Ixyroth said:
There is nothing inherently inferior about games as a medium - books, movies, music and games all have their place.
You’d have to be dumb to compare them qualitatively.
The fact is that games are dumb because the establishment wants them to be dumb. Period. It's not a question of technical limitation. Most movies, and many books are dumb for the same reason. And this trend will continue. Media will get dumber, the population will get dumber, then the media again, then the population again. It's a vicious circle.
And this is were we differ: I say that there is something about the medium that prevents it to become less “dumb” (simply put). And also: I think making games less “dumb” should not be the goal of game developers in the first place.
UncannyGarlic said:
By suggesting that all games have to have audio/visual elements you are artificially restricting the medium as there have been many text only games.
Ah yes. That’s why I wrote “today’s games”. Text only games are usually called interactive fiction nowadays: it’s basically a text (words) incorporating an element (interaction) that is found in games. It’s actually a brilliant example of how incorporating new elements (plus) limits your remaining possibilities (minus): the whole grammatical structure of your text almost comes predefined: most often these games are written in second person singular (“
You come into a large hallway. To
your right is a cupboard.”) Incorporating the interactive element even limits you in a real spatial way: you can’t carry the text around so easily anymore, you can’t just print it out and carry it in your pocket, ready to read whenever you want to, no, you need an extra tool to make that happen. There’s certainly more, but I’m too tired to think about it any further.
Anyway, “in short”:
Each and every “artform”, each expression we make is part of a spectrum, a continuous line covering all other forms of expression. Each artform shares similar elements with other artforms (movies have moving pictures and words and sounds, comics have pictures and words as well). Some artforms use one element only (or definitely predominantly): classical music does this ever so clearly, but often literature does so as well (you can have illustrated books, though). Instrumental music is the purest: it does not refer to anything in the real world, it’s self-referential. When you hear a ‘do’, you might think about your taxes, while someone else might think of his grandmother falling down the stairs and breaking her collar bone. Then comes literature, using 26 signs and a couple of interpunction marks or whatever the fuck they are called. Words are weird because they interact with each other and not seldom it is not the word that creates the meaning but the context. Words can change their meaning in an instant. Pictures can do that as well, but with more effort since they are much more tied to reality: forget Magritte because a picture of an egg will be seen as... (a picture of) an EGG by most sensible human beings (and pomo is so passé anyway). That’s why we are living in a pictorial world today: pictures take away most of the ambivalence of words and certainly of music. Humans can’t stand uncertainty. It kills them. You know this to be true.
Music, words and pictures are the building blocks of every artform, every discipline (except maybe dance, I need to ponder about this). They are like atoms and they can form molecules with certain traits, possibilities and limitations. It’s fucking math at its core, really.
Now you have to take into account the medium you will be using: it too has its limitations, possibilities, characteristics. It’s a recepticle that can be filled with your building blocks: you are making a cocktail. Now with games today you’ll be filling your recepticle with lots of eyecandy (pictures), a soundtrack (music), dialogue (words) and a way for the reader to interact with all of this (game mechanics). Every element you add (this is the plus) lowers your remaining possibilities (that’s your minus).
If I write a book, I can use all the literary techniques out there to reach my goal, finish my project. I can illustrate it (adding pictures) but in doing so I limit the amount of interpretations I send out to my reader, I reduce the richness of my simple text. Compare “The little blond girl caressed her little pussy and whispered: “I feel so happy today.”” With
[spoiler:6a02f3c299]
The little blond girl caressed her little pussy and whispered: “I feel so happy today.”[/spoiler:6a02f3c299]
Get it? This is in fact such a simple and logical system that I feel surprised I even have to explain it. And this is just an illustrated book we’re talking about! It gets even worse when you go to strips and then to movies and then to games: you add more elements, you basically make the form more complex, but that has severe repurcussions for the content: you automatically simplify it, yeah, you “dumbify” it. And no goddamn closure is going to prevent that from happening.
My point (and I think Eyenixon’s point as well) is that game developers ought to concentrate more on the game elements instead of the eyecandy (pictures), sounds and words because the only thing they do is that they restrict games of being innovative again (getting them to a higher level).
All I hear on these boards and in this thread is that games should focus more on secondary elements like dialogue (“Boohoo! Dialogue so dumb in FO3! Bethesda writers suck!”). I say that this would be in vain because the literary possibilities of games are restricted by the medium and the interaction with the other elements used in said medium.
You guys should have gotten the hint years ago: in which way have graphical engines (pictures) resulted in innovation? They haven’t. It just looks... nicer (sometimes). It’s cosmetics. And that’s all it can become in games. It sucks up a large portion of the budget for a game developer, and ha! it ain’t even what games should be about.
If you want game innovation, you need to get rid of the preoccupation with imagery but also with sounds and dialogue. The last two offer little or no room for improvement and the first one is just the cashcow for the whole software/hardware industry (UPGRADE NOW!).
But hey: that’s just my opinion. I’m the kind of guy that when he wants to read some cool texts just opens a book, when he wants to see cool pictures goes to the museum or watches a flick, and when he wants to hear music, he’ll just put on some Radiohead. I’ve dabbled in crossover crap during the nineties. I once did a poetry slam with a hiphopband and I’ve seen all those hybrid fabrications crossover artists produce: they’re fun once. The notion that media are flexible enough to mix together soon fades when you do it yourself and see projects by others: there are matches made in heaven there, but more often they were fabricated in hell.
I also think that the whole discussion of books vs. movies artificially limits the possibilities of film. Series use most of the same tools that movies do but don't have the same restrictions, such as time and resolution at the end of each allotment, allowing for them to have bigger, more complex stories.
I find it funny how similes and analogies completely throw people on this board off. “That’s a bad comparison because...” Ha! Comparisons always only have so many similarities, the rest is deadwood and should be ignored, that’s the whole point of a comparison, simile, analogy.
I for one never intended to make this into a game vs book discussion, I simply compare it to books because that’s what I know best. Again: that’s how comparisons work.
PS Also: last post on this subject from me.
