, I can say without hesitation that it is an art form. If you have different views of what it is, then you could ask yourself whether you can see it as an art form. You might not.

Sure. You can also draw parallels between movies and concerts, or dance and sports, and you could even make a game mixing all four experiences into a cohesive whole in which jumping from one to the other doesn't feel awkward at all. You can connect anything to everything if you like. Doesn't mean they're really related.

I have never claimed otherwise. I thought everyone here already knew that I'd made up that word, since I've used it here so many times already. But if you'd like me to spell it out yet again: I object to the terms used to describe such games as Zelda, Pikmin and GTA (and Okami, incidentally), because they do never acknowledge that they are fundamentally the same type of game. So I made up the word "metalude" to describe them. "meta-" because it is a game which makes use of other types of games (on a base of exploration): Zelda's action/puzzles, Pikmin's strategy/puzzle/simulation, Beyond Good & Evil's stealth/platforming/action. They're all the same sort of experience. (GTA I include based on what little I've heard of it, but I could be wrong since I've never actually played it.) Anyway, I don't expect anyone but myself to use it, but I needed a term to describe these games so I invented it. Of course my posts are the only ones you'd find on Google.

There are many different types of fun. There's the fun I get from movies and adventures. There's the fun I get from wandering around in forests and playing Metroid. There's the fun I get from organizing things and playing simulations. There's the fun I get from jumping around and playing platformers. There's also the fun that comes from learning. A lot of different things can make games fun, and the "complete a challenge, get a prize" system is by no means the be-all and end-all of fun game design.


I will concede that the game of Guitar Hero is more than and different from the Guitar Hero disc.

I beg to differ. The player knows what's right and what's wrong based on what he's trying to play, he's challenged to play it, and he's rewarded by hearing it. Even without notes. But I'll listen to the rest of your argument:Okay, I've listened. Now tell me- how is a concert not a game? In fact, how is it even significantly different from Guitar Hero? There's a pretty explicit "right" and "wrong". A message might not flash in front of your eyes telling you "You messed up!", but you definitely feel every success and failure, same (I would imagine) as in Guitar Hero. The point tally is kept in your head, yes, but it's there. In a standard concert, the player can't change the music in the middle; he's following a set path, along a set tempo. And I should stress that even though none of this is digitally programmed, it's not really self-imposed. It's built into the concert system. You can't go out in front of a crowd and mess up and not feel bad about it. So the experience is the same as if you were being told everything visually. But moving on: At the end, you're judged by the audience, whose appreciation is essentially the same as the points you get by the end of a level. If you completely mess up, they're not going to clap very hard, and if you play brilliantly they'll give a standing ovation. Challenge, reward. If you do really badly, you're booed off the stage and can't play the next level.

So you've got rules. You've got structure. You've got clear goals. You've got a reward system. You've got everything you say you need for the act of playing music to qualify as a game. But you're not going to call it a game, are you?

Now, say we do call it a game. What does this tell us about videogames? Well, it tells us one way in which videogames can be art. Give the player an interface as complex and deep as a musical instrument, have them play out something artistic (There needs to be a Practice Mode to study it, like I've seen in F-Zero GX.), and maybe even allow the output to be streamed over the internet to audiences. This recreates the concert experience, which is art. And so this game would also be art. Now, some people might say it's not art, but it's just got art in it that the player is going along with. But that's like saying that a concert isn't art, only the music that's being played is. And a concert is art enough for me.


Great point! You got me there.

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SnorkleCat

First, I didn't actually say that ice skating was a "game." I said that ice skating might be a better analogy for an adventure game than your soccer example because of the artistry required in addition to the athleticism. To take it a bit further, consider the creative elements as the story and the athletics as the puzzles. Pure athletics without the twirly-whirly-fancy footwork-watch-how-well-I-skate-backwards bits would receive low marks, as would pure artistry without the athletic demonstrations. One must have sparkly costumes, fluttery fringe, a goofy smile, and the Rocky soundtrack for it to be successful figure skating...but one must also execute the triple axel-double toeloop combinations cleanly, again, for it to be considered figure skating. It's some of both, otherwise it would be a different sport/art.

As for chess having a story, it has only just enough story to make its existence possible. Period. I suppose you could give all your pawns names and issue moving speeches to the troops and confer with your bishops on the despotic White King across the valley...but it has absolutely nothing to do with the game play.

As for soccer, that's pure combat with more rigid rules, team against team, strategy against strategy with a clear objective to defeat the other side by scoring goals. Considering soccer as a game, the story would be wholly optional, rather as it is in chess. Such a game does not RELY on creative elements; they're just gravy- often yucky, distracting gravy.

My opinion? Adventure games can of course be "art" (can't anything?) and have the potential to offer valuable literary contributions in a way that other types of games do not. I do think that the story is the most important element and that "game play" must always follow it, with the two ideally meshed into one seamless creation.

After a brisk nap

I'm preparing my lawsuit as I speak.

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