With all due respect, Nate K, I don't think there's a single intelligent thing in the article to debate. Damn near everything in it is wrong. If I didn't know how horribly serious ToT is I'd think it was some kind of joke, and if tomorrow Michael Samyn came out and said his entire game making career was all a hilarious prank I'd be the one laughing the hardest. It would be a genius troll the likes of which hasn't been executed since Andy Kaufman.
Just gonna pick on a couple random points. I feel pretty confident that if you told me to pick apart anything on the page, I could. If you need me to elaborate I can.
Perhaps these are species that are naturally aggressive as well as smart enough to realize that playful competition benefits their survival. To achieve that purpose, competition obviously needs to be fair. So they make up rules. And games are born.
One hundred percent absurd pseudoscientific bullshit. "playful competition benefits their survival", though we're reluctant to explain how or why. NOT engaging in playful competition doesn't seem to put less aggressive and less intelligent creatures at a disadvantage. And competition does not need to be "fair", in fact it never is, fairness itself is an abstraction. Rules do not beget fairness, either, in fact, rules can make things LESS fair, and often that's the point of them.
There's no goal that does not evaporate as soon as it is discovered.
No, what the hell. How do you "discover" a goal? You SET goals, and then you overcome them. The goal doesn't "evaporate" and you don't "discover" it. It's an IDEA.
Art enables us to see the mystery in the mundane and to recognize the unfamiliar. Art is a conscious act of an author who seeks to communicate with an audience in a language without grammar, in a structure that is undefined with no predetermined goal and no rewards but finding yourself.
I used to do this in my core English class. I spoke in a language without grammar in an undefined structure with no predetermined goal. I got an A because everyone else in my class was illiterate, but what I wrote was meaningless. Just like the above quote.
There are no rules in art that cannot be broken.
Robert Frost once said of "free verse" poetry that it was "like playing tennis without a net". Which is interesting, because this implies that to Frost, art... was like... a GAME?
videogames are not games
We play a game once in a while. But it's a lighthearted activity that we can easily abandon when more important things come along. Not so videogames. We spend hours with these things!
Yeah, I know right? Non-video games are never serious, especially not to people like Michael Jordan, Kasparov, or the multitude of athletes who casually and lightheartedly compete in the olympics every two years.
All experts, many of whom are gathered in this room, agree that, in general, videogames are not as good as non-videogames. Chess and Go are still considered unrivaled.
BUT WHAAAAT ABOUT VIRTUAL CHESS? Also note we are comparing Pac Man to Chess, here, not Monopoly to Starcraft. The reason Chess and Go are deeper and more complex than video games are so mainly because THEY HAVE BEEN AROUND MUCH, MUCH LONGER. It's not because they're GAMES and video games somehow aren't. Ultimately, video games are just simulations, and all simulations are games.
The old media, with their one-way communication and linear formats have ceased to suffice. The complexity of the world has spiralled out of anything that they can handle.
IT'S TRUE, I CAN'T READ.
What can we do? We need a medium that is interactive, a medium that can generate realities, a medium that is not linear! Is there such a thing?
WHY? WHEN DID THIS START? WHY DO WE NEED TO PLAY JUMPSTART 3RD GRADE TO GET THE NEWS?
It promised it would become bigger and friendlier. That it would let women play too and elderly people. And it kept its promise! It allowed us to create pacifiers and candy.
Why would you ever think women and elderly people would be a sign that video games are getting better? They never go near the very best games ever created! No, they're a sign that the bar has been LOWERED. So, yes, pacifiers and candy. But it's not like I ever met a woman who read Nietzsche anyway.
When they say that one day, we will be playing instead of reading or watching or listening.
I hope to GOD this never happens, it would be the stupidest thing since Twitter.
* The "make love, notgames" motto was first proposed by Erik Svedäng on the Notgames forum.
Oh yeah, he made Blueberry Garden, right? Figures.
The idea is to explore the potential of digital entertainment and art that is not games.
This is ridiculous, as well. It's actually the MOST ridiculous thing here. Here's how it happened. ToT made really awful garbage like The Graveyard and The Path, and then some idiots who were still smart enough to find the games repulsive tried to insult them by saying "THIS ISN'T EVEN A GAME!" But of course, they failed at insulting ToT, and they instilled in them a great falsehood, a falsehood that would become ToT's maxim. "THESE ARE NOT GAMES!"
For you see, Tale of Tales has always made games. Awful games, but games all the same. They are creating weak, boring little games and are trying to hide this fact behind retarded artfag storylines, ugly visuals, and frustrating, unintuitive mechanics. By saying that what they make is NOT GEAMS, they're trying to create an excuse to avoid being criticized for what awful games they're releasing. By calling them NOT GAEMZ, they think they're making something BETTER. But they really just don't know anything about games. They're just trying to do what I did to get an A in English 101.
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