I tried to walk around her TWICE! Do I need to go all the way to the bottom to avoid her? It was pretty evident what the game wanted me to do, so I did it. At one point I started to walk backwards and the game was evidently not impressed.
The decision of whether or not to take the girlfriend is central to the game. If you didn’t get that, then it’s a big mistake to slam the game for having a trivial message.
I mean, where is “all the way to the bottom”? Did you not go far enough south on the screen to notice that the game scrolls vertically?
There are a lot of details to the game. Jason mentions them in his creator’s statment at Passage: a Gamma256 video game by Jason Rohrer.
I do think that the game doesn’t do the best job of making it clear that you have a choice about the girlfriend thing… but I think it does become clear upon 2nd play or so.
Having just DLed the Marriage I donno whether I should be more bored by the gameplay or offended by the message.
How can you be offended by something that is a sincere description of what one guy’s marriage feels like, to himself?
In fact I think the whole idea of thinking of these games as having “a message” is somewhat wrong and trivializing, and I even regret using the word in the negative a couple of posts ago.
This sort of “the moral of the story is X” thing is a remnant of grade school. Sophisticated thinkers don’t think that way, and good art doesn’t convey meaning that way.
So if you come up to one of these games predisposed to thinking of it as, “it is trying to tell me some statement X, what is that statement?” then you are bound to be disappointed because nothing really deep or interesting can come that way.
A good art game, especially, is going to have a complex interplay of emotions or ideas. Think of it as like a painting. You don’t look at the Mona Lisa and say, “the message of this is that she’s kind of smiling so she’s thinking of something that I can’t know.” Maybe that’s one thing that goes through your head, but it’s nowhere near the whole point of the painting – if that were the only thing to get out of it, it would not be very interesting, and in fact da Vinci wouldn’t have had to make the painting – he could have just written down on a piece of paper, “Hey, there’s this chick in a painting who is smiling but you don’t know what about.”
There’s a lot of stuff in such a work to see and appreciate, both in terms of concept and execution. The themes are a lot deeper than what you can say in a sentence – because that’s why the work was made, to express things that aren’t that simple.
Games are especially interesting to me because they are inherently these kinds of dynamic, complex systems, which may suit themselves even better to expressing complicated and nuanced ideas.
So even though I will probably insult some people here, I am going to put forth the idea that if you think the message of an art game is something like “The moral of the story is, always look before you leap!!” then you are probably not as Game Literate as you think you are.
SPOILERS
WOAH REALLY? YOU SIR HAVE JUST BLOWN MY MIND!
Yeah I knew, I tried to dodge past her but didn’t know I actually needed to have her like off screen to ditch the bitch. It seems like it just becomes a frustrating maze (especially since my sprite size doubled because I took the wife powerup) further south so I just jammed on the right arrow button in one straight line at the very top of the screen.
I was slightly surprised when my wife transmogrified into a headstone, because I totally was sure that the pap he was going for was my guy and her walking into “the light”. Also I know she had to die first because I’m the main character and she’s a power-up, but aren’t women supposed to live longer?
EDIT: It just read out as “YOUR ARE MORTAL”, a sentiment which is covered a mere seconds into the intro movie for Persona 3. Oregon Trail and Creatures expressed what this guy was trying a billion times better, and were games to boot.
I don’t want to define what is meant by an ‘Art’ game (which is which I put it in quotes), but there is a very real sense that there is such a category now - as proven by the fact that Jonathan could compile a list pretty quickly. The reality is that people will now be making games to succeed within this new genre, which can be both good and bad. Hopefully, we don’t get stuck with this:
Bite your tongue heathen! ELP is even better than Jethro Tull!
I would like to hear Soren explain what he meant by “art” games, since he brought it up and he says he’s writing an article about it …
But maybe I need to wait for the article?
People are right to be wary of the word “art.” It’s a word made half-useless by baggage. It’s also hopelessly vague, on its own. It means something different to each person. When you wade into conversation about it, you find that there’s loads of maintenance to do, to clarify what each person is actually thinking of.
“Art” can imply any or all of the following:
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a work that expresses the personal vision of a single creator
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a work which aims to challenge the viewer rather than soothe him
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a work which explores the untapped possibilities of a medium
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a work of deconstructionist self-awareness
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work which finds a new purpose for a familiar idiom
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a work which rises above the norm in certain areas of craft
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a work that carries a philosophical/political/social message
It can be said that there’s usually something aspirational about the things we want to call “art.” They are works which somehow differentiate themselves. Combine that with the vagueness of the term, and people get uneasy. If you are going to refer to something rarified and aspirational, you should be specific. Otherwise, you are just gesturing at an empty sky. People are not wrong to raise an eyebrow, suspect the emperor of public indecency.
But it’s hard to be specific about things which fall outside common language. The word “art” becomes a placeholder, while we try to understand and develop a vocabulary for what we’re looking at. Unfortunately, it’s a word which turns away as many people as it invites.
I’m looking forward to Soren’s article but I hope he doesn’t use the word “art” without clarification. Actually, he might save himself some work in the long run by avoiding it completely.
fortunately, we can both agree with that statement.
So you would enjoy some… Hocus Pocus!
(I can’t find the one where he only has one tooth. That was great. I think it was recorded in Amsterdam maybe?)
Hang on, you see “art” as a genre?
THRILLER - COMEDY - ROMANCE - DRAMA - ART
Weird!
heh… you’re getting right to the issue there. However, “art” IS starting to become a game genre, at least in terms of perception. I don’t necessarily think this is the right way to look at things (which is why I brought up the tongue-in-cheek reference to “art rock”, another odd term).
Most of the games that claim to be ‘art’ are precisely the opposite in my book, and are usually just poor games. At best they devolve into polemics where we’re meant to infer some simple sentence that skates across the surface of an issue, and at worst they’re trivial, poorly implemented, vapid wank fests.
Something is not art because you say it is, and it’s certainly not art just because nobody would publish it and you had to make it on your own money in your bedroom.
Art in videogames for me is more about immersion, visceral experience and getting an emotional reaction from me - my reaction to games that try to make me ‘re-examine my existence’ or some other similar ridiculous sophomoric ideal is usually the same as those books or movies which attempt the same thing - They’re trying way too hard and communicating nothing.
And just to further incite 50% of this thread - you can find more commentary on the world and juicy items to discuss around the water cooler in the latest copy of Fifa and Madden than you can in 99% of the Indie games I’ve seen.
So what you’re saying is, you still didn’t really play the game, or read the creator’s statement I linked? “You are mortal” is definitely part of it, but, at this point I reference my earlier paragraph about the Mona Lisa.
I think just about anything can be art. It’s just that some things are more art than others.
well put.
We seem to have a number of angry philistines in this thread for some reason. I’m just curious why they feel the need to say that these games are retarded or crap. Why the vehemence? Are you trolling? Did some hippy abuse you? Do you only think commercial and popular art is worthwhile?
Well, if the artist is essentially a one-hit wonder and seems to have no clue why people are fascinated with/enjoy that certain work, then that would seem to suggest that it achieved its effect by accident. cf. Star Wars
And I’m not talking about any standard almighty definition of art. I’m just saying that I, personally, don’t believe that a game that is not good, as I see it, can be good art, without saying anything about whether the alternative is “bad art” or “mediocre art” or “not art at all.”
No. It cannot. For the record, I think many of Malevich’s other works are at least good paintings. Jackson Pollock, on the other hand…
I think Rucker’s right on the money. Modern art made some sense when we lived in the Cold War under the whole “World could end tomorrow” scenario of Mutual Assured Destruction, where there was little time to put into one’s craft or artwork because there might not be a tomorrow to finish a deeper work.
But now that we’ve moved past that, it’s time to act like there is a tomorrow, and get back to where a work is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, instead of the other way around. The artists who haven’t moved into this realm are just lazy.
Why do you say they are lazy?