Moments when a piece of entertainment completely rocked you.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 3:57 am

Looking the topic up, his wikipedia page says that he changed his position slightly, saying that video games would never be art within the lifetimes of current gamers. It's still an amazingly ignorant position, but he only ever played maybe a handful of games, at most, and possibly only one, confessing a lack of interest in them. Though he would object to the term, and did when Clive Barker applied it, he's simply prejudiced against games because they, by in large, did not interest him. And while that makes his comments ones of ignorance, that just means that maybe he should have not said anything.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 1:44 pm

Ebert was an old man who had an old man's view on technology and media. And that's a shame. He might have really gotten something out of a few games.

He did for at least one:

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/ ... tcred.html

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 2:46 pm

In Ebert's defense, his point was that giving players choices dilutes the emotional impact of the story. Which is true. That's why you can't use a Phoenix Down on Aeris, after all. And, of course, the thing where you do all the endgame sidequests while the world hangs in the balance destroys the sense or urgency. And lets not forget save scumming to get the good outcome.

Ebert's thesis was that art is about evoking emotion and the demands of giving a player control drastically detract from that.

In a film the scenes are in a certain order. They're paced a certain way. And they happen one way. In a game scenes might not have any particular order, some may have multiple outcomes, and pacing is absolutely not guaranteed (not when the player can spend twenty hours collecting butterflies in the middle of a world-ending battle).

He also argued that just because components of a game are art, that doesn't make the whole thing art. This is very much true. You can have the Mona Lisa in the background of a low budget porn movie, that doesn't make the porn movie a masterpiece.

Beautiful, stunning, emotion-inducing graphics don't make the the game art, they make the graphics art. A beautiful emotion-stirring soundtrack doesn't make the game art, it makes the soundtrack art. A single tear-jerking scene doesn't automatically make the rest of the game have the same impact.

To wit, Ebert's argument is that games creators don't have the same level of control over the way that the audience experiences the product that filmmakers do and so hve less control over what the audience is feelings.

A player who dies a hundred times on an easy level that's supposed to be about how elated the character is with his powers is just going to feel frustrated instead. And if it's too easy he'll feel bored. And the game designer can't be sure because it depends entirely on the player. Likewise, if a player spends hours exploring a level it detracts from the sense of urgency and danger. If you want a scene where the bad guy just barely gets beaten, that's impossible. Because that's entirely up to the player who could win easily ot loose horribly depending on skill level. If you have mandatory wins and loses, that takes the players out of the game because the forced victories and defeats might not match their actual in game actions.

The place where the story the game maker wants to tell meets the skill of the player is very problematic.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 2:59 pm

hyzmarca wrote:In Ebert's defense, his point was that giving players choices dilutes the emotional impact of the story. Which is true.

No. That is, in fact, exactly the opposite of true. While certain sequences might fall flat for specific players who represent edge cases due to being significantly less or more skilled, the same basic problem - that there will be edge cases for whom your artistic choices do not resonate no matter how well-crafted - exists in all media. As a local example, take Prak's aversion to the movie Brave: His upbringing has left him basically incapable of enjoying a movie in which a rebellious teenager is not fully justified in their opposition to their parents, which means there was never anything Brave could do to get him on board with that story. Having a couple of people just barely within your target demographic who don't enjoy the work because of situations you have absolutely no control over is a problem that all mediums have to face, and minimizing the problem is typically not even that hard.

A game cannot be constructed like a movie, but that doesn't mean Journey would've been better off as a television show, or that Shadow of the Colossus could've worked in film. These are experiences that work for no other reason except that we get to experience them. They deliver an emotional experience to the audience and that experience would not translate to non-interactive mediums at all.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 3:22 pm

That's a bit of an extreme simplification of my opinion of Brave...

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 3:50 pm

In some ways, games are a more difficult medium. Which means that the people who can manage to overcome the hurdles and make art anyway have made a greater accomplishment.

Ebert was wrong. But then, he was a specialist. Specialists are known for having narrow viewpoints - it's part of the tradeoff for their intense focus and extensive knowledge in a limited field.

Guy wasn't Satan, just wrong.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 3:51 pm

Yeah hyzmarca, you could have replaced that many paragraph response with just "I am too stupid to see that videogames are a different medium than film, so I am going to only look at telling film stories and pick at possible issues that some games (but not actually all games) have with telling film stories."

I mean, I agree that there exist stories that are better told by film. I spend a lot of time telling people to not try to tell those stories in cooperative table top RPG games. But those aren't the only stories, and things like Journey, Shadow of the Colossus, Spec Ops the Line, Braid, and maybe Dark Souls are things that in fact are totally better told by games because the unique facets of the media are useful and even essential to telling the story, and the story would be lacking in a non interactive media.

Just like sometimes books tell better stories, because in Game of Thrones understanding the motivations of the characters is important and being in there heads is better than jamming in awkward exposition, and being able to invade flashbacks gives a better understanding of the events going on now, and flashbacks are way harder and less communicative in a visual media.

But right from then beginning, if you only think "telling stories" is art, then you are a fucking idiot, because the Mona Lisa tells no stories. Obviously there exists a place for art that tells no stories at all, and those art forms can include many games that exist to evoke certain kinds of emotions and feelings that don't rely on story at all.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 6:37 pm

hyzmarca, thank you for you explanation of something I found inexplicable. It really did help me to see which kind of crazy Ebert was.

Now, in rebuttal here's the the crux of the matter:

hyzmarca wrote:Ebert's thesis was that art is about evoking emotion and the demands of giving a player control drastically detract from that.

Okay, for the purpose of illustration, I'll just accept that player agency detracts from emotional impact as a premise. That is insufficient to prove that media with player agency cannot be art. To me it seems to indicate just the opposite. If the interactive component of video games reduces the emotional impact, that is saying outright that games still have at least some emotional impact -- albeit reduced. That would support a claim that video games where inherently lesser than other art forms, but not that the media is incapable of being art.

The premise Ebert likely wanted was that the presence of player agency outright negates and eliminates any sort of emotional impact of the media.

So at this point I understand the argument Ebert was trying to make as:

If art is defined by having emotional impact;

And if the inclusion of player agency precludes emotional impact;

then

Media with player agency, such as video games cannot be art.

But to start out with Ebert did not make the argument coherently, and used a flawed first premise which negated his conclusion.

Then his first premise is questionable at best, and the second should be downright laughable here on a forum of D&D geeks. To top it off the conclusion runs into problems when you try to draw hard lines between the player agency in video games and the interactive options in other art forms. Are the move selections in Dragon's Lair fundamentally different from the subtitle/ dubbing / commentary options available for watching a movie on a DVD? Are cheesy optimizations like save scumming fundamentally different than cheesy social interactions heckling a performer at a live show? Are the performers at Friday Night Improv inherently not experiencing art while the audience is experiencing art by watching them?

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:43 pm

Kaelik wrote:But right from then beginning, if you only think "telling stories" is art, then you are a fucking idiot, because the Mona Lisa tells no stories. Obviously there exists a place for art that tells no stories at all, and those art forms can include many games that exist to evoke certain kinds of emotions and feelings that don't rely on story at all.

Sometimes I get the urge to call the gameplay, mechanics and/or feel of a videogame 'beautiful'.

Just Cause 2 comes to mind. I barely remember anything about the story or characters in that game, but reminiscing about the gameplay (e.g. paragliding, hookshoting nearby cars, tethering a jeep to a helicopter and using it as a wrecking ball to destroy a gas station, etc) is what makes me feel like re installing it.

Other examples of mechanics I liked that come to mind at the moment include web swinging and wall running in the Spider-man console games, combat in the Batman: Arkham whatever games, parkour in Assassin's Creeds, combat in Smash Bros, portals in Portal, etc.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 3:21 am

Yeah, overall I'm happy to call Ebert a net contributor to society but the conclusions he drew about video games do not follow from the arguments he made about video games. The nicest thing you can say about his opinions on the subject is that at least he didn't coin an annoying neologism that would get parroted across kotaku whenever he talked about dissonance.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 4:16 pm

Last night, I saw Guardians of the Galaxy. It was the best Marvel movie I have ever seen, short of the '86 Howard the Duck masterpiece.

Speaking of, the post credit scene at the end was probably the GREATEST thing that has ever been done by anyone ever in the history of talking and moving magic pictures.

Also, Laertes is full of shit.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 6:20 pm

Shrapnel wrote:Also, Laertes is full of shit.

You have your tastes, and I have mine. Hopefully enough people agree with you to make them make a sequel.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:06 am

Saw Guardians of the Galaxy. I really loved mister non-thesaurus.

Also, how the police officer got his nickname wrong, and the police database had a different wrong nickname.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 6:42 am

Laertes wrote:Hopefully enough people agree with you to make them make a sequel.

They announced the sequel shortly before the movie hit cinemas. The movie includes a line of text at the end pretty much flat out stating there will be a sequel.

They knew they had a hit on their hands before it left production.

And lets take a moment to just note not only that Laertes is out of touch with this news, but also how unusual it is for Hollywood to know they had a success like that and confirm the sequel that quickly. You can mock Hollywood and it's lust for sequels all you like, but even franchise films like this which were designed with the clear intention of being sequel bait almost never actually confirm a sequel that quickly or easily. Normally they throw them out there and see if the audience bites before hand.

They knew this was good, they have already planned accordingly.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 6:57 am

Speaking of which, I just found out that Transformers: Age of Extinction is the highest grossing film of 2014 so far.

Really, people?

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 7:35 am

The Bayformer films seem to do well financially regardless of the fact that they are terrible. Revenge of the Fallen made a gross of $55 million on it's opening day, and that was just from domestic ticket sales.

The world has no logic.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 7:42 am

Michael Bay is the cinematic devil. People sell their soul to him in exchange for filthy lucre.

The sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was announced two days after it opened, and William Fichtner has claimed during an interview that he was signed for a trilogy.

Goddammit, movie industry. I understand that it's all about the benjamins, but is there some sort of conspiracy that says that all movies I hate always have to turn into franchises? It's like a sort of reverse Peter Principle: the good ones stop while they're good and the bad ones just keep going and going endlessly.

Sadly there's no conspiracy, because there doesn't have to be. It's just Darwinian selection. I like originality and creativity, and those are precisely the things that are poison in a franchise aimed at selling toys and video games and Happy Meals as well as next year's movie. Nobody is ever going to make a sequel to Blade Runner or Fight Club or Dr Strangelove or American History X, because you can't: those movies resolved their stories and their character arcs and at the end they had nothing left to say. As such, they simply get outcompeted. (And in the case of The Matrix or Aliens, they did make sequels and everyone regretted it.)

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 10:34 am

Laertes wrote:Sadly there's no conspiracy, because there doesn't have to be. It's just Darwinian selection. I like originality and creativity, and those are precisely the things that are poison in a franchise aimed at selling toys and video games and Happy Meals as well as next year's movie. Nobody is ever going to make a sequel to Blade Runner or Fight Club or Dr Strangelove or American History X, because you can't: those movies resolved their stories and their character arcs and at the end they had nothing left to say. As such, they simply get outcompeted. (And in the case of The Matrix or Aliens, they did make sequels and everyone regretted it.)

You rather shot your argument in the face by bringing up Aliens. I remind you: that movie is already a sequel. Alien is one of, if not the best haunted house movies. Aliens, by contrast, is one of, if not the best adventure movie. Alien dropped the mic on haunted house movies, and the way they made a compelling sequel to it was by switching genres and dropping the mic on that. If they wanted to make new Aliens movies that were good, what they had to do was to switch genres again. I would watch the shit out of an Aliens 3 that had been Ripley saving the world in a spy thriller (the villain's plan involves the release of xenomorphs) or war movie (the xenomorphs land on Earth and take over a few cities). Those things didn't happen, and Aliens 3, Aliens Resurrection, Aliens Versus Predator, and Prometheus were all stupid haunted house movies - but they could have. The proper sequel to Aliens is Edge of Tomorrow, not Aliens 3.

The existence of the Android boardgame is proof positive (if any was needed) that there is plenty of room to tell more stories in the Bladerunner universe. The problem of course, is that anyone making such movies would probably take a giant shit on the previous film. They almost couldn't fail to.

When Harrison Ford played in that film, he was pretty sure his character was human. It never occurred to him otherwise, and as far as he was concerned the message was that his character was dehumanized by his position to the point that he was less human than the replicants even though he was "real" and they were "fake." The director decided otherwise after the film was completed, and changed some things to leave open the possibility that the main character was also a replicant and didn't know it.

One of the reasons the movie works so well is because the ending is ambiguous. Even the director's cut with the unicorn dreams doesn't really prove anything definitively. But moving forward, they'd have to take things forward from the closing elevator doors and then we'd have to get straight answers to the open questions hanging at the end of the film. And that means it would by definition have to shit on the interpretations of a lot of fans. That's basically your Matrix 2 problem right there. A movie which is good because of the questions it asks can't sustain that in a sequel. It has to either answer or not answer those questions, and either is generally fucked.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 10:59 am

You know, when I heard about Aliens vs. Predator, I was hoping for a Geiger-flavored kung fu movie where a small group of badasses (probably cybernetic, non-xenomorph alien, or android, because lol weeaboo fightan magic) takes on hordes and hordes of crazy-ass aliens in their quest to kill the queen. The Predators can either be on the side of the kung fu protagonists or they can serve as bosses on the way to killing the queen. Hell, you can even make them the protagonists if you want.

In other words, I was expecting Blade but with xenomorphs and predators instead of vampires. Yes, that's kind of a shallow premise for a movie, but if you didn't plan to do that then why the fuck did you allude to the comic and game franchise which did basically what I just said?

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 4:04 pm

The Capcom fighting game is the best version of Alien vs Predator.

And it was based on a movie that was never made but could have been. Come on, Two Predators, Cyborg Dutch, and a Japanse woman with a katana fighting Aliens in the middle of an infested city. That's all kinds of awesome.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 4:29 pm

hyzmarca wrote:The Capcom fighting game is the best version of Alien vs Predator.

And it was based on a movie that was never made but could have been. Come on, Two Predators, Cyborg Dutch, and a Japanse woman with a katana fighting Aliens in the middle of an infested city. That's all kinds of awesome.

For those who want to see it in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5oFATk5gh0

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 4:56 pm

A colonial marine with an autocannon for an arm and female samurai Robocop team up with two Predators to take out an Alien hive? Sounds cool to me.

EDIT: So long as we're talking about Alien vs. Predator, I thought I'd talk about the circle of plagiarism.

So in 1986, Aliens is released, turning the xenomorphs from a stalker monster to a guerilla warfare swarm monster.

In 1987, Warhammer 40k is released and has genestealers, which are exactly the same as xenomorphs. But by 1993, they've been expanded into the Tyranids, a swarm monster that comes in a myriad of shapes and sizes by harvesting genes from all manner of different species, with individual hives that are commanded by one type of monster and all of them answering to one superintelligence.

In 1998, StarCraft is released and has Zerg, which are exactly the same as Tyranids. But later on in the same year they released Brood War, which fleshed out the Zerg and their mutual history with the Protoss, giving them a common progenitor in the Xel'Naga and a specific racial hatred for one another that did not exist between the Tyranids and the Protoss' own 40k counterparts, the Eldar (certainly the Tyranids and Eldar do not get along, but the Eldar do not have a specific hatred for the Tyranids either).

In 2001, Halo is released and has the Flood and the Covenant, who shake things up by only being almost exactly the same as the Zerg and Protoss, being that they are two ancient species with a common creator who have a built-in hatred for one another and also the humanoid aliens are religious zealots who must eventually team up with humanity to defeat the non-humanoid and therefore more evil aliens.

Also, later on an RTS will be released which contains a versatile human species, a bug species that relies on lots of swarms, and a humanoid alien species that hates the bug species and relies on lots of special abilities and stealth tactics. That RTS could be StarCraft II, but it could also be Alien vs. Predator: Extinction, which is when the circle of plagiarism was completed.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 5:46 pm

Oh, yeah, that game.

That would definitely be a contender for the 'unexpected Ultraviolence' thread as the game is PG-rated except for a handful of overly gruesome moments, but c'mon. It's fucking Aliens. The unexpected part is that there's much less of it than you think there would be.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 7:02 pm

Frank Trollman wrote:You rather shot your argument in the face by bringing up Aliens. I remind you: that movie is already a sequel. Alien is one of, if not the best haunted house movies. Aliens, by contrast, is one of, if not the best adventure movie. Alien dropped the mic on haunted house movies, and the way they made a compelling sequel to it was by switching genres and dropping the mic on that. If they wanted to make new Aliens movies that were good, what they had to do was to switch genres again. I would watch the shit out of an Aliens 3 that had been Ripley saving the world in a spy thriller (the villain's plan involves the release of xenomorphs) or war movie (the xenomorphs land on Earth and take over a few cities). Those things didn't happen, and Aliens 3, Aliens Resurrection, Aliens Versus Predator, and Prometheus were all stupid haunted house movies - but they could have. The proper sequel to Aliens is Edge of Tomorrow, not Aliens 3.

I think we're agreeing with one another: Aliens is not a sequel to Alien in the way that Transformers movies are sequels to one another. It's a spiritual successor, yes; and it's set in the same continuity and features the same characters, yes. But it's entirely out of genre. It's almost a companion film rather than a straightforward sequel in the Transformers / Jurassic Park / Friday the Thirteenth mold.

I posit that it is extremely hard to make a good sequel in genre: I can think of only two off the top of my head (The Godfather Part 2 and The Dark Knight), although there's probably some I've missed. This is an incredibly dismal hit:miss ratio, even when they were trying to make a good sequel and not just cynically trying to milk the name of the original for everything they can get out of it; and it suggests that making in-genre sequels produces shitty movies more reliably than making new, original films.

Unfortunately, right now making in-genre sequels is one of the very few ways that producers think they can reliably make money from a dying industry, which is why most of the big cinematic releases are designed from the very start to spawn immense franchises. As such, there is a clear Darwinian pressure: if you want to survive, make fewer original, interesting films and more endlessly reheated franchises. Which means that people who enjoy seeing new, interesting films get the shaft.

Frank Trollman wrote:<three paragraphs on Blade Runner which I completely agree with>

The issue with making anything else in the Blade Runner universe is that that isn't enough: if you want to attach the Blade Runner label to it, people are going to expect to have Deckard and replicants and suchlike in it. They're going to expect to have the same themes and thoughtlines they had in the earlier film. If they do anything else - for example, a Strange Days like film about high level corruption and a threatened underclass rebellion - then there's going to be a lot of grumbling from people who bought tickets because they wanted to see the original again.

James Cameron's courage in making Aliens as an out-of-genre companion movie was immense: I can't think of another example off the top of my head. He must have decided to say "fuck it, we can't top Alien when it comes to brooding suspense movies, let's make a zombie military movie." And they did and it was awesome. But that's rare even in that era, and in the modern era of obsession over IP, endless remakes and milking franchises dry, I can't imagine anyone being allowed to do it.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Aug 16, 2014 7:39 pm

Laertes wrote:
Frank Trollman wrote:You rather shot your argument in the face by bringing up Aliens. I remind you: that movie is already a sequel.
I think we're agreeing with one another: Aliens is not a sequel to Alien in the way that Transformers movies are sequels to one another.

Nooooope. You just said words that are not in agreement. The hint should have been that you contradicted what he said.

Laertes wrote:I posit that it is extremely hard to make a good sequel in genre: I can think of only two off the top of my head (The Godfather Part 2 and The Dark Knight), although there's probably some I've missed.

http://www.empireonline.com/50greatests ... lt.asp?c=1

I agree with about everything on the above list although there's plenty of worthy omissions.

So yeah, it may be that the top of your head just isn't much real estate.