article by my friend on games

[rinkuhero]

http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=518&mode=one

may be relevant to this forum; the writer of that article is also the person who writes much of the story/dialogue for our games (immortal defense, saturated dreamers, etc.).

[Michaël Samyn]

I moved this post because it seems to fit better here.

I read that article when I saw your tweet about it. It's interesting.
My own answer to their first quiz question was "When somebody makes a game that is art".

I appreciate that the writer refutes the claims of some that all the banal commercial videogames that we already have are meaningful and important artworks. And that they point out that art is simply not made in corporate office towers by hard working employees.

But I'm reluctant to embrace the alternative suggested through the links in the article. Not because I don't think they are important artistic creations. But because it seems like a celebration of a low-tech "je m'en fou" style that I dread to see equated with artistic expression through games technology. Frankly, that's too easy. It's easy to be punk.

I think there's a lot of interesting things happening in AAA games that we should not ignore. And we should not allow big corporations to have the exclusive right to do these things. If only because there's a lot more that needs to be explored there and they will never do it.

I realize that this is a matter of taste too. The artistic games linked in the article seem to jump from the medium's equivalent of pre-renaissance art to expressionism and pop art. And, personally, I really love baroque, romantic art and symbolism. So I want to explore that first.

[rinkuhero]

thanks for the response. only disagreements with your response i have offhand is that i don't think low-tech is necessarily easier (e.g. unity isn't that much more difficult to use than game maker, and good 3d art isn't that much more difficult to create than good 2d art), or that there's any direct relation between how difficult something was to do and the kind of an effect it has on people (and it's the effect on people i think we should judge something by, not how complex it is or how skillfully it was made).

[Michaël Samyn]

I didn't mean easier in terms of skill. I meant easy in terms of solutions for a problem. Mentally, it's easy to be rebellious, to reject things and embrace the total opposite. It's much harder to find a way to be constructive, to explore, to develop.

(but now that I write this down, it looks suspiciously like a age argument... maybe I'm just getting old )

[rinkuhero]

isn't there a contradiction between saying that and naming this forum/movement 'notgames'? since notgames feels like just a rejection of games, and doing the opposite.

[Michaël Samyn]

You really like linguistic discussions, don't you? Even about neologisms!

Mine was a personal comment on the article you linked to. I wasn't speaking "in the name of the notgames initiative" or something.

I have no idea what the opposite of games would be. But there's lots of things that can be rejected in videogames. The notgames initiative is not about rejecting videogames as a medium. On the contrary even. It's about rejecting the "games" aspect in videogames (or at least doing that exercise to see if it gets us any further), in order to allow the medium to grow and expand. I agree the name sounds negative, but I really see it as a constructive effort. There's a lot of really great things in videogames. We're just cutting out the bad parts, so the plant may blossom and grow much more.