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[rrrowdy]

Why aren't more traditional games as interesting as Passage or Braid?

the answer is in the question. they're more traditional, and the article wanted to talk about a new direction in games.

[Eric McQuiggan]

Blow and Rohrer's Modus Operandi(Operandis? Operandisises?) is, most games play to 3 basic human emotions, like triumph, fear and rage, what other ones can we hit?

This rocks the boat a little bit.

[falsion]

Who says traditional games aren't interesting? Some of my favorite games are traditional as hell DOS role playing games like Rogue or Wizardry and I find those way more interesting than Braid or Passage. Maybe because they actually let you go on an adventure and create your own narrative through your own actions rather than just trying to spood feed it all to you through cutscenes or predetermined story sequences. Or maybe I'm just crazy, I dunno.

[C.A. Sinner]

When I brought up the whole interestingness thing, I was referring to how an uninformed outsider (in this case the average NYT reader) may perceive it.
Personally, I've enjoyed Spelunky a great deal more than any art game I've played, which isn't to say I don't like or enjoy art games. I'd like to think I'm open for most types of games.

[Asmo]

Who ever says anything new really? No-one has to be moved by originality. The depth of the portrayal is almost always what moves. It's almost like being manipulated. You've known, intuitively, about the game's message almost your whole life but Passage was brilliant for the way it leveraged interactivity to talk. You didn't just "know" what it was saying. You caused it to say and you were almost incapable of doing something that wasn't metaphorical. So you have a game that is almost nothing except the message and you're being forced to take a personal stake in it. It frames almost all choices as having thematic consequences, not gameplay consequences which is new and interesting and what the article wanted to talk about. Hence why Cave Story and Spelunky were not mentioned. It also addresses why playing the game isn't the same as watching. The only reason a person watching Passage gets the message is that someone is sitting there, bearing the consequences for their choices in an active way. It's a different experience

[Selben Coirlo]

Oh no you di'in't! You did NOT just fucking diss duchamp! Maaaaaaan, yoooooo. Fountain has an important message about how art doesn't exist without the artist or perception; by challenging the nature of art it forces us to define it. Without artistic intent, there's no difference between one arrangement of pigments on canvas and another. And whether we can enjoy a piece of art or not often comes down to whether we can infer the artist's intent.

When the firsts impressionists came on the scene, the masses didn't like their work because, to them, unblended strokes and other new techniques were just incompetent realism; they couldn't understand the artistic intent behind these techniques.

I'm not here to defend Passage or anything, but it seems to me that you value technique over artistic intent, when the former is always in service to the latter and trying to reverse that can only produce soulless exercises. You can say it's naive and that it's poorly executed or whatever, but at least give Passage its due as a work of authorial intent.

[sergiocornaga]

I have to agree, Kobel! Whether you like Fountain or not, it's probably the most important artwork of the 20th Century... partly due to the way it shifted the focus in art away from craftsmanship and towards intellectual discussion and interpretation.

This makes Lurk's statement "Making a game like 'passage' requires very basic skills and very little talent" less relevant to me (though I agree with a lot of what Lurk has said). The surface of Passage might not show much technical skill, but that's not the point. Plus, keep in mind that the context the game was made in, as a Gamma 256 entry, necessitated its lo-fi nature.

Maybe we should judge Passage almost entirely on artistic intent? I find the themes in Passage kind of... I dunno, generic. That said, what Passage did I don't think any games before it had done, and its something that in my opinion needed to be done, so it has that to its credit.

When I first played Passage I really liked it. I thought it was cool. Since then, I've seen a lot of Passage-hating from people I admire and my opinion or Rohrer generally has declined (woo, bias/peer pressure!). Perhaps I should give Passage another go... I only did play it that one time, after all.

[Corpus]

I don't agree with what Lurk's saying, but I am tired with Rohrer always being asked about this stuff. I can understand why the media so often go to him; he's like a Lady Gaga or an Andy Warhol--that is, he's very good at firing out bullshit and soundbites that sound good, but that don't, in reality, mean much, and may not even be that sincere. Ultimately, he seems a lot like he's playing a role, which is what those other two performers excel/excelled at.

Rohrer's games are fine. Passage was even excellent, though I wouldn't say the same of most of his other stuff. Still, he's one of the least interesting of the well-known people in indie games, in my opinion. Derek Yu is insanely talented; Blow is incredibly intelligent, and puts his mind to effective use; Fish is an (at times mind-bogglingly) brilliant designer; Cactus is just generally cool and a badass. I wouldn't say that any of these things are particularly true of Rohrer.

I can think of a lot of people who should be much better-known in place of Rohrer. Stephen Lavelle, for example, actually does what all these magazines claim that Rohrer gets up to, as far as creating artful, evocative and poetic works goes. He does it far more frequently and, often, he does it much, much better. As for the gameplay side of things, Adam Saltsman seems to have an unnerving knack for devising incredibly satisfying and enjoyable gameplay mechanics, and for shaping brilliantly atmospheric and visually beautiful games around them (see, for example, Canabalt). Rohrer just doesn't match up.

[C.A. Sinner]

I agree with most of your points, but I still find all the hate Rohrer gets around here a bit unwarranted. Also, from the interviews I've read, Jon Blow comes off as pretentious and full of himself.

[Andrej Vojtas]

As I said before, I liked the article, it does good job of breaking the non-gamers stereotype often found in mainstream magazines, that games = GTA = evil. I think it makes a service to all indie games, even those that weren't mention and people feel should have been mentioned.

I would like to get back to my original point about how I think it's a mistake to dump narrative from games. Look at Dragon Age - Origins a AAA mainstream console game days old (I hope it's not blasphemy to mention it here ), look at how it connects and touches people. E.g. this thread on their forums, 115 pages long, discussing ONE single NPC in the game. http://daforums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=703863&forum=145&sp=0
It's not discussing crowd battle cut-scenes, expansiveness of the game, and other AAA stuff money can buy. One single non-playable character. This is something any game can be proud of. This is something any indie can afford. Of course it sucks that you have to play for 75 hours to get that emotional experience

To get back to my point on art games: I think games with good stories well integrated into the game are more emotionally rich and meaningful then games where meaning is coming solely from game rules. Hence my analogy of Passage-type of art games being like mute movies. If a mainstream game making all the compromises to appeal to a mainstream audience is so emotionally effective, imagine what an indie game could achieve, combining both meaning coming from rules and meaning coming from a narrative.

Of course, there is space to explore for art games too, don't get me wrong.

[Don Andy]

I agree with most of your points, but I still find all the hate Rohrer gets around here a bit unwarranted.

It's probably partially because we, as a scene/community/movement/whatchamacallit, are being represented by a guy that nobody of us picked and that reflects maybe a fracture of what we all actually do. It's sort of like some aliens would judge the whole of humanity by that one guy we shot into space to greet them. Probably a bad analogy.

I mean the whole art game thing is nice and I'm cool with it if that's where HE wants to lead games as a media, but RunMan (just to take an example) is as much of an indie game as Passage.

Totally agree that Stephen would make a "better Rohrer" :D

[Lurk]

you value technique over artistic intent, when the former is always in service to the latter and trying to reverse that can only produce soulless exercises.

Kobel: I don't. I think both(technique and artistic intent)need to be there. An art teacher once told me that everyone has ideas, but that if you don't have the proper means to communicate them to the world, it is meaningless. If I put a toilet bowl in a museum, trying to express the tragedy of human living, and nobody understands it, I fail. I cannot fall back on an explanation on the side or the fact that a small 'elite' group of art lovers say this is genius. This is what I believe anyways.

Sergio:

shifted the focus in art away from craftsmanship and towards intellectual discussion and interpretation.

To the art craftsman, this is the death of art . One thing though; by sharpening your craftsman skills and having pleasing visual results that appeal to the masses, does that now make your work shallow? If you draw/paint for the enjoyment of it, to entertain yourself and others, are you less of an artist than the person who does not really put effort into something that will nonetheless generate profound discussion amongst the art critics? If you manage to make a good living off your craft, like all those renaissance/medieval painters, are you less of an artist.

[sergiocornaga]

Totally agree that Stephen would make a "better Rohrer" :D

Stephen's games, particularly his recent ones, are nowhere near as mainstream-press friendly as Rohrer's though. Reading about Brain Damage in that article probably wouldn't have the same effect on readers as Passage, for example... that said, picking Brain Damage for my example was probably a bit unfair...

To the art craftsman, this is the death of art . One thing though; by sharpening your craftsman skills and having pleasing visual results that appeal to the masses, does that now make your work shallow? If you draw/paint for the enjoyment of it, to entertain yourself and others, are you less of an artist than the person who does not really put effort into something that will nonetheless generate profound discussion amongst the art critics? If you manage to make a good living off your craft, like all those renaissance/medieval painters, are you less of an artist.

Are you less of an artist? In the eyes of art critics, probably. I feel that most people still prefer the art you talk about over contemporary art, which is typically baffling and inaccessible.

[Selben Coirlo]

There's room for more than one kind of art in the world. Anyone who is defensive about what art can be and seeks to restrict it to any limited set of forms is an enemy of art, or at least progress in art. Requiring technique, but restraining that which qualifies as technique to only the techniques which you yourself are familiar with is dismissing the work of others because of your own ignorance.

This is what I'm saying; what is considered technique now was considered a fuck-up in the past. I think you're holding a piece's technique against it by judging it by standards it never meant to adhere to. This is small minded. You don't have to like it, but you should respect the intent behind it anyway.

[C.A. Sinner]

Exactly.

On another note, why are people so obsessed with denying something the status of "art"? Also, why do these same people always use the word "art" in a way that implies quality (or better put their personal understanding of it)? I think that's an incredibly arrogant and not very constructive sort of attitude.