Sikachu said:
You sound like the videogame equivalent of the bigots who think games aren't art because they haven't learned to read them fluently. Your comments about pictures are staggeringly ignorant.
How exactly are they 'staggeringly ignorant' when I've been to showcases of photographs, paintings, pictures, drawings etc. and not one has envoked an emotion other than "what the fuck was this guy thinking? It's just a picture of an enclosed forest path that looks like one a minute walk away from my dorm room! Why is he asking £300 for this when I can go to this place myself and take a similar picture on my phone?"
I explained why I think games are better than photographs at portraying an artistic message, and that's obviously not enough to convince you of my opinion. I personally have yet to find deep meaning in photographs where games generally move me deeply in some way, whether its filling me with joy and laughter from it just being funny and cleverly put together (Portal or TF2 do this for me), or the death of a central character part way through (Mass Effect), the tough moments where it's just you and a bajillion enemies trying to take you down (Call of Duty 4). Games have done more to influence my emotions and choices in life than a picture ever has, purely because of how involved I can get in a game compared to that of a still image that someone will probably have to EXPLAIN to me for me to get the meaning.
IBlackKiteI said:
It depends on the audience and of course the game, personally I have never been very emotionally moved by a game other than Deus Ex and Beyond Good and Evil, maybe because no games really try to emotionally invest the player, just allow them to blow shit up.
I understand that to you games may be art which is fine, but saying that games are greater than photographs all together? Thats just ignorant.
Do you feel more moved when you see the photograph of the marines Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima compared to a team of Halo spartans doing the same thing?
What about the photgraphs of the My Lai Massacre, or the infamous picture taken of a Vietcong suspect right as he is being executed?
Photographs move people and convey a strong image in a way games cannot, and probably never will, because they actually show the harshness of our reality, not some fake fantasy land.
Well the thing is Halo isn't one of those games I'd call good, and probably bad in terms of an artistic standpoint, except maybe the Halo Reach bit where you're just going to die no matter what but I've yet to play that yet so I couldn't comment on it.
Plus I've not seen the original pictures you have mentioned, but I have seen stills of various scenes of what I'm guessing are a similar nature and it's hardly moved me. Purely because a picture cannot capture as much. Now a video of something like that moves me a lot more, although thanks to the internet desensitising me to a man being bludgeoned to death by three other men with a sledgehammer has made me just accept real life violence and not bother with it/find it rather lacking in any emotional value. Although there still are videos that can instill some form of emotion, it just takes a lot of effort.
So I suppose fantasy stuff is the only place I can imagine groups of great, decent people fighting for a true purpose in a way that, when the game portrays this to me, I can feel strong, good emotions toward them. So when those characters eventually fail, I can think of them as terrible warriors if they simply messed up, I can feel sorry for them if the villain gets more powerful and all their work to this point was ruined, and I can feel happy when they eventually overcome the threat at hand.
And the problem here is I'm being told I'm snobby by certain people just for having an artistic opinion. I said I disagreed with the second post, true, perhaps quite harshly, but it's artistic opinion and differences in that. It's like arguing that Justin Beiber is terrible music, yet something's obviously working considering his success and the enjoyment his fans get from his music. True, he's more than likely going to get sweeped away under the corporate carpet once he gets too old and they need a new young teenage star for all the young teen audience to throw themselves off buildings for, and most of his popularity is his looks and the likes of those users on here who won't just shut the fuck up about him and let him die, but at the end of it, it's his music that's making money. Again, my opinion is that his music is shite, but to the opinion of many others it isn't.
Same with my opinion on the Harry Potter books. I think they're poorly overwritten drivel that people need to stop banging on about, others think it's the best thing to ever hit bookshelves.
And here, I feel that still pictures, specifically photographs, show very little artistic message and are simply a means of recording something in a particularly basic manor, where as any form of motion and distinct line of storytelling can do it much better. Books, movies, and video games can portray an artistic message a lot better than a still image can. And in this case, I feel that any drawn/painted/whatever picture is better than a photograph. The only benefit a photograph has is the whole "in the moment" thing that a drawing or pre-made medium cannot perform, but then movies or at least recorded footage do this to a much greater extent. So it's not really an arguement of photographs being a better medium to display artistic messages, it's the TYPE of artistic message you want to portray that's important here too. Games to me are just the current best way of telling a story, perhaps with underlying artistic messages within. A photograph is for instilling such messages during an event that happened at the time the photograph was taken, so someone must have been there to witness whatever either great or horrific thing the picture is trying to show.
I suppose ultimately virtual reality would be the next one to undergo the same "NOT ART" hammer the ignorant world wants to label it, although that might be called for because most of it would of course just be porn.
