So what is a game? Don't ask Kellee Santiago

Here's stuff for a new article. It's a reply to some comment posted in Kellee Santiago, dreadful Avatar of VGA.

The comment in itself isn't particularly original, nor stellar might I add, but it nonetheless remains a good excuse to clarify a position about what the question of video games and art.

So basically, here's the anonymous comment:

You know nothing of art, whether it be film, literature, or games. What makes a game is its interactivity. The fact that you must play it. Unlike every other medium, nothing will happen unless you pick up the controller or football. Art can not be so easily defined, but most consider it to be the intentional composition of elements around a sole idea. All parts of a game must serve the overall thematic idea before they can ever be art. Most don't with the exception of perhaps a few exceptions. Many of those exceptions are indie titles. Kellee Santiago does make games that are also art. The playability makes it a game and the mechanics complete focus on the games overall purpose elevates it further to art status. Whether or not the game is challenging doesn't define it as a game.

3 January 2013 04:20

You vermin didn't even listen to your priestess' litany. She doesn't even claim to make games first, dipshit:
thatgamecompany sucks at making games
Therefore, I would obviously beg to differ on who really understands art here. As now, I can tell that you're still crawling in a cesspool of ignorance and idiocy.
Perhaps one day, when you'll know how it feels to be like a deity, you'll start to see what I mean. Because real gods do beauty and complexity, they don't do vomit and feces. They're ruthless but they know how to reward those who are willing to be part of their intricate universes, those ready to do their best to stand above others, as champions.
See, if we want to consider what makes a game artful, then we need to really understand what a game is. It's not the paint. It's not the pixels. Aside from the overall consensus that fun has to be part of it, what is absolutely clear is that the closer you get to throwing dice, the farther you are from a real game.
The nature of a game isn't primarily found in its prettiness (the visual -and even auditive- coating), but in the perfection of the challenges put forth by the rules and how players can literally bond with the game, in a way that is almost biomechanical. There's something promethean here, get it?
The creator and the player are complementary to each other, the maker and the subject. You can't pretend having a good game with mediocre designers and weak players.
Or perhaps you can, but it would be stuff for amoeba.
For the real matter at hand here, we're talking about playful and real challenges, in a complex ballet where the hero, the player, reads the game, learns it, faces difficulty and fights. The fluid complexity put into motion becomes a beauty in itself as the player is symbolically sweating in beating the monsters animated by the electronic cogs of the code.
There is no challenge without both real obstacles and the mastery of play that is required to give life to the game. You cannot cheat on that.
Such concepts are entirely absent of TGC's games, which are dumbed down, pussified kindergarten occupations pretending to be mature about something they completely ignore. They're almost non-games made for hipsters, themselves pretending standing above the masses, and they progressively lead the militant cohorts into a the new age of gaming stalinism, where you could "democratize" the capacity to create good games, and therefore artful games, merely by hiring a bunch of inspired graphists. TGC's software is at best defined as flashy interactive experiences. Proof being that Santiago can't even define what a game is, and gets all her priorities wrong. It's quite pathetic.
And let's not stop here.
You speak of interactivity.
Oh yes, such a thing is essential. But pick Flow, Flower, Flowerer, Journey... it turns out that most of the code that is ran owes more to noise, a simplistic batch, than anything meant to orchestrate meaningful play.
Santiago claims to have embedded interactivity at the heart of their so called games. Sure? Despite her claims, said interactivity is absolutely minimalistic. So what are we left with? Video and music. The cables that support part of the interactivity if you want, and that's all. Fuck that, let's watch a movie, with some real plot if it's not too much to ask for.
Santiago and pals focus on the *video* aspect and completely forget the *game* one. Visuals and sounds constitute a vital wrapping, but a game is first and foremost defined by its mechanics. Those who make good games know that, and for some reason they often found to be the wisest of the lot, not bothering people with silly debates on what art in games should be, nor fighting for a two minutes of exposure on a soapbox. Wise, the blokes at TGC aren't. They're absolutely oblivious to the fact that video is the adjective, yet they treat it as the main substance. As long as they remain so deluded, not only they will keep putting the industry at risk and make it bomb (and all varieties of crooks will keep raising them as new prophets according to a rinse and repeat template already used for the establishment of modern art), but real game designers will have to oppose them with all they have if they honestly care about the reason of their very existence.
The truth?
As it is, there's barely any gaming to be found in the sum of TGC's software collection, their products just stand a notch above those abject apps you can buy on the appstore produced by Gree or Pocket Gems, all pretending being games.
TGC sells empty shells in game booths, golden eggs with rotten flesh inside.

TGC : Be careful what you wish for...

... you may receive it.

Taken here.

I've been a dedicated follower of indie game maker thatgamecompany since their beginnings, and they've never disappointed with their releases. But things are about to really ramp up for them.

The Santa Monica-based company has just ended their game deal with PlayStation, and now they've raised $5.5 million from Benchmark Capital. Benchmark are the guys that funded Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, and more recently, Meteor Entertainment, the folks behind the awesome upcoming free-to-play title Hawken.

What to do with all that freedom and cash? Why not make more games for more platforms, reaching out to wider audiences? Founder Jenova Chen tells GamesBeat that he wants to "spread out" now, and that the funding will enable TGC to develop and release games independently.

"We got so many emails from fans saying they wished they could play our games on other platforms," Chen said. "We make games for human beings, not just gamers. Young, old, men, women, and from all countries. We want to change the concept of what a game is and show society what a game can be."

Chen confirmed that a new title is in the works, and it will definitely be a cross-platform game.

Oh boy no, you are not going to change what a game is. You certainly can't, for this is so above your abilities.
Your enterprise will fail.
Not only because anyone sane enough working in the video game industry will soon enough call you on the preposterous and pedantic bullshit you produce, and will properly militate so the debilitating heretics you are will never get the chance to confuse people about real gaming.

But also because you simply don't get what a game is.

Your "games" have constantly moved towards a movie-like experience (and a shallow one, at that), almost entirely passive, devoid of any challenging experience, so much that we honestly find more gaming in one second of Tetris than in the entirety of all your pretentious and pseudo games combined.

Try to get that once and for all: A game provides challenges, encourages players to try several strategies and makes sure said options are even, so as to be relevant and making sure that the game's rules are interesting, engaging and above all, not broken.

You and your female partner have been deceptively shy of coding any real game mechanics into your products (let's not call those games, they don't deserve that name).
You're just one notch above the shitfests of DragonVale and iOS abominations ever farted to life by Pocket Gems (mind you, the iOS platform is quite the perfect place for such shitty software).

Your heresies barely contain any meaningful choice to be made at all. You shun difficulty. You're limp and spineless and you want to disguise that pathetic weakness of yours as art. Your abortions solely sell on how nice and charming they look. But the truth is that they're all empty, and your entire rhetoric is pure pretense.
Your animated and barely interactive applications are not games.
They're fake.
You are fake.

Embrace DmC

Yo retarded bitches! Quit the whining about the nu Dante! Oh boy, what a bunch of pathetic crying sissies. Wah wah their boy looks different. Hey shitfaces, didn't you spot the difference between the Dantes of DMC3 and DMC4, the later in which Dante looked like Michael Douglas wearing a bleached wig?
Yeah so fuck off.
DMC has style, it has gusto, and it's Dante on full brit-punk mode, young and bull headed. Swallow it up petty dogs!

Got it thru ur brains? now STFU! (yup, it's Ninja Theory, but I have faith this time)

Day of Lolz

With a blog stuck into its most lethargic state to date, a new issue of them LOLz wasn't really due. I suppose it makes sense to launch one of those criticism missiles every once in a while, assuming my blogging activities are important. But they're not. I lost interest in blogging after realizing that it wasn't worth the time spent on it, since all that mattered was traffic built through tricks and social network pimping, not through the value of the content itself, which proved to be quite irrelevant. Add to that the fact the industry itself isn't as teasing as it once was. The next big thing could be brainwave-controlled games, but that's quite a mere gimmick in the domain of so called "interaction". As to the rest, what can I say? I fail to see anything truly exciting. The whole affair is most likely going in circles, and the most lively and challenging domain of games is about what I could call scholastic work.

However, I should have known that there's always something to laugh at these days, partly due to the overall mediocrity of professionals given so much attention that they think they can say anything stupid and not be called on it. And they aren't!
But I do shout. See, what I typed yesterday about the asinine Kotaku preview could have been worth a spot in a post about the silly shit that goes on in video game land. I prefer my LOLz to be about different topics, so focusing on just one bit wasn't worth a new entry in the series. But now that I have gone down a few links inside Kotaku and read some of their stuff, perhaps, after all, there yet was a time for another Day of Lolz.
So what is it about? Check it out: The Search For The Video Game Auteurs, by Brian Ashcraft.

The guy goes on a long tirade about the film industry's auteur theory, mostly picked from wikipedia in fact and a few other things you can find on internet in less than two clicks. When you think of it, the article is actually very poor in content, when you consider the time these people have on their hands. Nevertheless, Asscraft compares films and games to see how parallels can be drawn between both regarding said theory (which is pretty much a proven one and well considered a fact now). The auteur theory existed because it was felt that a particular director's style could be recognized throughout several movies he made, in opposition to the idea that there was no such style. Basically, if one were to transpose this concept from the director to a whole studio, and thus coin the term of studio theory, team theory, or as Asscraft put it, the studio auteur theory (sic), we would be considering the idea that a studio's style could be palatable throughout a series of games the studio worked on. This is not a given so it's a fair point to realize that some studios just generate games without any particular recurring trend of elements, while other studios clearly have something that makes their games recognizable.
But see, Asscraft doesn't get it that way.

In game development, because the studio is so important and because the team is so important and because there are so many variables, the auteur ends up being the studio itself. It's the, let's call it, the Studio Auteur Theory. More often than not, the studio heads or lead designer at the studio are driving the vision — not only for one title, but for all the titles the studio makes. They are setting the tone. That filters down through the rest of the studio. There are exceptions, of course, but look at Sam and Dan Houser at Rockstar. They have a clear vision and that vision becomes the vision of the entire company. Look at Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo. They are inseparable. It's inconceivable for Nintendo to make non Shigeru Miyamoto games and equally inconceivable for Miyamoto to make non Nintendo titles.

It's frankly stupid to claim that teams in video game development are "so important", as in opposition to movie teams, like if they didn't matter as much. How the heck does he think movie teams operate, for crissake?? Does he even think they're somehow more superfluous? It's a team, no matter the size, and it has a point.

Also, notice how he actually ends chasing his own tail. Silly boy. He claims that it's the studio that is the auteur, hence his awkward conflation manifesting as "studio auteur" (as alluded to above, an oxymoron, since the opposition is between an auteur and a team, aka the studio). Which is plain wrong, since in fact it is key people inside the studio (studio heads or lead designer) who matter.
So, Asscraft, call it the designer theory if you acknowledge that the vision is the fruit of one or a very few studio leaders, you dolt. But if he were to do that, he'd contradict himself in the span of two sentences.
In his mind, it is the studio, some kind of enigmatic hivemind entity, that upholds the vision as a whole, not key people inside it. Sure thing... Even the greatest propaganda doctrines are the fruit of a few minds. But now we're supposed to believe that a whole studio (preferably a large one considering the examples he picked), not key high-tier personnel, is the entity that builds and maintains the vision. Yeah, 25+ people have the same vision. What's that? Borg Collective? When do we laugh, again?

The real question is:

Who is responsible of the vision at the core of the studio?

That is all. Is it one "dictator" or is it the fruit of an agreement within that core?

Asscraft's understanding of the real working of a studio (try working inside one for a change mate) is so deplorable that it's not surprising he manages to miss the meaning of Truffaut's axiom. He ends saying something as doubly stupid as that:

The auteur theory is just that — a theory. The Studio Auteur theory is just that as well, but it encompasses more. It's bigger. There is room to breath and room for than one single author. Games are akin to encyclopedias. There might be a handful of editors, but there is a small army of writers filling each page. Even later in life, Truffaut acknowledged the collaborative nature of film production. "There are no good and bad films," Truffaut once stated, "only good and bad directors." And in video games, there are only good and bad developers.

Emphasis mine.
First, is that his grand theory? That there are good and bad developers?
I couldn't have figured it out myself. The term developer is so encompassing that it cannot drive any point through.

Secondly, what Truffaut said is that you have those directors who know how to drive a team and get the best out of its parts and the technology said team uses, while keeping a vision in sight and conforming to it (in more or less recent years, popular French examples would be Besson and Jeunet, whose movies are unmistakable), and those directors who don't know how to or don't care about any style at all.
Same goes with a studio. It doesn't matter if a few souls or half the team out of fifty or a hundred have understood the vision, because if there's no good project director to max them out as to obtain the product the studio's head or heads aim at, the game will be a failure. For anyone who has actually worked in large teams before going small, it's very obvious that the game is not a kind of egregious consensus that is the sum of all workers' opinions, miraculously adhering to some unique revelation. That's just bull, especially in larger teams. Many people are just skilled technicians and nothing else. Some are good programmers but suck in the arts department at large. Then there are the artists who have no mathematical logic or organization, and sometimes can get very enthusiastic about their work but need to be maintained on very specific tracks. All of these workers need a clever direction, and that direction comes from the core of the studio. Then, and only then, a studio may begin to produce games which are comfortably recognizable in their style, genre and themes.


Moving on. Here's an ad for a small video game about the crisis and the bankers pitted against humans.

Cookie to you if you if you can spot the major problem in this silly trailer.
Here's a clue: it's all about the phenotypes.

Asinine Kotaku preview

"I Have No Idea What’s Going On In This Game, But I’m Fascinated."

Geez, if there's a thing I hate with any game is when I don't get what's going on.
But this Kotaku chick (Tina Amini) is mesmerized because she doesn't understand anything of what's happening in Candle's trailer! Oh... that's the power of indie, of highbrow mysticism. It's unintelligible, but there's palpable profound meaning in it (winning keyword in game design circles), she can feel it. She supposes that the game is incredibly deep, full of said meaning and hinges on a powerful concept. She knows it can only be that good because it leaves her on her knees. In fact she already thinks it IS that good. The logical conclusion is that what she has witnessed is the work of art of a purely superior meta-smart mind. The Kotaku girl is most likely already too smart because she automatically likes this game - see the phenomenon of raising one-self's prestige by pedantically lauding what has to be a genuine gracious manifestation of the God of Games, of such pure obvious value, that there's no chance people would say it's shit without being called punks for not understanding how it clearly is a magnificent product, nevermind if all of us, the lowly ones, cannot get it, because the meaning is most necessarily impenetrable.
It is quite baffling that such an ego-driven alter-elitist would not want to play the pretense game and try to impress people about what is going on. But in this case the imbecile doesn't even try. In a way, it's so surprising and touching, perhaps even alarming, that you'd want to gently poke the girl with your elbow and tell her that she should really try to act as if she knew what she was dealing with.
But not this time. It's so honest, I'm disarmed.
She really doesn't grasp anything, but that surely must be the sign of a fascinating game!

Candle - Beta Game Trailer from Candle Game on Vimeo.

I love a game that encourages exploration, particularly if it intends to freak you out while you do so. The creepy trailer raises some serious questions, though. Like what the hell is happening at the 1:03 time mark?!

Not overdoing it at all! Yeah, she really looooooves a game that encourages exploration. Like, you know, the vast majority of games do, even if it's the exploration of the mechanics, the story or the world.
And how the heck does it raise "serious questions"?
She doesn't even know what is the meaning of what she has seen (some kind of ninja fist fu**ing perhaps?), but she's already fascinated by the game???
o_O

I put "preview" in the title but it feels like it already was a review, the kind Leigh Alexander produces, you know : small, pompous and useless.

Indie is less

Dorkly Bits: Mario is Too Mainstream