I’ve seen glimpses of this “movement.” That’s exactly what they fear. “OMG they gave us a shitty ending just so they could sell us more DLC!!”
No, they want it fixed, and they want it fixed for free.
Shit, I paid $80 goddamned dollars for the collector’s edition and ordered it back in July because I believed in Bioware that much. I’d pay more for a DLC alternate ending, but regardless of what happens, it’ll be a long time before I trust them to give a good ending again.
This is bizarre. Someone had to teach you language before you could even create a line of poetry, let alone write it down. As much as they are arts, things like writing and painting are also crafts, and a craft must often be learned, rather than simply discovered. People might have some natural talent for one type of artistic medium over another, but almost all of them must be learned as crafts. There are many ways to learn a craft, but taking instruction from someone else is a perfectly valid way of doing it. The idea that if something doesn’t just come to you magically that you were never meant to do it, is, first of all, a kind of magical thinking, and, second of all, contradicted by lifetimes of human experience.
This is a video game we’re talking about? Boy, do I feel like a dinosaur. I guess it never occurred to me that a game needed to have an “internally consistent” ending that “fits with the overall narrative and themes”. (Or even an ending at all,* per se*. You played until you ran out of quarters.)
On the other hand, when you released all the rivets and Donkey Kong fell on his head? Now that was an ending!
Get off my lawn…
That’s a misrepresentation of the point. I’m speaking from the point of view of an adult with a talent, not a child learning language. See my earlier point, by the time that it comes to create a work of artistic expression, your influences should be subconscious not direct. Of course I wasn’t born with knowledge of the English language, but now, as a ‘writer’, I would never ask for someone’s help/input on my work. The logical conclusion to make, if I had supported the idea you seem to believe I did, would be that we should do away with the school system and rely on mystical knowledge of the heavens, and I couldn’t put my name behind anything like that.
Cite?
“The Valley of Fear” doesn’t fit into the chronology of the other stories at all. Before “The Final Problem” Watson had never heard of Moriarty, and there is no time within it for "The Valley of Fear to take place. At the start of “The Valley of Fear”, Watson knows all about Moriarty. You can say that The Vallrey of Fear is set before The Final Problem, but the stories don’t brear you out.
In any event, The Valley of Fear was written and published well after The Final Problem. Doyle definitely resurrected the old villain, wherever you try to set things chronologically.
Semjaazah, your idea of art seems to involve the artist spontaneously self manifesting into existence fully formed in a featureless unpopulated void, and expressing only things they have either been born knowing or figured out through pure Platonic style thought experiments, to an audience consisting only of themselves.
I dare say no such thing is possible, or desired. And that by your qualifications there exists no artist in the universe with even the barest shred of integrity.
I’m surprised you can live with yourself after writing poetry. Any true artist with integrity would only work in mediums they had invented themselves.
Plus the final lines of “Valley” are pretty clearly meant to indicate the events of “Solution” are in the future.
Doyle is famous for not putting a lot of effort into making his stories consistant with each other. Watson’s war wound moves around, his number of wives changes, he claims to have never heard of Holmes talk about his relations despite having already met Holmes’s brother etc. His knowing about Moriarty and then reacting like he’d never heard of him in “Final Solution” is just another example.
Speaking as an artist, Of course they have the right to demand a change. I also have the right to tell them to go bugger themselves. When you create a commissioned work of art, you work to your client’s whims. When I perform a piece of music, I further tailor the song based on audience reactions. The final product isn’t less pure, or of less value than the first draft. Usually it is an improved version. The original may only be of interest to dedicated fans or collectors.
In this case the work is neither one thing nor the other. It is a work for profit, but created for mass consumption. So the fans do indeed have a point in asking for changes as they as a whole are the patron of the work. On the other hand, they weren’t involved in the creation of process of any of the material in the first place. They would be more like a person at an art show who asks the artist to change a color finish on a piece they bought or something similar.
It is OK, but it is also entitled and rude.
There is no hard boundary between a child and an adult and the very act of living is an act of continuous learning. At no point does learning from someone else somehow become illegitimate in an artistic sense. Every good artist will say that they are always learning, and they learn very often from other people.
And what about people who learn their crafts as adults and go on to create art? They’re somehow defying their destiny or something?
As for the entitlement thing, I guess there are some people who are over the top, saying that Bioware *owes *them a new ending. I suppose that could be viewed as entitled and assy. But if someone drops Bioware a note saying they loved the series, but the ending doesn’t make sense, and asking if it could be changed/explained/fixed in downloadable content, is that entitled? (Note that the creator in this case already plans to add to the story, and they’ve done so extensively in the previous game).
Is it only entitled if the request is rude? Is it entitled to ask for additional content for free, but not if you’re willing to pay for it? Or are both entitled?
Misrepresentation once again, though coming closer to the truth. Note my previous point about not being against schooling. I hate to resort to cliches but you’re inventing a strawman here. The audience is also irrelevant, because what you have created, you show once it is done, my point is the audience has no place within the creative process. Whether any audience every witnesses the end product is neither here nor there to my point. The whole platonic style thought experiments wasn’t a million miles from the truth though, so I will give you that.
A good point to counter the last is that I write free verse, so the only way in which I’m constrained is by necessity to use the English language, I don’t write in any form of set metre, nor poetic tradition. Also note my prior point on subconscious influence as opposed to direct, conscious influence. It is one thing to have picked up influence and knowledge along the course of life, it is quite another to say ‘where am I going wrong’ ‘help me’ ‘oh please critique my work and tell me how it needs improving’ ‘how can this be more popular and make me more money?’ ad nauseum.
I have made a very clear distinction for you now, and any further obfuscation on the matter is childish, but entirely your right.
This is one of the most absurd statements I’ve read in awhile.
That certainly can be true. But I see no reason it has to be true. Artists all over the place choose to involve the audience in the creation.
But a video game from a major label is nowhere near any ideal of art. This is not a garage project by some guy just looking to make something cool and if other people like it wonderful. The express intent behind its creation is to produce something that 8 million people will pay $55 for.
To not try and pre-emptively take into account what audience would want is a failure of the creative process for this type of “art.” Now, after it is released, if they find they misjudged the audience and want to change it I see no problem with that.
The more interesting question to me is that it is obviously true that if a game “artist” releases a broken game and people pay for it unaware of that, then they have some position for demanding a fix. If the game crashes after 27 minutes of play. Demand a fix.
If every once in a while a certain weapon starts shooting without effect on other players. Demand a fix.
Subtitles are riddles with copyediting errors. Demand a fix.
So, can the story be so broken that it essentially becomes a bug? I would tend to say no (see the David Weber thread going), so I wouldn’t support demands that it “fixed” but am not bothered by requests for that.
On the topic of Bioware, it’s not like there’s no precedent for them changing their own endings by releasing addons.
After Mass Effect 2, they added a $7 downloadable expansion that gives you zero choice of the final outcome and turns you into someone who killed 300,000 members of an alien race because you claim - and it’s just your word and the alien Council already is suspicious of you and your claims of destructive machines from beyond the universe - that the Reapers were going to come in from beyond the void and you had to blow up the gate and kill all those people to save more. So voila, you go from just a renegade agent type at the end of ME2 to a renegade agent who killed hundreds of thousands of people because of the bogeymen that the other alien races don’t want to believe in. So no matter how honorably you conducted yourself in the last game, you start out in the hole, six months after you fought to save the galaxy the Reapers are back already, and you’re hoping this character you grow to care about will have some kind of a proper wrap-up instead of a ‘WTF no foreshadowing of this weird shit’ ending that just has different colored lights as the most obvious distinction. Even a sad, more conventional ending would have been better.
When you say you’re a “‘writer’”, do you mean you’re a guy who writes poetry in a moleskin notebook in your spare time, or do you mean you’ve got a published collection of poetry in my local Barnes and Noble?
This statement makes no sense. Both “entitled” and “rude” are negative traits and therefore cannot fit under being OK.
And I’m not sure I agree that an artist is free not to change it, really. I’m having a hard time coming up with a utilitarian argument why the artist’s unhappiness with changing his work is worth more than the unhappiness of his fans. Especially when we’re dealing with actual mistakes, which is what is being alleged here.
Sure, there’s freedom of speech, but few use that to argue that you can’t say anything immoral. And I don’t agree with some nebulous concept of integrity that does not involve avoiding a choice that is actually wrong. It is not wrong to change your work in response to criticism, so you are not showing integrity by choosing not to do so.
No, that’s pride, and not the good kind.
Thanks for the explanation, you’ve added alot. Seeing as it’s your only contribution to the thread, perhaps it’d have been better not being made, but that’s a matter for you to decide. The dichotomy I meant was that subconcious influence is ever present, as with all things that shape us. Direct would be ‘I’ve been told to paint like this/in this style/like this painter’ or ‘I went to an art gallery and saw the works of Picasso, now I’ll do my take on it’ or ‘such-and-such said they didn’t like how I paint and to become more like this’. Find it absurd all you like, but your one clause sentence doesn’t even qualify as absurd, it was simply inane.
@Trepa If you read above, I mentioned it’s just hobby writitng, hence no financial element (this element being what often strips work of it’s integrity in my opinion, which is a subtext to everything I’ve said in this thread).
@obfusciatrist I agree completely, given that I find the classification of video games as as art as dubious (though that is for others to make their decision on). My replies have been more in terms of traditional art, simply given the title of the thread, rather than relating to the opening story. I mentioned earlier that it is obvious that given the intention of video games being making money, they will be tailored to market demand.
Seconded, or thirded, or whatever. Some creative artists will have a strong vision of what they intend to do, and/or temperamentally just won’t give a damn what fans say. Others will be more flexible and responsive to their fans. If the artist wants to be selling her stuff for many years to come, such as an author who’s writing a multivolume series, it just might behoove her to pay attention to fan feedback. But she doesn’t have to. Fans have plenty of other ways to spend their entertainment dollars, and can always go elsewhere if they grow disgusted. That’s just how it works.
Well, Kathy Bates “convinced” James Caan to change his final book’s ending to suit her demands in Misery.
All she had to do was kidnap him, imprison him, and smash his ankles.
~VOW