ludology and art

[pirxthepilot]

as an addendum to what i said before i do find it difficult to name many worthwhile aesthetic achievements that come specifically from the internet, apart from works by a few artists (huyghes, evans, rafman).
second life? idk anything about it tho beyond a few chris marker animations. or what is that new game with a near- infinite number of beautifully-realised planets? help me out teen friends

[nope]

Think you mean , but as far as I know it kinda sucked in the end, mostly featuring a near-infinite number of incredibly similar, quite boring planets. I don't know if the complaints were about it being boring from a gameplay PoV or an aesthetic one (or both) though.

I think some of the stuff Holly Herndon & Matt Dryhurst have been doing is quite interesting re The Internet™. I can't find much about it now with a quick google but they recently had a show (or maybe a whole tour) where they took ticket buyers personal info and used it to data mine their social media accounts and then incorporated it into both the music and visuals on the night. So you'd get stuff like a massive projected bit of text congratulating someone on moving into their new house, screenshots of an audience member talking about the previous HH album with a friend, "Hi Jeff, thanks a lot for driving 43.5 miles to get here" etc etc.

More generally I think anything uniquely "internet" will have to lean on the hyperlink graph aspect and/or connectedness / privacy / permanence.

[pirxthepilot]

thanks, i wasn't necessarily asking about art, more things that arose as part of that medium either from subcultures (like, say, graffiti) or from corporate design (eg those silk cut ads from the 90s) that have come to be seen as having lasting aesthetic value
disappointing to hear that no mans sky didnt live up to the hype

[oucho]

tagging, obviously

[bels]

Nick Knight clearly reckons that there's aesthetic value in some of it but I agree that most of the aesthetics that emerge from the internet at the moment seem to be based on nostalgia (then again, culture in general is on a deep nostalgia thing at present so why would the internet be any different)

I guess the only forward thing (aside from tagging) I can think of is The New Aesthetic, which I'm into, not sure if you're familiar?

(
There's a lot of computer games with beautifully realised worlds/designs but they're almost all cribbing from cinema, contemporary animation or at best, nostalgic retro videogame aesthetics. I can't think of anything that has come out vaguely mainstream that leverages anything else. Minecraft might be one (blocky aesthetic is nostalgic for sure but more a victim of technological/gameplay constructs than anything else) or perhaps something like devil daggers or memory of a broken dimension

Most of the time for a game to be considered visually relevant it has to be an X game but executed with Y already known style for ex it's a platformer but in the style of 30s and 40s animation (cuphead) or it's a zelda game but it looks like a disney cartoon (the wind waker) or it' a horror game but set in a ridley scott sci fi world (routine)

Naturally regardless of how well realised or original the visual aesthetic of a game is it'll never be acceptable to reference it as an aesthetic due to the fact it's almost all window dressing for juvenile adventures anyway.
)

[pirxthepilot]

everything i saw tagged newaesthetic looks utterly vapid. are there any examples you like? (i mean i appreciate the idea, its just the execution is not great from what i can see.)
edit: hmm actually some of the stuff on bridles tumblr now looks quite interesting.

also something like manuel lima's visual complexity blog is one of the better examples, although i dont know how much of the work on there is actually internet-generated/based:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

[bels]

I can't think of any examples that have grabbed me or that I've really liked to be honest. I think I probably just like the idea of what was originally incidental design choices (design choices that are extremely similar to my work environment) being elevated and considered worthy of study/scrutiny

[nope]

[oucho]

I think glitch art had some interesting ideas: visually presenting raw data but quickly it became so gimmicky. I feel like it got stuck heading in a particular direction that was a dead end. But the way that images change through being uploaded/going through certain programs, for example the difference between a film you torrented and one you see in the cinema. I feel like does some good stuff in this area, the techniques he uses are quite funny, for example is from this old online program that was basically a drawing program with gimmicky brushes, it was kind of viral for like 2 weeks in like 2008 or something, plus he does a lot of smudging which is funny. Overall I just find his images really interesting.

And TAGS:

[adiabatic]

[bels]

What is it that you find aesthetically compelling about the game Adi? I've not played it but it didn't seem very relevant to me (I can't imagine a coked out junior ad exec in 15 years time saying "I want it to look like monument valley! That android game from my youth!") (the blue and orange colour palette looked hackneyed and the rest of the art style seemed a stable mash of contemporary aesthetics?)

Probably the most pure gaming aesthetic in it that I could think of was the isometric view, which AFAIK isn't really used in other "Art" mediums?

[pirxthepilot]

so those things in oucho's post are what tags are? hmm

[pirxthepilot]

are the adventures in video games really always/inevitably 'just' juvenile? even if that is the apparent format there's surely something potentially beautiful about the very depthlessness (says the man who has never played a video game).
film makers have riffed on this in remarkable ways: think of laura dern in inland empire, or the final scenes of spring breakers

edit: why?

[nope]

: I thought of that Monument game as well, not so much in response to pirx's original question but more re your point about how games drape pre-existing aesthetics over their particular mechanics rather than develop their own. "Cinematic" cut scenes that are just (slightly) lower-budget blockbusters etc. Seems like the only way that games could really offer anything different is if their aesthetics are informed by the underlying mechanics (ie what makes them games and not just stories) and vice versa. So Monument Valley's design seems relevant because it's not a "platformer but in an isometric style", but because the functions themselves are entirely reliant on the form.

I have no idea how that could then translate to a new aesthetic for coked-up ad execs to mine but it seems like a necessary first step. Maybe it's already happened but I've never really been a computer games guy so I'm probably not going to know about it much before said ad exec.

[rjbman]

[bels]

It's not always juvenile no and it's definitely not an inevitability. In fact the inevitability is surely going the other way, there's lots of non juvenile effort being made to work out what's interesting/beautiful outside of pointless recursive statements like "it's so boring it's kind of interesting" etc. But in my opinion barely any of it is there yet, which IS what makes games interesting right now. Basic questions like "how do you portray characters" or "how much control should be given to the user" or "how do we represent time and space" have not been answered and there seems like a lot of things up for grabs.

But I would still say that yes, mostly the incredible feats of communal creativity and human ingenuity are still in the service of hitting people with magical swords or shooting dudes. I can reel off games that I think are trying to do something more, but the amount that I really think are making it is low.

Probably if you want to investigate something it'd be best to find something for mobile phones (that monument valley game could be worth a punt or i think the milan trienale had a collection that looked good) or some of the modern text adventures like what exprof linked you (unfortunately I'm yet to find a gaming blog that only deals in art games that I could recommend, maybe someone else knows of one?). There's plenty of stuff to take a look at but if you've never played computer games you probably lack the "literacy" required to find most of the stuff on itch.io worth your struggle.

[Bonobonobo]

[bels]

You could be right,and I'm sure in time attitudes will change.

i keep thinking of things like The Witness or Metal Gear Solid V which I think are amazing, auteur level projects that get close to being something really great. But then i remember that the witness has random deep and meaningful tumblr tier quote voice overs scattered around and that MGSV has a woman who constantly has her tits out and I think "hmm, not quite there yet!"

[BobbyZamora]

[Copeland]

I thought the overall aesthetic of bloodbourne was pretty amazing, from artwork to storytelling, writing, etc.

[pirxthepilot]

don't really get the parallels with fashion (not sure why you'd bother making them tbh) but thanks, theres a lot of good stuff in that post and it was what i was hoping to find- which was why i questioned bela's initial assertion that it was all juvenilia etc. because i think ideas or narrative in most art forms are subsidiary to the much deeper sense of 'world' that the medium itself can generate ( i mentioned before that i end up talking to film-makers a lot about neveldene and taylor -they made 'crank'-, who have the apparent sensibility of adhd teenage boys, same GTA-type tropes, but are actually geniuses: the way they move the camera, the sense of bodies in motion is unique and its the pure stuff of film in the deleuzian sense )

didnt know about armond white, i will look at his stuff. steven shaviro is very interesting, here's his essay on neveldine/taylor's film 'gamer': http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=830

[Copeland]

Most RPG and adventure type games have roots in fantasy and sci-fi, speculative fiction. The developers and their audience share the same references to literary and pop culture. I don't wanna make a high/low distinction but it would be unfair to expect a group of creators with their own history and identity to conform to a different artistic tradition that has little to do with their own.

[adiabatic]

[adiabatic]

[adiabatic]

[can-]

i split this topic off.

i'm echoing some other sentiments in this thread, but i think in all critically important video games you find that the traditional departments of narrative art on screen (visual, audio, etc) are in service to the game making and not vice versa. it's popular to talk about games like braid, limbo, and ico/sotc and hold them up on the strength of their a/v design, but i think that puts the cart before the horse and misses exactly what makes video games such a compelling narrative form which is the genre's unique relationship to the reader and to agency.

[Copeland]

It's also that the technology of video games has developed so quickly that it's simply a different medium than anything that is or resembles art. Designers always have to consider how technology factors into what they want to accomplish, the process is fundamentally different and that a piece of horribly cheesy dialogue should not matter as much as if it appeared in a novel.

[can-]

i disagree. if you are playing a game and there is a cheesy line of dialogue you should turn it off and sell the game to a less discerning friend.

[oucho]

Now that I think about it more tagging was completely defined by the fact that it was an internet community. Most of the members came from anime and videogame forums and didn't have many, if any, art world references. I was talking to a tagger recently, who is one of the best taggers right now, who was saying he has never been to an art gallery. Tagging wasn't considered art, it was just considered tagging and there wasn't much of a feeling that you should be interested in the wider art world. Exposure to the wider art world tended to be famous historical artists or what was going on in online artgroups/deviantart, which was mainly pretty boring and didn't lead to anywhere other than designing 'cool' looking phone adverts. I feel like one of the biggest reasons tagging became what it was was because so many of the taggers were creative kids who didn't fit in as 'arty' kids at school or wherever and found an outlet through the internet. Then they stuck with tagging because it was the only place where really experimental stuff was going on on the internet (that we were aware of anyway).

Almost all tags fit into the general category of digital collage combined with Photoshop techniques so tagging was also completely defined by what you could do in PS/new techniques people developed in PS/what images you had access to online. Planetrenders was the main tagging forum from like 2006-2012 (ish) and one of the reasons for that is because it had a huge gallery of cutouts and C4Ds. Almost all of the cutouts were from videogame concept art or anime images. is an example of a C4D if you don't know what it is. It would be interesting to see a categorisation of all the images on the internet at the time because I bet a huge number of them were to do with videogames/anime. Access to 'resources' has always been a huge defining factor for tagging because so much of it is collage. I've always wondered what would happen if anyone wanted to actually put tags in a gallery because there is so much copyright infringement everywhere in tagging. Another reason tagging was popular is that it was difficult to find high res images online, so it was easier to work on a tiny canvas because you didn't need such large images. It's funny because one of the most common identifiers of a tag is a render of someone or something with either abstract effects or collage or whatever around it. I don't know why this was so enduringly popular (to the extent that almost all tags ever are like this). What's also funny is that these renders were almost always completely non-conceptual and random and just based on general aesthetic trends, for example after videogames and anime stock photos of musicians and fashion photography became the main renders. But it really didn't matter, until recently, what render you used because you expressed yourself through your use of technique and a slight variation on a technique or particular way of doing something always felt like it had an almost subconscious idea behind it, I feel like the conceptual side of tagging was very raw and undeveloped in a cool way. I guess one reason why the style of using a render mixed with abstract effects was so popular is because it was a style that distinctly worked on a tagging canvas and not on other canvases and I always felt the best tags were things that would never have worked on any other canvas size. There were quite a few taggers who just made tag-sized concept art, which always felt pointless because they were just less detailed, worse versions of proper concept art, same with photography.

The original tagging canvas size was designed to fit into a forum signature and was very small, as computer monitors got bigger tags got bigger too. There was some variation in dimensions but generally not that much, I've always maintained that the tagging canvas size is special and made it very easy to experiment and work with weird compositions, people often tried to size up tagging styles to larger, 'more serious' canvas sizes but no one ever succeeded and it's generally considered to be impossible.

It's interesting because almost every aspect of tagging is a result of the internet.

[BobbyZamora]

original source: https://youtu.be/w65sF8vxYeU