DinoDeLaurentiis wrote:Anna I know that a the TITG, he gonna to be sad iffa the Mandingo, she not a be made.
ThisIsTheGirl wrote:I'm quite interested to know which development studios you really admire - I'm a big fan of Treasure and Sega-Am2
burlivesleftnut wrote:Fable, which was released last year, was a beautiful game and the interactivity was built into the story with purpose. That work was guided by one story telling master who directed a team to bring his vision to fruition.
DinoDeLaurentiis wrote:Spielberg's first a game, she gonna to be call a the "Touch a the Face of a the Hero" anna inna the game, you play a the group of a the children, anna you gotta to find a the Hero anna get him a to cry a so's a you can a touch his a face.
Anna Johnny Williams, he's a gonna to do a the "touchy face" music a too, eh?
The Ginger Man wrote: Atlus' Trauma Center: Under the Knife. Capcom's Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Lord Voldemoo wrote:I hope that for Fable II, assuming they make one, they will take the time and money constraints off of the game designers...
An AO rating is tantamount to death, and many game designers will steer safely away from that possibility, even at the expense of the story they are trying to tell. Unlike film, in which an NC-17 rated film may find alternative channels of distribution via DVD, etc., video games have no established alternative distribution venue for such adult-rated games.
Lord Voldemoo wrote:Please bear in mind, I didn't mean ALL constraints, but certainly money/release date issues led to Fable being released as it originally was. In this case these constraints led to the release of a product that was not anywhere close to its potential, which is sad...
Pudie wrote:It also doesn't help that Moleneux(sp?) hyped it up to be a LOT more then it ended up being.
Lord Voldemoo wrote:I partially blame the hype machine. Fable was certainly overhyped, but after having played it you can see WHY it got so much hype. The potential was there. With a little more love and time, it could easily lived up to it.
Answer Man wrote:Q. Thank you for jump-starting a discussion about the relative artistic and critical merit of video games as compared to film and books. I do take issue when you argue that video games can never have the merit of a great film or novel. You say: "There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."
Where you see a flaw, I see promise. Arguing that games are inherently inferior because books and movies are better at telling stories and leading us through an author-driven experience is begging the question. It's like saying that photography is better than painting because photos make more accurate visual records.
The invention of photography sparked a crisis in the world of painting: "Why should we paint if pictures can do it better?" But then painters figured out that there were lots of other things that they could do, that cameras can't. Now we see an enormous explosion of creativity in the world of painting. And another different explosion in the world of photography.
We agree that games are inherently different from films and books. I believe they are at their worst when they try to mimic films and books, and at their best when they exploit this difference to create experiences that films, books, and all the other art forms cannot. No one criticizes sculpture for failing to tell a story as well as a good movie.
Many people would agree with you that there aren't yet any games that rival the best films or books that you care to list. Game makers are only just beginning to understand that games are not films/books with action sequences. I think that you'll see that the more we work that out, the more we will find ways of creating meaningful artistic works that are unlike anything anyone's seen before.
Tim Maly, designer, Capybara Games, Toronto
A. If or when that happens, I hope I will approach it with an open mind. This debate has taken on a life of its own. In countless e-mails and on a dozen message boards, I've found that most of the professionals involved in video games are intelligent and thoughtful people like yourself. A large number of the video game players, alas, tell me "you suck" or inform me that I am too old. At 63, I prefer such synonyms as "wise" and "experienced."
Today I received a message from Professor David Bordwell (retired) of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who is generally thought of as the leading scholarly writer on film; the textbooks he has written by himself and with Kristin Thompson are used in a majority of the world's film classrooms. What he said was intriguing on a practical level:
"The last dissertation I'm directing is on video games as they compare to film. The guy is bright, so we let him do it. But he brought his games and game platform to my house to give me some experience on this medium. I lasted through 15 minutes of 'Simpson's Road Rage,' largely because my coordination is so poor. Even if I got good on the controls, what keeps me away is the level of commitment. The idea of spending hours at this boggles my mind.
"My student told me that the most sophisticated games require up to 100 hours to master. In 100 hours we can watch 25 Bollywood films or 50-plus Hollywood/ foreign features or 80 B-films or 750 Warner Bros. cartoons. Depending on how fast you read, in the same interval you can probably finish reading 20-30 books. Not to mention 25-35 operas or 100-120 symphonies. And that's just for one game! On the basis of my very limited experience, and given my tastes (a big part of the issue here), the problem with video games is that they're too much like life -- too much commitment for thin and often frustrating results."
The Ginger Man wrote:Lord Voldemoo wrote:I partially blame the hype machine. Fable was certainly overhyped, but after having played it you can see WHY it got so much hype. The potential was there. With a little more love and time, it could easily lived up to it.
The thing with Fable is that they made such outragous claims BEFORE they knew if it was possible to program the game that way. Once they discovered they couldn't live up to their original idea/hype, they can't tell the public...well, it's not all that we said. They have to keep up the illusion. Which is why I think companies need to hold off on the self-back patting until they actually know what they can do.
The Ginger Man wrote:Have to blame the hype machine on this one. If developers/publishers would shut their mouths and not talk about a game until they have a better grip on it, then things would be fine.
MasterWhedon wrote:This got posted in Ebert's Sunday Answer Man column:Ebert wrote:"My student told me that the most sophisticated games require up to 100 hours to master. In 100 hours we can watch 25 Bollywood films or 50-plus Hollywood/ foreign features or 80 B-films or 750 Warner Bros. cartoons. Depending on how fast you read, in the same interval you can probably finish reading 20-30 books. Not to mention 25-35 operas or 100-120 symphonies. And that's just for one game! On the basis of my very limited experience, and given my tastes (a big part of the issue here), the problem with video games is that they're too much like life -- too much commitment for thin and often frustrating results."
ThisIsTheGirl wrote:It almost seems like companies can't control their emotions - as soon as they get some decent screenshots, they pump them out to anybody who can be bothered to listen - it's hella lame
Chilli wrote:Games shouldn't be art.
They should be fun.
But so should movies. If a movies isn't fun to watch, then IMO its a waste of fucking time.
Films are for bohemian assholes.
Chilli wrote:Games shouldn't be art.
They should be fun.
But so should movies. If a movies isn't fun to watch, then IMO its a waste of fucking time.
Films are for bohemian assholes.
Scabby Robert Egghead wrote:There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.
But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.
Art
Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.
The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.
The study of these activities.
The product of these activities; human works of beauty considered as a group.
happydude3 wrote:I'm not really a gamer, although I do enjoy them once in a while. I AM an Ebert fan as I usually agree with his opinions on movies, but I'm reminded of something Dylan said when asked how he felt about his songs being taught in academic settings. I'm totally paraphrasing, but he responded along the lines of 'That's fine, but they're not poems or literature, they're songs and that's something different.' I couldn't agree with this more. A play in (insert your choice of sport here) isn't art, but that doesn't make it any less important in and of itself. By the way, I'm new, so skewer away. I need to develop some callusses. I have no idea how to spell callusses.
The sincerest form of imitation
Games' relationship with cinema is pretty simple: Games rip it off.
Games are, hugely, a derivative art-form. Their best visual motifs and scenarios are taken directly from one movie or another. What's amazing is how relatively few in number these are. This article evolved from a conversation with a designer friend of mine when we tried to work out the smallest number of films we'd have to remove from existence to destroy the game industry in its current state. With a short-list of six thrown into the void, the industry would be barely recognizable, full of designers stroking their chin and thinking, "You know, I know we have to drop our soldiers from an orbital vessel to the ground in some manner of ship, but God knows what we could use."
Clearly, cinema is derivative culture, too. Films echo films all the time. But at least a filmmaker had a bright idea somewhere along the line. Games echoing film just implies that game developers aren't smart enough to think up ideas themselves. That films are now taking from games doesn't particularly help address the imbalance either. Taking games' derivative plots, settings and mores
and turning them into cinema only ends in concentrated derivativeness; a photocopy of a photocopy. The actual original bits of game culture integrated go no further than the occasional first-person shot in a movie like Doom.
The real hopes for turning parasitism into symbiosis lie outside the films, which are directly licensed. The games that resonate most are those which make themselves influential, like NHL being used sociologically in Swingers. And if you look outside of cinema, games' cultural mores weigh heavy on comics, like Scott Pilgrim, or TV series, like Spaced.
But, this process is relatively new and has a long way to go yet. At the moment, the conceptualists of videogames are often indebted to cinema to the point of creative bankruptcy. Admittedly, some fare better than others. Even if cinema is stripped away totally, specific genres walk away with relatively few scars. Until Lord of the Rings, fantasy cinema was only a small influence on Western Fantasy games. They took either from a literary source or good-ol' Dungeons & Dragons. Eastern fantasy games' influences are equally hard to tie down to a direct singular influence. Outside fantasy, sports games would be pretty much untouched. However, it's interesting to speculate what sports games would look like if you didn't draw from modern television's coverage of sporting events.
Some other sub-genres are left bereft. Fantasy games can get away without movies, just about. Science fiction games just fall apart. For as long as videogames have been a rising cultural force, the primary way science fiction has been consumed is on the silver screen. While Halo quietly took some pieces from Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, its more celluloid-inspired riffs were more obvious. Irrational's forthcoming BioShock - inspired by objectivist classic (yes, I know: contradiction in terms) Atlas Shrugged - really is in a minority.
The following list is our best attempt to collate those who have been pillaged so often by games, it's almost reached the point where we've forgot where the component elements came from. In terms of series, we're taking the film which was taken from most. If any of these films had never happened, the game industry would be so screwed they'd even have to - ladies, hold your man, gentlemen, pour a stiffening brandy - try being original for a change.
Mad Max 2
Mad Max manages the rare trick of both being enormously influential and curiously ignored. In terms of its look - once described by JG Ballard as "Punk's Sistine Chapel" - it entirely cemented the idea of what anything even vaguely post-apocalyptic should look like. Yes, come the end of the world, everyone will immediately attach bits of car tires to their shoulders and apply a car-grease foundation to their features.
Dawn of the Dead
When the game shops are full of games which take from George Romero movies, the dead will walk the earth. It will come soon enough. Especially in certain sub-genres - anything that marches with a shuffling gait beneath the banner of the survival/horror game - the images of society falling apart (shortly followed by the remaining humans) lingers in many a designer's mind. It would probably be cruel to suggest that the zombies have inspired a considerable number of AI programmers over the years, even when not programming zombies.
The Matrix
For all its success, The Matrix arguably would have scored higher if it was a less derivative work itself. For example, the trench coat and shades was already a post-cyberpunk cliché, and visible in Matrix-contemporary games like Deus Ex. And we didn't see anyone try bullet-time until the Wachowski brothers showed how cool it was, despite the fact the Wachowskis had to arrange a million cameras in a circle in a particularly laborious process. To get bullet-time working in games, developers just had to stop the game's progress and waggle the camera around a bit.
Full Metal Jacket
Pre-1970s war movies are rarely influential on videogames. It took America's disillusionment with Vietnam to mix up the genre until it made more sense in the modern world. But of those classics, it's Full Metal Jacket whose shadow in games is longest.
Why? Because it's the most fun. As much as the depths cut through you while watching it, the memories people take from Full Metal Jacket are the ones which - whisper it - entertain. While R. Lee Ermey's drill instructor is one of cinema's greatest sadists, he's a fun sadist to be around, and as such it's rare to see a drill sergeant in a game not reference his performance.
The Terminator
RoboCop or The Terminator? RoboCop or The Terminator? RoboCop almost made it, through the simple beauty of its ED-209 design, which will be re-used as long as a designer needs a robot to have the dual abilities of carrying enough firepower to flatten an average town and looking a bit like a gawky chicken. In the end, The Terminator pulls clear, with the design of the titular robots being regularly pillaged - though perhaps its panoramas of the mankind's future war proved even more influential, for all their brief appearance. Tangentially, the first-person views of the Terminator (and RoboCop) are clearly in mind when any developer has strove to make the HUD an atmospheric part of the experience rather than mere decoration.
Saving Private Ryan
Spielberg's reinvention of the modern war movie acted as a sharp kick in the head for games' World War II games. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the ground-level chaotic battle scenes that were most influential. It's easy to compare pre-Ryan WW2 games to ones after it and note the phenomenal increase in spectacle. The action games pre-Ryan were like Hidden and Dangerous - stately boys-own adventures which were often almost understated. Post-Ryan, you're in Allied Assault's recreation of the film's opening. Even the more strategic games - like this year's peerless Company of Heroes - are aware that it's those minutes that are affixed in the majority of gamers' minds when it comes to What War Should Look Like.
Perhaps most interesting is Saving Private Ryan's influence on games outside of the period. Its low-level shaking hand-camera view of the action can be seen in other action games attempt to ground the action. Consider Gears of War's run function, complete with camera-shake.
Evil Dead 2
In short: Hero kills hordes of monsters, makes wise-cracks and wields chainsaws. What could be more videogame? While Romero's films have had more influence in a smaller number of genres, Evil Dead's influence reaches further, especially in the early '90s, when id Software was doing the closest videogames have come to articulating the inchoate cry of the teenage metalhead by bringing album covers to life. The more extreme demonic energy of Evil Dead was a clear inspiration to Doom's gates to hell. Of course, elsewhere in the world of first-person shooters, 3D Realms took the lighter tone - and lifted lines - to create Duke Nukem. While the Dawn of the Dead is what action games turn to when they want to take themselves a little bit seriously, when the dials are turned to 11, a developer is certain to consider digging out an old VHS Copy of Evil Dead.
Blade Runner
Put it like this: Blade Runner invented the future. While others' view of the future is clear fantasy, as Ridley Scott's world unveils in front of us, there's a nagging worry that we may end up living there. Clearly, Blade Runner is a film that has had huge cultural impact on how everyone portrays the day after tomorrow.
Star Wars
If we were looking across the whole life of videogames, it's arguable that Star Wars would be the single most influential movie in the industry's history. Its release in 1977 provided inspiration in everything from high level ideas like game types (Space Invaders was created in 1978. Space remained the natural adventure-playground for games for years afterward) to the base implementation (even if videogame tech could have made more realistic noises, with Star Wars influence, it's entirely possible they'd still have applied an exciting and iconic array of bleeps). A virtual sub-industry has been created around the Star Wars franchise, and when a developer wishes to present an enormous space battle, he's thinking of matching what Lucas managed.
Aliens
Ironically, while Alien was the original, it's Aliens where the majority of developers go when their creative well runs dry. For example, Giger's original design for the body-horror, genitalia-phobic organic alien has inspired anyone who sat down to workout something icky to shoot, but the implementation in games owes more to Aliens. An alien's lifecycle is too iconic to take without being too obvious, but the more generalized egg-laying queen has been used time and time over. Any alien race, if they're not taking from the "Grays" of urban folklore, is more often than not Giger-derived. But that isn't even the primary influence. Instead, the movie's Colonial Marines provide the backbone for everything from Halo to Command & Conquer's view of the future. Where in even the dirtiest parts of the Star Wars universe are elements of romance, the Colonial Marines take their own visual cues from a post-Vietnam military with its array of firepower, gung-ho slogans and omnipresent wise-cracks. The Colonial Marine's weaponry provides the backbone of most shooters. Hell, if they managed to cram a mini-gun into the movie, they'd have a majority shareholding in weapons stocks in any given shooter. It goes on an on, and watching Aliens can feel like an advertising video for game hardware. The drop-ship design specifically is borrowed whenever an orbital landing is called for. Actually pre-empting Full Metal Jacket, the easy, brutal camaraderie is reprised time and time over. Developers make use of the Marines' hand-scanners, which chirped faster the closer the enemy way, to build tension. The specific design of the armor, all clasps and hard edges, shows up everywhere. Even the use of dropped flares as a cliffhanger comes from Aliens. The billowing smoke and blue light that director James Cameron fills the corridors with are modern games' default atmosphere.
If we removed Aliens from existence, the list of games left without a premise could have filled this article. To badly paraphrase Voltaire: If Aliens didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it. And really, that would just be too much work, wouldn't it?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/comments/781
Kieron Gillen has been writing about videogames for far too long now. His rock and roll dream is to form an Electro-band with Miss Kittin and SHODAN pairing up on vocals.
If we removed Aliens from existence, the list of games left without a premise could have filled this article. To badly paraphrase Voltaire: If Aliens didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it. And really, that would just be too much work, wouldn't it?
MonkeyM666 wrote:Graphics are in the spotlight with gaming at the moment… but not for all systems/platforms. Nintendo show that they want to push for the game not the graphics. It’s a form of media like no other with regards to its dynamic nature and endless possibilities. As well as the fact that it now slams Hollywood with generating entertainment revenues.
Games as art… now I’m not sure about that. I believe that games are entertaining, exciting, controversial and all the bits in between but to call it art? I would think that calling something art means that it’s been refined and definitive choices have been made towards moving the medium forward. So I guess yes, but it’s like asking when did wall painting turn into art…. Hard question.
I'm defiantly not saying that video games are just a cheap knock off of cinema. Zelda, Final Fantasy and the like franchises are their own entities.... It’s just that everything has its origins. I’d say that everything, these days at least, feeds off of everything else.
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