Nabeel Ansari

The cool thing about math is that every 5 years you end up cycling the same games lists.

I would rather people stop derailing the thread with discussions like "are games art" and start talking about the actual topic instead.

I don't know how you can seriously quote this with a straight face.

There are rules in playing music too, it's called sheet music. You're given constraints (rules) as to how a song is written and functions. The performer can surely interpret that and work within those rules, yes. But so can a game player, in fact that's what it means to play a game. If I break the rules, i.e. play the song differently, for example invert the melody in Chopin's Waltz in C# minor, I'm not playing Chopin's Waltz in C# minor anymore. I'm playing a derivative work/improvisation (these are your ROM hacks, your mods).

Once upon a time in 2011 (I was merely a 10th grader), dear brad had helped me select parts for my first PC I'd ever built On this day, this machine is still going strong, with many wonderful upgrades cast in over the years, like an OS SSD, GTX 970, and 32GB RAM. Tanks through the biggest and baddest Kontakt libraries and power synths, and with my new graphics card, 50-60's games like Shadow of Mordor and Fallout 4. Only a one part has ever failed (the mechanical hard drive, just last year). What's most surprising is this power supply has straight been in this machine for now ~4-5 years and is still stable. 600W modular OCZ. My GTX 460 is sitting on my shelf looking for a new use. I might sell it, dunno. Thanks for all the great help back then! I refer people to you every now and again for good reason. Any time someone asks about getting a custom PC, I say "I know this guy on OCR, get it from him."

So then (I'm playing devil's advocate here, I don't actually give a shit), why would Finn's commander tell Kylo Ren that his battalion is super well-trained and loyal? Was he lying? Did they just grab a guy from sanitation and stick him in the army, un-conditioned, un-brainwashed, despite the rest of the First Order being clone troopers? Seems like the First Order has a lot of internal blunder and stupidity going on masquerading as people trying to be tough like the Empire but not actually. ...wait, maybe that's the point? It's not like it happens elsewhere in the movie...

It should be assumed in a discussion of art (something in inherently subjective) that a person doesn't need to include formalities like "in my opinon" or "according to my values" because by virtue of a person writing up a thought, it is, of course, their opinion and based on their values (unless they're playing devil's advocate or something). And well, that includes this response too; it's my opinion that that's how it should be.

Half of said "brutally honest list of 40 plotholes" was also straight-up over-analysis (and a few others were actually explained in the movie and the person simply didn't pay attention, like "how did the monsters get loose?!" It showed Rey release them by accident.). The movie has problems, but not that many problems. Again, if you rally around a complaint about a gag (Every original trilogy Star Wars movie was funny) where Han Solo tries out Chewie's bow caster, I've filed you under "complaining just to complain".

I'm not applying objective evaluation, in fact the point of the OP is to bring about people's subjective points of view.

The point was that the restriction is arbitrary, because separating the components of something doesn't assist you in seeing what the bigger picture impact is, though it helps in seeing how each component is harmonious, which is the sign of a greater work. I would argue that Pac-Man doesn't exhibit any manipulation of its game mechanics to elicit player responses like the games I rally behind do. It largely remains the same, which you can argue is an allegory of the futility of life, but I see that as easy, not very insightful, and thus it's more primitive (because you are both looking at a work that is inherently very simple and drawing very heavy extrapolated insight from it.) Also because so many games exhibit that type of phenomenon, and it's not really for a narrative message, it's because they want you to pump your hours into it for economic reasons. Maybe intentionality fallacy, but I think the saturation plays into it. So if you say it's art, I can get behind that, but I will also say it's not particularly good (or insightful, or impactful) art. Who cares about the words, though, right? So let me say this instead. If my motivation is to create or encourage the creation and critical acceptance of more artistic/impressionable/memorable great works in video games, I would not look to make more games like Pac-man, unless it were self-aware and manipulative (much like Undertale does with the more rigid and straightforward normal JRPG formula).

That's actually why I choose to encapsulate it in quotes, because I don't really think it's a cool term. But it's the only effective way of directly referring to the subset I'm talking about. I think we're sort of in agreement, you're saying both camps can be pretty valuable. I think right now I've been leaning on emphasizing how mechanics can be art as well, though. I kind of see these abstract, less challenging games as giving a bad impression to people, and I see it in some of the people at the game studio I do some work at, where the immediate connotation of talking about games as an artform means "take away the 'fun' and 'challenge', it pollutes it and gets in the way of the message". Gone Home being an exemplar. A project I am working on right now suffers from this; an extreme fear of game mechanics and thinking they will lead to some lesser abstract and lesser meaningful, more gamified and less mature experience. I don't think that's true at all. That's my beef here.

I said Pac-man is not emotionally impactful, which is a subjective statement. I don't qualify games as an artform medium as "all games are impactful and creatively designed", I qualify them as an artform because they are capable of demonstrating artistic qualities and have shown themselves to do so in recent history. It's not about "every game is so artistic and impactful, look at Street Fighter and Pac-man they're so GENIUS AND ABSTRACT", it's about "this medium can be explored to find artistic and creative things, and pioneers like Journey and Shadow of the Colossus have shown us how games can be art." Every other artform behaves like this. There are primitive works early on, by unskilled artists and early people not understanding the strengths of it. Movies used to be simple camera recordings of stage plays, until cinematography and special effects were invented and now it's a unique artform. And yes, many would argue those have little to no artistic value in the context of artistic film analysis. It's okay to say things used to be primitive, and now they are better and more refined. Artforms grow. They don't simply start existing with all their nuance and greatness. To bring it to games, I am not talking about nor was I ever talking about the "old stage plays" (pac man). Though if someone wants to go back and try to argue that those have unique artistic value to them, that surely is welcome here. I don't particularly agree with it, but I'm willing to be persuaded. I'm not saying "look how creative Dark Souls mechanics are, so Space Invaders must also be really genius too, right?" But for the record, my interest in Dark Souls does make me take it as seriously as great works of art, because I find aspects of the game's design (including that one that I've tried to explain now 6 or 7 times) to be incredibly unique, unprecedented, and memorable, and making a lasting impression, forever altering the way I look at how I approach game design.

You can't do this with movies either, since if you remove music, writing, and theatrics, it's just camera work and production, "which isn't as emotional as Mozart or Beethoven". It's a shitty, arbitrary, and anecdotal restriction you're using, to try really hard to say "games aren't art because I'm finding this incredibly small and non-holistic aspect of them that isn't completely subjective and creative". You say "it's a package deal" and then you're clearly contradicting that, right here. IS IT A PACKAGE DEAL OR ISN'T IT? Finding lowest common denominators of a developing artform is a really disingenuous way to evaluate the emotional impact of that artform, and just shows you have a lack of experience in studying games. Just because our early generations of games primarily focused on fun and balance and challenge doesn't mean people haven't started figuring out how to extend beyond that into using games as a medium of storytelling. Yes, Pac-man is not emotionally impactful, but Shadow of the Colossus is. So clearly Pac-man doesn't qualify to create generalizations about how impactful a medium can be, when Shadow of the Colossus is also a video game and clearly says "well we CAN be emotionally impactful".

So by your answer it seems you think there's a valid, inherent separation (since it was the first bullet and that's what I meant by that one). Now, do you see this as a bad thing? Should games be approaching the "art game" format for better/more mature reception and being accessible to more people? Or are we sacrificing what made games previously fun by doing so? Should we just divide the the industry and have "art games" over there and "fun games" over here? What do we do then with games that are both fun and "artsy"?

Architecture Cooking Anyways, that's not how categorization works. You can't say "something fits in a category if it has essential traits of that category" and then define essential traits of that category as the lack of specific traits simply because previous things in the category didn't have them... that makes no sense. If we start with visual art, and then look at music, we would say music isn't art, because it MUST NOT have aural components because it never did. Fast forward, cooking isn't art because art never had food in it, or active participation in its consumption. Or writing can't be an art because art never had written words in it. But then those things became art. And those lists of traits that art was allowed to include grew. The point of expanding, progressive worldview is to see how new ideas reconcile with old ones by way of adding nuance to old ones using new, never before seen additional concepts. Not to say they can't because the old ones didn't have a nuance to them that new ones did (don't forbid nuance, welcome it). Platypus example. Platypus have traits other mammals don't. Your post, that I am quoting right here, equates to saying that Platypuses can not be mammals because according to you, since mammals did not have any of those Platypus-specific traits before, then logically their essential defining traits are the LACK of these things. This is what you are saying. "Because mammals have never had things that Platypuses have, that must mean the LACK of Platypus features must be an essential trait of mammals." This is absurd. And you must address it. (Not repeat it.) You're coming off as if you are not defining by merit of prototyping, but that's exactly what you are doing. You're just doing it in a really convoluted way. A "lack of a trait" is not a trait, unless it is specifically agreed on in a dictionary definition or if there exists some other extended category that says "well, it has this additional thing to it along with all the other things, so it's something else". There is no such extended category for games (unless you'd like to shift your argument and say we should make one, then you have my attention), and there is no common understanding of art that forbids it operating with some logical principles (architecture) or having participation (cooking). I think you're drinking Ebert's kool-aid a bit too much. Where else are you getting these "lack of trait" traits from, if this is so obvious among "critics"? Let's see some links.

Interested in @djpretzel and @BardicKnowledge's opinions on the actual questions I asked in the OP.

I think there's a misunderstanding here. I'm not saying "game mechanic designs violates your definition but your definition is invalid". Our definitions are the same. I'm saying you are incorrectly deducing that game mechanic design violates your definition. You say: "it is about rules." Rules can be manipulated and changed creatively. "Rules inevitably decide a winner or loser." No, they don't. Several video games have no win or lose states, and your only defense here is saying they're not games, which is stupid and runs counter to how these things are literally sold and running against the language the entire rest of the industry uses. You are one person with no authority to invalidate an industry or a language. "Participation is necessary." That invalidates cooking, since eating is an active participatory act of consumption of the art (cooking), and many people eat their food differently. You must also actively eat the food in order to appreciate its flavor, texture and composition. I can argue games are art by using your own definition and I pretty much have this whole time. I've actually been specifically saying that games are MORE artistic than we previously thought BECAUSE I think they can even apply to stricter definitions of art like the one naysayers like you like to hide behind. Do you know why this logic works? It's called proof by contradiction. Proof by contradiction states that a claim X is impossible/false if there is something that does not agree with it. We start with a claim: "Game mechanic design can not be creative." I find you a counter example. But first, let's use a temporary definition of creative. Let's try the first one on google, " relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work." : "The consequence in Anor Londo is a creative mechanic because it creates the unprecedented first gameplay consequence for an impulsive action taken by the player. Half of the enemy types disappear and the bonfire is killed off when the game registers that its keeper is now an enemy and the bonfire is no longer active or usable. This is the only time this happens in the game, and it happens not for any motivation of optimally engineered balance or fairness; it's done to screw with and punish the player for taking a narrative action they thought was acceptable. It is imaginative and original because it takes the normal game's formula and creates a singular variation of it that only appears this one time in the game for the sake of conveying the narrative, not to mathematically optimize something to be more "fun", as if that could be mathematically derived anyway, ditto for fairness. Unless you say that it's "fair" because the player did something "narratively bad", thereby forcing you to admit that the game isn't separable from the narrative (because they would be completely orthogonal otherwise) and thus since narrative design is artistic the game design must also be artistic because they are one in the same. This contradicts your claim. A creative mechanic exists, therefore NOT "game mechanic design can not be creative" = "game mechanic design can be creative". It is not a stretch to say that because it is creative, it can be categorized as art. I don't need to take it that far. I already have previously. He's pointing out that you were saying games are not art because they have things other art doesn't, not because they don't have things art does. You even just said architecture is art, even though it's full of mechanical engineering (which is incredibly mathematical and objective), or cooking is art, even though it requires active consumption (participation). These are things you claim art doesn't have. And yet, things you list as art do have them. It was only until recently you changed your mind about how you are categorizing. Maybe decide these kinds of opinions of yours first before entering the discussion (or maybe just enter it to learn via inquiry and not pretend you know everything)? You'll save headaches all around. Like I said, this whole thing of yours completely derailed the topic from the questions I was asking in the OP.

Such aaaaaaaaaaas... make sure you include traits that are only shared by every "real" artform (I'm sure you can pull up the list of all the real artforms somewhere since it's so well-categorized). Go ahead, I'm waiting. Also, don't write "critics" if you're just talking about Roger Ebert. He's a singular critic.

There are no good remixes.

I think it's fairly easy to define art: non-deterministic (i.e. not designed according to absolute logic) creative works that evoke subjective and varying responses in different people. Everything that can be designed according to aesthetic, "taste", wanting to elicit or convey specific ideas or emotions is art. That includes cooking (hence the name CULINARY ART), and, to me, it includes game mechanic design, because game mechanic design is *not* objective or approaching some universally optimal engineered state, and game mechanics have been shown to be manipulated by game developers in order to further convey narratives (narratives that in isolation may not even linearly function ina any other medium like books or movies as a traditional story in the case of Dark Souls). Most opposition has either been "that's not reeaaaally a game it's interactive software because you can't lose so its mechanics don't count" or "the effects you observe don't exist because you're a sad lonely nerd who wants games to be movies".

Neither is listening to music or looking at a painting or watching a movie or viewing a play or reading a book. Don't use shitty analogies and expect them to make any coherent sense. Acts of consumption aren't art, the creation is the art. Your analogy is a misdirect at best, and it's really funny how hard you're trying to scream about how everyone's just a big baby and won't grow up and accept games aren't art when the only reason you think so is that you got so jaded that siding with Roger Ebert (someone who doesn't know jack shit about current video games or game design) makes you feel like you have higher class even though you've failed to demonstrate that you know anything about game design (poor attempt at speculating how Riot does character balance arguing with people who watch Riot people talk about how they character balance) and have failed to address any lively examples that people have provided of good storytelling in games (besides saying "no that's not good storytelling uniquely, that's just regular good storytelling" without addressing how the same stories wouldn't function in any other medium). You often complain about how I assert people don't know what they're talking about, but it's hard not to when people don't have nearly the same amount of time, study, research or experience and then come off as if they "know" what's up. The age card is laughable. I live and breathe this stuff, study this stuff, and my social circle is entirely comprised of creators, game designers, composers, writers (people who know more about art than people who don't create). I'm not a lonely nerd, I actually pretty much share a fairly common and dominant viewpoint in the industry (that's actually where I got it from). The point of this thread is not saying whether games are art (read the last bullet in the OP), it's about arguing what kind of games make them art (just art games or more?). You're welcome to state your viewpoint that none at all is art, but the hostility you're displaying towards people who are on topic is incredibly not cool. something something feeling superiority something something You've made your point (I GET your point, I just think it's naive and non-holistic) and are just continuing to echo it louder and louder now. Please let the thread go where people want it to go. If you have no interest in the discussion stop trying to shut it down with personal attacks.

Studio One Remote Control - Brings Studio One's mixer to your iPad. Faders, insert effect chains and parameters, sends, macros, macro control mappings, transport control. 100% improvement to how I do things. SoundPrism Electro - Haven't gotten this set up yet, but with a fancy cable mess in place I can use this as a great and fun MIDI Controller for sketching music and playing in alternative input schemes (it's completely diatonic, you can apply accidentals to the tone scheme, and it's spaced in thirds instead of regular scale steps). Other than that, I usually write my own Python scripts for filesystem stuff when working on sample libraries.

I encourage you to move to my art games thread to put the discussion in a place where it can actually be taken seriously and is welcome xP