Comment by bawolff
1 month ago
> Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind.
But transforming the viewer is how i would define all art.
When we judge a movie, a novel or even a painting, its about what it made us feel. I don't see how a video game is any different.
> To read a review or an attempted critique of a video game is scarcely more satisfying than someone telling you about a dream they had once; presenting a video of cutscene compilations or a few minutes of gameplay doesn’t add much
I don't really play video games, but i've recently been watching some of the videos from GDC on youtube and have found them fascinating nonetheless, so i don't think this holds up for me.
So, the way it's different is that it's you, in a way it can't be when you read a novel, or look at a painting.
There is interactive art, but it's usually a very soft limited interaction. "Soul City" would be an example. There was a pyramid of oranges, in fact if you arrive when the work has been re-created there is, in fact, a pyramid of oranges, you can take one. That's nice, I've done that. That's the interaction. My sister's performance of "Fragment of a Dress" (as opposed to its static exhibit which I have seen) was interactive, it was also short and had a relatively tiny audience because the act of cutting the dress apart with scissors doesn't take long.
Video game interactions can go way deeper. A Tale In The Desert had long complicated story arcs which were entirely player generated drama. Is this guy cornering the market in a key resource because it is to everybody's benefit that it's controlled or are they just a megalomaniac? This player seems to be a vandal, we should kick them out, or, wait, maybe we're being manipulated to perceive their actions as vandalism and actually the push to vote one person out of the game is a wedge to drive us apart.
I enjoy watching people play video games and playing video games myself, and these are distinct activities, you shouldn't mistake how you feel about other people's play for how you would feel as a player. Some exercises, many of them at GDC are like the 100m sprint, you would need a lot of training to get even half as good as the people you've watched and maybe it's not worth it. But other parts of video games are also interesting experiences even though you are not an elite player. Rolling Credits ("Bequest%") in Blue Prince is a very different experience as a player, than as a viewer, I can assure you having been both.
> So, the way it's different is that it's you, in a way it can't be when you read a novel, or look at a painting.
I mean, i would just disagree with that. I think its the same.
Edit: rereading im kind of unhappy with what i said here. Maybe we are just talking past each other. I agree choice in video game is what makes it relatively unique as a genre. I suppose i would say that choice/interactivity does not neccesarily translate into co-creating the artistic experience. Sometimes it can, allowing you to be part of the art. Other times the choice is superficial and does not meaningfully translate to participating in it. "Static" art can have the same effect by being ambigious and requiring you to put yourself into it to interpret it. I think all art is a mirror to some degree or another.
> I enjoy watching people play video games and playing video games myself, and these are distinct activities, you shouldn't mistake how you feel about other people's play for how you would feel as a player. Some exercises, many of them at GDC are like the 100m sprint, you would need a lot of training to get even half as good as the people you've watched and maybe it's not worth it.
The videos i was talking about are not of people playing video games, its of people analyzing artistic choices in video games. Which is a very different thing (and of course also very different from actually playing them)
Ah, yes, sorry, I read GDC but I thought GDQ, a very different event ("Games Done Quick" is an event for speedrunners).
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> So, the way it's different is that it's you, in a way it can't be when you read a novel, or look at a painting.
I disagree.
Consider what it's like for a non-native speaker to read a novel. Yes, the novel that they're reading, all the words on all the pages, are identical to what a native speaker sees. But they might lack basic vocabulary to get all the meaning. They might lack cultural context to get all the idioms. The artifact is the same, but the experience each reader has is different.
Now consider someone who's a fluent speaker, but who's new to the genre. They possess the vocabulary of the language but they lack the vocabulary of the genre, so they won't understand when the author deliberately plays with tropes, subverts them, etc. Compared to someone who's genre-savvy, the experience each reader has is different.
Now consider someone who's both a fluent speaker and genre-savvy, but who is jumping into a work in a long-running universe with decades of history, e.g. Star Wars or Star Trek or any comic book superhero. They won't get the deliberate references or callbacks, so again the experience the reader has will differ.
And of course there are a million other ways by which interpretations of a novel will differ, based on the life experience of the reader. There's a reason that it's common for people to argue about the interpretation of even straightforward books, well before you get to something like Joyce's Ulysses.
So while it may be true that the words of a novel are all delivered in the same order to all readers, which isn't analogously true for the experience of a video game, that doesn't really set video games apart as a medium. All art is interactive.
The variation in interpretation is the same, but that's not really an interaction. In a video game you're not just the audience you're a participant. There are other forms of art like that, and they too are difficult to review.
Reading "Blue Prince" [if you're thinking "the book is actually named Red Prince in the game" and you are still playing stop reading this, right now, I'm serious] is a very different experience for a new parent than someone like me. But that's just a variation in interpretation.
In contrast Ascending is a different experience if you've half-arsed it - maybe even somewhat without quite realising what you're doing, versus if you've meticulously planned (as I did) or again if it all came together by chance on the day. A movie could have attempted this pay off but it doesn't land the same as for those three different experiences.
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