ludology and art

[BobbyZamora]

Highly recommend watching the whole 3 hour thing by the way.

In particular the part where he discusses Owlboy and pixel art, something I am personally invested in and something that I would gladly rub in the face of anyone who claims that videogames or the internet have not created any worthwhile aesthetics.

(And one may claim that pixel art is just another form of pointilism or mosaic art but I personally don't think it's as similar as some people think, particularly because of how rigid it actually is.)

I'm not really all that familiar with the "tagger culture" that's discussed in this thread but I'm guessing pixel art and its community has many similarities. Most were gamers with little exposure to the art world. However, the approach to the art is basically the complete opposite. Pixel art is extremely laborious and pixel artists are notoriously strict about what methods should be used to achieve its creation. Photoshop, extra effects and filters, and all manner of other things are generally frowned upon and oftentimes straight up just not allowed on many pixel art communities. If you're a good pixel artist, you can work in MS Paint without issue. Most of them do not venture too deeply in to the art world and if they do they go in to the circles where traditional forms of art and methods of learning are discussed.

Pixel artists do experiment but it's in a much different way. Extreme emphasis is put on how even the smallest clusters of pixels interact with eachother and precise and careful use of colour is in general probably more important in this medium than any other. Pixel artists repurpose old antiquated game limitations and technical workarounds to create new pieces of art in a way that I think is really unique and interesting in its own right. It's an art form where the true emphasis is in complete control over the end product, down to every last pixel, and every last hue used.

Pixel artists don't mix colours on an easel or using some sort of colour mixer tool, they methodically adjust hue, contrast and saturation until they can find the perfect shade to use. Each shade is deliberately hand picked and serves a unique and important role in every piece. And sometimes, pixel artists will put a true limitation upon themselves- such as limiting their colours to something that could be displayed on antiquated pieces of hardware.

Take this piece for example:



This is not a piece where the glitchiness and blockiness is haphazard or random. The description for this piece is "c64, multicolor mode, meant to be viewed on a rotated monitor. The code on the side explains why these colors do not look like normal c64 colors."

The same deal applies to these pieces:











The image is not distorted randomly. Everything you see is a result of the artist following the limitations of c64 hardware limitations.

This whole concept gets pushed further and further by pixel artists all the time, who are trying to test themselves and see what they can accomplish with the bare minimum.

Take this piece for example:



4 colours. Red, Green, Blue and Black.

Or even these:














2 colours. ONLY two colours. Less than the Gameboy. Nothing inbetween. Locked to a grid, and usually done on a very tiny canvas. It is pretty damn close to the bare minimum of what an artist can work with in a visual sense.

Even with stuff that is clearly rooted in videogames and nostalgia, there's plenty of interesting ideas and visual themes going on.



Like this piece and its unique and honestly pretty gorgeous palette.


Pixel art is not a medium that's simply defined by its ties to videogames or its association with nostalgia. It is defined by its meticulousness and its approach to self-limitation, and the way that approach can conjure its own distinct aesthetic. It's an exercise in how the eye perceives shape and colour even on the smallest, most precise scale. Pixel artists don't just "draw" when they create art, what they really do is solve visual problems that have really precise answers. In my opinion it is the purest form of digital art that one can create.

I highly recommend that you try creating some pixel art for yourself. Not just any pixel art, but pixel art with a hard limitation. Try a 100x100 pixel or smaller canvas, and a limit of only 2 colours. See what you can create, see what solutions you can think of to solve the problems you'll encounter. There's something really great and unique to be experienced in the zen of pixel art.

There's a lot more that could be said about it but I'll finish the post here.

[oucho]

Sometimes I feel like the fact that animation and videogames moved into 3D has kind of held them back. It just seems like people have really struggled to make really interesting work in 3D. Am I completely wrong? Talking about pure 3D not stuff like 2001.

[bels]

disclaimer: I haven't watched the video you linked and I don't want in any way to run down the very serious work, dedication, creativity and craftsmanship that goes into every aspect of making computer games. Nor do I think that games in general can't aspire to be something great or that they're not. Computer games are the art form I'm most interested in but I would say I'm extremely critical of their current position (possibly because I hate myself).

A lot of what you linked above is really cool and I'd love to see more of it (I remember you used to post some of your stuff in the other threads and I enjoyed that too, it also just so happened that a night ago i downloaded a pixel art making app on my phone and have been trying to "sketch" random objects (without much success) which is a lot of fun) but if I was to look at it "critically", I wouldn't find much of it compelling aside from being pretty. Probably that first image piques my interest most, but a lot of it falls into the complaints I had before, pictures of monsters, robots and men with swords are not interesting to me regardless of the artifice that it has taken to execute them. It feels the same as when I go to see a lot of classical art: It's gorgeous, I love to look at it, I'm in awe of it and its craftmanship and occassionally it conveys a mood or captures an emotion. But it doesn't manage to interrogate anything serious or unique about our world, doesn't push me into thinking differently or considering something new. I'm OK with that in classical art but I'm not OK with it in what's meant to be the most vital and cutting edge of art forms.

I feel like there's a tendency to dodge computer game criticisms by falling back and saying oh well it's a game, so you have to ignore (for eg) a bad plotline, because games don't need plotlines, does tennis need a plotline? No, but tennis also doesn't have a plotline. I think it's a failure to say DOTA is a great game but doesn't need a plot. The plot is there, it was added, why is it so crap/inconsequential/juvenile? Why are we willing to put up with this?

I didn't play owlboy so I don't want to comment on it (I agree that the art looks very nice) but I did play monument valley, the game mentioned a while back. I liked my time playing it overall and recommend it but it felt like 8.5/10ths of the levels devolved into randomly moving bits of the level around until something worked (the final level was the only one that really felt like something) and it had a naff ghost saying eye rolly things every so often. A lot of the design (art/music) was on point but in the service of this not fully realised mechanic which made it feel like a toy. Why should we let games fall short like this? I get a kick out of finding the one important part of the most stupid things just as much as any pop culture armchair critic, but how many of what you consider to be the best music/films/books required you to ignore one part of their creation being really skewy?

I agree with you that the best games are about putting you in a place and think that STALKER and Dark Souls are great examples to bring up, games where design and gameplay come together to make a world that proposes something (or many things) about our world in a way that no other artform can (I'd include Silent Hill 2 and probably Metal Gear Solid 2 as other games that manage to do something similar). I would even say these games transcend issues of being about playing soldier or killing monsters, because they aren't about these things and this is very clear if you play them. However I still feel that games like this are the exception rather than the rule and that writing off criticisms as high/low culture concerns or snobbishness isn't useful for the artform at all.

[thephfactor]

I think one of the main differences and drawbacks of video games as a work of art is their emergence under late capitalism and particularly the computer age. The economic and ideological relations of video games are all fundamentally different than those of the novels, which essentially predate capitalism, and films. I would venture to say that video games are more "ideologically determined" as a general rule than novels or films, simply due to the difference of modes of capitalism they are created under. By this I suppose I mean that the individual making video games is generally less free or less encouraged to express an original or subversive meaning through their art. In the film journal Cahiers du Cinema, Comolli and Narboni wrote that films were “more thoroughly and completely determined” ideologically than a work of literature, because their “very manufacture mobilizes powerful economic forces” that a work of literature does not (at the manufacturing level). I see video games as being progressively "more thoroughly and completely determined" than films for the same reason. One only needs to a at the of the video games industry to see what kinds of "economic forces" are harnessed to make them.

This is not to say that all video games are bad, just that the vast majority of them, and in a more consistent way than films or literature, are "bad". Comolli and Narboni suggest a way that the filmmaker can counter the tendency: they can “disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function” by breaking with the industry’s “so-called ‘depiction of reality’”. This is vague but I think we can identify a few examples of video games, even those created in big studios, that genuinely counter the ruling ideology's reality. Kojima would be a good example, with his torturous plots of conspiracy and deep states and computer simulations, preposterous ideas that break with our concept of reality, but are somehow being proved feasible as the years pass. Kentucky Route Zero is another favorite of mine, and one could write an entire essay about how the nation's imagined reality of Kentucky and the South is subverted by the video game series. These games are rare but they do exist.

A couple of essays that influence my thinking about video games: by Tevis Thompson (often a contrarian blowhard, but good here), and The Neoliberal Language of Videogames by Lana Polansky (can't find a working link to that atm). As well as the cited Cahiers .

[BobbyZamora]

One thing to remember is that the art world is a pretty insular place. It's very easy to get sucked in to a trap of thinking a certain way about art and its relationship with the world and the consumer.

Videogames are a very new medium, interactive art is still in its infancy and to me it's always seemed very odd that people are expecting it to challenge their worldview and be subversive even when it's such a new thing. Most developers are not approaching videogames with the angle of what they want to say about ____, most of them are approaching them like engineers.

While a lot of the games mentioned here are great, and do present some cool subversive ideas, that really isn't the main thing they're offering. There's something to be said about the art of Fun, which is ultimately what videogames are striving to achieve. Take a look in to how Nintendo manufactures its games if you want a clearer picture- the goal is never to create a work that subverts the medium or challenge the player's thinking in a unique way, it's always focused around core gameplay ideas and what is "fun", that's why devs will spend months tweaking the main character's movement until it feels right.

Why subvert the medium when its main offering is so unexplored already? It seems a little premature to me.

[oucho]

There are aspects of pixel art that present ideas: using specific computer models as a canvas, working in a technologically outdated medium, presenting everything as a videogame. Based on the pixel art I have seen, which is not much, I would agree that it isn't changing the world but it's a young art form full of people who aren't much exposed to the larger art world. It's a double edged sword because a community that develops away from the art world can develop new ideas but they are also often very stale and not preoccupied with breaking new ground (based on my experience of internet 'art' communities). That's not to say that over time they can't develop, it just requires the right individuals at the right time to move things forward.

[bels]

Here's an essay about games that I liked from my friend Patrick that talks about meaningful themes in a juvenile setting

http://marginalgloss.tumblr.com/post/15 ... ip-of-time

[oucho]

and here's the new LP Crop: http://lpcrop.tumblr.com/

[adiabatic]

[vgtbls]

Yahtzee is bad because he thought Monster Hunter was too hard and he didn't get it. Dude's a joooooke

[BobbyZamora]

[thephfactor]

As an illustration of my earlier post, is it a coincidence that Tetris was developed in a (nominally) non-capitalist context? (And hasn't it only gotten shittier as its been absorbed into that economy?) Makes you think ...

[BobbyZamora]

thephfactor, have you ever played any of the Oddworld games? Matthewmatosis discusses them at the end of that Bioshock video I posted previously. I highly recommend checking them out if you haven't already. Stick to the originals though, I don't think the remake does the game much justice.

They were developed by Lorne Lanning, who is pretty outspoken about the exact thing you're talking about in this thread- that capitalism is ruining videogames.

Oddworld tends to get overlooked by people since it looks a little juvenile based on the cover, and also because there's a fart joke built in to the control scheme, but it's honestly an amazing series and the game is quite literally anti-capitalism in videogame form. It's a very scathing critique of capitalism. In fact, I'm not sure the game would have ever even been made if it wasn't for the fact that Lorne Lanning got lucky by entering the games industry with 3D Animation experience in a time where nobody in the industry had those skills yet. That alone gave him a lot of leeway in terms of what sort of game he was allowed to pursue.

Right off the bat the game already is a little different since instead of some musclebound hero or badass you're a wimpy green dude who is effectively a slave to this giant corporation. They made a clear decision to also not give him a weapon which at the time was a bold choice considering everyone else in the industry was going in the opposite direction. (Insomniac Studios, upon being asked why they sold the rights to Spyro to Activision, said that they felt the character was limiting because "he can't even hold a gun.")

The villains in the game are literally a species of hyper-capitalists who are portrayed as incredibly exploitative and greedy. They are so lazy in the game that their legs are shriveled and atrophied, forcing them to walk on their hands. They then don these power-suits which makes them look like an extreme caricature of the sort of person that pops in to your head when you think of a greedy capitalist.

But those are just the villains- they only appear in cutscenes. The actual antagonist in Oddworld is capitalism itself, which takes the form of the meat factory the game is set in.

It's kind of on-the-nose but necessarily so. It's absolutely true that capitalism hurts videogames as an artform. I'm convinced it's also the reason Oddworld Inhabitants hasn't released anything in over a decade despite being a successful company- every time they start work on a game it ends up in development hell for a variety of issues, all of which stem from the capitalist nature of the videogames industry.

MMO's have it the worst though. World of Warcraft was so successful that every MMO that has come out since is basically just copying that formula and trying to recapture the success of that series. That's why they're all so bland and boring. It doesn't help that they're even more laborious to develop than normal videogames.

[INNIT]

did we ever decide if videogames are art or why it matters to call things art?

anyways, I just played oikospiel, which is a game presumably about ecocriticism and unionization, but it could also just be about dogs playing sheet music. probably the most bizarre/innovative game that i've ever played. the only original content in the entire game is its music; the rest of the game is composed of assets from other games (no idea how the dev got around trademark issues, literally uses the disney "D", donkey kong, etc.). idk, really interesting shit, i'd love for others on here to check it out.

here's a trailer that doesn't really capture the game but oh well: