next »

[Keops]

Movius, what was that all about?

Don't you go all Kojima on us (jk)

This thread is made of win and god, and please, pardon me for not bringing anything more interesting to this discussion, although rinku's original post has gotten me thinking a lot about the games I'm making :| I wonder if I should re-think my approach.

At any rate, GREAT post.

[Melly]

@ Alec:

I think this discussion was doing very well, actually. Just people posting their own opinions about the subject (with ergo-man's exception). If your opinion is that games should just be good and fun, no matter their inspiration, then that's your opinion, which is good too.

[Tr00jg]

I rarely get inspiration from "dreams" but last night's dream was quite interesting.

Some people got in a bus and started promoting Roach Toaster 2 + another game in America (touring) without me noticing it. Even people like John Travolta (lol) climbed on the bus to promote my game.

When I found out about this "marketing" I saw the screenshots and general gameplay of the other game and it was quite intriguing. It is nothing I have seen before. The gameplay isn't concise (because of the nature of dreams), but the core idea behind it is... strange.

ergo it is awesome?

[Michaël Samyn]

Who cares where tf games come from as long as they're good.

Perhaps the audience doesn't.
But I think developers do. And they should.

I personally find making games a very complex and difficult thing to do. Even when you're making a game that fits within a well-established genre, it's tough. But when you're trying to go beyond that, it is only normal that we feel a little bit insecure. In such situations it is nice to hear how other peple do it, where they get their ideas, how they make decisions.

[Chris Whitman]

I think we have every need to use profanity, because this is bullshit.

If what you guys are getting at is that we shouldn't make games hopelessly derivative of other things, that people should express a little creativity and put something of themselves into their work, I think we all agree on that.

The problem is that we have a bunch of half-baked would-be-philosophers espousing a bunch of pseudo-structuralist claptrap and, unfortunately, when the only tool you have is the proverbial hammer, you start deriving socio-moral imperatives on the basis of some perceived teleology of games-as-art.

First off, please stop confusing your social agendas with artwork. I understand you want social acceptance of games as something on par with music or visual art, but that doesn't make you entitled to try to exploit a normalizing social effect to dictate to others what is correct or proper. Art doesn't require mainstream social acceptance, and the concept of tailoring art to garner critical praise is disingenuous. Phrases like "Games will never be art until..." reveal a weak understanding of criticism in general, as if making art was simply about fitting into some broad social category.

Secondly, your tools of analysis and conclusions are naive at best. As an art form, games exist within one or more genealogies stretching back before most of us were born. If you are aware of these, as obviously we all are, you don't have a choice whether or not to produce work within an existing discourse. The ideas of others are as much an influence on you if you try to ignore them as if you try to implement them: either way, you are making a decision predicated on the existence of a particular history which will be interpreted in the context of that history.

I just don't see the validity or necessity of excessively arbitrary proscriptions from self-styled gurus. I think the congruency of your examples to your theory belies the many games which I would consider to be excellent despite not being inspired from real sources, and once again, if basing a game on life is neither necessary or sufficient for quality, why should it be portrayed as such?

[Melly]

I think we have every need to use profanity, because this is bullshit.

Just saying that because I don't particularly enjoy when discussions turn into anger outbursts or sarcasm ping-pong. You have a lot of valid points, and I too agree that we should have a balance between perfecting what already exists, searching new things, or just doing whatever we feel would be fun/provocative/whatever, and I also don't find the "Games as Art" debate productive anymore. It's just that when people get too emotional about it, things have a tendency to go downhill.

[Oracle]

I dont get it...its not like someone touched one of your "sensible spots" or offended you i-like-cake, why so extremely against the discussion?

Just dont participate on the discussion if you dont find any value to it, otherwise, lets just get along?

[Chris Whitman]

I just don't like being told what the point of art is, and I don't like it when people assume a false mantle of authority to talk about it.

[Blaster]

Once again, I Like Cake, you've pretty much said it exactly as it is, and I agree with most of your points. But I don't think I would/could ever put it quite as bluntly. :D

(also, no need to stop at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the notion of observing and deriving strictly from nature goes as far back as, what? A Long Time)

Thanks for making it clear, though!


So, yes, in the end, no particular source of inspiration should be invalidated. Certainly, I am with you on this one. And I agree with Alec that if one is going "DO WHAT I THINK IS RIGHT AND NOTHING ELSE", then yes, fuck that, naturally. But I'm pretty sure no one here is trying to oppress other peoples thoughts.

Ironically, I also agree that 'I AGREE, I DISAGREE' posts like what I'm typing right now are ultimately unproductive, and to not much end, so I'm going to stop typing this right now. :D


(peace, everyone)

[Oracle]

I just don't like being told what the point of art is, and I don't like it when people assume a false mantle of authority to talk about it.

Dont take it so personally...i dont think anyone was trying to attack you, or jam some kind of knowledge down your throat

[Seth]

I don't know if it particularly matters if we get inspiration from life or games or other art, just whether or not we are able to put a new perspective on it.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

One thing that I should point out is that because this was a copy and paste from my personal journal it may sound more authoritarian than if I had written it specifically for others to read. When we write only for ourselves we naturally use a different tone.

Also I didn't mean inspiration exactly, I meant something more like research. For instance, if you're making a fighting game, and looking for some martial arts moves to work in, you could either look at other fighting games and use the martial arts moves they have (uppercut, leg sweep, fireball, or whatever) or you could do some research into real martial arts and use things from there.

I'm not necessarily saying that games made doing the first of those rather than the second of those will always be better or more fun, just that there'd be a tendency for the second of those to be more interesting, because it'd lead to introducing things into games which haven't existed in other games before. There are probably thousands of things in all the various martial arts that haven't yet appeared in a game, but we tend to see the same ones over and over, because it's less work to reuse the ones that have appeared in other games.

[Michaël Samyn]

Dear Mr. Cake,

If you feel comfortable with the medium of games and its achievements, by all means go ahead and continue doing what we do.

But some people think that this medium is capable of more.
And we are researching its potential.

I know that I am personally a lot more extreme than Rinku in my opinons about this. I personally don't care much about the history of games and I don't even want to make games. I can't help it that what we're doing has ended up being called "game". I'm not going to let some dictionary stop me.

But you shouldn't feel threatened by that. Nobody is telling you what to do. Some people are just developing another thread, another way of playing with the medium. Maybe they are deluded. Maybe it's a dead end street. But that's our problem, isn't it?

And when discussing art, we should indeed be very careful because the word is used in different contexts.
When used in the context of "fine art", "contemporary art", the stuff we see in museums and galleries, of course you're right: it could be anything and it's often more about the marketing ("criticism"), then about the actual content of the work. This kind of art certainly does not require mass appeal. Quite on the contrary, in fact. It thrives on being controversial and misunderstood.
But when game developers use the word "art" as a goal, I don't think they mean they want to put show their work on the Venice Biennial. I think they're thinking of a much more traditional context. Basically what the word "art" meant before modern times: a beautiful way of expressing a feeling, an opinion, etc. In fact this is what it still means in popular art forms (pop music, cinema, comic strips, some literature). In that sense, making games more artful and making them more widely appealing, more popular, in fact often amounts to the same thing.

[Michaël Samyn]

I think a lot of us have very clear memories of playing games which were influential to us as children, and it seems a lot of the real game enthusiasts, that is to say those of us aspiring to make games which are not simply adolescent murder-fantasies, have already become mired in self-reference to the point where we have lost perspective completely, and we stand here wondering why no one 'gets it,' like we do.

Sorry for stalking.

[Alec]

Who cares where tf games come from as long as they're good.

Perhaps the audience doesn't.
But I think developers do. And they should.

I'm so glad that you bothered to read my full post.

I mean, its interesting to talk about where everyone's inspirations come from. But if its about "DO WHAT I THINK IS RIGHT AND NOTHING ELSE" .... then fuck that.

Obviously its great when people talk about where their influences come from. I love hearing that! If it comes from a place of respect and to the mutual benefit of the community, great. Exchanging ideas and contemplating them is important.

But if its just about someone jacking off to their own ego, then its pointless. It boils down to people saying "I DO THIS" and other people saying "BUT I DO THIS OTHER THING! SO THERE!" Neither way is universally better, and its stupid to debate it as if you can prove that one way is always going to be better. Everyone has their own approach, and they should continue to explore those approaches. Even if self-centered assholes completely misunderstand it.

We're all following our own passions, we're all doing what we want... we should be able to respect each other's decisions - even if they're not exactly the decisions that we'd make.

[Al King]

Drawing inspiration from the real world has advantages over doing so from other games insofar as there is just more of it to draw inspiration from. Also, it's fairly reasonable to suggest that modelling new games on old games inherently means you're dealing with many of the restrictions that the originals were.

But when it boils down to it, no-one should ever be prescriptive about how people approach these things because, as Cake and Alec have thoroughly explained, no-one can really claim to know better than anyone else. Also, there's an assumption here that the sole aim of developers is to 'further the medium' and create 'art', which I doubt everyone would agree with.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I don't think anyone was expressing disrespect toward other ways of doing things. Saying 'way A leads to results B, way C leads to results D' isn't the same thing as saying 'I have no respect for anyone who uses way C'.

I remember a post in the main blog here once with a video of a guy (who I should really remember his name but it escapes me at the moment) talking about how he thought it was a bad way of doing things for someone to post on a forum and ask for ideas for a game and then make a game according to what ideas people responded with. The guy being interviewed thought it was a bad idea because good games don't usually come about in that way. And in the comments for that blog post a lot of people attacked him for it, saying he shouldn't tell other people how to make games. I think that's overly defensive, he wasn't trying to literally force people not to make games in that way, he was just saying he's observed that that's not the right approach.

So my post is meant in that spirit: if through experience I have noticed that one approach works better than another approach (and I've done both here, I've made games both primarily from other games and primarily from life), I can make a case for that. I have the highest respect for anyone who makes games, regardless of what methods they use, but it still may be true that some methods work better than others. And I also wasn't saying that everybody should take my word for it, I think people should experiment for themselves and see if they get the same results.

[Zaphos]

I'm not necessarily saying that games made doing the first of those rather than the second of those will always be better or more fun, just that there'd be a tendency for the second of those to be more interesting, because it'd lead to introducing things into games which haven't existed in other games before. There are probably thousands of things in all the various martial arts that haven't yet appeared in a game, but we tend to see the same ones over and over, because it's less work to reuse the ones that have appeared in other games.

Perhaps Skate ( http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3162725 ) is one good example of this working out well in practice?

I do think that from the first post on there's a bit of a funny false dichotomy in this thread between 'games' and 'real world' or, more broadly, between 'art' and 'real world' ... 'real world' is interpreted narrowly enough that you keep focusing on this sort of sim-genre of work ... when in practice, the real world is, well, everything, including art and video games.  I think that the real world is in some ways actually inseparable from art, as almost every part of our lives has been crafted or architected in some way by our particular civilization's sense of aesthetics.
So I can see how it could clear one's head a bit to try to step back and think about how what they're doing fits together with the non-videogame world, but I'd just like to remind that while that could mean looking to simulation, it could also mean looking to ... well, anything else.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Skate looks nice, and it'd be an example, but I didn't really want to restrict this to simulation. For instance, one of the games I have half-finished somewhere is called Ziggurats for Red Turtle. It's not a simulation really, it's set in a fantasy world where giant turtles have overtaken the surface of the earth and the people have been forced underground, and kingdoms compete with each other for underground territory. And I got a lot of ideas from it from ancient history.

Ancient armies used to use a rock and sling much more often than you hear about, it's very deadly apparently, and was used almost as much as bow and arrows were. So I added a unit type for rock slingers. But that addition doesn't make the game a simulation. But they also have a special damage bonus against giant turtles (a reference to David and Goliath sorta) which isn't really realistic in the simulation sense.

So I wasn't saying that games should be more *similar* to to the natural world, that physics should be realistic and so on, but more that there's a lot of things in the (non-videogame) world that people can make games about or include in a game.

And I of course agree that art is part of the real world, I didn't mean that it wasn't, but saying 'non-videogame world' over and over would sound funny.

[Michaël Samyn]

a fantasy world where giant turtles have overtaken the surface of the earth and the people have been forced underground, and kingdoms compete with each other for underground territory. And I got a lot of ideas from it from ancient history.

Why did you bother to research ancient history? Half of the games out there contain storylines like this. Are you sure you are not trying to find stories that fit within a given game structure (i.e. making games based on other games)? Or are you simply naturally drawn to game-like stories?