in dishonored 1 there's a mission where you go to a party and choose whether or not to engage in small talk or play party games or get a lady something to drink or sneak into the hosts bedroom and steal everything or kidnap a woman or murder everyone with your sword or devour everyone with magic rats

best mission in the game

Well... the more obvious thing that differentiates comic books from film is motion, which is a much more prima facie reasonable thing to identify as the defining trait of film. (Although it's also a trait that belongs to TV, or, I don't know... YouTube videos, which at this point probably have every right to be treated as a distinct form.)

The mission in Red Dead Redemption 2 where you get ****faced with your buddy is my favorite so far.


This is going to sound really pedantic but they're both a series of static images providing you w/illusory motion. Obviously one has a machine do most of the work for you. But. So do audiobooks? :V

It may be quite different, but perhaps not quite as different as you're saying. Authorial expression and reader agency aren't entirely opposed, I think, in the best works of art. Sculpture and painting often requires the viewer to imagine that a still object is in motion, for example. Or even something like the ending of the Sopranos gets its emotional weight from what you as a reader bring to it through trying to discern it. I think the best sci-fi (even the original Star Wars, or the first Matrix movie) is often so effective when it's immersive, because in following characters through a world, you imagine the world is much bigger than the parts of it you're seeing in the course of the narrative. The experience of watching a film loses some of its linearity, in that way.

But yeah I also share your skepticism that a high-concept video game that strives to be have the aesthetic qualities of high literature would make for the most satisfying gaming experience.

I don’t happen to think Call of Duty is especially good at being a video game, either, so I’m not going to defend it.

My point is that there’s something ineffably “game”, whether we have the language to describe it or not, and it seems obvious to me that there’s a tension between this thing and authorial self expression. This “gameyness” is partly agency, partly play, partly simulation. Like I said, I don’t think the game equivalent of literary analysis is mature enough for us to have an especially intelligent discussion about this yet.

oh, ffs

Video games are not art per se, but they have artistic elements in them. How is this even a debate?

One's a lot more convincing at emulating motion than the other! It's hard for me to put my finger on a definition that would capture the difference as a difference in kind rather than a difference of degree, though. The fact that it's automated might not be a bad one, though. Having to move your eye across the page versus watching a moving image means that the two things occupy time and are linear in very different ways. But I bet there's something simpler.

But the difference between audiobooks, film and comic books is pretty clear: the latter are visual media and the first is an auditory one.

I think that games can be art as well, and even in the pretentious way that Ebert, Moriarty, and Reid define "great" art. Jon`C hit the nail on the head by pointing out that this kind of art necessarily has some kind of narrative; or, more broadly, we could leave it as "having something to say".

Jon said some stuff about how agency is at odds with narrative, which makes a lot of sense to me. And at their heart, the vast majority of games throw the player into some kind of simulation, and usually any kind of "narrative" to go along with it is subservient to it, and the results are usually laughably bad (would anybody enjoy watching the Jedi Knight cutscenes in order if they never played or knew anything about the game? Or the same with Diablo II?). Likewise, when movies give up on a decent narrative and rely on CGI, the result is painful and boring, like in the Hobbit.

But, I mean, I don't think we need to imagine a "Choose Your Own Adventure" version of James Joyce to combine artistic narration with simulation. There are some really elegant things you can do with regard to player choices that definitely reflect what the artist has to say, and thus reflect some kind of unspoken narrative: in this thread somebody mentioned Dishonored (never played it), where the choice of committing violent acts are met with consequences, and these consequences say something that provokes thought.

But that's just how I might argue that games can be the kind of pretentious art that Ebert / Moriarty / Reid are arguing in favor of. I actually think the idea that games need to be like so to be pretty obnoxious and just wrongheaded, because as Jon has said, I think games are better thought of as their own thing. I mean, you could say that certain games are good or bad by some external standard, and you'd basically be talking down to the vast majority of gamers for enjoying something that, I contend, can nevertheless be considered art without saying things about society that you seem to care about more than anything else (hello Gamergate).

For example, look at Morrowind. I didn't mention the whole notion of worldbuilding, but if Lord of the Rings is art (what does it even say about society? And is this important to enjoying what makes LotR so significant?), then Morrowind is too, IMO, and it doesn't matter if it has anything to say that extends outside the game, because in my opinion it has lots and lots to say about the world of Vvardenfell itself, which is such an immersive world all unto itself, that you don't need to resort to existing society for art to enter the picture.

Which sort of raises the question: is Star Wars art? It's a world unto itself, and with only shallow and naive things to say about actual society. I can totally understand why literary critics don't care for it, because like Morrowind, it's its own thing, i.e., you are the one responsible for actively immersing yourself in it in order to see the art, whereas such people are far too up their own ass to care about that before snubbing it for being inferior to the "great" works.

I may as well ask: is Beethoven's Ninth symphony great art? By the reasoning of this Moriarty guy, no, it's not. Which frankly, is a worldview that I find quite sad.

tl;dr: "art" doesn't need to have the capacity to change your view about things that are, if it creates a large enough world to be artistic about structures arising in it that never were (to paraphrase a Shaw quote a little bit).

Edit: bonus question: is Rushmore "great art"? Is there a meaningful narrative in any Wes Anderson movie? More importantly, since the artistic merit of triumph of form and feeling over meaning and narrative that are Wes Anderson's movies seems to be widely recognized, why shouldn't the similar triumphs in games be as well?

SUPERMAN IS REAL AND HE'S MY FRIEND


That's fair! & I'm definitely willing to admit there's a ton of ways in which player agency & authorial intent can be at odds with one another. I'm not totally willing to concede that they're inherently at odds.

I might be in a couple years though. Will check back

tl;dr: Roger Ebert was mad because he watched the DooM movie. At least if the movie was based on Half Life it could have had a half-way decent narrative, but expecting the Doom "story" to lend itself to "literate" / artistic narrative, ahaha

But this is the tension. when you make choices that reflect what the artist has to say, they don’t reflect what the player has to say. This is literally trading player agency for authorial self expression.

I think pretty much everything I wrote in my longer post on this page agrees with this 100%!

That's true, and as was mentioned in this thread, it apparently pissed some players off because it seemed like the game was "punishing them for being violent", making their own self-expression within the game seem subservient to the preconceived artistic choices made by the person who wrote the game.

In a lot of ways, then, if you're going to put in some kind of social commentary, it could be an orthogonal concern to the aspect of the game that gives the player agency. You know, like you walk past a couple of NPC's having a conversation, or you read a book in a Morrowind bedroom bookshelf, etc. I can definitely see where the clash arises if you stray from this and start casting judgement on the player's actions, or the like.

I’m still mad because I watched the doom movie.

Contrary to our intuitive/culturally imposed understanding, agency isn’t about making decisions, it is about choosing outcomes. Making decisions isn’t fun. Forcing outcomes is fun.


Game designers make this mistake all the time. Being free to act like an ******* and suffer the consequences isn’t agency, it’s real life.

This greatly irritates me. Dishonored, Hitman, Metal Gear, Splinter Cell, Mass Effect, many great games give the player myriad ways to kill the bad guys or make certain "bad" decisions, but if you use them, you get in trouble, the game restarts, or you get the bad ending. The "bad" choices are red FFS.

I did appreciate how in The Witcher series, there was no obvious good or bad choice, and they all usually ended up bad anyway. It actually caused players to consider not even getting involved in the first place (which is a pretty important theme in the books), because outcomes are never as one would expect.

If everything a player CAN do is preordained by the developer, does that make the agency illusory?

Except in the most systems-driven games, we're always creating a curated set of options for the player. It's just that most developers are curating those options based on player gratification rather than messaging/expression. That doesn't mean the messaging goes away, ofc, it's just unintentional/muddled (see: politics of The Division)

Going back to this a bit, I think you also need to look at the demographic that buys games, and what this demographic wants to experience while gaming.

In particular, you seem to be interested in games that tackle issue of morality. There are a couple of problems with this being viable business-wise, IMO. First, teenage boys and young-ish adults who make up a large chunk of gamers are not the kind of people who necessarily even watch movies that deal with moral issues. Why would they suddenly be interested in games that tackle the same themes? I bet it's mostly the older, more mature audiences who appreciate movies that tackle these deeper issues.

And related to that point, guess which group has more free time to invest in gaming? Movies take two hours to watch and are self-contained, but games are a major, longitudinal time investment. The kind of adults who would be predisposed to games that tackle deeper moral issues don't have nearly the amount of time and energy to waste that teenagers do!

But maybe even more deeply, I think there is a fundamental point here that is related to Jon's remarks about agency vs. narrative: people generally don't like being held accountable for their actions, but one of the reasons why literature and film has so much potential to deal with deep issues is because it is fictional! We are drawn to fictional characters distinct from ourselves that we identify with enough to fall into some of the same moral traps and mistakes, but are free to withdraw on a whim once the consequences ensue! And thus, from afar, we take satisfaction in having learned some moral lesson, with no skin off our back, but while having nevertheless been drawn in closely enough for our emotions and beliefs to become tied up with those of the characters. Like Goodfellas, where we are simultaneously endeared to and abhorrent of the protagonists, which is probably one of the reasons why it is so engaging.

Contrast this to a game, though! In a game, you are actively, emotionally invested in the mere surivival, or at the very least, the success of your character! This does not leave the slightest bit of distance from your avatar to permit the kind of introspection and second thoughts that media like film and literature permit. On top of that, paying attention to actually succeeding in the game is hard work, usually! One usually doesn't have time to simultaneously keep track of navigating a game world successfully while also letting gradual thoughts about the consequences of chosen actions bubble to the surface--before too long, there is another distraction in the game to attend to, and whatever deep thought that had been forming is going to dissipate.

I think your best bet is going to be a low-budget game that is further removed from physical simulation. For example, maybe "Enron simulator" (or any number of less over the top examples).

This definition would exclude things we'd intuitively consider great art. Sure 'Guernica' would remain a great painting by this standard, but everything Van Gogh did would not. I think most would want to think of Van Gogh as a great artist.



TBH I think you're imposing these value judgments that (at least personally) I am not. No one is trying to snub video games (well, maybe Ebert was). At least I'm not. I'm just pointing to what I see as a reality: that there really aren't any games I'd consider great art. Not yet. I don't feel I should hand out participation trophies to make gamers feel satisfied in their hobby.

Interestingly, my view on art is far more modernist than yours. It takes a heavy dose of post-structuralist kool aid to get to the relativistic, anything-is-art kind of perspective people usually take if you levy criticism against something they enjoy. I'd also like to repeat what Moriarty said on Kant and aesthetics: aesthetics are not simply a matter of personal taste. I put my standards out not to tell you you're wrong or criticize you, but to try and build a common language and aesthetic understanding. You're not wrong to disagree, the whole point of aesthetic discussion is to learn to appreciate other people's sensibilities.



Just as a side comment, I don't care much for binary distinctions on these things. Trying to call X art but Y not art is a fool's errand, and I wouldn't try to make that argument seriously. Ever created work is artistic. My goal is more to evaluate the artistic merits of these works. Specifically a set of posets over the various ways of evaluating art, not a totally ordered set of "goodness".



I don't think he would think that. The Ninth is heavily banalized in popular culture. If you try listening to all four movements back to back, it takes a bit more effort to appreciate than most realize. Maybe if he built up to the climax of the 4th movement in a minute and repeated it like a pop song this would make more sense as a criticism.



Great art is as experienced. Art isn't defined only by message or emotion.

I don't think I've ever seen a Wes Anderson film.

I think we're mostly in agreement, because I am having a hard time now recognizing in your response any trace of my conception of your initial post. Looking back, I think I can see that I took the implicit conflation of literature and "great art" in Jon`C's post a bit too literally, and retroactively read the conflated definition into your post, so as to straw man you:



whereas, judging from your last post, it was wrong for me to assume that your conception of art has anything to do with the assumptions of the literary medium. Having said that, in your follow up post on the last page, you did almost exclusively cite examples of how games failed to deal with moral issues, which is something in common with art forms in which the author puts forth a narrative (and thus, in my opinion, subject to all the criticisms about agency that Jon`C levied).

I do think that "games" can be works of art, and I think they exist today. Just not in a visual medium! And (I believe) this is in large part because, per my (more recent) long post above about morality, it's not easy for the player to be an objective recipient of the author's message so long as they are hopelessly emotionally inured to the outcome of the game. I don't think you can subtly deal with complex moral issues if you are still emotional about them, and yet what in-game experience isn't inherently emotional? Most games end abruptly when you "die", and you remain hopeless emotionally vested up until that moment.

But what if you jettison the visual medium as an immersive device? That is, don't simulate a world in which the player is embedded; instead, show the player a global view of the game state, like a board game. In fact, Moriarty even hints at doing this, if you take his comment here to its logical extreme:



Unless you get away from the direct experience of "living" within the game, I think that all of Jon`C's criticisms about narrative vs. agency apply. But from a birds' eye view? Lots of things are possible now. For example, I recently played a time-wasting game called Universal Paperclips: the game (which I will not link to, due to its highly addictive nature) is nothing more than a webpage with a few text displays, several buttons, and some Javascript. In short, I can describe the mechanics as a stylized simulation of the economy, from the point of view of a paperclip manufacturer. But the narrative of the simulation, as you progress in time through several stages of human progress (like in the series, Civilization, If I am not mistaken), tackles an (admittedly heavy-handed) "moral" issue of sorts, and implicates the player by challenging their assumptions and beliefs, and giving them pause about things that go far beyond the game.

If there was ever a full, 3D version of "Universal Paperclips", I seriously doubt people would pay attention to the philosophical implications of the narrative baked into the mechanics, because there would just be far too many immersive items of interest to pay attention to instead.

Added HUD scaling and letterboxed/pillarboxed display modes.



Makes 4k a little less oof.

Not sure how the HUD works in JK, but any reason that texture couldn't be upscaled?

That's too bad. The time to see Wes Anderson movies is when you're a teenager. Also, ideally, you should be a teenager in the early 2000s. His movies are often very nostalgic (especially in terms of the cinematic influences they draw from), but I don't think they can be fully enjoyed if when one watches them one isn't also nostalgic about one's own youth.

Kind of like Kurt Vonnegut's novels, Wes Anderson's movies seem like the sort of thing that you need to discover at a certain age or else you'll never really appreciate them.

I don't think I've seen any of his films either although I briefly had him confused with Paul W.S. Anderson. That guy's a genius!

That's cool. Isn't the HUD like one of the most requested fixes over the years. I can barely imagine what the hud looks like in 4K.

Okay, I know I do weird things on my computer that other people might not nor care about fixing but here is an odd thing that happens. I use a regular HD monitor and a 55" HDTV. The TV is mounted above and is usually just used for videos or some of the consoles I have down here. Sometimes, rather than running as an extended monitor I'll mirror the display. When I did that with injector (have no idea if vanilla JK would do this) both monitors displayed a scaled up upperleft most portion of the screen. I tried again making sure "let windows fix my display"-type settings were turned off and I had the same result. Not really worried about it. I only like to do this so I can play on the smaller screen but also on the larger one or just to enjoy cutscenes on the large screen. When I instead set it as the primary monitor it played it fine and it's not too bad to play with the higher screen. I got quite used to it and the much better textures were great.

Speaking of cutscenes, since we're specifying a resolution in the config file I don't imagine there is any fix for stretching out everything other than the gameplay. Or is that something your latest version actually does address?

Is this injector process something you plan on expanding to other games? I assume you plan to update textures for MotS. Now that I think of it, does that games heavy if not overhanded use of colored lighting present any problems? I would imagine it could benefit greatly from updated textures but, from memory, maybe the lighting in that game obscures too much detail.

Okay, I suck with a keyboard and mouse. It wasn't too bad when I was younger but pretty hard for me now. My old Logitech Wingman Cordless to the rescue! Takes a few minutes to figure out a good layout in the game but works pretty much flawlessly and I had zero problem plugging this old device into the modern PC and since it's from back in the day when these games were recent they work with it fine.

I was in my 20s when I saw Rushmore, but since I was really into British Invasion music at the time (the entire soundtrack was originally conceived of as entirely comprised of Kinks songs, but was expanded to include many other spellbinding songs, including a particularly epic use of this rendition of A Quick One While He's Away), and had recently gone back to college to get my degree and thus felt somewhat childlike again, I absolutely adored it. His later films, not nearly quite as much. Although this Devo song is amazing....

I love them all!

I really ought to at least check out The Life Aquatic, since I adore that scene, but actually haven't seen the movie!

Edit: I need to watch The Royal Tenenbaums again, since it was so long ago that I saw it and don't remember much of it. I was also amused to read on Wikipedia that "Nico provided a model for Margot's character design."

Do apparently about a year or two of use of the Switch's controller wears out the graphite sensors on the joysticks so they act erratically. Lots of people complaining about it now.

At least you can buy new ones instead of needing to send the whole unit for repair. I bet they made 'em cheap for just that reason.

You know what, after looking at the prices of those things they're more expensive than I thought they would be. Sucks.

Yeah. From what I read, the joystick is a standard product and it's easy to just order the part and replace it yourself.

Still says something about how engineering is done at Nintendo now. Looks like they're grabbing cheap prefab stuff which isn't engineered to accept the typical wear and tear. Either someone flubbed up or they're pushing "efficiency" too hard.

“now”


I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat. You know the wii motion plus? It was an add on that came out a few years after the wii did. It made the motion tracking about a million times better, making it actually useful for games (and it was required do skyward sword).

The hardware in the wii motion plus is the exact. same. chip. as the launch PS3 SixAxis. 7 cents for the one in the original wii remote, 13 cents for the one in the wii motion plus. They could have done wii motion plus quality controls on launch day, but they didn’t. To save 6 cents per controller.

And don’t even get me started on the god damn resistive membrane touchscreens.


nintendos been doing this sort of thing for a long time.

I knew nothing of the Wii-U, so hey I learned something new. I'm guessing Nintendo wants to keep costs at a minimum to be "the cheap guy" or something?

I’m guessing it’s financial. Other platform vendors dump consoles and make up the difference with platform royalties. Nintendo spent 24 years without any meaningful third party support and had no reason to think the Switch would be better. It’s probably easier to argue for premium when there’s no direct connection between the money you’re spending and the revenue you’re making from it.

And if you hang around and do nothing for too long, a guard will come around and ask about your identity.

The Sniper Assassin mode in "Hitman 2" is really fun.

I haven't given it a go yet.

I've had Hitman 2 for a while but haven't played it nearly enough. I actually think the previous one benefited from the episodic release because it gave me more desire to replay and rinse each level, whereas I've not been feeling the same about the newest game, as well made as the levels are. Fun though.

I was an idiot that decided to partake in some matched betting at the weekend, so I bought Devil May Cry 5 with the takings.

Jon, if you feel bored sometime (probably not) and generous (probably so) can you please fix Shadows of the Empire? Pretty please? I'll buy it for you on GOG.