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[ThePortalGuru]

It is a well-established norm for indies to tend to be more experimental than mainstream developers in the way they design their games, with a large percent of those indies focusing on providing a deep, meaningful experience.  But when does that experience become too deep and meaningful?  Where does artistic start to drift into forced and pretentious?

[Fission Mailed]

pretentious is a meaningless word really that people throw at things they don't understand, and if a game is too forcibly deep and meaningful then it's a bad game not a pretentious game

[iffi]

I call it pretentious when it's the creator calling it "deep" and not the players.

[Castle]

Significance is a matter of reception.

Reception is a matter of opinion.

There can be lines drawn, but unfortunately, there is no uniform measurement of the distinction between the artistic and the fraudulent.

Some things will only be powerful to those that have the requisite mental receptors. Some things will only be significant to the creator, but some others might be able to find artistic value in that personal creation. Furthermore, a creator might try to put too many ideas, or ideas that aren't fully matured into a piece, and others might be annoyed by the attempt at intellectualism.

Pick your poison.

[DavidCaruso]

The pretense probably kicks in the moment your focus shifts explicitly to making something "deep and meaningful." (I think the word is a perfectly valid descriptor btw, despite how it's often abused.) Combine this with exacerbating factors, e.g. extremely simplified 2D games, dumb symbolism, gimmicky player characters, etc. There's probably a multivariable function somewhere here but I've already spent too much time in threads like these to want to find it.

[Netsu]

if a game is too forcibly deep and meaningful then it's a bad game not a pretentious game

Actually that's pretty much what pretentious means. I think it's useful to have more negative adjectives than just 'bad'.
And  what iffi said, although I'll add that it doesn't mean the creator has to directly state the game is deep, he can do it though his game. If the game somehow tries to show me how deep it is when I don't consider it to be, I'd say it's pretentious.

[Derek]

A good way to not seem pretentious is to avoid confusing your audience from the outset. That always gives people the impression that you're just covering up a shallow idea with needless complexity or ambiguity.

[JWK5]

Artistic
1. "Relating to or characteristic of art or artists"
2. "Satisfying aesthetic standards and sensibilities"
3. "Aesthetically pleasing"
4. "Having or revealing creative skill"

Pretentious
1. "Making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction"
2. "Intended to attract notice and impress others"
3. "(of a display) tawdry or vulgar"

The way I see it, artistic is a focus on creating and pretentious is a focus on receiving praise. Or as Lou Reed put it, "I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artist's ego."

[C.A. Sinner]

false dichotomy

[Pandara_RA!]

Good topic.

I think pretentious to me is when maker of the game thinks hes smarter than the consumer, so for example when a consumer plays the game and rates it as poor the maker may say something like

"All the bad scores are given by people who "just didn't get it"" and not because the message is told in a way that isn't well done.

parts 2: Artistic games to me are games designed with a "meaning" or as an expression of thought. Where as a typical game is based around it's mechanics (oh I leveled up, got a new sword, beat the boss and progressed) That isn't to say that a game about mechanics can't include artistic elements and an artistic game can use mechanics.

[SirNiko]

I call it pretentious when it's the creator calling it "deep" and not the players.

I think this is a pretty good metric to go by.

[Paul Eres]

i don't think "with a large percent of those indies focusing on providing a deep, meaningful experience" is a true statement at all. in my experience most indie game developers don't care about that. i can probably count the number of indie game developers who are trying to do something new on one hand, and certainly on two hands: most indie game developers take the position of tom sennett, rob fearon, and konjak rather than that of increpare, rohrer, and tale of tales

so i think the whole 'indies are all modern artists' thing only represents a very rare, small segment of indies. and that small segment is almost never "pretentious", they're just more interested in playing around with conventions and discovery than with improving upon the classics of their youth, although the motivations between them vary quite a bit

my impression of tale of tales, for instance, is that they do not like most games -- either 80s games or modern games -- and want to make games that they enjoy. they think games are too nerdy and adolescent, and should deal with topics more interesting to people who have otherwise grown out of videogames

my impression of rohrer on the other hand is that of more of a theoreticist, he sees the possibility space of games as being much larger than what's currently being made, and wants to try to fill in some of the huge empty areas composed of game types nobody has tried to make yet, and gets bored with playing small variations on the same formula

whereas my impression is that increpare is more playful and experimental in the true sense, he thinks "what if i would make x a game? that'd be pretty cool, why has nobody done that before" and then makes it; he has a wide variety of different kinds of ideas, and has made hundreds of short games trying out a bunch of different stuff

cactus is actually quite similar to increpare i find, although he's more interested in experimenting with different visuals and sounds, on experimenting with the "experience" of the game, rather than with just the mechanics (not that increpare doesn't experiment with the experience, he does that too)

i've spoken with all of the people above, and my impression of them is not that they want to seem smart at all; a lot of them don't even particularly care for all the attention they're getting, it's just that if you do different things and say different things people naturally make you into a target, whether you want it or not

so again, it's really just the fringe who make "weird" games, the vast majority of indie game developers make (often low-quality, but sometimes high-quality) slight modifications of traditional games. just take a look at the 'indie' section on steam, or take a look at the average flash game or iphone game -- they were all made by indies

as for pretense itself, it's not really something that affects makers of "weird" games any more than it affects makers of traditional games. for instance, i'd say adam coate is about a million times more "pretentious" than increpare: even though adam coate paid someone to make a basic arcade shooter-style game for xblig, he hypes it like mad and says it's the best game ever made, and that if the game gets bad reviews it's a conspiracy against him and that miyamoto never had to work like he has. and is rohrer, who makes games about people telling each other stories, actually more pretentious and phubans, who makes traditional 80s-style games? i love phubans and consider him a friend but even i think he has a tendency towards pretense (e.g. he considers himself more knowledgeable than everyone around him, it's hard to imagine him considering someone else smarter than he is, or considering any other indie more talented than he is). but it strikes me as pretty judgmental in general (even though i've just done it for demonstration's sake) to consider someone else pretentious -- i think that calling someone else pretentious is like the most pretentious thing someone can do, because it usually just means 'i don't like that person and am better than them, because they think they are better than others'

as for artistry, it comes in all shapes and kinds. innovating a game to make it more fun is an art. doing something new or weird is an art. making the player addicted to a game is an art. selling games is an art. there's always at least some part of a game that's artistic, and different developers have strong and weak points. for instance, spiderweb software is terrible with visuals, but really good at creating huge expansive words and at writing prose (which is the most artistic part of his games). whereas you have developers like edmund mcmillen, where a lot of the artistry is in the visuals and level design and balance, but who isn't particularly good at writing stories or giving you a feeling of an open world to explore. i think it's best to appreciate the strengths of each game if one seeks artistry in games, since it's a lot cheaper to point out someone's weaknesses than to praise their strengths. so yes, there's just as much artistry that goes into a konjak game as that which goes into a tale of tales game. but that doesn't mean what tale of tales is doing shouldn't be done, because tastes differ and the values that different people get out of games and what they look for in games differ

[BlueSweatshirt]

I remember one time when Ashkin called my art "too abstract".

[SundownKid]

IMO, pretentious games are those that imitate artistic games. When one art game becomes popular and a bunch of similar ones follow, pretentiousness happens. Basically, "art games" don't have to be, for example, monochrome sidescrollers or be some kind of abstraction of how much life sucks to be "art". As long as the creator has their own style and runs with it, it can be called an a art game.

[Paul Eres]

IMO, pretentious games are those that imitate artistic games. When one art game becomes popular and a bunch of similar ones follow, pretentiousness happens. Basically, "art games" don't have to be, for example, monochrome sidescrollers or be some kind of abstraction of how much life sucks to be "art". As long as the creator has their own style and runs with it, it can be called an a art game.

yeah but that doesn't make those things not art, either -- for instance, a lot of emo/goth teenagers write bad poetry about how bad life is. but even that bad poetry about how their life sucks is still art, since it represents their current place in life and maybe gives them a little relief from it, even if almost nobody else would find such poems enjoyable reading

similarly if someone makes a clone of an art game, i think that's still fine, since at least they're creating something rather than nothing, and perhaps they don't yet have the capability to be original at that point in their life (maybe they're too young or inexperienced). it might not be as impressive to trace as to draw something from your imagination, but if you can't yet draw anything from your imagination, it's better to trace than to do nothing, since that'll develop the skill to draw from your imagination later on