No Mutants Allowed

[Brother None]

The Smithsonian is setting up a 5-era exhibit for video games, and hoi polloi gets to vote for what makes it in. Wisely it's been split into eras so it's not just Halo and Call of Duty. Ausir says the candidates of interest to us include Wasteland in Era 2, Fallout in Era 4 and Fallout 3 in Era 5.

[Ausdoerrt]

The poll doesn't seem to be working properly...

[Guiltyofbeingtrite]

Yea, I think it's getting a lot more traffic than they anticipated, being that the museum is half a mile from my office I'll be sure to post pictures when it opens.

edit: drats, in a year.

[Ausir]

Actually, Fallout is in era 4, not 3.
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The Vault - Fallout Wiki *Wasteland 2 Wiki * Torment and Numenera Wiki

[Brother None]

[frosty_theaussie]

Sucks that you have to choose between Fallout and Grim Fandango.
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"People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have."

[Idiotfool]

Too early to include Fallout 3, I think. I don't see it influencing many future titles, nor is it really all that "artistic". Even with Morrowind, the only games it influenced are other Bethesda titles, and that's only loosely...

[Little Robot]

That's really cool, I wish that I could go see this exhibit.

It's interesting that it seems to focus on home video games, specifically-- especially since the time period covers arcade games as well as home systems. Many arcade games had a lot of art put into the machine itself as well as the games, so that would be a cool exhibit to see.

[))<>((]

Fallout is a better game than Grim Fandango, but vote from an "Artistic perspective".

Grim Fandango is more art than Fallout.


If people are going to take the medium seriously as an art form then you have to show them the correct aspects.
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[TheRatKing]

[))<>((]

Polls, Reality shows, and other illusions of involvement in the processes of society are the future mang!
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[Ausdoerrt]

@BN: Well, it's an exhibition of art more than anything else. IMO FO1/2 weren't that great from an artistic perspective. Had great music and plot, but nothing great in terms of visuals/artwork that I'm familiar with. Planescape, on the other hand... Although even a lot of Planescape stuff will look odd outside the context of the game.

EDIT: Boy, did they pick the most boring picture ever to represent Baldur's Gate. And yep, PS:T isn't even on the list.

[TheRatKing]

PS:T had some great visuals, especially when you got to the higher tier spells.

The best art in the game was far from visual based though. The fact that it had characters of any depth makes it lead well ahead of many many games on the site.
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Fallout: Grim Fandango

[))<>((]

Planescape would be a hard game to present at an art exhibit, unless you lock viewers in a dark room, feed them ritalin, and force them to play the game to the ending
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[Ausdoerrt]

@Ratking: Well, I know that, same for all RPGs from that period, but PS:T actually had great art to back it up. The loading screen design alone is worth a lot.

Why games like CoD or Epic Mickey are even on the list baffles me. I'm guessing the publishers of those games are sponsoring the event And out of ALL FF games from the 4th era, they had to choose FFVII and FFT, the two ugliest FF games ever made (well FFT isn's so much ugly as visually boring with the oppressively persistent green-brown palette). A nod to the fanboys more than anything else.

Aand, not a single game on PC in era 5 that I've played and thought to be great artistically (well, maybe Portal, but only marginally). Borderlands, Divinity 2, Crysis, Sublustrum, Turgor (and I could go on) deserve to be on the list a lot more than the mainstream games with generic VG art that are on the list. Applies to many other consoles/periods as well - it looks like they're just advertising games from a few big companies (that probably contrubuted funds - would explain why there isn't a single Capcom game on the list), and just have a few random indie games thrown in to appear "comprehensive".

[Diospyros]

I hate that I have to choose between Fallout and Baldur's Gate II. As much as I love Fallout, I think BGII was the greatest RPG ever made so I had to vote for it.

I did enjoy seeing Intellivision games in Era 1. That was my very first introduction into gaming as a kid and it brought back a lot of memories.

Overall I agree that too little thought was put into the choices.

[sea]

I appreciate this exhibit, I really do, but there are a lot of problems with the way the information is being presented and voted on. I'm not going to lie, this reads like an attempt to gain some relevancy points with the younger generation, but the shallowness of the gesture shows through in how sloppily and ill-conceived the process is.

For starters, popularity is never a good metric to determine historical relevance or success. Some of the most influential and fondly-remembered games of all time didn't sell as many copies as the later titles that borrowed from them. Putting, say, BioShock on this list but ignoring System Shock 2 would be an utter crime.

Second, there really needs to be some sort of genre separation. Half-Life is amazing, but I don't think it's the best game from its time period; despite that, I shouldn't have to decide between it and something like Fallout. Seeing games go ignored simply because people had to choose between a few of them isn't fair to the particularities of the medium.

Third, there aren't enough eras on display here. I think it's silly to lump in the beginning of the 2000s with the end of the 2000s; games have undergone some major, major changes since then, some for the better and some for worse. The approaches taken to design and production have resulted in very, very different experiences and having just "era 5" doesn't acknowledge that.

Fourth, and my most severe complaint, is that there is an implicit hierarchy in the way that these games are being framed. While I don't know exactly how the exhibit will turn out in the end, the way it's being posed as of now suggests continual growth and improvement. While to some degree that's true, I don't think it's at all right to imply that newer games are better than older games simply by virtue of being made in a time period where design has become a far more concrete discipline. This is an inherent problem with how we understand numbers (the bigger, the better), and the Smithsonian had damn well better do their best to get around it.

[Ausdoerrt]

^ One point you're missing, people are supposed to vote on the ART, not how GOOD the games were. There's a plenty of good games with bland art.

[sea]

[Ausir]