To Jim Sterling, Who Hates Art Games

Right jimmy.

His point is that we should praise games for being “good games” not for being “artistic.” And if a game is bad (the criteria being unfun, frustrating, or confusing), it’s bad — even if it claims to be artistic.

Telling people to stop making any type of game is even more stupid as giving attention to people telling other people to stop making a type of game. If you don’t like art games, don’t play them; if you don’t care about them, don’t read or write coverage about them.

Anyone is free to remove things from their own little world as much as they want, so long as they don’t remove those things from my world while doing so. That’s what America is all about.

Any game can be art, through it’s atmosphere, how it makes you feel while you’re playing, or simply through it’s art content. What people consider art games is helping legitimize the medium but at the same time hurting it by either directly or indirectly saying “these are the only games that can be considered art”. Why set out to make an art game and almost explicitly label it as such instead of just letting your game speak for itself an not sacrificing gameplay?

Derek does bring up some excellent points though . The comparison to impressionist criticism was also very good. We shouldn’t try to supress these type of games even if their creators rub us the wrong way sometimes. It’s like stepping on that amphibious creator that eventually becomes man when it stepped out of the water. Let’s at least see where this takes us.

What I really don’t get about the whole Artgame Vibe is why a large quantity of them shuns gameplay like it is some great disgusting evil to avoid, yet at the same time demand they be recognized as games.

So if Artgames call themselves Games, why the spiteful glare when they’re judged like a game?

@Theotherguy, that’s the problem though, the criteria for a good game can’t be truly defined. And “fun” shouldn’t be a prerequisite for a good game imo.

Personally the most important point for me, when dealing with art games et al, would be whether the gameplay expresses something through interpretation.

Is there a reason for my character to jump? Why have I collected this green star? etc etc.

Unfortunately, as Sterling suggests, most art games don’t truly convey interpretation and meaning through their mechanics. Extending it to indie games only worsens that, given the amount of bad Metal Slug clones among others. Although I will say indie and art are not interchangeable.

While this article has suggested the infancy in which art games have found their own space within gaming, I would say that attitudes toward and the majority of indie or art games will not become great.

We will however get a great art game to latch onto once in a while, but true genius comes from originality and generally, that isn’t in abundance. Blame education!!!

I appreciate you posting on this, Derek, and I agree with your perspective. I admit i didn’t read all of Jim’s writing, because it was so needlessly vitriolic. I think a lot of the frustration revolves around the fact that we have called works like The Path ‘games’, and all our predispositions on what a game should be come into play. I don’t want to call it interactive art either, because all art is interactive; when presented with art, you interpret it, and react to it. That is how people interact with art. This does not mean that the viewer sees the same thing as the artist. Nor should you, necessarily. You decide what the art means to you. Now Jim here seems to think the art should very clearly state to the viewer what the artist’s feelings were, rather than let them find their own answers. The reason someone writes an essay about their art is for this purpose, to tell you what they felt, but it is purposely left separate not because the art has failed, but because you should take away your own experience of the art, so that afterwards when you read the essay, you can compare your opinion to someone else’s, rather than go into the experience with prejudice. So what I take away from Jim’s writing is that he doesn’t understand what the purpose of art is. Sadly, many people dont. What really is upsetting though, is that he rants about it being stupid, pretentious, contrived, etc. with such a tone of reproach. Its fine if you didnt like it Jim. But if you try to shame me for enjoying The Path? No, Jim, shame on you.

literally everyone who has commented on this including me is retarded

This thread in one paragraph:

“Of course, most of these indie games get away with their bullshit because there is always a subgroup of people too terrified of looking stupid to argue against “art.” Your game can be a broken, waffling, irritating mess, but if you call it an artistic endeavor, there will be an army of pretentious Internet professors defending it and telling dissenters that they just don’t understand.”

@Alex: people who call themselves retarded are retar… oh.

Jim Sterling fits into a very simple character arch-type, which Brian Reagan discusses in-depth here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QvSoRQrVJg

Yeah fatso! Go pick your snivveling nose, which you turn up at the frontier of gaming society – art games may be pretentious but they’re bringing new stuff to the field whether you like it or not.

Don’t be a hata <3

I don’t get it… They always refer to 5-10 of the currently well-known indie games as the representative state of so called art games in general. I don’t consider myself as a “literate gamer” at all, but I’m pretty sure that there are many other good examples out there, which are truly able to demonstrate the artistic potential of this new medium. Vectorpark’s wonderful games for example. Jodi’s “Untitled Game”, as an older conceptual “art piece”. Myst/Riven. Older adventure games, like The Longest Journey maybe, as some older commercial examples. Cactus’ games. Or increpare’s series. Agj’s story-based games. To name just a few I know from the forums… Linger in Shadows, a relatively new interactive piece for PS3. And .deTuned. Interactive new media art installations/programs. Game-like toys coming out for iPhone… Old flash-websites of the early days of the http://www... Elektroplakton, things like that. Storybook-types of games like Samorost… – I don’t know, but there are so many good examples out there that demonstrate that games — and esp. small independent games — can be used in many expressive and artistic ways… It’s probably true that there’s no big, monumental Shakespear-equivalent type of work yet, but who cares! Otherwise it would be dead and dry place to be, like the the snobby high-art world today. Modern, but dead, scary and simply deadlocked. I mean, experimentalism is great sign for life… Even when it’s futile, weird or even a full failure. I see it a bit like nature’s evolution, with hundreds of required but maybe “failed” species/mutations crawling up the global canvas of the internet. Not driven/led by institutions, or other limiting forces anymore, but just the creators/players/viewers, directly. Still, I think those critical voices are right about certain games in particular, but IMHO it’s much too generalizing to be right about the entire diversity of “artistic indie games”…

Games are one form of art anyway (considering they involve creation, molding, imagination, and architecture). “Art Games”, which are another variation of game design, is simply a way for people to express there ideas differently. Don’t know why there’s such a big hubbub over it. Surely there is enough room for Art Games, considering there are certain genres, such as the first Person Shooter, which is overwhelmed and overflowing with the occasional innovative idea and yet far more knee-deep in mediocrity and creative design than probably any other genre, even more than RPG’s. From the standpoint of a gamer who enjoys games from almost every and all genres, I’d say if yet one more First Person Shooter can be made, and for every new FPS made, surely there is room for several dozen Art Games which perhaps might not innovate but instead might inspire. I can’t think of any time when new ideas in development, creativity, and imagination have had a negative effect except maybe when they are forced on people, which I haven’t encountered yet (in gaming).

However, all games should be subject to the same type of criticism regardless of their ingredients or development, though perhaps not all for the same reasons based on genres and / or mechanics and possibly the intent of the creator (developer).

Jim’s comments on “art games” can just as well be applied to art.

He cites BioShock as an example of something good as opposed to something bad – an “art game”. He likes a clear narrative, to be led by the hand, told what to think.

Others don’t. He could just as well bitch about how much greater some painted by numbers cartoon bullshit is compared to Rothko.

He’d be wrong though, as he is now.

Also, when you continually remove the necessary elements from a game, it ceases to become a game and instead becomes a toy, an interactive narrative, or an interactive art display.

A game requires structure, goals, and interaction. If it lacks any of these, it is not even a game at all.

If a game is poorly defined in any of these areas (yet it makes an attempt in all three) then it is simply a bad game.

haha this made it all the way to TIGSource huh?

well said Derek!and Jim did have good points but has quite the negative attitude.

i think jim ko’ed derek. he might be a bit offfensive, but he has great points.

Yes, Jim did say “bad art games are bad” and “not innovative art games are not innovative”. I think we can all agree on those points.

But he did write a lot more than that, and there was a lot more implied (or directly stated) by his article. That’s what I wanted to address. Specifically:

*1. That vagueness is bad.*

*2. That the creators of the games he mentioned are lazy and uninspired.*

*3. That making these games more fun is necessarily how to make them more valuable or engaging.*

To reiterate, I agree that games can be innovative and fun at the same time. I’ve said repeatedly that I’d like to see more depth and polish in indie games… and I also defended the IGF this year when people said it was not innovative enough.

But notwithstanding the “black is not white” arguments, those articles are way off base, imo. And yeah, they’re needlessly vitriolic and sarcastic.

Hope that clears up my point of view a little bit – I am defending art games here, but I’m not giving them a free pass. (Just as Jim is not saying all indie games are bad, which is never something I implied!)

@DalaranJ:

_”How do you feel “art” games have already developed from their primitive roots? Can you predict what the next steps of the evolution of the art form are?”_

That’s a good question. Like I admitted to Jason, I’m not familiar with the art games people were making in the 80’s. (Does The Manhole count as an art game?!) So I’m not sure how they’ve evolved from then, although I believe the current generation is inspired in great deal by intuitive tools (Game Maker, Unity, Flash) and the indie games scene.

Until now you had to be a coder to make a game, I think that’s a big difference between then and now. It’s harder to be spontaneous when you have to do a lot of programming. I think things can be lost in the process. (I love programming, but it’s not the same as drawing or even dragging and dropping.)

I think “art games” in the future will remain vague and relatively abstract (and possibly very short), but they’ll also be more engaging and less clunky. A lot of them will work better with interfaces like Natal and eventually “Holodeck 0.1”. I think strict goals will feel less necessary with more natural interfaces.

For now, I’m satisfied that art games are trying to express things that games have had a hard time expressing, even if they are kind of clumsy about it. If something is new it’s not necessarily going to be good, but I think newness is a good thing. There are hardly enough art games out there yet for me to be tired of them (relative to every other type of game).

_”Is the medium of games robust enough to truly support pure ‘high art’ games?”_

Video games are robust enough to support anything. I can’t imagine anything that couldn’t eventually be done with the right technology.

Corpus, pretty ironic you question my choice of words and then proceed by providing a post of fitting characteristics to my chosen words.

Very well, I made an Art Game just for you. Here are the install instructions: Open whatever Tool you use for Spreadsheets, Calc, Excel, your call. Randomly mark a number of cells and paint them blue.
To start the game you click whatever cell you feel most comfortable with. You control my Art Game by using the Arrow Keys. Reaching non blue tiles wins the Art-Game.
I hereby call this game “Deep Blue World: Life simulated in a cell of meaning” and it’s about the deeper connections of life, how it might appear like an endless struggle of swimming in an ocean of blue.

What’s that? It’s not a game? How dare you deny it the nature of a game? It’s got controls, Start, Finish, a Character, yep all the hallmarks of a game.
What? It sucks? Nuh-uh, I’m sorry my dear. You’re not allowed to have a negative opinion about my Art-Game. It’s Art! Art is exceptional and creative by default and if you don’t agree, honey, you just aren’t getting the deeper meaning of the Art-Game!

I’ve seen a lot of stubborn comments posted here. It almost sounds as if some people are trying to bash Derek for his comments, meanwhile he hasn’t done any bashing toward Jimbo, so it seems peoples passion for game discussion is a little misplaced (not everyone here, just a handful or two).

Derek is no less entitled to his point of view than Jim was when writing the article. Derek elaborated on his view and opinion. Jim did have some valid points but Derek also countered some of those points with his own.

We could easily end this discussion right now by analyzing all of the games Jimbo has made himself… Let me know when you find one that we can criticize ;)

So how about this, lets not get all poopy with each other over our opinions about games.

Discussions aren’t about seeing who got burned the best or who dissed who. Lets stop with the childishness.

Part of me is impressed; Jim Sterling actually managed to put together not one, but two almost coherent posts that manage to make genuinely worthwhile statements. I found myself, less than eagerly, agreeing with parts of many of his points. Because he’s… well, Jim Sterling, most of these points got lost in bile and petulant whining. I seriously hope somebody who ISN’T an attention-seeking whore takes up his banner and does something worthwhile with it. Such debate is good for the indie scene, and long overdue.

Really, you’re no better than Jim Sterling with that post.

I love Jim sets himself up as some sort of hero against his own supposed injustices, charging off at tiny windmills with a horde of followers whose mentality is that of Warhammer 40k Orks, the biggest, most cunnin’ is the best.

Can anyone name an “art game” “that does not bore the experienced gamer to death within the first few minutes?”