Comment by tialaramex
1 month ago
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).
To be fair to speed runners, i do think there is a sort of beauty to eeking out every last second.
Idk, maybe everything is art
> 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.
> 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.
I think you participate in all art. There are novels where you have to bring a lot of yourself to the table to form meaning. There are video games where you may superficially control the character on the screen, but your participation doesn't significantly alter the meaning. E.g. i think super mario brothers is less participatory than most novels because despite controlling mario there is really very little of yourself you are bringing to the game.
Its all on a spectrum and i dont think video games are necessarily any more participatory than any other medium. Some are more and some are less. Interaction and participation aren't the same thing.
late edit: to give an example, take a game like doki doki literature club. This is probably on the extreme end of interaction in a video game, you make almost no choices and those you do largely don't matter, and yet it feels (or at least felt to me) very participatory much more so than your average game where you do get to make choices that do matter. I guess i would say you participate in making the experience what it is to you.
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> In a video game you're not just the audience you're a participant.
I'm not about to say that games don't occupy an interesting point in space to the degree that they invite (or require!) you to actively participate in the art rather than passively observe. But I still contend that such a stark division is artificial.
When I spent my youth running around the worlds of Mario Sunshine or The Wind Waker, whatever narrative or gameplay experience the games presented was secondary to the worlds themselves that stoked my imagination. My fondest memories were imagining myself being in those worlds, at which I spent hours upon hours, using them as a canvas for creativity well beyond what the limited game mechanics could allow. And that wasn't directionally different from how I experienced the Harry Potter series in that same era, spending countless hours daydreaming that I was in that world. It didn't matter that the latter was a book, it was interactive to me nonetheless, as well as to legions of others, as the piles upon piles of extant fanfiction can attest.