Though I tried my hardest to keep the fame with another ranting post about video games and art, alas my sparkling days are over.
Anyway, I was looking at my declining graph of traffic. It had spiked last week from 2 to 3000 views. Since then, it has made a steady decline downward: 2,000 views, 1,500, 800, 300, and so forth. Presently it rests at 28 hits making a nifty little shark fin shape.
Do you think it only coincidence so deadly a graph protrudes upon my monitor a mere two days before Shark Week on the discovery channel? Dare I brave the waters of my local pool (no beaches where I live)? Will that infamous, minor second, Jaws theme haunt my every step towards the shower? Should I be eating more garlic?
Is posting something else on the distant horizon for me? With so many eyes that graced this place forsaking me, is my blog still relevant? Well it’s too late to look back now because, against all the odds, I just did! (Those who live near me will be happy to know that I’ll also be daring the waters of my local shower in the morning.)
Thank you for reading my blog. In all, there were 225 replies and close to 9,000 views. Those who replied with clever comments have been noted by me. I will now do my heart-felt duty to search you out and reply with witty words of my own.
Mark my words, these hungry fingers will find you!
And while doing this I’ll keep in mind that phrase from Finding Nemo:
I’m debating with myself about this baffling curiosity called the video game. Is it a computerized novelty, a hyperactive board-game? Is it art? Some think games should never join that ever sacred hierarchy of the humanities. To them…
Which would make these three white canvases um… well.
Art is a commentary of life itself, an exaggeration of the human condition that appeals to the five senses. Do games achieve this, or are they a collection of boxy pixels with beeps and screeches to accompany them?
The above game is the cinematic opening to a remake of Final Fantasy IV played on the Nintendo DS.
Compare this with a still shot of the original opening, released for the super Nintendo in 1991.
A picture of the battle sequence from the new DS version.
And the old.
So games have come a long way it seems.
But can they move us in the same way that the Beatles song All the Lonely People?
The song plays well with a mixture of stings and voices. My heart moves with it. The complex tonalities of sound touch me deeply, yet while sitting here, basking in the glory of sound, I cannot see or touch any of it back.
Video games allow for this.
Unless I am an artist playing an instrument within the string symphony, I cannot effect how the music is produced. There is no choosing or composing to be done. As a member of the audience, I simply observe and hear what is already composed and finished.
A jazz trio follows a melody when playing together. During certain times a soloist steps up and composes his own tune on the fly.
In the video game Rock Band, my friends and I can join a “band” of sorts, effecting and touching the direction of the music with every plastic button I grind or beat.
But this is only an imitation of music and has no bearing on the real thing… until recently that is.
Video games work the same way as playing an instrument, though on much simpler terms. You are given a world to waltz around in, an instrument (the controller) to affect it, and an avatar (the character) to symbolizes that effect. The story, or series of events, unfolds before you and you touch it back with a jump or the shot of a gun. You are the player, conductor, and composer, creating your own garish melody within the programed movement of pixels.
So gamers, like jazz musicians, compose their own way. But jazz is considered art of which games are not. And in the jazz club well, it is only the trio that makes the music. The audience can only listen on with eager ears. Games are different in that they are simulations to be explored and experienced.
Can this compare to the cinema?
Movies are a collection of music, cinematography, actors, and set pieces which all come together in an artistic way to tell a story. The audience sits there, physically passive behind the fourth wall, and watches the movie unfold.
In the video game Half-life 2, non-player characters speak their lines to you like actors in a play. The music and set pieces work around your every move, pointing and urging you on to the next chapter. You are the cameraman, the protagonist, and the main actor in a save-the-world type of story, which is viewed only from your perspective.
Is this art?
The movie Kill Bill entertains the audience with violence and brutality, artistically expressed before them.
In the game Grand Theft Auto IV the viewer actively creates his/her own form of mayhem inside an artificial world. How that virtual world responds to your touch is a large part of the experience.
If I were to argue that video games are art, why then are its concepts so vastly different from every art medium that came before? Does the audience’s ability to choose make it something less or something more?
Take those Choose Your Own Adventure books back in the days.
Could they have been a feeble beginning to a new emergent type of art that has a very different set of rules for artist and audience to entertain? Comparing such a thing to other art forms is almost laughable. It’s apples and oranges.
In January 2010 a similar, yet vastly more evolved choice-driven format emerged in the game Mass Effect 2.
The game was a critical and commercial success with many famous actors hired to voice the cinematic story it told.
Recognize any these voices in the trailer bellow?
So now we have television and movie actors, voice-acting in games. But these actors are only using their voices. There bodies are absent. Pixels coming together to form a “person” with a human voice attached, can hardly be something of cinema quality right?
And what of the concept art used to help bring the game to life?
Starcraft II
Mass Effect 2
Homeworld
Fallout 3
Just like in movies, there are many concept and storyboard artists used to make a game. Is their talent being wasted away? Must artists only work for the cinema before they can be considered with the title of their trade?
Perhaps it’s during the game’s conception that it has the potential to be art, but then those wacky, non-artistic, game designers come in and commit the great taboo! They break out of the sacred fourth wall with gusto saying to the audience, “Here are the world, plot, and story. What are you going to do about it?”
Most triple A games take about two years to complete, much like triple A movies. Similar techniques are used in forming both works of art, hundreds of people on both ends share the load in creating a product out of an idea.
The only way that these games are vastly different than movies is with the little addition of touch.
Games are more palpable to the audience because the audience is an actually character within the game. It is an artistic collaboration between the game designer who creates the simulation, and the game player who triggers it to life with his thumbs. Through an avatar you touch what is made in response to how it touches you.
Paintings are the art of visual appeal. Music is the art of sounds layered across a period of time. Books are the art of pure story and how it plays inside your head. The cinema shares aspects of all three.
High-budget video games share everything that movies do and more. It is a half-baked, half-hazard medium, with you at the other end of the easel asked by the developer to finish what he started. Video games are the art of choice and of touch.
Would this then make the game player an artist?
Perhaps the day will come when games bring to life what we imagine, a sort of Star Trek holodeck or lucid dream experience. Until that day, games like LittleBig Planet 2 will have to do.
The movie critic Roger Ebert challenged us to, “cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.”
Perhaps the question should be reversed: how are the great poets, filmmakers, and novelists like video game designers?
The answer is very simple: they aren’t.
Games are not like anything we have seen before. They share many aspects with other art mediums, yet it is experienced differently. This does not make it artless. It makes them as artistic as the audience who plays them.
As many people already know, the SciFi Channel has done some creative spelling to change its name to the super cool-beans Syfy Channel. Every nerd I’ve talked to has felt the same way I do about the change. And we all ask: what’s with the “Y”s?
SyFy must be trying to appeal to non-nerds… because nerds are the only people that know how to spell correctly. And well because spelling was like so last century.
SyFy president Mr. Howe said it a bit more eloquently: “What we love about this is we hopefully get the best of both worlds. We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.”
Um… actually you’ve alienated the nerds and done nothing to your content that will grab any new viewers. Perhaps a rerun of your most popular show BattlestarGalactica is in order, which, I might add, was running with millions of viewers even with your channel’s name spelled correctly.
But hey what the heck do I know, according to your focus groups, misspelling parts of words is human-frieeeendly. See how I did that. Adding all those e’s made my blog post twenty times more keeeeen to newcomers!
In any case if he’s right, then rest assured, we wil bee seeing mor ov this in thee neer future.
The worst part is what this is saying about the non-nerdified normal people out there. Apparently Mr. Howe thinks you’re too stupid to read their channel’s name.
“You see, children, the ‘c’ in ‘Sci’ is silent. This is why you non-nerds have been passing over our channel for so many years. We aren’t the Sky Fiction channel we’re the Syance Fyction Channel.”
Well golly gee Mister Howe, thanks for clearing that up for us. But why not keep going? Go ahead and call it the SyFy Chynyl! We know how human-friendly the letter “y” seems to be.
Honestly folks, the guy must be an anal retentive, symmetrical vowel Nazi. Maybe he thought the double “ar” sounds in Star Wars was the secret to its success, or maybe all the “a”s in Avatar made it the number one movie of all time. It had nothing to do with the actual content within.
After all, good content is for good writers to worry about. So let’s just do a quick fix with the name and move on to deliver more mediocre monster flicks…
Or you could just hire Ronald D. Moore to write another fraken show!
Don’t stop there Mr. Howe! Your creative juices must be bursting at the seams! In fact why don’t we go ahead and help other less-fortunate science fiction franchises to be more human-friendly. Alyans and Star Track anybody? And what about that new Christopher Nolan film Insipshun?
What the, SciFiChannel needs is well-written stories, driven by science and the future. Because that’s what a nerd like me expects when I tune in.
Oh and by the way Mr. Howe. Don’t worry about finding an audience. Nerds are the cool thing to be right now.
Not that twilight!
