Variety

[syntheticgerbil]

"He drove his car."

"The other guy drove his car also."

"He drove his car around a corner faster than the other guy."

"The other guy caught up!"

Repeat for at least 120 pages, find publisher, retire.

Haha this is awesome to think about.

In general, it seems most action, chases, and fights seems to come off boring in books. It's all better with visual flair in those cases.

[OssK]

I think I prefer fights in comics though…

[James]

I often wonder what the audio description tracks are like for action sequences. Or sex scenes. Does the narrator maintain a relatively neutral, or do they get into it?

So anyway, are films more varied than paintings because they have thousands of images rather than just one, and sound to boot? Or is that a foolishly reductive way of looking at things?

[Gwardinen]

So anyway, are films more varied than paintings because they have thousands of images rather than just one, and sound to boot? Or is that a foolishly reductive way of looking at things?

That's a good point. It would be difficult to claim films are more varied than paintings at this point in time, but I also wonder how much of that is to do with how much longer paintings have existed and that they are generally a non-collaborative art form. By which I mean, it is clear that the potential variety of films greatly exceeds that of paintings due to them being, as you said, thousands of images and sound, but the nature of creating films as a group at this time has constrained their actual variety. Changing technology may well broaden the variety of films as time passes.

[James]

My intended point was that the nature of the medium, including its limitations, are an important part of the art itself, and that the surface-level qualities of the medium can't really be used to determine its expressiveness or breadth.

Or, to take a slightly different approach, the possibilities of sufficiently well-established medium are essentially limitless, rendering comparison on such grounds irrelevant. Sure, there's theoretically more room for manoeuvre in some media than others, but I don't anticipate us reaching the end of any of them, so as far as I can tell it doesn't really matter.

[Gwardinen]

While I agree that we haven't reached the limitations of any of the art forms we've discussed, so their theoretical maximums aren't an issue yet, I don't think that means that we shouldn't consider their actual physical limitations in variety. Just because there are still an almost infinite number of unique paintings that can be made, doesn't mean that the fact that there are more "moving parts" in a game isn't relevant, simply because of the scale at work. When there are so many variables, as there are in the development of a film or game, one only has to change a relatively small subsection in order to make something radically different. By contrast, a "radically different" painting is often genuinely pretty different in terms of its physical composition.