You are not logged in. Please login or register.
It might also be helpful to set down "entertainment" as sister concept to "art."
Entertainment can be a creative expression requiring creative skill, but there's no intent to communicate a point, just to pass some time in a relatively enjoyable manner.
Thus delineating "Clash of the Titans" from...say, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Or "Pong" from "Myst."
I think abortion should be the next thread topic.
So art has to have a point? Ya can't paint a picture just for the sake of creating something that looks nice?
Last edited by TrowaGP02a (2010-04-24 00:09:31)
We're being very relative if we're calling 2001 entertainment.
Also, someone please collect the new hypotheticals.
I think there's some sort of vague intersection here between the notions of "game" and "story," but I'm having a hard time sussing it out in my head. I'm bringing to bear here some of my paltry experience with games: World of Warcraft. You seem generally to run into two kinds of people who play that game. There are those who play for the game of it — the challenge, whatever — and those who play for the story of it. There's surprisingly little overlap between the two groups, in my experience.
Very little in that game is random. There's an overarching plot, and tons of little side-plots. In fact, the whole story is kind of horribly complicated; I never wrapped my head around the whole thing. There are tons and tons of characters, hidden identities, people switching sides, fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles … blah de blah. It's really very rich.
Lots of people who play just ignore that stuff so they can go fight bosses and whatnot. But it's all there, if you want to take the time to listen to the dialogue and stuff. I'll even admit, freely, that there were moments when I was playing the game that left me slack-jawed. There's one quest in the last expansion that seems wholly ordinary, but then it cuts to a big cinematic — and this is a game that doesn't do cinematics ever — and it's just epic, and … well, there's drama. Like legit drama, like you'd find in a novel. It's really quite something.
I hadn't thought about that in quite a while, but this conversation made me reflect on it again. And … y'know, I might have been wrong. Maybe the line between art and not-art is blurrier than I thought. Maybe it's possible, or even common, for video games to contain within them the essential art-ness that we find in drama or poetry or whatever.
I'm really not sure what I think, now. Except to say that maybe whoever-said-it-first is right. Maybe video games, as a thing-people-make, are too new to really know for sure what can and can't be done in that medium.
Teague edited my last post instead of quoting, because Admins have extra buttons to click and break things with (I did it earlier with one of JH's posts), so this post of his technically doesn't exist except in this quote, but I copied it from my post and edited it in here.
Confused? Good. Anyway...
Dorkman wrote:Not quite. More like, a gamer at his game system is similar to a musician at his instrument. The game is the piece of music to be played.
...yeah. I think that's what I said.
It's not. In SAT analogy syntax, you said:
Gamer is to video game as musician is to instrument.
This is an inaccurate analogy. More accurate would be either:
Gamer is to video game as musician is to song.
or
Gamer is to game console as musician is to instrument.
I think abortion should be the next thread topic.
As no one currently posting here has a uterus or vagina (that I know of), none of us are qualified to speak on the subject.
Hey none of us are "qualified" to speak on anything 
But, yeah, in my head it connected to "starting another religious debate" really easily, not so much on paper I guess. I'll cross that off the list..
Last edited by TrowaGP02a (2010-04-24 00:24:56)
This is an inaccurate analogy and then some other stuff.
Your analogies aren't perfect either, though. A musician with an instrument but no sheet music can make his own music. A video-game-player with a computer but no software can't do anything. (For purposes of conversation, we're assuming the player is not also a computer programmer.)
Musician, song and instrument form a tripod, but two out of three pairs of legs can stand alone. A musician without an instrument can still compose, and a musician with an instrument but no song can still play. An instrument and some sheet music without a player is pretty useless, but whatever.
But the player-game-consoleorcomputer triad is interdependent. Take away any one of them and the whole thing falls. I'm inclined to doubt that there's any significance to that, though; I think it's just an artifact of the nature of computers and computer programs.
Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2010-04-24 00:20:37)
Hey none of us are "qualified" to speak on anything
I would contend that I'm fairly qualified to speak on the subjects of eating and masturbation.
Separately, I mean.
Bahaha first time I actually laughed out loud to a form post in a while. Caught me totally off-guard, I totally thought it was going to be a "we are all most likely "artists"" post!
That PICard is equally as hilarious.
Also, another Moderate perk is that no one ever knows when you edit a post, they think you are always perfect
Last edited by TrowaGP02a (2010-04-24 00:31:44)
I could give a seminar on pooping. I could teach classes.
I could give a seminar on pooping. I could teach classes.
But would you want to teach a class full of the kind of people who would go to a class on pooping?
But would you want to teach a class full of the kind of people who would go to a class on pooping?
We're in a recession, man. Work is work.
I had brought up the idea of playing games as performance art on twitter. With that in mind, has anyone played Little Big Planet? The point of that game is to design your own levels that you play. You then share them online with the rest of the world. Most creative game Ive played in a bit.
I have played Mass Effect. I love Mass Effect. I haven't played the second one yet, because I'm poor. But I would love to, if anyone out there is feeling generous.
If you enjoye Mass Effect, nay, if you gave it even as high as a 4 out fo 10, ME2 will Blow.Your.Fucking.Mind.
If I could take us back a few pages, as someone who hasn't taken Art History, could someone put this into Captain Dummy talk for me?
If I could take us back a few pages, as someone who hasn't taken Art History, could someone put this into Captain Dummy talk for me?
Yeah, I didn't get it either. But it seemed besides the point to ask.
Short version: The painting's called "A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte," and it's noteworthy as one of the earliest and best examples of neo-impressionism. That style of painting was heavily influenced by late-1800s research into color theory and the science of light. Seurat and others (mainly Seurat at first) basically invented a new way of painting that uses small points of primary color that, when viewed from a distance, get perceived as subtle shades.
Fun fact? Literally all of modern print and digital media is based on the same principles.
I brought it up 'cause pointillism (as it's called) is an art form that makes the viewer an inherent part of the artwork. It relies on how light and color interact with the eye. And it's a hell of a thing to see in person. Photographs can't really capture it.
Photographs can't really capture it.
That is one point I can agree on, it really is a different sight up close.
Last edited by TrowaGP02a (2010-04-24 23:19:38)
You know how if you look at a newspaper printed picture close enough, it's just a bunch of dots?
That's what this guy did. With a big painting. Just tiny little dots. Lots and lots of tiny, tiny dots.
People told him he was crazy. They were right. But he still did it.
Since any attempt by me to enter into a discussion on this topic would end in a rambling, incoherent rant that nobody wants to read, I will simply say that I wrote a blog post about it when Ebert first posted his opinion, and you can read it here.
http://filmisawayoflife.wordpress.com/2 … -have-fun/
Welcome to the forums, sir. I look at your name and signature and feel that you have found your home.
Something occurred to me. I'd be really interested in reading "novelizations" of the top two or three stories present in video games, the ones used as a pillar in the argument that video games can clearly tell worthwhile stories, and see how they stack up against novelizations of some other proven storytelling genre.
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.
Currently installed 9 official extensions. Copyright © 2003–2009 PunBB.
