T w e n t y S i d e d
Paul is on the road this week, so his audio might be a little tinny. But if we pull together as a community, I’m sure we can find the strength to endure this hardship.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Show notes:
00:00 Shamus Falls for Clickbait
I admit, I’m weak. I suppose I’m part of the problem, but when I read Game developers, it’s time to stop listening to the fans, I was compelled to argue with it.
Part of the problem is that this is coming from the deputy editor of a majorBigger than THIS site, anyway. gaming site. If this was some rando on YouTube I would have been able to scroll past. It was really strange seeing a game journo insulting the consumer using guilt by association, sticking up for the corporations, and pushing against the very idea of consumer feedback because the internet is mean.
Fallout 76 was a broken pile of bugs and glitches that was sold to consumers for $60. Loot boxes are a plague on the industry. Pointless DRM is somehow still a thing. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was made grindy and story quests were level-gated so Ubisoft could sell you an “XP Booster” for $10.
There are a lot of problems in this industry, but “Listening too much to the consumer” isn’t one of them.
Also, here is the video I mentioned during this segment:
Link (YouTube) |
13:32 GDQ Long Speedruns
Link (YouTube) |
I realize six hours is a really fast completion time for a vintage JRPG like this, but “six hour speedrun” still sounds like a contradiction to me.
23:45 Programming the metal. CPU, GPU, and FPGA
We started off talking about this paper, but then I got sidetracked and talked about this video:
Link (YouTube) |
35:01 Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 1/3 of its PC copies on GoG
Obviously this news can’t be true. What kind of crazy person would buy a DRM free game? Everyone knows gamers are mostly dirty pirates, which is why publishers are forced to add obnoxious DRM to everything.
38:03 Mailbag: Emergent vs. Authored Story
Dear mailbaggles:
Shamus, you talk about narrative a lot. How do you feel about this tweet?
I think when you *find* story, in events produced by a system, a whole different part of your brain lights up than when you’re being told one, by a narrative.
The tweet in Question is:
I think when you *find* story, in events produced by a system, a whole different part of your brain lights up than when you're being told one, by a narrative.
— Tom Francis (@Pentadact) July 3, 2019
48:06 Ubisoft and the Art of Saying Nothing
Link (YouTube) |
I’m criticizing Ubisoft for not making “political” statements when I have a firm no politics rule on my site. Maybe that seems hypocritical. But my problem isn’t with their lack of making a statement, it’s the way they go out of their way to grab onto a controversial subject, supercharge it with violence, and then not say anything about it. As someone who reflexively analyzes stories, this is maddening. It’s like a field of visual noise that’s been deliberately designed to look like one of those magic eye pictures. You keep looking for the hidden image, but there isn’t one!
Footnotes:
[1] Bigger than THIS site, anyway.
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
To be fair, it can be expected that the game will be DRM-free on Steam as well.
You know that Steam is a DRM right?
For some games, you can just go to the directory where Steam keeps the files and directly run the executable, without going through Steam. Of course, Steam doesn’t tell you for which games this is the case because why would anyone want to know that?
Good Robot for example. :-)
Gosh I had no idea!
As a non-customer, I have to ask: if a game is bought on Steam, doesn’t it already require the installed client just for installation purposes? If so: Is a game bought there which can be run without activating Steam actually DRM free, just because the DRM doesn’t install a new instance of itself for every single game and doesn’t need to run while playing the game?
As I understand it: If you opt out of Steam DRM, then the user can supposedly back up the game, copy it to another computer, and run it just fine. That’s the theory anyway.
I do wonder how well this works with Steam integration. If I hook into the Steam API for cheevos and leaderboards, then what happens when the game is copied to a machine without Steam on it? Will the game launch, fail to find Steam, and run anyway with the features disabled?
I never have any machines available that don’t already have Steam installed. (And if I DO have a machine without Steam, then I’m probably in the middle of an OS reinstall / migration and I’ve got more important things to worry about.) So I’ve never been able to test this for myself.
Okay…I generally can understand why Steam would not tell their customers.
What I don’t get: If this option exists and you knew about it and Good Robot does support such an option-why did you not mention this when it got published?
I don’t know if this type of person does make a significant number among your readership, but I for one might have asked someone else who does use Steam but wasn’t interested in the game to buy the game and make a copy for me to play without Steam. Even if I don’t use Steam, I sure know people who do-and they could buy stuff for me-as long as I know it will work without having to install their client.
Just wondering. It’s the kind of information I would try and make known to my customers if I was publishing a game to a fanbase that is critical of DRM. It’s the kind of information that’s not really common knowledge to people who don’t use the platform.
I’m not sure what you mean. I mentioned several times that GR didn’t opt-in to Steam DRM. (Disclosure: I didn’t do the Steam integration myself. Pyrodactyl published the game so Arvind handled policy-level stuff like this.)
As for the question of whether or not the game will work without Steam: This is a more recent question. Previously I just accepted the notion of “If you turn off Steam DRM, then the game has no DRM.” It wasn’t until this year that I began questioning how true this was, and wondering how it all works.
This would be a good thing to crowdsource. I’ve got some GR keys I could give away to anyone willing to test it. Maybe I’ll set something like that up next week.
I apologize if I seemed accusatory. As far as I understood your earlier comment, I thought it meant the game would technically be able to run on a system that doesn’t have Steam installed. If that’s unproven/untested, it would of course not make any sense to make any claim about this.
Also, I must have missed your hints during your development documentation. I won’t read it up now but trust you actually mentioned this and I just didn’t pay enough attention to it for some reason.
Does anyone else know about this, btw? Has anyone here already tried migrating GR (or other Steam games) to systems without Steam and is able to report their results?
Afaik if the game does not have Steam DRM enabled once installed it can run even if Steam itself was deleted as it is not dependent on any of its files, the issue of transferring the files and just running the executable on a different machine (or different OS install) is more complex in the sense of “can the game run without being installed”. Bear in mind I’m a layman so I don’t have the right terminology but essentially a game can either be “self contained” or it might be dependent on various registry entries (or other… stuff? again, layman) which are created in the process of installation or outside applications/libraries that are usually bundled with the installer while not being part of the game itself*.
Obviously these requirements can be circumvented by delivering the pre-requisite resources yourself and/or spoofing the… I’m gonna call them registry entries and hope that’s close enough, but particularly in the latter case it’s essentialy equivalent to cracking the game anyway at which point you might just crack Steam DRM as well if there was any… I guess we could argue about the dev/publisher intent of the game being redistributable or not on moral grounds but from technical standpoint there is little difference.
*PhysX or DirectX might be examples most people would be familiar with, or at least have seen the names pop up during game installation. This is in fact something that happens with certain older games even if they do come as installers because the devs just assumed certain files/libraries/applications would always be present in the system (dll files from older Windows version for example).
Steam offers DRM as an optional feature. Whether a dev/publisher uses it is their own decision. The Witcher 3 and Kerbal Space Program are notable examples who opted against it.
I feel so bad about clicking on that link – they don’t deserve the traffic. I didn’t read the article, but I still shouldn’t have clicked!
I tried to mouse over to find out which site published the article, and accidentally clicked the link as well. We’re both part of the problem.
I did the same thing. At least misery loves company.
I don’t think that Paul’s argument regarding the Hero’s Journey (more precisely, Star Wars being able to make the story up on the fly because it’s templated on the Hero’s Journey) needs fleshing it out more. Star Wars was very deliberately based off the HJ, but the HJ is a reading lens that can be applied to any narrative, and usually fits pretty well. So I’m not sure how SW would be special in that instance.
It applies to lots of stories that have endured. Unclear whether that’s because the hero’s journey is the pattern that people are interested in or because people see that pattern in stories that they like. Either way it seems like a good idea to pay attention to it.
George Lucas explicitly stated that the hero’s journey was a major fascination and motivation for making Star wars. He got mixed up with the light side dark side thing, but that doesn’t mean that the themes didn’t help.
I haven’t bought CP2077 yet. I want to get the collector’s edition for some of the bonus features, but it doesn’t seem to be on sale anywhere in Australia right now. And if I’m going for the regular edition, there’s no point to preordering.
I love speedruns, especially for games I know well. It’s amazing seeing how much better other people are than I am, and the tricks they find to get around. Like Skyrim, the horse catapault and marriage tricks.
On the subject of politics and pop culture, I remember when Kathleen Kennedy claimed that Star Wars was nothing but harmless entertainment. There was no message to it. You can imagine how fast people brought up George Lucas talking about his inspirations and ideas. But at least SW is dressed up as a fun space opera. If you don’t dive down the rabbit hole, it’s easy to miss. He didn’t set it in contemprary America.
Shamus, your point about criticising other countries is well taken. There’s many times I want to say something about a certain country, but then remember that Australia is a glass house. I put down that stone and walk away.
And it’s a good thing, too – if you run out of stones, you might start throwing some of your Australian spiders and snakes – and then the whole world would be doomed!
In all seriousness, though, I think that this is an attitude we don’t get enough of these days…
“In all seriousness, though, I think that this is an attitude we don’t get enough of these days…”
It isn’t easy, but it’s probably better than getting embroiled in a pointless argument that won’t solve anything and only make the participants even more pissed than before. And I don’t want that for myself, at least.
Eh. I thnk there’s a time and place for potiitical arguments; there are important issues worth discussing or considering. It’s just that the Internet is almost never that place.
As for not criticising another country becuase yours isn’t perfect…show me someone who comes from a perfect country that’s completely blameless?
a) Just because I come from a country doesn’t mean I endorse everything said coutry does or bear any responsibility for it.
b) The existence of my flaw isn’t relevant to me pointing out your, different flaw.
While I agree with you, I interpret Joe’s comment more along the lines of “I live in a place and culture that is very different from this other country I want to talk about, so my opinion may not be very relevant (and I may not even understand the issue completely).”
But living in another country also gives you a perspective that you sometimes can’t see within it. What seems the norm within the US, would be very right-wing in many Western countries. The US has a perspective on minimum wages, that a lot of countries would be entirely unfamiliar with.
Equally the UK is very unaware of how other countries in the world perceive it.
Sometimes that perspective is very insightful, while other times not so much. In some contexts, sharing that perspective might be detrimental to the discussion and derail it entirely.
No, Australia has a lot of the same culture and values as America and Britain, and a lot of the same problems. If I had any solution, I’d apply it at home first before telling the rest of the world what to do.
I’m still baffled that drm is still a thing considering how much it hurt several games.
EA pretty much lost an entire franchise (simcity) thanks to them.
DRM was not the thing that killed SimCity.
SimCity died in the gameplay design phase, the DRM merely desecrated the corpse.
When you’re making an installment in a beloved turn-based single-player sim, and decide to include mandatory multiplayer features…there’s not muchyou can do to salvage things after that point.
Was Simcity really turn based? That doesn’t sound right to me…
I’m pretty convinced at this point it’s a decision made by managers at the top and not anyone who watches how DRM pans out. AAA top manager makes the DRM decision because securom (or whomever) told them they’d make more sales, or because DRM has always been added and why stop now? The cost of of the DRM is pennies compared to the game budget so it’s thrown in more because it can be, rather than measured effectiveness.
It feels so cynical but we’ve been watching big publishers make bafflingly tone deaf and backwards decisions for years I can’t think of any other reason than at one point someone told them it would make them more money.
I get the impression that certain publishers/developers don’t – or can’t – consider what it’d be like without DRM. They’re making money, they don’t quite know how the system works and they don’t want to deviate from it too much. NOT having DRM just sounds too much like a risk – don’t rock the boat!
Then there’s pressures from the ‘appeal’ of exclusivity of platforms: whether its a console, an online platform like Origin or GWFL – by fencing off our games, we force people to buy the way we want them to! It’s genius!
I think there’s also an idea along the lines of “Security is very important in the tech industry. DRM is security. How are we going to explain to the shareholders why we’re removing security from our products?” Bear in mind, some of the people in charge aren’t all that tech-savvy, and given the fact that DRM doesn’t cost them that much, for the rest of the people involved it’s probably less of a hassle to keep it.
I doubt DRM has cost many sales in the history of use – if that were true GOG wouldn’t be struggling financially right now.
So publishers don’t see much cost to chuck it in a game. They don’t see the development problems, and if it on some chance it worked even a little bit then they turn a profit.
Certainly a big part of it is the “shareholder argument”, essentially piracy is (correctly or not, that is not the topic of the discussion) often perceived as directly lost sales, the people who benefit from the company’s profit want to maximize it, the people who answer to them want to be able to say they “used the top technological solutions in piracy prevention software” (or something along those lines).
But there are also several legal reasons, at least potentially (and companies very often deal with legal potentialities). For example, this may differ by country but there is usually a legal distinction betwen just stealing an item and stealing an item that “requires overcoming an obstacle to get” (the whole “you wouldn’t steal a car” discussion notwithstanding). Similarly, the very presence of DRM requires cracking, which requires there to be a cracker, theorethically a more reliable target for legal action than a crowd of people just copying the game, in particular because the initial assumption was probably that cracking would be performed for profit, thus leaving a money trail on the one hand and making it more easilly prosecutable on the other. Heck, even the pirating players are, again potentially, less likely to feign ignorace (or at least such claim will have less merit) if pirating the game requires obtaining and/or applying a crack. Again, we all kinda know how likely it is all those people downloading the new release off Pirate Bay will be facing charges in a court of law but you have to keep in mind this is how the legal department sees things.
As a guy who makes his living working with FPGAs, firstly, it’s really cool to hear you guys talking about them. Some thoughts on the segment:
– Programming an FPGA is basically the same as wiring a breadboard, except you use code rather than physical wires. It’s actually an interesting exercise for convention programmers, because hardware code isn’t sequential.
– You can’t actually change the chip while it’s running (very easily). They are used quite widely for ML, but usually for inference (detection) rather than training (learning). GPUs still win in terms of training performance, but FPGAs have better performance/Watt for inference, making them useful both in mobile spaces (limited battery), and certain server applications (because of cooling purposes). An FPGA might be 2x slower than a GPU, but uses 6x less power (50W rather than 300W)
– Thre trade off for the flexibility comes at a cost in performance – most FPGAs cap out at ~500MHz, so you won’t get the same single-threaded performance. You can have multiple different clocks within an FPGA though.
– There are two main FPGA companies: Xilinx (which you linked), and what used to be Altera, before the were bought by Intel about 5 years ago for ~$16billion; Intel bought them because Microsoft replaced basically all their datacenters to run on FPGAs rather than CPUs
– FPGAs are already used to emulate old hardware (for stuff like audio drivers in phones, etc.), so they totally could be used for gaming purposes
– They aren’t all super expensive – you can get a hobby FPGA board for about $50 (similar to a raspberry pi)
Excellent info. Thanks for speaking up!
Also, FPGAs are picking up as backup control components for safety-critical systems (think nuclear, aviation or trains), because since they’re fundamentally different from standard CPUs, there’s no possibility of a common-cause failure shorting out both the primary system and the backup system.
Which, obviously, is a major requirement for the control system regulating the operation of a nuclear plant. (although the specifics are country-dependent; I’m told the UK doesn’t even want FPGAs, and will only accept good old printed circuits as backup systems)
Thanks for sharing! Would you mind answering a couple of questions?
Let’s say I was interested in getting an FPGA to help learn how older computers and consoles work and tinker with my own designs. I’d be looking for something that could simulate everything, including things like timing issues. So, my questions are:
1) Am I correct in assuming I could fit everything – the cpu, video card, etc. – into a single package or would I need a separate FPGA for each processor?
2) Would you recommend any specific FPGAs? I’m looking for something reliable and easy to use, but not too pricey. It wouldn’t have to be very powerful, though… Think SNES/GBA levels of performance or a little higher.
If I were a games journalist, I’d tell developers to stop listening to fans too. I mean, think of the type of interactions games journalists have with self-identified fans.
Case 1: Journalist likes game fan doesn’t like. Fan accuses journalist of bad faith because (a) journalist has politics that differ from fan’s, (b) journalist has been bribed by developer or publisher, or (c) both.
Case 2: Journalist dislikes game fan likes. Fan accuses journalist of bad faith because (a) journalist has politics that differ from fans, (b) journalist is just posting click-bait, or (c) both.
Now, I haven’t read the article in question–Shamus told me not to!–but I have to say, Shamus, Paul, that I’m a little disappointed you guys went past “this is wrong and/or mistaken” and on to “this is click-bait/disingenuous”. I get that the article touched a sore spot for Shamus in particular, but maybe the presumption of bad faith is a little much? If you’ve got specific evidence of bad faith that changes things, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the case here.
Oh, I nearly forgot:
Case 3: Fan and journalist have similar opinions. Everyone is very smug about having their opinions validated.
Case 4: Punching down at the masses as a major publication is never a good look, ever, and if you’re doing it you should be prepared to have all manner of ill intent speculated from your part, and insults to be thrown. I say this not out of some sense of justice, or fairness based on who started slinging mud first, though I totally could. I say this because this is reality we live in, and that is an if X then Y mathematically provable absolute.
Case 5: same as Case 4, but now they can buy a yacht with the money from all the clicks that controversy generated :D
Absolutely no one is buying a yacht with the money made from internet ad revenue except maybe Larry Page.
Case 4.1: writing an aRticle in deliberately general terms berating “gamers” as a group for being such awful peoPle, and then passive-aggresSively stating that anybody else irritated by the overall tone-deafness should have realised that it wasn’t about them, although come to think of it they might be displaying signs of being one of those, and they better watch it.
This one particularly gets my goat.
I used to really like that site.
I still like that site. The thing that bugs Geebs doesn’t bother me.
I’m a gamer, probably. Not everyone uses the term the same way.
But I play games and I talk about them on the internet, so I think I’m technically a gamer. I’m not deeply invested in my “gamer identity” though, and I don’t really care what people say about gamers because, well, so what? I know what I’ve done and what I haven’t. My conscience is clear and what some games journalist who doesn’t even know I exist might hypothetically think about me because I happen to fall into the ill-defined category of “gamer” doesn’t matter at all.
It’s one of those “this person is agreeing with me so ineptly that it makes my own opinions look stupid” kind of deals.
Without veering too much into politics, this might be one my biggest grievances about online discord and the visibility of content online. I naturally hold opinions on many subjects, as we all do. Perhaps the one thing that’s more egregious than disagreeing with someone on a very fundamental level, is someone arguing for something that you conceptually agree with, but in such a terrible way that you don’t even want to be remotely associated with this person through shared believes. That and people dragging their opinions and views into conversations that are at best tangentially (but usually not at all) related.
This is why I limit my exposure to any sort of social media to a bare minimum.
They’re still useful as a way to see what games are out there or upcoming. Just ignore the political/moralistic stuff and skim for articles on the games themselves.
I used to like that site, then switched to Kotaku.co.uk because some of their coverage was better, their interest were wider (not just PC games) and they were more upfront about their politics (even if I disagreed with most of it, but I preferred their disagreeing with things that were mostly orthogonal to games than wonder “Am I being insulted/told I’m an idiot” every three articles). Then I mostly stopped following video game news sites.
What is the exact article please? I cracked your code (after a little bit of being puzzled haha!), they seem to have been quite good of what I’ve seen so I’m interested. I think I’ve found it, is it from 2014?
Your arguments aren’t so much support for developers ignoring fans as they are for journalists ignoring fans.
Fair enough.
Is this trolling? How is the fact that they’re blaming an entire group of people (the group they’re supposed to work for, mind you) not a sign that it’s bad faith? Plus, have you read VG247 articles before? If you had, you’d know it’s bad faith. That’s what they do. They can’t write interesting articles to save their lives, so they’re forced to fall into clickbait.
Also, again, Shamus didn’t just read the title and extrapolate from there, he read the article, and none of your cases are taken into account.
Not a troll, not a reader of VG247. Don’t know what their content is generally like and not sure I’ve ever heard of them before today. Allow me to reiterate:
I don’t know anything about the article–which Shamus encouraged me not to read–except what Shamus said and he didn’t say any of the things you just mentioned. So how am I supposed to know? I’m not psychic.
I don’t know if this will help or make things worse, but I thought “clickbait” was the more charitable assumption. I get that running a text-based site is TOUGH, and you have to pay the bills if you don’t want everyone to be out of a job. Clickbait articles aren’t nice, but if they pay the bills and allow you to keep writing the stuff that matters, then I can see how an editor would view it as a necessary evil.
The less charitable assumption is that this editor really thinks that most consumer feedback is worthless and the entire hobby is mostly honking dum-dums who don’t know what they want and that game developers should ignore them.
The first is a compromise of integrity in the name of paying the bills, while the second reveals hostility and contempt for the community.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I’m not sure it’s even relevant whether they do the one or the other. In the past, when I read similar things about voters, wrestling fans, comic readers, metal fans etc, I used to say it doesn’t matter what was meant, as making the comment in the first place comes across as first degree PR diarrhea. There is nothing good in insulting one’s own audience.
“The people who read my outlet are dumb and shouldn’t be listened to” isn’t exactly a quality mating call.
I blame it on either a lack of reason or instinct, and a lack of either that leads to this kind of behaviour is in my book a clear sign that I should stop listening or paying attention to that company/person/party/other.
Thank you for the response, Shamus.
“Developers should never listen to fans, ever” is indeed an obviously stupid position, so stupid in fact that I have trouble believing it’s real. I can easily believe it as a headline, but as the central thesis of an article? I don’t doubt you, it’s just that my brain refuses to process it. I feel like a vintage sci-fi robot confronted with a logical paradox; I want to stumble around and shout “Does not compute!” while smoke pours out of my ears.
But I have a lot of sympathy for the position “don’t always listen to your fans” or, to put it another way, “always listen to your fans but for Pete’s sake exercise your own good judgement”. Fans can be every bit as wrong as anyone else, including you, and they have less at stake than you do and are operating with less complete information. If you’re a developer and you had a good reason for doing whatever it is that you did, then you should (probably) stick with it rather than doing whatever the internet is demanding at the moment. (Just don’t be a jerk about it.)
I mean, if you’re Bioware and the fans demand that you “fix” the ending to Mass Effect 3, should you really do it? Irrespective of the ending’s actual merits, revising it would be hugely expensive and if you aren’t also fixing the narrative that led up to the ending (even more hugely expensive) then there’s no guarantee that the fans will be any happier with the revised version. I’d argue that you should let shipped games lie, learn from the experience, and resolve to do better on the next game. The fact that Bioware did the opposite, that they revised the ending and apparently learned nothing, confounds me. But they (arguably) listened to the fans, for all the good it did them.
“Never listen to your fans. You will look arrogant and your screw-ups will be more spectacular, which will provide me, a journalist, with more to write about.”
I liked Vlambeer’s take. It was something like “Any problem a player has is real, any solution a player has is wrong.”
To be that guy and not even pretend not to be, I believe that was Sean Murray of Hello Games.
Sorry, and have a nice day!
Everyone agrees that devs should use their own judgment when taking in feedback, but this not what this article seems to be about.
About the ending of ME3 yeah sure they should have changed it. It was stupid, it destroyed narrative cohesion and soured every game before it. The same amount of work they put in the extended cut could have easily removed that starchild idiocy.
Bethesda did it. They got feedback from the fans for the egregiously stupid Fallout 3 ending, and fixed it in Broken Steel.
While we’re talking about fixing the endings of games, isn’t that exactly what Polygon, RPS et al demanded of Ubisoft when they didn’t like how AC: Odyssey disregarded player choice about the PC’s sexuality (something that was unquestionably dumb)?
There’s a difference between “should fix it” and “should not have done it in the first place”. Even if we grant “should not have done it in the first place” it does not necessarily follow that “should fix it” is correct. The correct course of action–bearing in mind that this is all from the developer’s perspective–depends on many factors, including financial considerations and also whatever “it” was.
There’s also a difference between a patch that does nothing but fix the ending and DLC that, among other things, happens to fix the ending. The patch probably won’t affect sales of the base game, and in this day and age isn’t likely to earn you much good will from an angry internet. What’s more, unlike DLC, you can’t sell a patch. So I’d argue that–again, from the developer’s perspective–an ending-fixing patch is probably the wrong course of action unless it’s somehow really cheap to do.
Do you really want Ubisoft to say anything with their games? I mean, not evey game is Spec: Ops The Line nor should it try to be. From what I heard, Far Cry 5 was a standard Ubisoft Collect-A-Thon and was fine from that perspective.
Given the quality of the writing I’ve seen from Ubi, I personally don’t WANT them to try and make Meaningful Statements – stick to the basic gameplay, please.
I’m reminded of one of Bob Case’s articles for this site on The Witcher 3 that asked (paraphrased): ‘Why aren’t there any black people in this game?’
And my response was a resounding ‘Because…there aren’t? Why should there be?’
That game said far more meaningful things about race using its elves and dwarves* than just including people with different skin colours would have done.
I dunno. Ultimately I don’t find the lack of a political message as annoying as Shamus does.
*Witch Hunts are never about witches, for one.
I want Ubisoft to either a) make their games about a theme, rather than a real world political issue (like Far Cry 2). Far Cry 2 is about war economies and exploitation of natural resources for profit. It takes place in Africa, but the theme could be true in other places too. That was a decent idea for a game story. Or b) make their games about real world issues actually take a stand ON the real world issues they’re about, and then have the guts to back their play when people have issues with it. Just taking one, if Watch Dogs Legion is about Brexit or immigration, make it clear what your stance is on that issue. Don’t do this total crap of “well, some people think immigration is a one way ticket to ruining the culture of your country and some people think the culture of all countries has ALWAYS been updated and changed by immigration, we’re just hosting the ~~conversation~~ and have no viewpoint of our own.” It’s cowardly and facile to do it that way.
Looking at this further, they might think the benefit of their approach is that it doesn’t upset people. But it… really really does. Look at the responses to Far Cry 5’s story. Or that it will protect them from criticism. Ha ha ha, NOPE. I guess it could be shareholder driven? But that seems dumb, publicly traded book publishers and film studios make very overt political statements all the time, why would game companies be this special entity that just CAN’T make a political belief known?
So I’ve got two responses for this:
a) Why do they need to have an opinion on the thing (in this case Britain & immigration)? The fact that an issue can be important to people doesn’t mean that it has to be every time. A game can just be a game.
Yes, referencing-but-not-really a political issue like this is most likely a marketing stunt and that’s bad – but that’s just how advertising works.
It’s not going to change anytime soon.
Then there’s b) do you really care what Ubisoft (or pretty much any games developer honestly) have to say about a complex, emotive issue like this? I sure don’t! At best it’d be some bland, non-insightful blatherskate
In my experience, games trying to engage in Political Commentary are much more likely to end up like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided* or Detroit: Become Human than they do Spec Ops: The Line.
*AUGS LiVE MATTERS
They need to have an opinion on it because the game is ABOUT it. If they don’t want to talk about Brexit, that’s fine. Don’t bring it up, I won’t expect you to suddenly start talking about Brexit. But if you specifically say “hey, Brexit happened and now London is a ruin and a blight compared to what it used to be”…. you’re saying something already! That much is enough to say something. To do that much and then say “I have no opinions on Brexit at all,” then a) you’re lying and b) you think your audience is stupid.
Alternatively, if you really do hate current day politics and want to stay 50 meters away from talking about them at all times, just promote the game by saying something like: “In the long distant future, London has been overtaken by the Evil Corp. They are selfish and are taking us for everything we have! We have to stop them!” There’s still SOME political issues that could be read into such a thing, but you didn’t namedrop current day immigration and border policy to get there. So people would have to bring that baggage to the game themselves and most would not bother.
I don’t have much more to say than repeating myself…but:
I agree that by namedropping a current political controversy in the marketing for their game, Ubisoft are fishing for attention. It’s lazy and cynical, sure, but that’s all; they want to sell a game.
If they are genuinely ‘saying something’ about Brexit, (and I really don’t think they are – they’re just hacks taking advantage of keywords) then what they’re saying is worthless and I don’t care.
A worthwhile political comment requires thought, and depth, and lots of other things – which I don’t think we’re going to get from Ubisoft.
And I also don’t think they’re calling the audience stupid or lying about their position on real-life Brexit by refusing to commit to a stance.
It’s just a marketing stunt, done for attention.*
*and it’s succeeded!
If you bring up a real political thing, you’re going to piss off a bunch of people who assume you’re trashtalking them. If you don’t follow through on the trashtalking, you’re going to piss off everyone you conned into showing up for the non-existent political stance. You’re burning your bridges at both ends. If you’re bringing up real issues you should at least commit and appeal to half the mob.
That seems like an excellent summary of what happened in the discussion around Far Cry 5 preceding and following its release: just as you say, one group of people were pissed off, then a different group of people were pissed off. Nobody involved in the discussion of its politics came away happy.
On the other hand, Wikipedia suggests that the game sold more than twice as many copies as Far Cry 4, a game less visibly situated in contemporary Western domestic politics. While I don’t want to ignore other factors, this might suggest that BlueHorus is right that the approach is an effective marketing ploy, in spite of the distaste it generates online.
We should also bear in mind that the critics’ ire isn’t necessarily indicative of the average gamer’s attitude. The people writing on the interwebs and making videos are a very small subset of the gaming public. Yes, some of those videos generate millions of views, but views don’t always mean agreement. Many (if not most) people watch, because they like the content creator’s personality, but they base their purchasing decisions and opinions on entirely different factors (for proof: look at the plethora of titles that were panned by critics, but sold extremely well, or the critic darlings that couldn’t even make their money back).
It’s effective in the short term, before people realize what you’re doing. We’ll see how Far Cry 6 does.
I think suggesting that sequel sold better strictly on its storyline is not a good reading of the data. Far Cry 5 seemed to be well aimed and well timed at the market. I’m curious on how the immediate followup (which was a storyline sequel) did. Did a lot of players return for that?
I don’t see what’s wrong with criticising Ubisoft for using those same cynical marketing tactics, though? Incompetence doesn’t excuse venality.
Anyway, it’s not a case of whether Ubisoft are saying something, it’s that they have already said something, they’re pretending that they didn’t say something, and, most heinous of all, that they’ve used that as an excuse to not show their working.
Oh, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with criticizing this kind of lazy, cynical advertising.
What I do feel, though, is that someone bringing their opinion or emotions about the political issue into the discussion is kind of missing the point. Ubisoft don’t care about Brexit or crazy cults in the American Midwest* – they’re just trying to hijack the fact that other people do care.
It’s like getting riled up by a troll – what they want is the attention; they’re not actually interested in the issue they’re pretending to talk about.
*Actually taking a stance would probably be bad for business…
My personal problem, and I’m aware this is a case of varying mileage, is that I find this approach of “we’re going to use this topic but then we’re going to claim it’s just for fun and gingerly dance around making any overt statements” trivializes issues. Which whether you want to or not is contributing to the discussion. I mean, look at the “Aug Lives Matter” (Eidos) and #WontBeErased (GOG’s twitter) situations. I believe none of those were ill-willed, in the first case the writers probably felt there were actual paralels and wanted to signify that (there is a lot of issues there but it’s a topic for a separate discussion) in the second case… uh… look, I’m from Poland and let’s just not go there because politics and I don’t want to diss on my country. None of those are Ubi but maybe they could learn from them.
So I kinda agree with you about the “hacks taking advantage of keywords”, I’m actually willing to buy that Ubi at least think they’re not making political statements but by co-opting these issues they’re participating in the discussion whether they want to or not. Additionally, while I might maybe buy that someone could navigate this minefield of issues in a tactful way while making an engaging story my experiences with Ubisoft writers tell me they are not those people.
People should be allowed to trivialize issues.
A common problem I’ve noticed in this particular fight is that people who are really, really invested in some issue think that everyone else in the world is obligated to take it as seriously as they do. They are not, in fact, obligated to do that, and it does not make them bad people if they don’t; everyone has their own concerns and troubles.
Not a bad person: Not getting involved in issues that don’t apply directly to you, seeing as you have more issues to think about than you can EVER resolve. Example: not really being knowledgeable about elections in other countries than your own is an understandable way to live.
Kind of a bad person, actually: Taking an issue that you KNOW is important to other people (but not to yourself) and trying to make a lazy joke out of it or score some cheap cash by pretending to give a crap. If you knew that people were dying in an election related issue in another country, being like “hmm… how could I sell some T shirts off of that problem…” makes you a scum profiteer.
Hello smiling triangle avatar friend, for a sharp second I thought I answered to myself for some reason and didn’t remember it.
So at the risk of repeating what Shoeboxjeddy already said I assume what you mean is that nobody can engage in every crisis in the world, no matter how terrible it is and how many people it affects and that we internally trivialize those things. Which is perfectly true because literally no human in the world has the spoons to deal with all of that.
However, there is a difference in what we’re talking about, because at this point you’re making a conscious decision to engage in the discussion and, with all due respect, if you choose to do so you should check if you’re not… let’s call it trespassing.
If you don’t want to say anything, don’t tease the audience by bluntly and repeatedly shoving an issue in their faces? We have approximately eleven billion variations of safe, boilerplate templates for exactly this purpose.
“The audience” isn’t a monolithic group here. Yes, there are some people who will be upset at being teased like that. There is a much, much larger number of people who don’t have a problem with this particular tease and just liked the idea of a contemporary American setting. They bought Far Cry 5 and enjoyed it.
It’s not about the audience reaction. It’s about the act itself being ill-advised.
For example, you should not directly insult your audience. This remains true even if, say, one in three don’t react negatively.
Back in context, promising something, and then blatantly not delivering on it is bad business.
Sure. And in this case, Ubisoft promised that they were not going to be making any real political points, and they delivered on that promise.
No, they said that after the fact in response to people getting angry about it. There are temporal lines that have to be pointing in certain directions for it to be a promise.
Did they promise beforehand that it would be making any real political points?
If you deliberately raise the issue without having promised a lack of stance, you’ve promised a stance.
It’s like a movie just having a pair of giant monsters show up in the trailer only to have them never once get involved in a giant monster fight.
Nah, they just implied there would be a monster fight/played on the expectations people might have at seeing the monsters on screen.
Which is shitty, to be sure, but technically not lying. And ‘technically not lying’ is what a hell of a lot of advertising is…
Which would matter if I were making this an explicitly legal consequences thing. There’s lots of other reasons it’s a horrible idea, and bad business.
> If you deliberately raise the issue without having promised a lack of stance, you’ve promised a stance.
Who says? I know I’ve certainly never operated under this misapprehension. Probably the majority of movies, TV, and other media which raise issues at all are just gesturing at them for color, like the first five minutes of a Michael Bay Transformers movie being set in Afghanistan.
And beyond that, what “issue” was “raised” by Far Cry 5 in the first place? Of all the problems in the United States right now, apocalyptic cults are pretty much at the bottom of the list.
> bad business.
Far Cry 5 was quite popular and successful. Sounds like good business to me.
Says all the numerous people pissed at this specifically and stuff like the transformers movies in general. Really though? Using the transformers movies as a counterexample? Those things that a solid majority of the internet openly reviles?
>Really though? Using the transformers movies as a counterexample? Those things that a solid majority of the internet openly reviles?
The Transformers movies made $4.8 billion at the worldwide box office, so apparently the “solid majority of the Internet” is a solid and easily ignorable minority of the moviegoing public.
Now, if you want to argue that Far Cry 5 is basically throwaway entertainment that doesn’t try to make any real point just like the Transformers movies are… sure, I agree. In fact, that’s my point. Ubisoft did not promise they were going to stroke anyone’s political sensibilities. They explicitly said otherwise, in fact. No one was lied to. If someone is mad that Far Cry 5 wasn’t a political barnburner, that’s on the person who’s mad, not on Ubisoft.
Protip Shamus: If you want to link clickbait without incentivizing clickbait, make an archive.org copy of it and link that so it doesn’t drive ad traffic.
Or make the link a Rickroll. That’s fun too.
I think one of the major pros of emergent stories is that they are somehow more real than written story. You can tell a dramatic story where the mission gets down to the wire and it’s all on our hero to make the one in a million shot at the last opportunity, but there’s a little part of our brain that knows the author is cheating. He’s not really facing those odds, the writer made them up specifically to hand our hero the victory. In X-COM, when your point blank shot misses, flies out of sight, into a building, through a window, kills the alien commander and sends all their forces into a panic, that really was a one in a million shot. I’m sure I’ve played a dozen games where that kind of thing happens in a cutscene and I can’t remember one of them, but I’m writing this post right now to tell you about it in X-COM because it actually happened to me and holy shit, it was amazing. Some jokes are funnier because they happened in real life instead of being scripted TV, and some stories are more dramatic because they happened in “real” gameplay instead of scripted narrative.
I immediately though of XCOM when they talked about this, and yeah its the best example of satisfying emergent narrative.
Crusader Kings and grand strategies from Paradox make for awesome emergent narratives too, there are some good ones too. And obviously Dwarf Fortress… it endures.
The trick is having a sufficiently complex system of complex choices to engage the player while making individual plays uniquely recognizable stories. There’s a reason most games that do this well are some variant of RPG or strategy.
Re: JRPG speedruns, if you really want to see something fast and impossible you could check out the Tool-assisted variety. Although these days most TASes on the SNES boil down to someone discovering an exploit that lets them directly manipulate memory until they can get the ending to play (in Chrono Trigger’s case, by resetting the game while it’s saving and then using a different bug to bypass the checksum when loading a save). The results tend to be incomprehensible gibberish if you don’t know the ideas behind these exploits and almost comprehensible gibberish if you do: http://tasvideos.org/3606S.html
FWIW, if someone is considering trying a JRPG from that era for some reason, Chrono Trigger is actually a really great candidate not just because of the art/polish level but because it’s actually very devoid of grinding and filler compared to JRPGs in general and of that era in particular. That is, until the DS remake added some content that seemed specifically to serve the “JRPGs aren’t tedious enough” market: https://lparchive.org/Chrono-Trigger/Update%2022/
Not nearly as much fun to watch, but that’s what I call a real speedrun!
The Human TAS of Dragon Warrior is the best JRPG speedrun I’ve seen. That is a short list, because they can be hard to sit through. The linked run is mind-blowing, under half an hour, and entertaining.
Nice, I hadn’t seen that one! I just got done watching that run followed by the FF1/White Mage Only run in the related videos (also a classic)
My default explanation for game stories being dumb and bad in any particular way is that the industry doesn’t care about story (reflecting the interests of the public who largely don’t care about story). But Far Cry 5 requires another explanation, because they didn’t just lazily bang the plot out at the last minute: it can’t have been an accident that Christianity is so absent from the game. Someone went out of their way to sanitize the game’s treatment of religion, someone cared.
Maybe it’s an organization problem? The writer bangs out a lazy plot no one cares about, then the marketing department hears “religion”, freaks out and throws a lot more pressure behind sanding down the rough edges?
The only other possibility I can come up with is the depressing thought that someone has done market research and found that looking vaguely political but saying absolutely nothing gets 4.3% more sales than the previous model.
I noticed that most of the commentary around this game assumes that the Seed cult was “de-Christianized” at some point in the development process. However, I question that there was ever any content to its religious ideas at all. It’s not like there haven’t been more than one non-Christian cult, even if we’re talking about only the United States, to draw upon. Possibly the most direct comparison can be made to cults such as Jim Jones’s People’s Temple. [While using some Christian iconography (and claiming to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ among many other figures) he became pretty wildly anti-Christian in the late 60’s and 70’s]. The problem is that this kind of story would get really, *really* hard to explain properly in a game. It would come off as saying some extreme things and not go over very well for the same people who criticize it now.
>The only other possibility I can come up with is the depressing thought that someone has done market research and found that looking vaguely political but saying absolutely nothing gets 4.3% more sales than the previous model.
What’s depressing about that? Lots of entertainment is just throwaway fun, and no one is forcing you to consume it. If you want explicit politics you have plenty of options, especially these days.
I’m still super skeptical about the whole Watch Dogs “emergent story generator” thing.
Past experience tells me these emergent stories almost always sound better on paper than when you’re playing.
Well, no, there’s one thing that’s better when playing: making fun of the incoherences of the game world. Like watching 12 Sable goons trying (and failing) to take out a single thug for 10 minutes in Spiderman, or killing a dozen enemy minions while having a phone conversation about the ethics of vigilantism in Watch Dogs 1. It’s not exactly emergent storytelling, but at least it’s something you can’t find anywhere else.
Well now I have to link ChipCheezum’s Watch Dogs playthrough.
Justifiable Force!
I’ve had some good emergent stories come out of Rimworld. I wrote about a couple of them in the forums.
Your past experience must not contain enough X-COM then.
I still remember the…proactive working style of GTA San Andreas ambulances and police I got to watch (and other events in the game).
True stories: 1: I followed an ambulance for a while. If people in the city get injured, the ambulances seek them out and reanimate them. The ambulance I followed was rushing through the streets without any concern for people’s health. They were driving too fast, crossing red lights, driving through fences and backyards etc. I followed them for maybe 10-15 minutes. They hit at least 5 people during that time, knocked them over and then revived them. I kept wondering whether they got paid per revived person.
Police in SA has always been really funny and very often made that strange impression of actual corruption. They suddenly stopped random people, pulled them out of their vehicles and shot them. They crossed red lights without sirens etc, only to hit some guy in the middle of an intersection…and decided to give chase across the countryside until they got the guy.
I randomly got into a scene (I have no idea how this was possible at all) where some random guy got into a car chase with level 6 forces-that included helicopters and TANKS. They were even so busy they forgot to stop the guy who had just at that moment robbed a casino and came paragliding off the roof.
I encountered police forces who hit each other in such a way that they seemed to throw exploding police cars at me.
And I saw cops stop to arrest somebody on the sidewalk, only for a guy I just accidentally pulled out of his car to see the police car standing there with open doors, get in and leave the scene in a stolen police car.
And of course, there were the planes randomly crashing around the top of Mount Chilliad-some of them during my bicycle challenge. I almost got hit by 6 planes during one single challenge and was really lucky to get to the finish line alive at all.
These are only a fraction of things I saw happening in that one game alone. I think emergent stories in games can be amazing if the game lends itself to this kind of stuff.
That sounds like quasi-buggy wackiness. I’m not sure that counts. It’s cool. It’s interesting. It’s fun. Emergent? Maybe? Maybe not?
When I think of “emergent” I think of something like Day Z and the stories that come out of that. Or Eve Online.
I once saw a GTA V video where an actual cop attempted to perform a simple task in-game without breaking any laws. Her conclusion was that it’s a) virtually impossible (she did her best, but still got a few traffic violations), and b) no fun, because the game simply isn’t designed to be played that way.
On the subject of final battles to finish college, you’re not the first people that’s occured to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrlro3YJ15o
Somehow I knew where that link would go before I clicked it. As a PhD student myself, that one really resonates with me.
Just pray it doesn’t resonate with your professors!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa when you’re out on a run and you’re listening to the diecast and you have all these points you want to make that you might forget before you get home-
1) One aspect of the grimdark future (where there is only culture war) is an observable tendency for commentators to pick their side first and construct their argument accordingly, rather than the other way around. Gamer Network sites, of which VG24/7 is a prominent member, are.. enthusiastic culture war participants. This leads to a lot of strident and rather ‘red-toppy’ editorial. Inconvenient facts are not welcome there (or let’s be honest, anywhere. I’m as guilty as anyone.)
2) As Paul noted, the nature of internet-resident demographics makes their worst elements more noticeable and prominent. This is reinforced by the reliance games media outlets have on reddit as a source for their stories. The reddit upvote/downvote algorithm unfortunately tends to hollow out discourse where only polarising opinions gain traction, leading to big gaming subreddits having this regrettable habit of upvoting exactly the sort of whiny, entitled posts bemoaned by games sites. The focus on nowness and newness also encourages users to think only in terms of the latest controversy, rarely stopping to set things in their proper historical context (I’ve lost count of the number of temporary and swiftly fixed Dota bugs ‘proving’ that Valve has nothing but contempt for its player base).
Twitter is the same deal as Shamus has observed on the podcast before (and we all know how much media types love their Twitter.)
3) The issue with Game Maker graphics might be what I think of as the air freshener effect: the scent of air fresheners isn’t inherently unpleasant (its specifically engineered not to be), but it’s use in proximation to and remedy for bad smells and dirty places (such as the loo) has a strong associative effect and the mind eventually processes the smell as ‘bad’, even if it’s not commingling with that of unpleasant waste. To the same end, I’d suggest that the low average quality reputed to amateur RPG Maker games (fairly or unfairly) might be having an affect on the perceived quality of the tilesets.
4) An immersive sim with pixel art? You might be in luck Shamus. Streets of Rogue has just left early access and is receiving a LOT of buzz. The game claims to be a mix or rogue lite and immersive sim, with the developer citing Deus Ex and GTA as influences. The graphics are far from the best example that 90s Japan was putting into games in the pixel art golden age, but I’d wager they qualify.
5) Thank you for scrolling this far down the comments and still having the energy to read my post!
Regarding Odyssey, to make things even worse, Ubisoft recently deleted a quick XP farming story from the Story Creator Mode, just so that players can’t escape the grind and/or the cash shop.
Am I the only one here that agrees with Kirk McKeand’s article? Video game development is an artistic medium, and we’re not going to get the next Rembrandt if all the developers do is pander to fans.
Sure we are. Some of the greatest artistic achievements in the medium come from the people in charge of these things pulling their heads out of the sand to listen to the general public. Like Nintendo’s recent success with Mario: the grand road trip or Zelda: Actually letting the player off the choke-chain.
Or that time Sega let a company of fans make a game that surpassed everything they’d done for decades.
Or that time fans made a better remake of metroid 2 than nintendo.
Never mind all the other times blatantly doing the opposite of what the fans wanted lead to some of the greatest failures in recent gaming history.
I feel like “you’ll never make art if you’re too concerned with pandering” ignores that many of the great classical artists were working under a patron and no doubt catering the work to what they thought their audience would appreciate. The Sistine Chapel for example was a bought and paid for art installation. Imagine artists of the time being like “I can’t believe he’s just doing what that chapel wants him to paint. He should just paint in alleyways for the creative control!”
I’m having a hard time imagining Michelangelo listening to church-goers and passers-by for advice on what and how to paint. Pope Julius II was the publisher, not the fanbase.
At that time, if he had painted something that people could not appreciate at all… he could have easily been brought up on charges and killed. I’m not saying he was taking suggestions from the peanut gallery, just that he had a savvy mind of what he would be able to do/get away with and tailored his work to that.
Of course, it’d be risky to assume that Michelangelo did have some desire to “get away with” anything. Perhaps he was totally fine with what he was asked to paint.
You can’t spell ‘fantastic’ without ‘fan-taste’.
Or to put it another way, art is a method of deliberately conveying emotional states. How in the bloody hell do you intend to do that without stopping to consider what’s likely to speak to your intended audience?
If art even has a definition, it is certainly not that. I consider a five-year-old’s macaroni picture to be art, and it does not fit with your description.
Sure it does. What is the macaroni picture of? A family? A picnic? A doggy? Even a five year old is trying to convey SOME kind of idea with their macaroni picture.
Through that lens, every action and every thought is art, and the term becomes meaningless.
No. Not all actions involve deliberately communicating with someone else. Actions taken while alone for example, or actions taken with no thought whatsoever to any observer.
For that matter it’s physically impossible for a thought to be art under that definition unless you communicate it to someone else because conveyance requires someone to convey to.
So if I paint a landscape on a canvas by myself on a sunny afternoon, and then destroy the painting and never tell anyone about it, the painting is not art?
What if I paint a painting with every intention of not showing it to anyone, ever, but then just as I put down my paintbrush I die from a heart attack, and someone finds my painting next to my corpse and decides to put it up on their living room wall? Is that still not art?
The first is idle thought with aids.
The second is someone else co-opting your non-art by getting emotional conveyance from it.
Art is a form of communication. It doesn’t become art until SOMEONE is getting emotional content from it.
You could argue artistic merit for making a piece to look at yourself later, but making something and destroying it before it can be seen by anyone? That’s keeping your hands busy.
Your definition of art is weird on so many levels. My ‘idle thought with aids’ suddenly becomes copyright protected by the state as soon as someone looks at it, but not before? What is this, Schrödinger’s canvas painting?
What if I keep a painting no one but the artist has seen in a shoebox in my attic. Is the painting not art until the shoebox is opened?
Regarding your 2nd point, yeah that’s art. That’s how we actually got the work of Emily Dickinson.
Elaborating: think of death of the author. Even if you write or paint selfishly and ONLY for yourself, if someone else encounters the work, they will probably have some kind of reaction, even a minor one. Being selfish/private doesn’t transmute the work into non-art.
See my reply to galacticplumber.
Can’t directly reply to certain comments due to chain limits. However, a drawing never viewed is chicken scratch.
Words don’t become communication until read. Art is a form of communication. It doesn’t exist as art un-viewed.
You can even have art if you view a past work after the fact. Past you communicating with future you. Someone still needs to experience it.
Art is not a form of communication, as I have been trying to tell you. You can make up your own definitions to words but what we as a community think of art does not require any information being sent between two parties. A painting does not become art because the author intended someone to view it or because someone incidentally viewed it. The painting is art regardless of if the author is trying to convey an emotional state or is simply enjoying the creative process. If I am the last man on earth, I can still make art. I don’t know what else to say. I’m going to create a stackexchange question for art students and see what they think about this.
“I’m going to create a stackexchange question for art students and see what they think about this.”
Your optimism is inspiring.
More seriously, this is has been very interesting discussion to follow. Regardless of the definition of art, this seems to have hit on a topic that’s important to people. It’s not often that a thread will live for an entire week.
Nice that someone other than me and shoeboxjeddy is reading this old comment chain.
It seems Stackexchange agrees that art is a form of communication, though it’s up for debate:
Tjaap notes that “Anything can be communication”. Frank Hubeny states that “art both creates and is communication”. I especially like Rusi’s answer which quotes Beethoven: “Music, verily, is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life.”
I don’t know what to make of this. I still can’t think of art as a form of communication, but I’ll have to recede that other people may think of it as such.
My opinion that great artists are not made from pandering to their fan base still stands.