Spector: Videogames Still "Comic Books" and "Cartoons"
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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Wait, I'm sorry, I was playing a cartoonish video game like Saint's Row 2 and having a wonderful time, what were we talking about? Oh, Mr. Spector thinks games should be more serious.
...more serious than what? Are you honestly expecting to see Hamlet: The Game, or The Seventh Seal MMORPG? Cripes, man, I game for fun, not to get deep existential dilemnas. If you work that in, cool, but if it ain't fun, it's not staying in the ol' game system for long. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill a bunch of Slavers while wearing Lincoln's hat.
...more serious than what? Are you honestly expecting to see Hamlet: The Game, or The Seventh Seal MMORPG? Cripes, man, I game for fun, not to get deep existential dilemnas. If you work that in, cool, but if it ain't fun, it's not staying in the ol' game system for long. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill a bunch of Slavers while wearing Lincoln's hat.
I dont think it should really all just fall to us. Society needs to get out of the hole it has dug for itself in regards to sterotypes. It seems it will have to be some give and take, from each party, to prove its not all just the same old stuff...and, that gamers arent all people who live in there mothers basement
He makes a very good point.
Although I think over time things will get better. I mean, look how far we've come towards acceptance in the past 10 years.
Although I think over time things will get better. I mean, look how far we've come towards acceptance in the past 10 years.
I currently feel that the "buff guys" and "space marines" as drivers of the top sellers are a sign that the genre IS mainstreaming and NOT being marginalized. The ones who drive those sales, like the folks who drive Madden sales, are generally the types of gamers who would NOT have played video games 20 years ago when it was just pixels. Yes, they would have had the handheld with 10yd display and a little red light for the ball carrier, but they didn't have a C64, and they really would let you know that fact. That the guys who used to pick on me for playing games now represent THE target market for a good portion of the major moving titles (again, Madden sold-thru how many units? How "non-mainstream" is that?) says to me that it's anything BUT marginalization.
I know this has been said before and probably better, but what's being marginalized is the pioneer aspect of the medium, not the medium itself. Now we can't just count on the imaginations of 10,000 people willing to attach dire peril to a printed line of text (You may be eaten by...); now, we have to entertain the jocks and art geeks and theater gals and all points in between. That is the VERY DEFINITION of mainstream: needing to hit the broad audience, because there IS a broad audience, now.
Shakespeare didn't write plays for theater geeks alone. He wrote them for the high seats and the dirt floor. By necessity. When the game industry complains about LCD, that seems a clear sign that arguments against mainstream are assessing the wrong playing field.
And, Jesus, what could be more tired, retread, trope filled and reductive than ANOTHER Mickey title in ANY medium? Like THAT isn't mainstream?
I know this has been said before and probably better, but what's being marginalized is the pioneer aspect of the medium, not the medium itself. Now we can't just count on the imaginations of 10,000 people willing to attach dire peril to a printed line of text (You may be eaten by...); now, we have to entertain the jocks and art geeks and theater gals and all points in between. That is the VERY DEFINITION of mainstream: needing to hit the broad audience, because there IS a broad audience, now.
Shakespeare didn't write plays for theater geeks alone. He wrote them for the high seats and the dirt floor. By necessity. When the game industry complains about LCD, that seems a clear sign that arguments against mainstream are assessing the wrong playing field.
And, Jesus, what could be more tired, retread, trope filled and reductive than ANOTHER Mickey title in ANY medium? Like THAT isn't mainstream?
Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Mr. Spector. Video games are not like cartoons and comic books, because they will never develop mainstream appeal. Comic books and Cartoons have begun to, we have "Graphic Novels" and "Animation Features" already, and authors are experimenting more and more with the content that can be rendered in those mediums.
To take an example from popular Prime Time television in the past 20 years, "Friends". Love it, or hate it, you know it.
It's a show about a group of people and the time they spend together. That's it. It took hold of people because the audience related to the interactions, if not the characters wholly by themselves.
You can direct character interactions much more carefully in cartoons and comic books, because they are a passive medium. Things happen to the characters that are out of their control, much like the audience feels like things happen to them that are out of their control.
Watching how other people cope with unexpected or adverse situations is riveting to a lot of people, that is why in the early days of film serials, every one ended on a cliff hanger, asking the question "How will they get out of their troubles this time?"
In video games, the audience takes an active role in participating in the story, and can become doubly frustrated when bad things happen because, for one, the player character has to deal with this situation, and for two, the player may have been trying to avoid one or more of these situations from happening.
Personally, I absolutely hate it when I'm playing Guild Wars and am trying to skirt around a group of enemies only to catch one of them inside my aggro circle maybe 10 feet from a corner I could run around and get to safety. Even more so when another group of enemies chances upon the skirmish I'd been working so hard at avoiding, and jumps into the fray. Most often the result is anywhere between one and all of my party dying, and I get set back to a respawn point.
It's like having your party die in an RPG where the last time saved was an hour and a half ago. You lose all the spoils you've earned, and you've lost the time you've invested in advancing the story.
In passive mediums, you don't risk being disappointed by an unexpected conclusion because someone else has planned the further resolution already, and most often has a happy ending, or at least a satisfying one.
To take what brings about that frustration into a different medium, say there's a comic book series you've started reading, and you like it a lot. Say 50 issues in, the writer sends the hero back in time some 15 issues, and then proceeds to republish issues 35-50 with minor changes to characters, like wearing a different shirt, or eating at a different restaurant in issue 42. You, as the reader, have invested the time it took to publish the original run of issues 35-50, and the money spent to own them, and now you have to make that same investment all over again.
Do that more than once and you'll no longer have an audience for your comic.
And people wonder why there's a dwindling audience for RPGs; not many people have the time to replay entire sections of the game over again in the case that they die before reaching the next save point.
Anyway, I think my main point is that most people prefer to invest their time in things that will make them feel good when they're finished, and passive mediums are the best sort of thing for that, unless you're into reading really dour stuff where the main character dies without accomplishing much by the end.
Video games can be an exercise in frustration for people who don't want to, or don't have the time to repeat things they've already done because of some chance setback.
To take an example from popular Prime Time television in the past 20 years, "Friends". Love it, or hate it, you know it.
It's a show about a group of people and the time they spend together. That's it. It took hold of people because the audience related to the interactions, if not the characters wholly by themselves.
You can direct character interactions much more carefully in cartoons and comic books, because they are a passive medium. Things happen to the characters that are out of their control, much like the audience feels like things happen to them that are out of their control.
Watching how other people cope with unexpected or adverse situations is riveting to a lot of people, that is why in the early days of film serials, every one ended on a cliff hanger, asking the question "How will they get out of their troubles this time?"
In video games, the audience takes an active role in participating in the story, and can become doubly frustrated when bad things happen because, for one, the player character has to deal with this situation, and for two, the player may have been trying to avoid one or more of these situations from happening.
Personally, I absolutely hate it when I'm playing Guild Wars and am trying to skirt around a group of enemies only to catch one of them inside my aggro circle maybe 10 feet from a corner I could run around and get to safety. Even more so when another group of enemies chances upon the skirmish I'd been working so hard at avoiding, and jumps into the fray. Most often the result is anywhere between one and all of my party dying, and I get set back to a respawn point.
It's like having your party die in an RPG where the last time saved was an hour and a half ago. You lose all the spoils you've earned, and you've lost the time you've invested in advancing the story.
In passive mediums, you don't risk being disappointed by an unexpected conclusion because someone else has planned the further resolution already, and most often has a happy ending, or at least a satisfying one.
To take what brings about that frustration into a different medium, say there's a comic book series you've started reading, and you like it a lot. Say 50 issues in, the writer sends the hero back in time some 15 issues, and then proceeds to republish issues 35-50 with minor changes to characters, like wearing a different shirt, or eating at a different restaurant in issue 42. You, as the reader, have invested the time it took to publish the original run of issues 35-50, and the money spent to own them, and now you have to make that same investment all over again.
Do that more than once and you'll no longer have an audience for your comic.
And people wonder why there's a dwindling audience for RPGs; not many people have the time to replay entire sections of the game over again in the case that they die before reaching the next save point.
Anyway, I think my main point is that most people prefer to invest their time in things that will make them feel good when they're finished, and passive mediums are the best sort of thing for that, unless you're into reading really dour stuff where the main character dies without accomplishing much by the end.
Video games can be an exercise in frustration for people who don't want to, or don't have the time to repeat things they've already done because of some chance setback.
Part of me says "Yes, good point. The medium needs more variety." Another, louder, part of me says "Way to go with insulting, surface judging, and missing the point of three types of media at once."
Also,
Also,
Zing!McMarbles said:
I said writers, not screen writers. Everyone's focusing on the leaps and bounds of the technological aspects of videogames, but the writing has barely budged. Every storytelling medium needs its own style of writing; you can't just take a writer from one genre and put him in something else completely different.ZippyDSMlee said:
Screen writing does not equal videogame writing does not equal novel writing does not equal short story writing, etc. etc.
Okay, not going to get into a long-winded rant like the old man that I am at 26, but here goes...
In short, I do agree with what this guy says and instead of trying to build off realism that films often due, as well as some comics, we have the technology, now lets see what sort of nifty things that we can do with it, much like how Yahtzee stated it when he commented in No More Heroes about Killer 7. Look what we got, now make it a spectacle that's actually awesome.
In short, I do agree with what this guy says and instead of trying to build off realism that films often due, as well as some comics, we have the technology, now lets see what sort of nifty things that we can do with it, much like how Yahtzee stated it when he commented in No More Heroes about Killer 7. Look what we got, now make it a spectacle that's actually awesome.
<a href=http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=united+states+households>Wolfram Alpha says there are approximately 105.2 million households in the united states.McMarbles said:
Nintendo <a href=http://www.mcvuk.com/news/40374/US-Wii-sales-pass-30m>just announced that in the US, the Wii system has just hit the lifetime unit sales figure of 30 million.
In almost 4 years, only one third of the estimated households in the US have bought one.
Based on those numbers, the Wii does not have mainstream appeal. Looks like Nintendo isn't doing a very good job of proving me wrong then, eh?
I completely agree with Spector, and I've actually held a similar opinion for quite some time. In the same way that comic books became completely dominated by superheroes, videogames are becoming dominated by space marines and fantasy heroes. These are not necessarily bad things in themselves, far from it, but the problem is that there are so damn many of them that they're all people think of when they think of the medium; when someone mentions a comic book, people automatically think superheroes. It's for this reason that comics haven't been able to be taken seriously as a medium, and videogames are likely to suffer exactly the same ghettoisation unless they can break free of this mould.Tom Goldman said:
There's nothing wrong with them per se; the issue is that they aren't taken remotely seriously by the vast majority of people. There are advantages to this, I admit: people can get away with things in comics that they couldn't in films, such as alcoholic Irish vampires [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)], but it does mean that people are unwilling to acknowledge their artistic merit. I assume most people would like videogames to be taken seriously as a medium, and if they continue going the way they currently are, they won't.Space Jawa said:
He's right, dear God he's right. Though, I don't think we should stop shooting for photo realism. We do need to 'limit' the Bulletstorm 'You scared the dick off me' type crap, though. Getting rid of CliffyB would be a good start.
I think what he's saying implies that the point of gaming is to provide a thought-provoking experience, which, in my opinion, completely misses the point. The majority of games can not be thought-provoking out of necessity, because by definition a game means that you, at some point, have to stop watching the characters think about things and actually do something. This need to do things is what we call gameplay. It's the same reason that an action movie can't always be about people considering their existence, because at some point, somebody has to kill something. So what we get are games that are (at least meant to be) fun, like Gears of War, or Space Marine Goes to Space 2: This Time It's Personal. One of the only games that is considered as thought-provoking as other mediums is Heavy Rain, and look how different that game is from others.
In short, most people don't sit down to play a game expecting to get some kind of philosophical meaning from it, they play games for fun.
In short, most people don't sit down to play a game expecting to get some kind of philosophical meaning from it, they play games for fun.