next »

[Paul Eres]

@paul: That's basically what I meant, just worded poorly. I feel a game/movie/whatever is pretentious if its form or presentation is trying to display depth or emotion that the contents can't deliver on. An example for me would be recent Halo/Gears of War trailers with slow-motion panning across battlefields to somber, perhaps classical, music (I'm going from memory here, so the actual trailers might not be exactly that, but just take it as an example). Those games are primarily concerned with action and machismo -- not the emotional depth of the proceedings, so the form and presentation rings hollow to me, and because of that I'd call it pretentious. Other people might buy into that emotional depth and therefore wouldn't consider it pretentious. But -- and this goes back to mirosurabu's misuse of the word -- I'd never call it pretentious because other people praised it more than I think it deserves. I might call their opinion of it pretentious if they justify their like by also applying depth and emotion that I don't feel is there, but that's a different matter.

EDIT: Or what Fallsburg said in a lot less words...

speaking of GoW, i think that generally you're right but i felt that GoW2 had one genuinely moving scene (the scene where your partner killed his wife since she was tortured too much for it to make sense to him to keep her alive). most of the story was pretty stupid but that one scene i thought was pretty powerful

(also: see my reply to him about ff4)

[JWK5]

Nobody spells it out better than Dorkly Bits.

[C.A. Sinner]

Nobody spells it out better than me:

P-R-E-T-E-N-T-I-O-U-S

>B)

[mirosurabu]

@Christian:

Your counter-examples aren't counter-examples, your reading comprehension is zero, your dictionary definition is not disagreeing with me and the long debate you're having right now is thanks to your weird obsession over precise use of meaningless words.

SO WHY NOT JUST GET THE FUCK OUT?

Yes, I'm wrong, I'm wrong for treating you like a sane person.

[Christian Knudsen]

[mirosurabu]

That was deep.

[moi]

yuo=fagget

[iffi]

Is this thread artistic

or is it

pretentious?

[Paul Eres]

@Christian:

Your counter-examples aren't counter-examples, your reading comprehension is zero, your dictionary definition is not disagreeing with me and the long debate you're having right now is thanks to your weird obsession over precise use of meaningless words.

SO WHY NOT JUST GET THE FUCK OUT?

Yes, I'm wrong, I'm wrong for treating you like a sane person.

i think the problem is that you consider those words "meaningless" when to others they are "meaningful" or even "have meanings". if you consider them meaningless words then of course you're going to use them in a meaningless way

but at least what i got out of your posts is that at least there's someone who admits that they don't actually mean anything other than an insult when they call someone or something "pretentious"

[Paul Eres]

btw, could you (or someone else) reply to my ff4 post? i'm still curious about what others who believe that pretense in games exists think about the issue of games which have themes which seem banal to adults and therefore seem pretentious but which were actually meant for children anyway and may not seem banal to them, because i think it illustrates an important point about the whole art game / pretentiousness subject

to use another example, let's take passage. passage's meaning is something like: going with others makes the goal harder to reach, but you get double points along the way. but score may not matter in the end, anyway, since all you're left with is your grave

a lot of people found the game meaningful (perhaps because they were materialistic and this is the first time they've stopped and thought about it), and others seem to have found it banal. i think it may have to do with whether they heard that particular idea from other places or not. if an idea is new to someone, it's considered meaningful, if they've heard it dozens of places before, it's considered banal

which gives us the odd but somewhat chillingly accurate idea that the more art you consume, the less you like it, because the higher your standards become, and the more you compare the art you're consuming with previous art you've consumed, and find it lacking in one or more departments. if you've read 0-10 novels, reading one is amazing. if you've read 100-1000, reading them is still good but you'll be more choosy and begin to pick favorites, and if you've read 10,000-100,000, almost nothing surprises you anymore, so you find it hard to enjoy reading them. "this is a okay novel, but it's no brothers karamazov! it's not even a les misrables! compared to them it seems banal" etc.

[Christian Knudsen]

Well, I agree that something can seem pretentious to one while not to another, since I don't think pretentiousness is necessarily an inherent or objective element. Like I said with my Halo/GoW trailer example: Some won't find them pretentious, because they think the overly emotional presentation is actually a good fit for the contents, for whatever reason. So, yeah, I definitely think a 30-year-old could find a game pretentious because the theme is too shallow for his somewhat mature personality, while a 14-year-old might find the themes quite profound.

[Paul Eres]

hmm, kk, we're in agreement then; i had thought you were in agreement with the totality of fallsburg's post since you said that he said what you said in less words, and he said something which i definitely don't agree with: that a game is pretentious because it's pretentious, and that it's simple to identify a game as pretentious or not

still i don't think a 30-year-old would be correct in saying that ff4 is pretentious because i don't think it ever specifically *claimed*, even implicitly, that its theme wasn't banal to some, just that it would be meaningful to some. i think it goes without saying that most game developers know that everyone won't like their game. so it still seems unfair to say that ff4 is "pretending" to be meaningful and it's banal instead when the banal-meaningful thing is relative to the audience, and a game can't control its audience in that way

anyway, i think we spent too much time on the "pretentious" part of the original post, and not enough time on the "forced" aspect. games or art in general can certainly sometimes feel "forced" -- e.g. a character giving a speech at the end of it explaining the meaning of the game to you as if you were stupid, or it being too repetitive and patronizing to its audience

i think the issue with "forced" meaning is that the author simply tells rather than shows, and doesn't trust the player/audience to be able to figure out the meaning, so they just go ahead and tell it to them directly. fusoya did that at the end of ff4 in a short speech (longer in the ds remake). there was a character that did that at the end of "don't take it personally, babe". john galt did it at the end of atlas shrugged. and so on; a lot of works stoop to directly telling the audience what it's supposed to mean. and i think that causes a forced feeling that most people don't like; their reaction is 'yeah i already got that, you don't need to spell it out for me'

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, I wasn't really talking about ff4 specifically, since I haven't played it, but in general I agree that pretentiousness is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. And I actually removed my agreement with Fallsburg's post shortly after making it, since I wasn't sure if he meant that pretentiousness is inherent -- you just happened to reply before I removed it.

[mirosurabu]

i think the problem is that you consider those words "meaningless" when to others they are "meaningful" or even "have meanings". if you consider them meaningless words then of course you're going to use them in a meaningless way

but at least what i got out of your posts is that at least there's someone who admits that they don't actually mean anything other than an insult when they call someone or something "pretentious"

That's why I never use the word, except in very rare situations.

[JWK5]

I think people confuse "deep" moments in games that come off as being cringe-worthy or "forced" as being pretentious, but pretentiousness is more about expressing self-importance rather than attempting to relay an important message. I mean a comedian who fails at delivering a good punchline isn't being pretentious, he just sucks at telling jokes. That is really what it is when you see these failed "deep" moments, they are failure to properly deliver the message they are meant to convey.

Games really can't be pretentious, I mean artgames aren't pretentious they are just boring (kidding... kind of... not really). The fact that they are trying to convey some deep meaning isn't what's pretentious, it is when their creators tell you that this deep meaning sets them apart from all other games, that they are more thought-provoking than other games, that other games are childish compared to what they are doing, and blah blah blah (all sorts of general ego stroking). This does not mean they are by default wrong about everything, of course, but it doesn't change the fact they sound like complete douche-bags.

Artistic, on the other hand, is pretty much what it's definition says "satisfying aesthetic standards and sensibilities". Most game creators are aiming for that in some form or another (with the graphics, the music, the gameplay, the writing, etc.). Creating games is a pretty artistic endeavor regardless of whether or not you feel games themselves are art.

The idea of an "art game" being art and other games are not is kind of silly because most art games function as watered-down "regular" games (for example, The Graveyard and The Path are relatively close to most other 3rd-person action games or RPGs in terms of how the camera and movement is handled).

The definitions of art these days are pretty blurry anyways. We have a lot of posters, figurines, pottery, movies, electronics, etc. decorating our homes these days that a hundred or so years back people wouldn't have had as easy access to or access to at all. They also didn't have DeviantArt, TIGSource, etc. and sharing works and learning from other artists wasn't as easy, especially not for free.

Today you don't have to go to an art gallery or be an art snob to sit down and enjoy art, tons of it are just a few clicks away. Most of the people that cling to the "art house" notion of art are the old guard who tagged along with the few artists who could get exposure and enjoyed the elitism of that scene. These days even fledgling artists can develop a fanbase and supporters and artists of any age can put their works out there. Times have changed and so has art.