The article reviewing the lack of convention-busting on the part of Halo 3 was really interesting, but I have to disagree on the idea that there aren't any games that can portray a storyline without cutscenes or cinematic elements. One example is also one of my personal favorites- the Half Life series. Within the games, there are absolutely no cutscenes; everything takes place from the first person view. The closest the game arrives to a true cutscene are but a few brief moments when the controls are suspended in Half Life 2, due to game events. Plot-wise, the Half Life anthology is very intricate, and it achieves this without ever leaving the perspective of Gordon Freeman.
John Lanchester's article was great in how it compared the playful, plotless simplicity of certain games with the artistic depth and complexity of others. However, as he stated, difficulty does not always make for good art. The shred-metal bands 0f the 80's proved this very clearly. While complexity is embraced by some circles, it isn't the cornerstone of an artistic piece. For example, Pacman is extremely simple in concept, graphics, and sound, and yet can be incredibly difficult to beat. On the other hand, a game such as Halo is outstanding in terms of aesthetic appeal, but can be conquered in rather short order.
N'Gai Croal's attack on Roger Ebert's view of video games was pretty enlightening; it showed a solid snapshot of how people view things they don't- or care not to- understand. What's worse is when people like Ebert begin to lump art into categories of "better" and "worse", or in this case, high and low art. Ebert's pretentious viewpoint was very irritating, not only because he had virtually no gaming experience, but also because he seemed to be fabricating reasons to convince himself not to accept them. Art is art, and a medium as flexible and engrossing as video games are not going to slow down or go away any time soon.
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Perhaps most developers opt for cutscenes because if they told the story in real-time, allowing the player to retain control ability, some players would just run around like idiots and not pay attention. It'd be like reading along to a group who all has the same book; but one person decides to skip ahead to the last page.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the whole art debate goes, I think everything is art, but some things are more art than others.
N'Gai's debate with Ebert was pretty interesting. He went point by point and shared his own thoughts as to why video games are art. Art is many different things and I don't understand why some people just can't accept video games. Perhaps they are biased against them for their own reasons.
ReplyDeleteMusic is an art form, so is dance, literature and etc. If we're calling that art, then video games combine all of them together, so games must be higher art than any famous author, musician or painter.