"That's what you're going to show to Ebert to convince him videogames are a legitimate art form? You're going to show him the morph bomb and expect him to nod repeatedly, and admit that the story of an extinct bird race and a woman with a bazooka on her arm is just as meaningful as La Dolce Vita? Seriously?"
"The implication of this being that treating games as the inwards-facing exclusive province of boyish adolescence is perfectly acceptable as long as Mom and Dad aren’t looking; if they are, though, hide the controllers and put on a tie. This inferiority complex runs so deeply in the gamer mindset that we will often swear up and down it does not exist while we continue unbridled our wildly passive-aggressive approach towards the artistic establishment, equal parts brash and defensive, trying to look older and more experienced than our years: the hallmark of youthful insecurity."
Bonus Material: Here's me earlier this year on why I'm tired of the Citizen Kane thing.
I'll just say it for the record now: I think repeatedly raising Kane is amateurish and useless. It's self-defeating shorthand for what Bogost and Wasteland correctly identify as the real desire: legitimacy for games.
...Legitimacy, in this case, actually meaning 'the approval of others' or 'the ability to fit in,' I suspect.
[dunno where i got header picture. if it's yours and you want credit, comment or mail me.]
19 comments:
+10 Realizing the need to raise a sense of awareness in how both gamers & developers perceive and play.
-10 Try to legitimize games in order to validate them to ourselves.
-20 Using the 'its just a game stance' whenever games DO manage to hurdle up and get noticed (albeit negatively) by the masses
-10 The innate fear some fall prety to when applying any sense of academic thought to their games, usually from fear of falling into this mess.
+100 The irony of how fun of a merry-go-round like this still is.
~sLs~
While I think there is a lot of people needing to feel legitimacy for their pastime, I also think looking at the gaming medium as a potential art workspace can lead people to think differently both about how games are created and how they are enjoyed. I really liked the quote you posted awhile back that games don't need to be fun, they need to be engaging. Art affects the heart and the mind in challenging ways- surely this medium has the potential to do that. People just seem to lack the innovative ideas that would make it happen, or if they have the ideas, they lack the money and the talent needed to pull it all off.
Leigh, who's the artwork's author?
-RC
no idea, hence 'if it's yours and you want credit' :) wish i knew!
anthony birch is the glenn beck of videogames
I don't even get a soundbyte in this debate? At least everyone who's written in opposition to my assertions has had the good courtesy to point out, in some loose way, just what those assertions were. You've also managed to misquote Matthew's title. There's quite a lot of difference between "something" and "himself" in that context.
'Mike' - Regular readers of SVGL understand that when Leigh posts quotes like this, they are intended to spark discussion and commenters are expected to read around the subject (here to at least read the linked article and view the original report). It should not be inferred that Leigh necessarily agrees with them, so I believe it is unfair to insinuate that Leigh was here 'writing in opposition to [your] assertions'.
On topic... Not having experienced either Citizen Kane (to my shame) or Metroid Prime (likely to my relief), I can't really weigh in on the first area. That having been said, I hadn't thought about it before but both sources have sold me that games are better critiqued by their use of techniques unique or particularly appropriate to the medium rather than how big an impact they make on gaming culture's awareness.
Next: 'This inferiority complex runs so deeply in the gamer mindset that we will often swear up and down it does not exist' - I have a real problem with this kind of statement because it denies the possibility of sincerely not having this insecurity. I have no problem with letting non-gamers know that I enjoy both the heart-wrenching and thought-provoking fringe of interactive experiences and the adrenaline fuelled pop-corn-for-the-thumbs of the mainstream.
I wonder if games have not already matured and most people, even gamers, missed it. We should stop looking to the future for our watershed moments and look around at the existing cultural landscape. There are many games about which have been written brilliant and insightful analyses and essays. There are games that blow your perceptions of reality and your place in it, or lovingly tear your heart to pieces like the best tragic romance stories.
If only more people had played them we may not be having these problems.
What are we going to show Ebert to convince him? "It brings the fantastic into our everyday lives; it delights in showing us the reaction of the man on the street to Superman's latest stunt. This is what Ebert had to say about Superman II, the premise of which is quite frankly far sillier than that of Metroid Prime. He has laser eyes.
You need not base a movie or game on real world issues for it to be legitimate.
The video game ghetto is also compounded by the Sci-Fi Ghetto, because many, many games are set in science fiction or fantasy settings. (At least most of the science fiction haters are getting old and dying as time passes.)
What the hell's wrong with seeking legitimacy? The desire for your favored art form to be as acceptable as painting or sculpture or literature? Photography and film both had to struggle for decades before they were recognized as proper art forms in their own right.
Do you know what legitimacy brings? Not just respect, but money. Money in the right places, too. Money for artsy stuff, not just mainstream.
Citizen Kane has really become a sort of shorthand for 'arty film' like War and Peace for literature, mostly used by those who have very little knowledge or understanding of the artistic nature of film in the first place.
I don't want to sound snobbish, but seriously, how many people who make this comparison have actually seen Citizen Kane?
I seriously wonder how many of the people seeking legitimacy for games as art actually read or watch art in other respects.
I had similar thoughts re Kane. I seemed to come to this debate a bit late, though.
http://voorface.posterous.com/2618370
Kast: "I wonder if games have not already matured and most people, even gamers, missed it. We should stop looking to the future for our watershed moments and look around at the existing cultural landscape."
This is exactly my argument. You don't have to read more than 300 words into my article to get to the assertion of that self-same idea.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/103/1033302p1.html
Also, referencing my assertions matters quite a lot because both Matthew and Anthony were responding directly to my piece. Matthew was good enough to actually call me and have a 45 minute phone conversation before formulating his response (during which we discovered a lot of common ground). Burch, though he violently disagrees, was good enough to quote me and distill my assertions into a handful of points which he argued against.
Leigh doesn't even acknowledge my arguments, only the counter-arguments, and in that way frames the debate as whether or not games can be compared to Citizen Kane. That wasn't my point. My point was this one single game can be compared, and for me, it's just as good if not better than Kane. To argue against those specific beliefs might have been illuminating, but Leigh's just given us a regurgitation of the "whether or not" debate. That debate is over for me. The answer is yes, and here's how...
But you'd never know that from this assembly of adjectives which suggests my work is "immature" and "useless." I don't mind the suggestion, but it would have been sporting to have had those adjectives backed up in some way that acknowledged what I actually wrote. Otherwise, this is just sort of histrionic, no?
This is a really crazy debate. The New Yorker ran a giant feature profile of Will Wright three years ago*, and depicted him as a great artist. They did the same with Cliff Blezinski last year, even though that's a stretch if there ever was one. The New York Times magazine regularly has features about videogames as an artistic and cultural phenomenon, most recently with Harmonix and the Beatles game. Wait, I take that back, last week the Times Magazine ran a long feature on *indy game developers*. The latest New Republic has an essay on Guitar Hero. On and on and on. Videogames are regularly treated as a legitimate and important art form in the mainstream highbrow media far more than they ever have. But some Chicago *movie reviewer* whose best years were about two decades ago says games aren't art, and gamers get all pissy and defensive?
If they bothered to read more than Kotaku, they probably wouldn't be so upset.
A Mind Forever Voyaging (Infocom, 1985) was the Citizen Kane of video games.
Sorry you guys missed it.
The issue is not legitimacy for games, but validation for the young adults playing video games. It is the cry of an outgrown child to their disapproving parents...see, Daddy? Video games are art! I'm not wasting my life at all!
I am a film person and a game person. What people who are solely film people don't get is that what makes games art is not generally their story, their characterizations, or anything that makes movies art. Games are not movies with a joystick attatched. What makes a game art is the mechanics of the play. The value of chess isn't what the pieces look like on the board, it's how they move, the balance of what they do. If we can make the leap of faith that abstract art and design are art, then we need to extend that common courtesy to the abstraction that is the functioning and interactivity of games. There is something elegant and deep about the mechanics of portal and braid or any game with a set of really well thought out verbs that almost no other artform can claim. Just because it's not topical or didactic does not exclude it from the ivory tower of art, since we don't use those criteria to kick other forms of art out. Games are plagued by the same problem that Movies are- they are often expensive to make and as a result end up as a commercial medium. You end up with games for teenagers more often than not just like you end up with movies for teenagers more often than not.
fuck citizen kane and fuck the critics, fucks sake avatar just won best drama at the globes.
so there u go.
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