Sundays are for sitting, drumming fingers, waiting for your new comic to be announced at WizardWorld Chicago and compiling a list of the (especially fruitful) interesting (main) videogame writing across the week and try and not link to -er – some poetry? That doesn’t sound very me. I blame womankind.
- Simon Parkin plays proper journalist over at Eurogamer, and does a beginners guide to the whole Timothy Langdell situation – fundamentally, Langdell aggressively pursuing anyone who uses the word “Edge” in videogames for infringement of trademark. Strong games journalism, to say the least. And, according to Simon’s twitter, Langdell is unsurprisingly threatening to sue. Go read.
- Gamasutra do a hefty interview with Rhianna Pratchett on games writing. Both about her and the craft generally, if you actually want to know how games writing works currently and who and what you should be blaming for its shortfalls, this is a great grounder.
- New Scientist on the race to make the ultimate Mario AI.
- Over at Maisonneuve, the Chris Lavigne questions whether him following the E3 expo with far more passion than the elections in Iran this summer is something to be worried about. I suspect many of us have had a moment like this, though him dovetailing to debates which probably should have sparked a debate (Greenpeace analysis of the environmental footprint of consoles) to those that did (L4D2!!!!!) rises it above a “I must go to the gym more often”-ism.
- Christian Donolan over at Eurogamer interviews PopCap about their working methods. Opening line: “Learning from failure is easy. Learning from success – particularly slightly unexpected success – can be a lot more difficult.” This strikes me as true. Fun stuff.
- Nullpointer throws up some notes on Entropy and Gaming.
- Rob Hale chews over the recent music-industry-failing infographics and wonders whether videogames actually did kill the music industry.
- Craig over at Gaming Daily on the joy of planning. That being, the calm moment before all the action kicks off. It’s interesting – we talk about games as interaction, but during these moments, no actual outwards interaction is taking place. It’s us, running internal simulations of how all these things work. Spinning in a different direction, I occasionally use this sort of thinking to semi-justify cut-scenes in games. As long as you’re running those internal simulations on the cut-scene – i.e. “What does this mean for me” – you are interacting with the game, no matter what the outwards appearance may say.
- Meanwhile, also at Gaming Daily, Chris Evans remembers the joys of bots. He misses them so. Me too, actually. Bots as a worthwhile endeavour are one of the casualties in the current multiplayer-uber-alles direction of the industry.
- Alex Hayter’s piece on the three-letter-acronym we don’t talk about here. “A sensible critique of NGJ,” said Jim upon finding it, “Extraordinary. Affective fallacy. I knew we had to be doing a fallacy somewhere. It wouldn’t feel right if we weren’t”. Strong piece, which holds together on its own terms, and I find myself guilty as charged – and not really caring. The point of culture is to move. An objective approach means nothing without the gold standard of something once having moved someone. Objectivity is a thin, deceitful veneer. Either you’re hiding you’re arguing for something you like – or you’re lying about its aesthetic effectiveness, so turning your criticism into a parlour game of argument-for-its-own-sake. “That said, we do like graphs,” adds Jim, sagely.
- Over at Resolution they are a-posting. Mr Poisoned Sponge talks about the effect of a third-person game versus a first person game – the most interesting observation being that sense of distance from a third-person avatar means you’re more able to accept game-dictated actions which are not what you’d have done. I’m not sure if he’s right, but it’s an interesting one. Also, there’s more Why I Play Games there – especially notable is Michaël Samyn of Tale of Tales writing about why he doesn’t.
- Tom Armitage writes about how media actually prepare us for strange and glorious future technology – specifically, how things are preparing us for how Augmented Reality will work. The Dead Space is a particularly good example, I think. I’m actually doing some AR stuff in one of my to-be-announced comics, and the “preparing the road to the future” is very much on my mind.
- PJ Holden lobbed a short 4 page comic he and I did together in 2006. It’s called “Horror” and you can read it here.
- John Hughes’ passing this week was a bit of a shocker. If you haven’t seen the piece by one Alison about her teenage-pen-pal-hood with him, you really should. There’s a John Hughes film in it, I swear.
- Time for some grueling American Realist Trailer Park photography, yeah?
- Laura Dockrill. Start with Heaven Knows, I guess, but it you ideally want her on stage, twitching, doing it at twice the speed to get its full effect.
Failed.
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With relation to: Over at Maisonneuve, the Chris Lavigne ………. rises it above a “I must go to the gym more often”-ism.
I’m far happier getting overly passionate about games than any of the (fl/st)uff in the Review, Family, Guide, Guardian Magazine, Sports pullouts and more than half of the main newspaper itself in this weekend’s Guardian/Observer.
That is how I justify it to myself anyway.
This one really, really turned out to be a gem. Thank you Kieron, EyeMessiah and Noc for a healthy and mature discussion on aestethics. I have to things to add though:
@ Kieron: ” In proper criticism, the buyers-guide nature of the review doesn’t even get a seat.” I’m not questioning this at all, but I am wondering about the motivation. Is it a necessary consequence of the realisation that an art review is an inherently subjective thing, or is there another reason entierly?
@Dante: I do agree with you that there is such a thing as objectively bad code or a badly built house. A code or the act of building a house have some predefined purposes such as accurately presenting the “vision of the designer” to the consumer with a minimum of bugs, memory leaks, water leaks or improperly mounted beams (in short, production faults). This is because a coder of a constructor are simply engineers contracted to make a designer’s or architect’s vision happen. They are not artists themselves. This is why the analogy between bad constuction and a “bad house” is incorrect. Because even if, and sometimes even because of , the construction of a house is incorrect engineering-wise, the finished house can still hold a high aestethic value, i.e. be beautiful.
Tom: It’s because criticism’s purpose is to explain how something does what it does and what it means, basically. You can say that its purpose is forwarding the formalist theoretical framework of games, but I think even that’s pushing it. I’m not sure the practical necessarily comes into it at all.
Put it like this: Criticism is primarily academic in nature.
(If you read the piece linked, its forwarding what it thinks more formalist criticism should be.)
KG
Noc, great posts in this thread.
>This is because a coder of a constructor are simply engineers contracted to make a designer’s or architect’s vision happen. They are not artists themselves.
I don’t agree. Coding has some aspects of art in it. Not as in “It makes people think about life and cry”, but in the same way that a really skilled martial artist performing a kata makes art of grace and power.
Coding often requires tradeoffs – simplicity vs speed vs extendability. When to choose one before the other can’t be reduced to set rules, but it something that is learned over time.
Langdell deserves to be sue’d so hard he’s left pennyless living in the streets.
I’ve read he tried to sue U2’s The Edge and I saw a banner on his site literally saying MIRRORS a game by EDGE (”a game by” was wrote so small you could only read it by squinting and squishing your face on your monitor.)
Hes also known to get people to make games for him, then not pay the full agreed amount and credit himself with alot of the work done on the game. (Eg. Fairlight)
@Kieron: By “Tom”, do you mean “Tore”? :)
@ Tore
Either that or he’s figured out my real name.
I can’t fully agree with you there, I think there are two aspects writing a story, one is deciding what you want to do, the other is pulling it off.
If I don’t like what you set out to do, well that’s subjective, but if you’ve failed to do what you set out to do, well then that’s a failure, objectively. I’ll give you that. If a house falls down, it doesn’t matter how pretty the rubble is, you’ve failed in your attempt to make a house. Whether it can succeed accidentally is a tricky tangent, and rather complicated to get into now.
Some simple examples, let us say that I do not like films about gangsters, then I do not like the Godfather, but I understand it tells the story it wants to tell well, so I might dislike it subjectively, but objectively it’s good (or at least ’sound’). But although I might like stories about alien invasions, I still don’t like Plan Nine, because although it has picked a story I might like, it has failed to deliver it soundly.
@Dante & also Lars
“If a house falls down for no reason then it is a badly made house. There are no ifs or buts here, this isn’t subjective art, it’s a basic, practical failure of craft.”
Dante, if the house really fell down for “no reason” then it seems a little mean spirited to blame the carpenter for dumb bad luck! ;)
Seriously though, when I asked you what you mean by “badly coded” I wasn’t trying to suggest that you could never validly assert that some program could be a “bad example” of something called “good code”, rather I was trying to suggest that without further specification “bad” doesn’t say much about the code except that you don’t like it and clearly we can disagree about whether or not we each like the code without contradiction.
There are certainly lots of situations where we can agree that if something fails to meet some set of conventionally established criteria, it is therefore a bad example of thing X.
I understand what you might mean by “this car makes for a bad aeroplane” for instance.
So yes, the fact of whether or not some thing meets an agreed set of criteria is indeed an objective fact, and if we disagree about this then one of us is wrong.
The problem with trying to apply this kind of analysis to art\entertainment is that coming up with a set of criteria that doesn’t “miss-the-point” with regard to what people found meaningful about said art in the first place is practically impossible once you get beyond trying to talk about it in terms of people who like all the same stuff for the same reasons you do.
Sorry if that’s not clear, its hard to put into words. Maybe its easier if we think about it in terms of how you would actually come up with a set of fairly concrete criteria to judge works by.
Taking writing as the example. You mention an example of a criteria for “good writing” as being telling a story in such a way that your audience can follow. Right away you are going to struggle to get literary critics to agree to this because one of the recurring themes in critically successful post modern literature has been the problematicisation of exposition. You might think that this is BS, but if you can’t get them to agree with your criteria for “good writing”, then you can’t make objective assertions (objective properties being observable properties that we can all agree on remember) about whether or not Finnegans wake is well written.
So you might think, well screw those guys – I’ll just pick some OBJECTIVE criteria, which have authority of their own and then it doesn’t matter if they get all whiny about it and say they disagree.
There are a few of different options for declaring that some set of criteria come with authority built-in, but they are all pretty broken, imo.
The first one that most people go for is the appeal to critical authority. In your case this one won’t work because a quick skim over some university literature courses will show us that, as we have seen, the academic literary canon includes – perhaps even favours – works which violate your only stated criteria. They assert that works which barely tell a story, demonstrate terrible grammar, lack structure or possibly even characters are examples of good, nay, great writing!
So maybe you decide you would rather get a bit more down to earth – a bit more “common-sense”. If its self-evident then regular people everywhere must be able to agree on what constitutes “good writing”, right? So lets take a poll, and rank the great works of literature by popularity, and then we can declare that Harry Potter, LOTR and the Da Vinci code are the finest examples of writing ever seen and surely the standard by which all other literature must be judged. Maybe not.
So what about authorial intent? We can just examine the end result in relation to what the author had in mind as their ultimate goal and derive an objective measure of how successful the work is from the comparison. But even if we put aside the question of whether or not how “on-target” the work is is the same thing as how well written it is, we will quickly find ourselves mired in an impossible debate about what the authors intentions really were, or whether they were lying about them or they were misreported or whether the author really had anything clear in mind at all.
(If you had some other argument in mind for how your criteria derive their authority I’d be very interested to hear it.)
At the end of the day if you are talking about some literary work, people aren’t really interested in the book itself, the objective thing, – they are interested in the subjective experience of the consumption of the work, and you can’t make objective assertions about the subjective properties of subjective things without straying into easily picked apart illogical nonsense. Its like trying to build a house of stone on quicksand. In other words, even if your logic is internally consistent, its built on axioms so slippery and nebulous that your manipulations won’t yield reliably truthful conclusions.
@KG
So, I don’t think that art criticism can explain how a work of art functions, at least not in terms that I find rationally accessible. As for what a work of art “means”, I’m not at all sure I know what *that* means tbh.
Yes, I’m being crass though. I know. And long winded…
@EM et al re: ‘bad’ code
Seems to me (he said, hooking his thumbs into his braces and rocking on is heels) that you can make non-subjective ‘bad’ statements about code for the simple reason that there are objective metrics you can apply. Does this version run faster or slower than the last? How often does it crash? Does it leak memory? etc.
(That said, as regards the elegance of the code – I’m prepared to concede an element of the artistic, but most of the time you don’t get to see this when you play a game unless its open-source, and you can be bothered…)
Subjective writeups of the type you might find here make no claim to objectivity, but I think they still function well in a ‘buyer’s guide’ sense simply because once you get to know the hivemind hereabouts, you can adjust for bias. eg. “Jim always hates the stuff I will like best.” or “Kieron is always wrong when zombies are involved.” (Examples for example purposes only)
I agree on the “beginners guide” description of the Langdell EG article, nice for an introduction but there’s so much more to this story (the comments and links therein actually tell you 100x more interesting stuff) that I’d say it’s a pity a big site like EG didn’t really push it to the limit. I thought journalism could be a lot more than repeating things the internet mostly knew about a few weeks ago.
Langdell resigned from the IGDA board: http://www.igda.org/newsroom/Tim%20Resigns.pdf