I think that video games can be art, but relatively few are, and most of those that do reach the bar of being considered art aren't particularly avant-garde. Like, taking a couple of artsy-ish games, how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)? Or to put it another way, there's a good number of games that are Discworlds but none that reach the level of the Lord of the Rings: a lot that have a good, concise moral that will stick with you, but none that can change an entire culture. Of course, it could just be that my definition of "art" is too narrow and too high a bar, and there's something to be said about the interactivity of games that gives them greater impact than other media
> how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person?
That’s an odd bar to cross in order to define art, if that’s what you mean there. I’ve seen plenty of art in my life (not hard to do living in Italy) and most of it didn’t change me as a person. It was still art though.
Building on ranger207's point about transformative impact: I think the challenge is that game transformations are often invisible to outside observers.
When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.
I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.
Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?
All this is just "Games haven't(/can't) had their 'Citizen Kane'" all over again. What are you expecting? What would a "Lord of the Rings" of gaming need to do to be "real art" in your (the general you, I'm not really trying to call you out specifically) eyes?
When someone watches a movie, or engages with any other art form, are they "transformed"?
Games are certainly a unique art form, but I reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary", or that the experience of playing a game can't be discussed to just as rich a level as, say, the experience of watching a movie, or listening to a piece of music. Ultimately, to fully engage in a dialogue about a work of art, you need to experience that work in its intended form, this should be obviously true of music, movies, painting, and games. But to set games apart as somehow less able to be fully discussed is nonsense.
> reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary"
Anyone who witnessed a playtesting session with someone who never played video games before knows that there's a tremendous amount of shared cultural vocabulary there already.
I’m genuinely curious, why is there a transformative requirement for something to be art. I think transformative works can certainly be art, but thanks just a possible characteristic of art. Where does this requirement come from, as in, is it somewhere defined academically, or is this a personal position?
Wikipedia defines it as: Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around works utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience,[1] generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty.[2][3][4]
I like the "evoke a worthwhile experience" idea.
Transformation is a bit ambigious imo. In a certain sense, every experience is at least a little transformative.
we see games impact culture constantly, especially language. it’s spearheaded shorthand language we use online and texting, influences how people approach problem solving, created social groups and impacted lives. there is a quantitative measure that can show video games have impacted people not only at an emotional level (the standard barometer for determining what “art” is), but how they ripple into the zeitgeist
> how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)?
I haven't played those games, but, in general, I guess it depends on what kind of change do you mean? Playing first-person shooters certainly transforms your brains in some ways; you become better at tracking small objects on the screen; your spatial reasoning likely improves; the coordination between you hands and eyes develops to respond to events in the game; etc.
Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but Disco Elysium is one of the most emotionally poignant and utterly impactful pieces of media ever created. But why take my word for it? Have a look at some reviews and reactions - and note that each players experience is dramatically different in outcome and determination based on your playthrough and choices.
The press has always been full of propaganda, it's just that in the time period 1850-1950 there weren't any dissenting media outlets so it was impossible for anyone to recognize that there was anything different from the propaganda
Every society is going to have problems. Democracy's benefit is that it allows those problems to be freely discussed and resolved
They probably won't reverse course, as the problem isn't the AI (or else they would've banned it completely), but instead the AI submissions crowding out all other discussion. There's lots of subs that do things like this; for example /r/games limits self-posts by indie game developers to Sundays
Personally I like dark mode because most of the time my screen isn't looking at things that are majority pure white, it's looking at games, or videos, or blogs with a background color, or whatever. If I adjust my brightness to see relatively dark things comfortably, then things in light mode are now too bright. But since I look at more things that aren't pure white than pure white I adjust for the more common use case. The increase in blank space in UIs and the trend towards less color and differentiation have made the number of things where light mode is unbearable too high.
That's how my comp sci degree went at Georgia Tech. There was a data structures and algorithms class first that used Java but then 2110 was building a computer from the (simulated) transistors up. I would've never understood pointers or C in general otherwise lol
One common complaint with the idea of the year if the Linux desktop is that Linux simply doesn't "just work" in the way MacOS and even Windows do. I think that's becoming less and less a barrier though for both the fact that Linux is getting closer to "just working" (especially as Windows and MacOS get further away), but also because more and more of the people still using Windows are power users and aren't as intimidated by the command line or manually resolving library dependencies or whatever. Like, there's a lot of PC gamers that'll happily spend hours on messing with their system to eke out another 5 FPS, or doing manual dependency resolution to get 200 SkyDome mods to play nicely together. "Doesn't just work" isn't as big a deal to power users that are more likely to be annoyed by Windows and MacOS's trajectory anyway
The idea that Windows "just works" is pretty recent. 20 years ago, any time I visited a relative who had a Windows PC, I was installing Firefox, fixing a driver, and removing spyware, if not outright malware. Either you were a power user, or you were having a bad time.
The main difference is that with Windows the work is mostly front loaded. From 2000/XP forward, as long as you set up the correct drivers post-install, they for most intents and purposes, barring shitty hardware, really did “just work”.
There’s something to be said for “Windows creep” though, where the install decays over time and a reinstall is required. Back in the 2K/XP/Vista days this could be pretty bad, but that improved with 7 onwards. It still exists today, but the decay takes years to become noticeable instead of months.
Linux isn’t without its own issues there however. Even on a more friendly distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, eventually one will end up with things like config files that slipped through the cracks and didn’t get migrated correctly, very slowing degrading the desktop experience.
That more or less matches my experience. A quality PC with NT5+ preloaded and not too much bundled crapware would mostly just work when it was fresh, but it would not be working well a year later if not maintained by someone with a modicum of technical knowledge.
It's also still not true. My son has a Windows machine that he's responsible for, after a long time running ChromeOS. He's reported all kinds of weird driver things, and having had to watch YouTube tutorials to figure out how to fix issues.
I don't disagree which is why the level of effort needed to use Linux has always seemed overblown to me lol, but that is the relative popular perception
"Just works" in computing is an illusion. Modern computers have enough complexity and potential failure where their internal (usually software) components interact that they must be maintained and sysadmin'd. And if you're not doing that yourself, you're delegating that task to someone else—typically the OS vendor. That's why Microsoft considers Windows a "service" and will force updates at the least convenient possible time. That's why Apple has set up restrictions on running arbitrary software, even on Macs but especially on iDevices. The cost of having a device that seems to "just work" is a device you don't really own.
Not far off though. My mum's been on iphone for a decade and I don't think there have been issues with it not working. There are issues with figuring out how to work it though and Apples magic hidden gestures and the like.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. A running clock set incorrectly is correct zero times a day. If you have an incorrect clock, the solution isn't to stop the clock, it's to set it correctly and fix the process
I play a wargame (Battletech) where the rulebook says "use a bottlecap if you want to as long as you can tell which way it's facing" and even there 3D printed minis are uncommon. For Battletech there's two official sources of minis, plastic from CGL and metal from IWM[0]. IWM has a model for almost every unit published in the last 40 years, but some of them are... very hard to look at. CGL's plastic ones look much and cover the most common units so you can usually get by with just them (although, I did just order a couple minis for an upcoming tournament). If I ever see a printed mini, it's either a) one of the ones where the IWM model looks terrible, or b) a model ripped from the Mechwarrior video games that the person thinks looks better aesthetically.
Where 3D printing has been revolutionary for Battletech though has been terrain. Battletech's played on a hex grid, and ever hex has an elevation printed on it to form hills, buildings, and rivers. There's one company (Thunderhead Studios) that makes STLs of the elevation of the official maps that's very popular. Popular enough that they've actually started mass manufacturing them and selling prepainted terrain retail. That shows up in every event I've been to, even official events where 3D minis are banned. But it's a decidedly ancillary part of the experience for Battletech.
You don't change people's minds by telling them the truth. You change people's minds by letting them discover the truth on their own. People want to believe what they already believe, so a direct argument that goes against their belief is more likely to harden them against the argument than change their mind. "Elegance", or an indirect approach, softens the argument. The parts ancillary to the argument itself creep into the person's mind, make connections there among other things they already know (including of course the concept that "elegance is truth"), and prime the other person's belief system to accept the argument when it's finally presented. By making connections with flowery language and things-that-aren't-the-argument, the argument settles in as a highly-connected vertex in the belief system instead of a brick thrown in through the window.
Same here. I really hope that the movie industry gets over the stigma and moves to higher frame rates appropriate for fast action and panning shots. Doesn't look like it will happen any time soon though - even the few high frame rate movies there are don't get high frame rate home video releases.
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