I’ve spent most of the last few weeks writing about Bloodbowl, so and as such it’s merely friends and twitter followers that have been subjected to my occasional outbursts of anger, it’s time to change that. Sometimes a good rant helps clear the blood, but you don’t want to do it too often or you just seem bitter and twisted
So what I’m going to do, right now, is rage furiously and unfairly at all the things I think are crap in games, from the general to the insanely specific. It’s not really thought through in depth, so feel free to respond if you disagree, it also contains lots extemporaneous swearing and not a lot of screenshots. Sorry.
The Social Aspect of MMOs
You have no idea how many times I’ve criticised the gameplay of MMOs and hear the reply “Well it really gets good when you play it with a bunch of friends at the same time.” To which I respond “Well no motherfucking shit Sherlock, because this is true of all bloody games!”
Seriously, everything is more fun in co-op, that doesn’t mean it’s any good, or that it doesn’t also have to stand by itself, you know why World of Warcraft is fun with your friends? Because your friends are fun and interesting people! (except Dave, he’s dull as fuck) seriously, they’re providing the entrainment, which raises the question of who should be paying who here.In fact the only thing that MMOs actually add to the experience, over, say, co-op, is not your friends, but the hundreds of other people (90% of whom are, let’s face it, dicks) who you can’t get rid of.
Don’t get me wrong, MMOs have a lot of potential, but their gameplay mechanics are, near universally, terrible, and if we continue to simply avoid that because we happen to play them with fun people, there’ll never be an incentive to fix them.
Driving in GTA Games
There’s actually an awful lot about Rockstar’s bloated, overhyped behemoth I could object to, but let’s keep it simple and stick to the most woeful feature. The game is called Grand Theft Auto, cars are inevitably involved, so why on earth to they handle like fucking moon buggies?
It made a kind of sense in the initial 2d incarnation, but ever since the series transitioned to 3d and became increasingly serious, the fact that it takes superhuman driving ability to get from a to b without actually killing half a dozen civilians and ending up in a chase with the police becomes increasingly infuriating. GTA4 spends every five minutes trying to get to to go out for a drink with friends or women (yes, in GTA the two are mutually exclusive) yet the excruciating driving mechanics mean simply getting to the bar involves twenty three dead and a high speed chase.
Rockstar are clearly aware of this problem, that’s why they patched over it with GTA4′s magical teleporting Taxis, the equivalent of bandaging a cancerous tumour, get that shit down to the metaphorical hospital and surgically remove the fucker.
Dwarf Fortress’s UI
“Oh it’s just not a priority for him” the fans cry, “Then sir, his priorities are wrong” I retort, with Churchillian swagger. Dwarf Fortress is an interesting and complex game, like an infinitely detailed version of Dungeon Keeper, yet many people who could theoretically be interested in it can’t play it, because the UI is so unfathomably, incredibly bad.
One could blame the ASCII graphics, but thankfully community and modders have taken up the task of replacing it with a more coherent substitute, when they haven’t done however is replace the truly abominable control scheme with a simple mouse and hotkey interface, rending the game playable.
In the end, the Dwarf Fortress UI can be traced to the same reasons as the graphics, they’re kept at a primitive state not because anyone likes them (because let’s face it they could have to be mad in order to do so) but because the community enjoys the exclusivity it promotes. Learning to use the DF UI is like circumcision for Judaism, it’s a rite of passage that shows you worthy of joining the elite community, and folks, that’s just sad.
Women
Oh my fucking God people! Where do I even start? Are you all twelve? Have you even known the touch of a woman? Or have you only seen their footprints? The vast, vast majority of attempts to put female characters in games are failures of truly epic proportions. Both physical appearance and personality do not correspond to that of any creature to ever walk this earth. Why are you even bothering with the huge breasts and skimpy outfits? I’m a gamer, I have the internet! If I want to look at tits I can damn well find them on my own terms!
Okay, here’s the solution, I’m going to make one simple rule right the fuck now that should end at least a portion of this madness, here it is:
“No games designer may create a female character with breast larger than those he has actually held in his hands at some point in his life”
This masterpeice of legislation should have one of three effects:
1) Female characters will have more realistic proportions.
2) Several of the worst offenders will be forced to stop working due to sexual harrasment suits.
3) There will be a massive increase in the number of buxom, promiscuous women employed in the gaming industry.
The way I see it, we can’t lose on this one.
The Whole Citizen Kane Thing
I really would like to know how many people that talk about the medium’s Citizen Kane moment have actually watched Kane, or are aware of it’s place in film history. Most people haven’t, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re going to use it as an example you should damn well be aware of how, for instance, it wasn’t considered a classic until long after it’s release or it’s innovation in cinematography (in fact you can just start with knowing what cinematography means).
Really, a Citizen Kane isn’t going to mean much in the grand scheme of games being accepted as an artistic medium, most people don’t depend on the judgement of an elite critical establishment to discern what they consider art (or more people would sit down for a night staring at Tracy Emin’s bed). What games need is not a Citizen Kane but a Shawshank Redemption; a game which transcends the mainstream, which can be played by anyone, not merely intellectual elites, and move them emotionally, to near universal acclaim (seriously, try and find someone who doesn’t like Shawshank, it’s near impossible). That’s the kind of thing that’ll really take us off, when the man on the street can pick up a game looking for entertainment and come away with a message about the unbreakable nature of the human spirit. Most people don’t look for deep meaning in films or games, when people can find one in a game anyway, even when they weren’t expecting it, and be moved by it, then we will have arrived.
Art Games
Oh I’m sorry? Did you think I was going to rail on the gaming mainstream while talking about how the true indie artists will save us all? Nosiree Bob (I knew you’d read this Robert) Let’s face it, most ‘Art’ games are a joke by the standards of any other artistic medium. All you need to qualify as an ‘Art’ game nowadays it seems is to have unusual art design and a vague sense of abstraction, actual meaning, story, theme or narrative is not only non-essential, it’s frowned upon.
Does anyone honestly think this movement is going to produce our Citizen Kane or Shawshank Redemption? Kane was a deep portrait of what our lives will amount to when we die, most art games are a lot of pretty colours united by an abstract concept you’re only aware of because the author told you about them. Games like The Void don’t resemble the heavyweights of other mediums like The Third Man, Othello or Of Mice and Men (to name some personal favourites), they don’t tell us anything about the human condition, or tell a truly engaging story, instead they resemble the obscure fringe movements like Dadaism or Dogme 95.
Why does this make me angry? Because so many act like this small abstract indie games are the way to gaming gaining artistic acceptance, they really aren’t, they aren’t our Kane or Shawshank, they’re our equivalent of Damien Hirst or Bertholt Brecht, pointless abstraction that is only considered art because the creators present it as such.
Subjectivity
There’s a reason this article is called ‘things that are rubbish’ and not ‘thing I hate’, because one of those things is the gaming community’s wholesale embracing of subjectivity. Call a game objectively badly written and chances are someone will pop up and say “that’s just your opinion!” No it is not.
Art and entertainment are both objective and subjective, no other medium seems to have trouble with this. People can, it seems, accept concepts like “Goodfellas was well made, but I’m a bit bored with gangster films” or “Harry Potter is clichéd and derivative, but I got caught up in the wonder” they know that The Da Vinci Code was not differently written, but poorly written. Many gamers, it seems, cannot. Gears of War is badly written, this is not my subjective opinion, nor my personal tastes, this is merely a judgement that it failed miserably in it’s own aims, to quickly and simply exposise what was going on at any given point.
Some things are objectively bad, this does not make you wrong for liking them (hell I love John Woo films, and they have truly awful writing) but it does make you wrong if you think they’re objectively good.
Blizzard
Oh yeah, I went there. That thudding sound you just heard? That’s the sound of Craig facepalming over the prospect of a million fanboys being poured down his throat. I was planning to keep this article general and avoid simply railing on games and companies I don’t like, but these guys, these are a special case.
Blizzard are the world beaters at corporatising gaming, they haven’t had any new ideas for some time, they merely take something that’s doing well, polish it, tie it into their existing mythology and make absolutely fucktons of money out of it. That however is not enough, they seek to eek ever more money out of their fanbase mostly by simply selling marginally less inconvenience. Somewhere deep in Actard towers there’s a chart of ideas to profit ratio with a big circle around the point where no ideas meets infinite profit and a note saying “This is where we want to be”.
The worst part? It’s working, it’s working terrible, horribly well.
Ooh! That was a fun post! You know what I was like as I was reading this? “Huh, yeah, you’re right. Oh yeah, that too! Ooh, burn, yet so true! HELL YEAH BABY! ON THE SPOT!” etc. etc.
Great article.
Also, don’t diss Dave! He’s special you know. In that special way.
Also, hi Robert. ART GAMES. Ebert needs to play them! (or not, if they’re the art games criticized here.)
Although, the thing about Blizzard (minus the giant wart of cancer aka WoW) is that they take really long until it’s polished. That, I can forgive them for. WoW? Nahhhh. But, at least all three universes are headed by different teams (StarCraft team, Diablo team, Warcraft team).
Again, fantastic article. The gaming community is terrible a lot of the time, and it’s probably the Internet’s fault.
Feel better? Probably says something that the only thing I can think to criticise is your reference to Brecht; you would have got away with Grotowski or Artaud, but Brecht was more of a social realist – he’d say his work was political rather than artistic.
Brecht’s whole philosophy was that art should surrender engagement on an emotional level in order to have the audience consider the message (invariably political with his plays, but not essentially so) abstractly and intellectually. Hence I figured he had a place alongside those who throw traditional storytelling aside in order to make an abstract point.
Ah OK, I see your point. Cheerfully withdrawn.
I concur with the outcome of this topic and/or product.
I agree with this, but it isn’t what you said.
Full of funny hyperbole, but I have to disagree with some of this:
The Social Aspect of MMOs – Seems dead on, although I don’t play the stupid things, probably for this reason.
Driving in GTA Games – Agree, driving in GTAIV was a total chore, and the missions seemed to always give you objectives on the other side of the bloody city.
Dwarf Fortress’s UI – It does suck. You understate the difficulty in improving it, however, and I’m not sure about the whole exclusivity thing. I certainly get that impression from many of the players, yet I doubt it’s the creator’s intention to make the interface as obscure as possible. He lives on donations, after all, so more players could never be a bad thing for him.
Women – Great, absolutely true, although the audience is probably the major driver in this situation.
The Whole Citizen Kane Thing – Ambivalent about this, simply because I don’t ever see it happening, at least not for a large amount of people. What’s more likely to happen is that almost everyone will experience this subjectively–personally–with certain games. The medium, and thus the coverage, is different. You couldn’t sit 100+ people down in front of a game and expect them to experience the same thing in the way that you can with an non-interactive film.
Art Games – I agree in the sense that “art” games (nearly almost given this title by the press, we should note) tend to be given undue attention when one considers their quality alone, yet I still think they’re worthwhile and a major force for change in the medium. Somebody has to be doing something different. There’s only so much refinement and iteration the industry can do before it runs down a dull dead end. Artistic acceptance is less important to me that the innovation that these games can spur, even if it only manifests in stolen concepts in better produced, more popular titles.
Subjectivity – I’ll get back to that later when I’ve had a breath.
Blizzard – Can’t really comment, last game of theirs I played was Diablo II.
100% bang on with every point. Completely agree. Fuck the fanboys.
Subjectivity – It’s tough to argue against subjective experience when talking about entertainment products. By what metrics do you judge success? Dan Brown is an awful writer (since when do we need to know that a smile is quiet? Have you ever heard a smile?) but he’s succeeded in becoming an enormously rich bastard and giving people with low standards an entertaining few hours. That said, I get your point about how things can fail, even within their context. I’ve played games with such poor writing that the story is either impossible to follow, or impossible to want to follow. I suppose games writing is a bit like non-sports like figure skating: a combination of subjective and objective judgement.
PS: Woo’s films do have bad writing, but I wouldn’t say they’re actually bad films! There’s some pioneering action cinematography in there.
I’m marking this up to the likes of Enter The Matrix. It’s a shit game, that’s a fact, but I still sort of like it.
I also quite like Enter The Matrix, but by god those vehicle sections were terrible.
All I remember about it was that I was really excited to play it, even deleting a bunch of other games from my hard drive so I could install it, and, man, the disappointment.
It was all terrible apart from the opening level which was ok and the hacking mini game thing.
sewers, vehicle sections, crappy sniping bits. Bleh. Better than Path of Neo though.
Oh, and it had a multiplayer that you had to enter a cheat to play (assume it wasn’t completed on time but they threw what they had in). You could make cars fight each other.
Enter the Matrix was a shocker. So glad I only borrowed it rather than spending my (not particularly hard earned at that age!) cash on it. Plus I didn’t need to be reminded of the horror of the driving sections – the AI couldn’t drive for shit. So frustrating.
Yes the idea is very much that if you have failed to achieve your ends, you’ve messed up. Gears of War has the low aims of a action movie; to get the exposition out of the way in time for the next action sequence, and maybe throw in a good one liner, and fails even at that.
That’s fair enough. I’ve never played the game and I don’t expect I will. By the way, I didn’t mean to seem like I was attacking your article; I assumed you wanted an argument. ;)
Pretty much spot-on throughout, don’t really have anything to add.
John Woo films are genious though.
An excellent rant, and spot on in so many ways. Further to all this, I’d say that the bad writing/subjectivity rant, and gaming’s lack of a Kane/Shawshank are actually intertwined. Essentially, the gaming audience, as a rule (and there are of course many exceptions) don’t read and have a dreadful grasp of written language. You just have to look at the average forum to see that this is the case (how often do you see posts by people who don’t know that ‘then’ is not the same word as ‘than’, for example?). We’re not going to get good writing in games until the average gamer appreciates good writing.
A quick rant of my own though….
Games like The Void don’t resemble the heavyweights of other mediums like The Third Man, Othello or Of Mice and Men
Considering how often the word ‘media’ gets abused in any sort of writing about computers/technology, it makes my blood boil when I see the word ‘medium’ wrongly pluralised as ‘mediums’. I mean, for fuck’s sake, how hard can it be? I realise that I’m over-reacting, but isn’t that the whole point here?
Sorry, Tom…
I am a huge fan of pretty much all Blizzard games, not really WoW as MMO’s are fairly dull in my opinion and paying for the game, and paying every month thereafter to play the game is idiotic in my opinion.
Getting back on subject, the Diablo series was well made, and rather (at the time) new with I think decent writing, but alot of the fanbase (esp me-bring on D3 ^^)doesn’t want huge changes, maybe a change of scenery, new weapons, and flashy graphics – it’s all they want, look at X-Com, I have never played it myself, but it looks rather vast and interesting, the newly announced XCOM is just flipping the bird really. I don’t want yet another mediocre Fallout3 style FPS, I want X-Com with non-blinding graphics….
I hate The Shawshank Redemption. To me it’s one of the schmaltziest, most obviously and crudely constructed manipulative pieces of work I’ve ever seen (don’t get me wrong – I’m all for manipulation, but not when it’s done as artless as in that film). For me, it’s only a couple of steps removed from that other cinematic masterpiece, Titanic. It’s like ’90s cinema’s McDonalds – every bit of it is constructed to be as effective for as many people as possible, which inevitably means every bit is also utterly bland and obvious. It seems filling, but leaves you feeling empty 30 minutes later.
On another point, I wouldn’t call dadaism a fringe movement – seeing its huge influence on theatre, literature, music and film.
I completely agree with your point about driving in GTA games – every other fucking mission will involve driving some vehicle that handles as if it’s made out of rubber. Let’s make it a chase! Let’s put it on a timer! Let’s stop playing GTA!
The stuff about Blizzard is a troll, right?
Activision is a money hungry company run by an asshole. It tells Blizzard what to do. There is no mutual respect there.
I’ve seen nothing that makes me believe that Blizzard itself is anything but a bunch of highly skilled nerds doing what they love for as much cash as they can get. And that’s exactly what I am too.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/04/earning-your-sword-a-picture-tour-of-blizzards-offices.ars/
totally with you on the question of subjectivity, although it’s not true that this is a plague unique to gaming – it is far more virulent and antithetical to constructive conversation in the world of music. People talking about music is like 90% guys going “I hate that band! They’re fucking shit and anyone who likes them is a prick! But that’s just my opinion.” uuuuurgh
RPS sent me here, and this was an interesting. I do have objections though, so here’s my anti rant:
The Social Aspect of MMOs No, not all things are fun with friends. Reading a novel is an activity where friends don’t contribute, and possibly hurt. Discussing a novel is cooperative, of course, but that’s a different matter entirely. Likewise, playing a puzzle game, playing an RPG with lots of dialogue and reading (Planescape: Torment’s dialogue and Morrowind’s books), adventure games, any horror shooter-like game trying to evoke an “alone against the world” feel are all examples of inherently solitary gameplay experiences.
Moreover, the point in this kind of claim is that yeah, maybe a massively-multiplayer persistent-world R.U.S.E. or Dragon Age or Half-Life would be great, it doesn’t exist. Uniquely, though, MMOs provide the interface for your friends to participate, that is part of what you pay for.
I think MMOs should theoretically also make it easy to find new friends to play with. This is where I agree that “the Social Aspect of MMOs is rubbish”. The social interaction revolves entirely around the mindless competition, with small talk occurring when people get bored. Small talk always happens, that is not a plus for the game. For the former, I think Wurm Online is a relatively well known example of an MMO where the social interaction aspect is actually interesting.
Driving in GTA Games I agree the handling is bad, but so what? I haven’t played anything past Vice City, but if you want some real nasty just go back to the infamous Dodo from GTA3. The point of GTA is to kill people and damage property, the physics are conducive to this to the point where “Drive this truck half a mile without wrecking it” is a viable, challenging, fun mission as opposed to an insulting cakewalk.
Dwarf Fortress’s UI As an ASCII hating player, I disagree. First off, the interface isn’t that bad. Why does everyone complain? I mean come on, it’s actually pretty efficient for the degree of complexity it needs to deal with. There is some annoying micromanagement like specifying stone item material, stone/seed excess, and having to constantly re-add bonecarving or cooking jobs which I agree should be fixed. Then there’s things like the chore of managing labors for 150 dwarfs, but Dwarf Therapist solves that problem, so who cares?
My personal complaint is that the graphics are ASCII, which sucks, and it’s not even good ASCII- you can’t even have different tiles for a chair and a catapult bucket! Not to mention the silliness with colors. Toady doesn’t fix this because the first time he tried to have decent graphics in a game, he bit off more than he could chew (3D engine all by himself) and now he appears to have an irrational fear that even thinking of improving the graphics will cost him decades of his time. Meanwhile the community acts like the ASCII is fine, that it’s actually somehow better than sane graphics, that it’s “okay once you get used to it”, which is all rubbish, I agree. But one thing they don’t do is act like it’s a rite of passage, that’s just absurd.
Women Come now, it’s not like women aren’t objectified in comics, cartoons, film, television, even books. This is a wide societal issue, not some peculiarity of the game industry. The one serious critique you can make is that some game devs lean on the “sex sells” maxim a bit too much, and I agree. By the way, Alyx says hi.
The Whole Citizen Kane Thing I haven’t watched Citizen Kane, and I don’t find the “are games art” debate particularly interesting. Nevertheless, I’d sooner agree with, say, Ebert as opposed to the opposition. Your example, Othello (also a favorite of mine), is different from games because unlike them it inspires thought. You can take some aspect of it and have all kinds of deep discussions because it provides such a great base for so many issues. What game is there which you can start with and have a serious debate over? I mean really?
As far as I know, in the last oh, 5 years, maybe Bioshock sort of took a step in that direction by promising a deconstruction of capitalism or whatever. Of course, it’s all ruined, because the game has magic (and calls it plasmids, which is especially annoying to an actual biologist) and every significant issue of the game is completely saturated by the influence of this magic. It is hopelessly fantastical. Not that I don’t think fantasy can’t be relevant, but Bioshock has only one theme with real-world relevance it attempts to explore, and undermines itself by completely divorcing this exploration from reality in the worst possible way.
I don’t really care if games are or should be considered art, but I don’t think the gaming industry produces anything worth discussing, and I think it should. Not discussing the quality of the game, or its artistic merits, or the work ethic of the developer, or the tactics- these are all concerned with the game and nothing but the game, when you’re done playing; they are irrelevant. I’d like a game to be relevant after I’ve “beaten” it, same as how Othello is still relevant long after I read and understand it. Until they happen, I’m more inclined to side with people such as Ebert and not take games very seriously on the intellectual level.
Art Games Well, there’s a class of “artistes” who adore pointless navelgazing, and nobody likes them, but the only sensible way to deal with them is too ignore them. This is hardly unique to games. Of course, sometimes you find that a game you thought was not rubbish turns out to be the product of such navelgazing, which can be annoying, but again this is hardly unique to games.
Subjectivity Some people just don’t like criticism, and a lot of those people LOVE to invoke subjectivity as a shield against it. Annoying, I agree, but also not unique to games. Haters gonna hate, man.
Blizzard What on earth are you talking about? Is this about how Starcraft 2 will be sold in parts again? The way it is now, the market has a lot of awful games, a lot of poor games, and occasionally there’s a decent game every 1-2 years. Creativity doesn’t really matter in this setting, will you really prefer an awful but creative game over a decent but uncreative game? Being the people making a fair part of those decent games, I don’t see how Blizzard is at fault. They could be better, I guess, but demanding that is not fair when you have people like EA, Activision and Ubisoft among others.
Besides, I don’t really see how Blizzard is so opposed to innovation. Warcraft pioneered one of the two major classes of RTSes (the one with builders as opposed to CnC style stuff) and that class now dominates. Warcraft 3 introduced hero units in RTSes, and not also managed to get it right. Diablo 3 was the first non-roguelike RPG with random level generation (again, not only that but they also got it *right*, so the game wasn’t innovative but awful). Starcraft created a whole nation’s most popular sport. WoW was not particularly new, but raids were not exactly a common feature before it.
The last couple of years they sat around churning out WoW expansions, which was a bit unremarkable, true. But now they have not one but two sequels to the franchises everyone is crazy about coming out this or next year, so what’s the problem? I know sequels are usually criticized as lazy schemes to milk a franchise, but if there’s been one game in the last dozen years that needs a sequel then it might as well be Starcraft. And they ARE adding a very different SP campaign, and the multiplayer balance appearce to have completely changed. Give the guys a break.
I don’t approve of the decision to sell SC2 in three parts either, but Blizzard is rubbish just for that? After all the games they’ve made? Come on.
Thanks for the considered response, I have one or two points of my own to make:
Women – I am well aware that this problem is not unique to games, I didn’t mean to imply it was, I just happen to be writing on a games blog, so I’ve focused there.
Citizen Kane – I completely agree on how post watching/reading/playing discussion of the meaning or themes is the hallmark of something that can usually be called ‘art’. I can think of only two games that have genuinely managed that, Bioshock (which did it by presenting a counterpoint to Atlas Shrugged, making it a not entirely original beast, though I’d still like to see that tried more often) and Deus Ex, where which ending you chose essentially gets to the route of your political philosophy (to put it in a very oversimplified fashion Illuminati = Conservatism, Daedelus = Socialism, Tong = Liberalism).
StarCraft II isn’t being sold in three parts. It is not paying for a third at a time, it is one base game and two expansions coming out over the course of a few years – as has happened with many RTSs in the past. Anyone who claims ANYTHING OTHER than them being expansions (INCLUDING saying they are stand-alone, as that information is so out of date it is no longer valid) is either lying or misinformed.
It was poorly presented in its original format – but what could Blizzard do? They had to tell us only the Terran campaign was coming in this edition, or we’d be like “what” when the game came out. They have said multiple times that the game was always going to have expansions. Pricing is unconfirmed but expecting full price for each of them is certainly a negative viewpoint – full price for first and “expansion price” (the same as a HL2 episode or any expansion for a game you wish to name) would be more realistic, but as nothing is confirmed (and, admittedly, Blizzard’s inability to confirm that they won’t all be full price) means it’s all guesswork.
But to reiterate: saying that StarCraft II is being sold in 3 parts is just plain WRONG.
What the flower is so good about shawshark redemption? That movie has WAY too many feelings. It’s horrible.
I’m going to punch the point on Dwarf Fortress’s community right in the nose. The UI for the game is rubbish, without question or argument. I love Dwarf Fortress, but I love it despite the UI. It is easily my worst enemy in that came (after carp).
But in my experience and considerable lurking around the forums, and spending a lot of time talking with other fellow players, I have yet to meet one single person who treats the learning curve barrier as some kind of exclusivity club. Not one. Not even a fucking hint of it.
Maybe you’ve had poor experiences, and if so, I’m saddened to hear that. But I’m calling [citation needed] on that claim. The community, the people I’ve played alongside, were always rock solid in helping a person get into the game and figure out how to do things.
I agree. ASCII art is used because Tarn Adams isn’t an artist. The guy has limited time and money and he’s added randomly generated monsters, massive subterranean caverns, and crushed a shedload of bugs for this latest release. He announces his income every month (he lives off of donations alone) and he made just over $1000 the one month last year. That’s not a fucking lot if you live in America. He probably goes without food to make his game some months – and sure, he makes a lot of money when he releases a new version, but he doesn’t do that a lot.
The fact is, Dwarf Fortress isn’t a very complex game to play as far as strategy games go. The controls are little more than hotkeys and menus to scroll through. Adams is open to supporting mods and addons that improve the experience while he gets around to streamlining that himself.
I for one am glad that there are developers out there who care more about the world they’re making and the rules of the game itself than the visuals and the controls. He doesn’t have time to spoon feed you his game before it’s ready yet. Deal with it.
What’s wrong with Brecht anyway? I thought his work was “politics” not “art”.
that games designer law is awesome :D
I agree wholeheartedly with most of these points. Particularly art games – they seem to follow the axiom of “less is more” which is true in some respects, but when it comes to true brilliance, more is … more.
I think these games can be ‘art’, in the manner of conceptual art that presents an idea in an abstract way. But what if “Citizen Kane” had been a game where you navigate a tiny sprite of Charles Foster Kane through an abstract landscape representing the pitfalls and pinnacles of his life? It would be no Citizen Kane, certainly.
Games like Metal Gear Solid and BioShock have flaws (MGS is derivative and barely interactive, BioShock let it all go to waste at the end) but they have topics, themes, issues – genetics, meme theory, political ideologies. That’s what art games need! Content!
“that is only considered art because the creators present it as such.”
How else would you define art?
To my mind, your article got a bit less coherent once you mixed your Citizen Kane point with the Art Games one. I’m still inclined to agree (“games have artistic merit” doesn’t tally too well with “We have this art game genre”, though I suppose other potentially artistic mediums such as photography have complex inherency-verses-utilization issues too), but dismissing the artistic validity of stuff like Photopia and Sleep is Death because they have artistic intent, but aren’t enjoyed by the mainstream, seems a bit churlish perhaps. Maybe I’m talking cross-purposes though; neither of the games I mentioned were your example, and I’ve not played The Void.
Yeah though, it does seem that by and large, people equate indie with artistic, to the exclusion of other titles and genres. Personally, I consider Silent Hill 2 to have more artistic merit than any other game I’ve played. Despite it’s flaws, it fits the criteria you set (it’s engaging, it reveals much of the human condition), and others that I consider essential (it’s moving, it uses the personal to highlight the universal, it is open to interpretation as opposed delivering a static moral or message). Actually, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on SH2 if you have time to reply. Do you think that it’s vague sense of abstraction, or maybe it’s vagueness in general detract from the game’s artistic worth? To my mind, they’re both integral to game’s emotional impact.
Hmm… I’ve mentioned three games, none of which featured in your post. Not a stunning counterpoint. Oh well, I’m going to grab a coffee. Found a lot of your rants to be spot on by the way.
Cheers,
Jay
Silent Hill 2, you say? Scroll up and run a search on it for opinions. (Not Tom’s but mine – I simply can’t leave a SH 2 discussion uncommented)
Jay, I’m afraid I’ve never played Silent Hill (I’m not much of a fan of survival horror) plenty of other GD writers have though and, as Paul says, there’s a lot of articles on here about it.
I don’t consider the problem with art games being that they are dismissed by the mainstream, but that many of them spend a lot of time acting like what they think ‘art’ is (heavy focus on art design, ambiguous plotline) rather than actually thinking about what their theme or message is. As such far too many ‘art games’ (and plenty of other games, and plenty of other ‘art’) either have no real theme even though they act as if they do, or abandon all subtlety and hit you over the head with a shallow and ill thought out message.
Your characterization of Blizzard as money-grubbing and derivative must be based out of some deep-seated distaste for extremely well-designed gaming experiences. Your argument holds no water whatsoever, mostly because you didn’t bother constructing one.
BUt I’m totally with on the Dwarf Fortress thing. That game needs a built-in tutorial, for one thing. It’s like this superbly designed, incredibly powerful toy you can’t play with.