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This hits the nail on the head. It's why I hope this forum can make a comeback. There must be an anti-Silicon Valley (I hope that will be the Internet.)

Something I've been thinking about because Michael says on his Patreon he is grateful to be liberated from himself, his own feeling that he has to make "fun" games to be relevant. Also in a Time magazine I read today the Nintendo president (Iwata?) was eulogized and his quote was all games must be one thing: [paraphrasing] "fun".

I've never once thought of games as fun. Not even Nintendo's games. And a lot of older games are anything but fun. But I think we should be careful about language, and instead of fun we should say "entertaining", which I am sticking in here because a post up above says fun and entertaining in the same breath, but I am not sure if they are supposed to be interchangeable or not, but I don't think they are.

When I read entertaining, or entertainment, I think like a someone entertaining someone else in an intimate or social setting. It isn't fun per se, although it might be. It can be really anything. And most of all we prize the entertainer for their intelligence. But intelligence too comes in many forms. Let's just say entertaining instead of "fun". It will make us think differently. If you are not entertained you just want to get away... that's what we really mean right?

(what is fun then? Stupid childish entertainment? I don't know. I think fun is at least as elusive as beauty.)

Just an update to say I've hit the half-way point in writing this! New post coming very soon, along with new music.

Just thought people here might be interested in my latest project: https://sauhiro-orihaus.squarespace.com/to-burn-in-memory/ (Moving hosts, but this link should work fine).

Like that, games can be about the pleasure of (inter)acting, rather than interacting for the sake of Big Drama. Not to say they cannot be 'dramatic'; Cheongsam is dramatic in a slow character-piece type of way. There's room for a lot in games but we need some different cultural heritage.

What is Cheongsam? If it's a video game it isn't on the digital stores I've heard of or in web search results.

Strikeout: aha. It occurred to me to search these forums for mention of Cheongsam. It looks like it's something you are working on. I also noticed Dinner Date last night.

PS:  Funny "travelogues, pastorals or character-driven pieces" seems like a perfect description of non-arcade video games. If "Big Drama" is more dominant now it's a relatively new development, probably as new as the word "triple-AAA game". Most games that contain drama feel like a ghost town, or a ghost world. How would a travelogue game differ from a pastoral or either from a big drama game? I feel like if there is any kind of game we are drowning in it's colorful quirky gimmicky games. It seems like a lost cause to even talk about those, they seem interchangeable like children's action figures. Drama never enters into them. Games are generally drama deficient, more drama of any kind I think can't hurt, even if it's only implied or suggested, or perhaps even better under the present circumstances.

Anyway, I agree on the one hand that games about dragons and magic and soldiers are bizarre. But on the other there's not nearly enough diversity of content in games. So I'd be loathe to discourage the bizarre. But yeah, I like art.

I don't know how we define bizarre. I think maybe you just become divorced from contemporary culture as time goes on and so it seems like it is bizarre. But if so I think filmmakers are similarly still stuck in the older culture (perhaps to be expected since filmmakers are aging people) or video games just tend to be bizarre!

I don't think dragons and magic and soldiers are bizarre at all, because we have lots and lots of movies and literature about these things, they are the furthest thing from it. What I mean by bizarre is that most of the games featured on Kill Screen for instance are setups that have no analogue at all in our culture heritage, no cultural touchstones, they seem to spring fully formed from the wildest imaginations of who are probably young people who know the world through self referential Internet memes and surreal cartoons that have yet to or cannot ever leave a mark on the longer cultural dialogue possibly because they seem to be divorced from it. In a nutshell bizarre to me is the things that melt your grandmother's mind, and that you've learned to tolerate and sometimes even appreciate but still wonder if you shouldn't hesitate to invest too much into it all.


PS: I expect a big reason for the bizarreness is most games are boutique games and so it's hard to conceptualize something for them to be that can still work within the limitations that gamemakers of today feel like they are forced to subject themselves to. Personally I think if 1% of these gamemakers would just get together and focus on tools and resources for gamemakers and have a dialogue about what we really want out of games then this divide would begin to mend itself within a decade.

I humbly think it is by far too early to say that. I know the anxiety you mean; but that is then also a problem of a game showing you Interesting Things while having a big countdown in the background. In ballet there can be a huge number of simultaneous things happening without viewer anxiety over missing parts (which will inevitably happen). I think the anxiety more comes from badly guiding players and bad scene set-ups than the possibility of looking around. Certainly when you get to something like Koyaanisqatsi, which has far less of a clear "Interesting Things".

What I mean is there is a clear focus, and there is periphery, and if there is a scene and it isn't clear what is its focus that's generally considered poor staging. I can't recall ever having seen such a scene myself. Sometimes there are slow tableau like scenes where there is time to look at all of the different elements one by one like a painting, but the elements themselves will then be overall static. So I don't have a problem with having the option to look around. I just doubt that it will be used unless the viewer/player already knows the scene by heart and it can't hold their attention, or they have something like ADD or autism or can't resist the urge to fidget with the shifting apparatus, in which case that could be a net negative even as an option.

This is why a lot of the time people think holodeck like technology will be a new way to experience movies, but it won't be. It will only work in an intimate setting like a classroom or basically something that can play out in a single room, and it would have to be short and self contained since moving to different scenes would be disorienting, and if there is a narrative again you have the anxiety of not knowing where to focus, so it has to be a much more open scenario where where you focus is more fluid and so it cannot be a substitute for cinema, like 3D glasses or anything like that.

we do need a Koyaanisqatsi of games, too.

Funny that you should say that. I just watched the 'qatsi trilogy in preparation of a new project…

Go oooon....

In the U.S. you never see the first two parts, only the third, which I think I read somewhere is the more underwhelming of the trio. I'm familiar with it because I regularly listen to Phillip Glass for recreation. You can see the third part on Netflix right now, and the third part was always available for rental when I was a kid, but never the others, so I've never encountered them. Speaking of Netflix I was horrified the other night when I noticed that the to-watch list I'd curated for myself had been reduced to at least a forth. I'm less convinced now that Netflix can ever be a semi-permanent home for older films. It's either been gutted or it's going to rotate it's library like a broadcast television channel when technically it shouldn't have to. I expect it's gutted because there's almost no reason to build a watch list unless you can count on the films to remain available. It's a lot of work for nothing otherwise (on the plus side that night I saw Pasolini's Canterbury Tales for the first time. It's now probably my favorite example of a medieval setting, which is a popular one in video games.)

This week ted.com is featuring random old talks. I caught this (http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics) one which although it's fast I feel like there might be a micrososm for video games in there. I want to start a thread featuring the presentation but I'm a little bit pressed for time. Comics are often compared to games both for being a format that seems overwhelmingly in arrested development but has genuinely progressive things to offer to art, and because supposedly as a medium it hasn't yet experienced a burn out stage where everyone gets tired of arguing about it and so stop and then never recover, that supposedly all other mediums have experienced at some point in their western history as a kind of coming of age. I think all of the ideas on rapid display in the talk are intriguing but also the navigation ones seem almost sibling like to video games.

How does one play a Koyaanisqatsi of games?

It's interesting in a way you ask it that directly, because in a way it is very easy to make Koyaanisquatsi interactive, either through camera movement, translation movement, determining cuts or rates, &c., &c., but it is hard to know whether it is 'good' because for that you need the right audience to experience it.

To me this sounds like a way to make different versions of the same thing. An editing tool. I think we spend too much time making/playing games and not enough making/thinking in terms of tools and improving/studying existing games. I think that's why progress is glacial. I don't like having the option to look around when interesting things are happening, it creates a sense of anxiety, never knowing if you are looking at what you are supposed to be looking at. So I only see something like this as a development tool for if you think you can edit better and are unhappy with the edit, or think an alternative edit would be interesting.

I humbly think it is by far too early to say that. I know the anxiety you mean; but that is then also a problem of a game showing you Interesting Things while having a big countdown in the background. In ballet there can be a huge number of simultaneous things happening without viewer anxiety over missing parts (which will inevitably happen). I think the anxiety more comes from badly guiding players and bad scene set-ups than the possibility of looking around. Certainly when you get to something like Koyaanisqatsi, which has far less of a clear "Interesting Things".

we do need a Koyaanisqatsi of games, too.

Funny that you should say that. I just watched the 'qatsi trilogy in preparation of a new project…

Go oooon....

you don't see movies that simulate being a trucker or anything like that.

That reminds me of Le Camion by Marguerite Duras, one of my favorite film makers (whose novels inspired our game Bientôt l'été).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nczd500mZAc

Anyway, I agree on the one hand that games about dragons and magic and soldiers are bizarre. But on the other there's not nearly enough diversity of content in games. So I'd be loathe to discourage the bizarre. But yeah, I like art.

we do need a Koyaanisqatsi of games, too.

Funny that you should say that. I just watched the 'qatsi trilogy in preparation of a new project…