I would love to see what Ebert would say after sitting down for an hour or two with Miyamoto. It won’t validate the point that video games are like movies, but it would validate that there are brilliant minds in the industry that could make it happen - Miyamoto is as much a visionary as most acclaimed film directors.
On a similar note, if Nintendo succeeds in their goal with the Revolution’s control setup, it’ll be very interesting to see what games are made for that console. The controller design theoretically allows for more abstract gameplay, such as conducting an orchestra or preparing and cooking food (Iron Chef: The Game 
). All it takes is one person coming up with an innovative idea to open the floodgates.
Nah… Miyamoto is like Tolkien - they’re good at what they do, but ultimately, their stuff is just mindless fantasy.
These are some great responses. But the discussion seems to have turned exclusively to the game creators, to the backdrops they create, as well as how they implement seemingly mundane things like lighting, character movement etc. But what role does the player have? Does a strong, “artistic” video game become mundane and trite in the hands of an inferior player? How does a skilled player make a game better? Many people argue that the best athletes — the Michael Jordans, the Muhammed Alis — practice their sport at a level that actually constitutes aesthetic distinction; the performance becomes beautiful in the way that fine dance does. Is their a parallel among video game players? I’m not a gamer myself, so I have no answers.
I’m curious why you feel that games are not a narrative medium. I always thought that video games could be an excellent storytelling medium. Not traditional narrative, per se, but, ideally, multi-linear narrative. For instance, I think the holy grail for games such as Fable, KOTOR, and other “good or evil” games would be an infinitely branching narrative where pretty much every decision the player made would influence the way the world would react to the player’s character. (Now, I understand that this is pretty much impossible from a game-design viewpoint, but holy grails shouldn’t be attainable anyway, should they?)
Personally, WRT Ebert’s statements, I think it’s shortsighted to say that video games can not create art. (On some levels, I think it can be argued that it already has.) IMHO, one of the primary goals authors and filmmakers has is the achievement immersion, the feeling on the part of the reader that s/he is part of the story and is emotionally invested as such. With that in mind, seeing as how video games are an inherently immersive medium, it seems only natural that a truly emotionally gripping story will, someday, be told.
With the endless progression of war sims, for instance, is it inconceivable that someday someone will create one where you’re genuinely connected to your comrades in arms and are appropriately horrified when they die? Couldn’t this conceivably convey as powerful a message about the horrors of war as Saving Private Ryan?
I don’t know if it will be any time soon (sadly, probably not), and I’m not saying it’ll be easy (to the contrary, art should never be easy), but the idea that there’s an inherent limitation to the medium makes it impossible rings false to me. Never say never, as my dad used to say.
:rolleyes: Oh, come now. You don’t expect us to buy that argument, right? I think I’m being whooshed. I hope I’m being whooshed.
People have been blaming games and music and movies for deaths since…oh, I’d guess since the beginning of such things. Don’t judge a piece of art (I include video games here) by the actions of someone who experiences it. Especially when that person is of questionable mental stability. A person who commits suicide or kills another person “because of a game” has problems far more serious than being exposed to the game.
That’s another facet that definitely exists, particularly in FPSes (which may be the most sportlike genre that isn’t actually sports). Given a solid, balanced game, with skilled players, deathmatches really can become something like violent dances. Some of the most breathtaking gaming moments I’ve experienced were when I was fighting another player or players who were evenly matched to me in skill. The give and take, the near misses, the shift in tactics that finally results in a person’s death can be as exhilarating as a tango. Granted, those moments were few and far between, but they did occur, and evoked intense emotion that can’t be reproduced by any sort of static art.
I’d agree with Pochacco to an extent - video games are not, inherently, a narrative medium. They can incorporate narrative, but so can dance and music, which aren’t inherently narrative forms, either.
As I said before, the narrative, and how it’s incorporated with the rest of the elements of the game, are, if present, part of the art and craft of creating games, but narrative isn’t a necessary part of it.
(This is from a gamer’s perspective, not a game designer’s, however.)
IMO, no more than a movie, or novel becomes less artistic when watched/read by someone who does not - or can not - understand the themes, narrative, or devices of the movie/novel. The sub-par player might get less out of the game, and be less able to appreciate the ‘art’ - they probably don’t get to see some of the interesting narrative, graphical, or sound aspects, they may not appreciate the gameplay as much as someone who’s better able to finesse it, or so forth. But, (to use myself as an example), the fact that I’m reduced to simple, cheesy tactics even with Talim doesn’t reduce any artistry in Soul Calibur, any more than, say, Citizen Kane is depriciated by my inability to sit through it.
This is assuming, of course, that the game isn’t badly designed enough that anyone who plays it is destined to be sub-par (and left feeling frustrated, rather than challenged).
I see on preview BayleDemon disagrees with me…sort of. So I’ll elabourate a bit.
I don’t entirely disagree with your points, BD, I don’t think video games, though, are different than other media in that, other than a matter of degree.
In all media - all art forms - what you get out of it is, to a certain extent, determined by what you bring into it.
In that regard, video games have the added element of depending more on the player’s skill than other media.
But, that you can get more out by being a better player doesn’t change what the creators put IN. I’d argue, actually, that playing a game very well may be its own kind of art - an art of the player, separate from (if playing off of) the art of the designers and programmers.
Because you can’t tell a story through gameplay alone. In order to tell a story with a game you have to include non-gameplay elements: cinematics, voice-overs, text, cartoons, whatever. These elements may profoundly enrich the experience of playing the game, but they are not intrinsic to the gameplay itself.
To better understand where I’m coming from it’s helpful to consider videogames through Johan Huizinga’s theory of play. In his book Homo Ludens, Huizinga argued that play depends upon three conditions: formal rules, a bounded play space, and a detachment from everyday life. Remove any one of these conditions and play cannot exist.
It’s easy to see how these conditions apply to traditional games like football or chess. And its relatively simple to see how videogames fulfill them as well. However, Huizinga argues that we can extend this definition of play to cover many activities that are traditionally considered very different from sport and boardgames. This definition of play can actually encompass activities as diverse as reading a book, watching a movie, or conducting a religious ritual. The power of Huizinga’s theoretical framework is that it gives us a way of talking about “fun” and why people are entertained by the things they are entertained by.
How then is traditional narrative play? Well, it certainly exists within a bounded space – books end when the last page is read, movies stop when the lights go up. And it’s certainly detached from reality – the very definition of fiction is something that isn’t literally true. The tricky bit is the formal rules parts.
The formal rules of narrative are the rules of human physical and social interaction themselves. When we read a novel our minds are always a brief step ahead of the characters, assessing the options that are open to them. Will she fall in love with him? Will they escape before the armored door closes? Our minds play freely over the potentialities, then relax as the “answer” is revealed by the ongoing story.
(This explains many of the curious differences between fiction and real life. Like why stories need foreshadowing and closure when life often as not has neither. Both foreshadowing and closure help the play feedback loop in traditional narrative.)
Tradional narrative has been around for a long time. It probably is actually older than the oldest games, making it the earliest form of play. It’s not something that you can tamper with easily.
The problem with trying to tell a story with gameplay is that the basic feedback loops in a videogame don’t line up nicely with the feedback loops in narrative. At a deep level videogames work by constructing overlapping layers of repetitive actions. In a good game the gameplay feedback loops are constructed to be stable and reinforcing – small errors yield small penalties, large errors yield large penalties, and the source of each error is visible and comprehesible allowing the player to learn and grow.
By contrast narrative feedback loops are ill-conditioned. Very small errors can have grave consequences. Goals are often ill-defined or non-existant. Since each narrative moment is unique there is no opportunity for the player to improve.
None of this matters in traditional linear story-telling. The predetermined story corrects any “errors” in the reader’s “play”. In fact, if well-done this effect is actually extremely satisfying. Just watch The Sixth Sense. It works because we implicitly trust the author. “This isn’t real,” he tells us, “Trust me that I will make it turn out in a satisfying way.” But in a game where the player is accustomed to agency we can’t make the same promise. If he acts like a total jerk toward the love interest we can’t give him a romantic ending without destroying the integrity of the character.
This is why I think that interactive fiction experiments like Facade or the Erasmatron are misguided. Fiction is *already * interactive and attempting to add another layer of interaction on top of it destroys the safe boundary that is essential for play.
So, to sum up. Videogames are not a narrative medium because the feedback loops that are required to support good gameplay are not a good fit with the feedback loops required to support good narrative. This doesn’t mean that you can’t mix the two to create a satisfying result, but it does mean that videogames, like opera, are a blend of many different forms of play rather than a single unified one.
True enough. I’d certainly think Myst’s inherent quality is the same regardless of if a player tries it and gets deadly bored with the puzzles and lack of action.
On a different tangent, it’s arguable that games can achieve the same sort of status that art, dance, books, and movies enjoy, simply because it is possible to objectively criticize them on how well they tell the story, how effective the game controls are at taking you through that story, whether the art in the game is appropriate to the setting, etc. If you can establish what a game’s creator is intending to do with a game, you can then evaluate how well that goal is achieved, just as with any other work of (potential) art.
Bah. Who cares what that fat guy thinks?
There’s one in every crowd. And just as it was getting good!
It was clear from the links provided by the OP that both authors whom Ebert was answering in the quotes provided were referring to some previous writing of his.
(This Q&A from Ebert’s Answer Man column refers to his “Doom” review, which was not good. The only reference he makes to its origins as a video game there is to say that watching it is like watching someone playing a game who won’t let you have a turn.)
So I think the answers quoted in the OP must be seen in the context of Ebert responding to criticism for making the bolded statements above. Ebert is not demanding that video games attain the status of great art at any point that I can see. He does, as a movie critic, demand that “Doom” attain the status of a good movie, rather than just a theatrical translation of the gaming experience of it. He also makes a statement regarding his own taste in how to spend time entertaining himself, and his reasons for it.
I just like a little context, ya know?
I agree - it’s the emotional component that will need to be found for a “game” (or whatever it will be called - interactive experience?) to be thought of as “art”. So far, no video game has made me cry (well, other than out of frustration). No video game has connected me to a character the way a great novel or movie can. I also agree that there is no inherent limitation in the medium, and that someday they will.
As for my own take on this whole issue, I believe there are two inherent limitations to video games that currently limit any aspirations to great art. Fortunately, both with very likely be overcome at some point.
Artificial Intelligence - The whole reason “realistic” video games are popular is because it’s fun to feel like you are existing inside the story, experiencing it as it unfolds. However, the world must respond to your actions, and the current level of AI does not allow for a sufficiently satisfying interaction, although it keeps getting better and better. However, to reach their ultimate potential, the AI in video games must react to the player on a much higher level of motivation. We are rapidly approaching the perfection of the ability of an NPC in a game to, say, decide to shoot back at the player when shot at as opposed to continuing to patrol back and forth like an ass, but we need something more. We need NPC’s to be able to plot strategy together on the fly, create dialogue answering the player’s speech, and come up with alternate plans in response to a player deciding not to walk into their trap. I believe these obstacles are entirely surmountable however, given that we also overcome the other problem, which is:
Graphics and sound - Currently, the NPC’s (and even the player avatar) in the world of a video game are limited in their appearance and voice by how much time the programmers felt like devoting to creating sound, image and animation files for each of them. A great deal of progress has been made in this area, but there is still far to go. You can create a kind of character template for, say, running, and superimpose the specific shape and appearance of a character that will then run in a way particular to that character. But, if AI decides the character should stop running and start dancing the sailor’s hornpipe, the character is out of luck unless some hornpipe template is created as well. Obviously, you can’t create images for every possible thing that could happen.
What’s needed is some means by which the game knows how to generate the correct visual for whatever the character or player wants to do. I believe there is a lot of progress in this area as well, so I don’t imagine we will need to wait too long for games which are completely open in their possibilities, which will pave the way for “classics” that can be compared favorably with the best of film, drama, and literature.
Indeed, a question on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” quiz show within the couple of years dealt with Peter Jackson’s demand that each and every soldier in the giant battle scenes of Return of the King be given self-decision: that is, instead of a batallion moving in a certain direction because that’s where Jackson told them to go, each “soldier object” would be programmed with the skills and judgement of a decent soldier and decide what to do on their own, based on their “training”. This was done, but had to be tweaked when a large percentage of them, seeing the state of the battlefield and weighing their own skills against it, decided to run like mad for the hills.
Cute. But an inaccurate description of the AI. WETA digital designed MASSIVE to simulate large crowds, where each individual character is an “agent” who acts independently, choosing from a list of pre-set actions depending on their stimulus input.
In the original testing of the system it looked like some of the agents were “running for the hills.” Actually, it was just that the AI was designed so that an agent would walk/run/whatever until it found an enemy, and then choose an appropriate fighting move, etc… However, by random chance some of the agents at the back of the crowd were facing the wrong direction (away from the “enemy”), and they’d just continue moving and looking for an enemy without realizing that should turn around. No AI cowardice involved.
Looking for a cite for the reality of this last part, I came up with this article from Popular Science
I clearly remember the explanation that I gave above from the special extras on the Two Towers Extended DVD. Granted, this isn’t the easiest thing to cite online.
From Wikipedia:
From theonering dot net:
Strategic AI isn’t that hard. We did it for the first Ghost Recon. Too well, in fact. We actually had to dumb the AI down. It turns out players don’t really enjoy being flanked … .
Procedural dialog on the other hand is HARD. Mind-bogglingly hard. Harder than computer vision hard. So hard in fact that I don’t expect there will be a solution to it short of actual artificial intelligence.
Actually, procedural character animation is available now. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Check out Endorphin.
I wasn’t trying to refute you, Waenara. Check the times, we simulposted.
I just couldn’t remember the details, and it wasn’t exactly a primary source material I was paraphrasing. As you mention, cites are slim, so I linked to what I could come up with.
I was not aware of MASSIVE, and the explanation you give jibes a lot more with my understanding of the current state of the art.