if you are an ex marketing/advertisement student who decided to change carreer to stick it to the man, or if you post on Tigsource...you know what you are...

A CIP (Completely Indiependent Person™) with CCC (Complete Creative Control™) of my life?

EDIT: The connection between indies and hipsters is that hipsters have CCC of their fashion just like indies have CCC of their games. However, in both cases the benefits of the CCC are usually offsetted by the downsides of LOM (Lack Of Money™) or LOT (Lack Of Time/Taste/Talents/Team™).

Probably around 5% (not counting games that only make it to the idea stage). Personally I'm at 0% right now as well.

Trixels?!?!

Sonic Retro, TIGS, a forum me and some friends made, occasionally Dream Theater Forums (joined recently on suggestion of a friend), and I think that's pretty much it for posting. Sometimes I lurk Shmups, Pixelation, and NeoGAF though.

http://twitter.com/#!/GeraldApperson1

rofl, that's an amazing Twitter bot. Post a witty proverb every few minutes to keep up appearances, then spam random people when they're least expecting it.

I like to think of formalist work as "theoretical," i.e. instead of (or in addition to) writing a paper about art theory, someone decided to make a piece of art purely to illustrate a certain concept. The art of Duchamp, the music of John Cage, Iannis Xenakis (well, in part) etc. all work like that. That stuff isn't meant to be "immersive" or enjoyed on its own merits. It's mainly aimed at other artists and people who are interested in art theory, not "consumers." That's right, art can be made with other aims than being "immersive" or "beautiful" or w/e. Criticizing Mondrian for not being "immersive" is about as dumb as criticizing motorcycles for not having 4 wheels.

There's nothing wrong with people making experimental works, only when experiments are claimed to be more than what they actually are (this is where "interpretation" comes in). Cage's 4'33" is an interesting and funny (to me, at least) experiment, but imagine if it sparked a huge movement within the musical community of composers creating "environmental music," and critics lauded this new style of music as superior to all the old classical styles, and eventually it was taught in schools that environmental music was the movement that injected personality, life, and meaning into the boring and lifeless classical works. That's similar to what I see with abstract art. (Yes I know noise music exists, but I don't think it's had nearly as huge an impact on music as abstract art and postmodernism had on painting.)

Junkie  

Okay maybe I should have said "fan" instead.

'Why is halo not art but art i don't understand is art'

Art is always open to interpretation
Modern artists create art that is all interpretation

If you don't want to try to interpret it you don't have to
Many people don't even care to try, but it just makes them seem closed-minded, not noble defenders of 'real art'

If I have to "interpret" or find "meaning" in a piece of art in order to squeeze any pleasure or fun out of looking at it then it's a bad piece of art. You don't have to "interpret" a painting by Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Waterhouse (or even Dali or Rivera) to enjoy it, because they already look good enough to easily immerse the viewer if he has eyes. "Interpretation" is a bonus, not the entire point (for example, I don't have to think about what George Orwell was "trying to say" with 1984 to see that it's an amazing novel), and saying that a work of art is good because it's "open to interpretation" is the equivalent of saying "man you just don't get it."

Re: abstract art being a scam: You do realize that only like the top .5% of abstract artists actually make any decent money from their work, right? That's assuming you're using "abstract art" as a stand-in for all modern and postmodern art, of course.

Scam isn't in the money as much as the elevation of minimalism, formlessness, etc. (aka: what's easier to do over what's harder to do) Going back to an earlier example I used, Andrew Wyeth was (and continues to be by some people) dismissed and ridiculed because he dared to be a "classical realist" in an era of postmodernism.

I think a photograph can do this too; angle, aperture size, exposure length, and all that other stuff I know nothing about is a way of selecting details for inclusion. Heck, even just choosing subject matter is a question of selecting which part of reality you want to represent - a beautiful one? One that's beautiful in an odd way? One that's so ugly as to confront the viewer? So it's not really the "realism" that is valuable in a realistic painting. But I digress.

Not to mention the post-processing and editing that happens with digital photographs. The point of modern photography and classical "realist" paintings aren't just to replicate reality, it's to make reality look boring.

If you're interested, you might want to read up on Photographic Theory. Painters didn't just shift over, they fought with hands, claws and teeth in all directions to stop Photography. Even today, you'll find quite serious scientific texts that claim Photography could never be art and why traditional paintings would be so much better.

Oh, I didn't mean that the painters themselves just rapidly shifted over. I meant that the people with the most potential were, from the start, becoming more interested in photography/film than in painting, which is why those fields grew in size and blossomed until eventually they became much more relevant and prominent than painting. The same shift is happening today, from film to videogames. I also see a greater number of talented people interested in digital and pixel art than interested in painting (though many are interested in both, as they probably should be, because digital art draws on many of the same skills and techniques that painting does).

Well because it is abstract, it once again shows us something we can't obtain or experience, because it is per definition abstract. So we now crave the abstract until someone finds a way to enable us to experience it, which we can't, once again, per definition.

So we can't experience Pollock's Galaxy, but we can experience Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee? Or any of those "kitsch" paintings with angels in them? =P

hahahahaha

Don't tell me you're an abstract art junkie, Superb Joe.

Abstract art: Photography killed off painting near the beginning of the 20th century (as in, all the best talent was moving to that field and/or movies), so painters needed something to differentiate themselves. Instead of jacking up the scope of their paintings to represent fantastic situations that couldn't possibly be captured in real life even with the editing and adjustment photographs went through (though they probably couldn't have done that anyway, since the best talent was already moving away from painting), the majority move the opposite direction and create mundane geometric or apparently-random patterns. When people call bullshit, they respond with "meaning" and "art is useless" (because that totally makes the picture better to look at), or even technical defenses like "color theory" (because preceding painters didn't use color theory, or much more of that theory than they did), and label pictures that are actually good to look at (like the centuries of art that preceded them, or later painters like Andrew Wyeth) as "boring" or "lifeless" or "samey." All this is facilitated by the prestige game, where rich people have shitloads of money and need something to differentiate themselves from other rich people (e.g. rare commodities, like art), and since all these new paintings usually have only one master copy, prices shoot up to ridiculous extremes.

EDIT: I'm going to anticipate Gilbert coming in like every other discussion about modern art now: Yes, I know Pollock, Picasso, etc. didn't only do one kind of art. The point is that the more abstract art is what was picked out and elevated out of all the stuff they made. The other point is that this art was in fact a step back from everything that had come before.

https://8bc.org/music/zinger/HIBERNATION+HACKER/

Why does FM synthesis sound so good. I mean maybe it's just because I grew up with a Sega Genesis or something but my ears are gasming.

it is still 1945 and we are just populating the mind of edmund macmillengovich, providing him a definitive escape from his torments.

Don't tell me he's in a concentration camp.

If you're a complete beginner you probably shouldn't start off with 3D stuff. Make a simple 2D top-down game or platformer or scrolling shooter first. If you can't complete a smaller 2D project then you'll never be able to finish a large 3D one.

Unless with your 3D LTTP simulation you're going to use a ready-made Java 3D engine or something?

the final twist is that icycalm made limbo -- he wanted to make a popular art game so bad that the world would finally see the evils of art games, but it backfired when the world ate it up

His site gave Limbo two stars. His site also gave 5 stars to Deus Ex, a game where the Illuminati play a major role, and called it Videogame Art. His site gave 2 stars to Braid, a game with a message advocating nuclear disarmament (and as we all know, the Illuminati control the world's nuclear bombs).

From even this evidence alone (though more can be produced if necessary), we can conclude that Limbo was not only an icycalm-backed conspiracy to bring down artgames, but also an Illuminati-backed corporate attempt to destroy the indie gaming scene in its entirety and restore power to the CEO bigwig cabal, the ones sitting in the shadows smoking cigarretes while torturing dependie developers and extracting all the creative control juice possible from their brains. And no doubt, Bobby Kotick's hitmen were already in place with sniper rifles, ready to strike McMillen, Blow, and Fish down as soon as they got the order from icycalm. But for some reason, this didn't happen, as all three developers still lived on to act in the landmark Hollywood epic Indie Game: The Movie. The question is, why?

You've dug too deep, Paul. We here at the TIGSource forums have stumbled upon something much bigger than ourselves. This is...The Da VVVVVVinci Code.

Let's merge these separate discussion trails into one. What would Dan Brown would think of Limbo? And which work of art is more artistic, The Da Vinci Code or Limbo? If Dan Brown drank beer while playing Limbo how far into the game would he get? And which brand of beer would allow Dan Brown to get the farthest before collapsing, if he took a swig every time he died? Would he enjoy real life limbo or video game Limbo more as a game? And which one would you prefer he writes his latest novel about?

The twist is that Dan Brown is going for the No Point in Dying achievement, because he is a total whore for the 'cheeves.  

Dude this is Dan Brown you're talking about, there can't be just one twist. There has to be an interconnected web of twists, with hundreds of individual twist threads tangling into each other. So here is my suggestion:

• First twist: Dan Brown should aim to get all of the achievements in one playthrough. For every failed attempt in Limbo the videogame, he must take one swig.
• Second twist: He must at the same time execute a real limbo with a bar continuously, on his living room floor. For every failed attempt in limbo the real life game, he must take two swigs.
• Third twist: Every 10 minutes, he must take a break to post about games as art in a TIGSource thread (and if such a thread isn't active at the current time he must create one himself). For every mention of Limbo and/or Passage that turns up in this thread, he must take ten swigs.
• Fourth twist: Whether he succeeds or fails, he must write a dramatic novel about his experience, featuring his Robert Langdon character in the starring role as he tries to stop the Illuminati from killing off all the major indie developers.
• Fifth twist: For every time he passes out drunk, he must multiply the above numbers of drinks by two.

I don't know if these rules are good enough, however; any ideas for improvements are welcome. There may need to be more twists, in order to approximate a true Dan Brown experience.

I think I've just stumbled on some secret Illuminati code here.

I think you're just watching too many beer commercials.  

Right so it must be the Budweiser Code. I'll have to email Dan Brown about this one.

Let's merge these separate discussion trails into one. What would Dan Brown think of Limbo? And which work of art is more artistic, The Da Vinci Code or Limbo? If Dan Brown drank beer while playing Limbo how far into the game would he get? And which brand of beer would allow Dan Brown to get the farthest before collapsing, if he took a swig every time he died? Would he enjoy real life limbo or video game Limbo more as a game? And which one would you prefer he writes his latest novel about?

This is what Ashfordpride tried to do:

Indeed, it is clear from his posts that he tried to become a bartender thinking that it would be a dream job, but then soon realized that this was just yet another position of wage slavery, dooming him forever to serving low-grade beer to apathetic yawning customers -- stuck in a Limbo of meaningless existence, wondering for the rest of his life whether he would ever be able to rise above his middle-class roots and realize the full potential that his grandfather always told him he had since he was young. I can only wish him success in this endeavor.

EDIT: Wait wait wait a fucking second. Bar. Bar exam. Lawyers. Videogames. Phoenix Wright. AshfordPride. Phoenix Wrong. I think I've just stumbled on some secret Illuminati code here.

Speaking of stereotypes, why are all young Russian women so inexplicably attractive?

They're skinny because all of the food is going to game developers, which is why their beards have so many crumbs. Likewise, since game developers aren't buying any shampoo or makeup products, the Russian women get all of that market to themselves, so they can improve their appearances without hassle. It's a delicate balance, but in the end it works out for everybody.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1

that has gone too far

Indeed, when Wired writes a 4-page article about Jason Rohrer's Minecraft mod on a USB stick you know things have gone too far.

Personally I stopped reading at the first sentence

Dude don't do that. You're missing out on shitloads of laughs.

No clue.

What spambot? (Haven't seen any of its posts.)

?