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clyde

Minimalism

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Cool piece!  Kuchera's piece on Mountain was bad.  Maybe a bit easy to take down...   :)

 

 

 

"Formal qualities are rarely considered as the core of a game. Even in the most formally expressive games, these qualities exist to be interacted with, rather than observed and appreciated in their own right (see RezIco,Journey etc.)."

 

I had no idea what he meant here, though.  I wish he had taken a moment to just give us one example of what he means by an interactive formally expressive quality.

 

Also funny how he slips in his dissatisfaction of Mountain in the footnote.

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I enjoyed this too because it takes the idea of a formalist approach into account (though doesn't seem to give it much effort) and still comes to the conclusion that Mountain is not for them. I enjoy reading about this struggle.

http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/91313343735/thoughts-on-why-i-am-unable-to-appreciate-mountain

"Formal qualities are rarely considered as the core of a game. Even in the most formally expressive games, these qualities exist to be interacted with, rather than observed and appreciated in their own right (see Rez, Ico,Journey etc.)."

I had no idea what he meant here, though. I wish he had taken a moment to just give us one example of what he means by an interactive formally expressive quality.

I thought they were saying that non-interactive form is part of the game.

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Now that I've read through it a bit more the final paragraph bugged me:  His solution to the problem that game criticism struggles with talking about formalism is that more Mountains need to be made, as that will widen the scope of critical acceptance.  That seems crazy.  Some (most) people will always think that formalist art is stupid no matter how much of it there is in the world.

 

So I don't think Ben's piece on Mountain is a problem that needs a solution.  You can't teach people to appreciate formalist art unless they're willing.  There's a lot of formalist art, music, books, poetry, etc. and that hasn't widened the discourse, it just displaces it elsewhere, to its own niche.  For now we should enjoy the fact that a formalist game touched so many people.  Enjoy this discussion because it probably won't last.

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Ben Kuchera spends a lot of time and energy throwing around words concerning problems that don't require solutions.

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Now that I've read through it a bit more the final paragraph bugged me:  His solution to the problem that game criticism struggles with talking about formalism is that more Mountains need to be made, as that will widen the scope of critical acceptance.  That seems crazy.  Some (most) people will always think that formalist art is stupid no matter how much of it there is in the world.

 

So I don't think Ben's piece on Mountain is a problem that needs a solution.  You can't teach people to appreciate formalist art unless they're willing.  There's a lot of formalist art, music, books, poetry, etc. and that hasn't widened the discourse, it just displaces it elsewhere, to its own niche.  For now we should enjoy the fact that a formalist game touched so many people.  Enjoy this discussion because it probably won't last.

 

I do think that if a larger audience was exposed to more non-objective applications that this attitude of "The person who made this is just trying to trick me" would dissipate. I would say that the most formalism I see applied to games is on Game Jolt. The expectations of that community are vastly different than the expectations of Steam-users. Of course, it's not an entirely fair comparison because people understand that Game Jolt content is usually work in process or "I'm done experimenting with this idea" and formalism is incredibly useful in analyzing unfinished work that promises little. But isn't this form of analysis much more likely in a community of people who are actually creating in the same media? Look at the comments given to this game for example.

 

Right now, most self-identified gamers have very inflexible definitions of what a "game" is. And when that definition changes, it changes what they are identifying themselves with. So we have them trying to keep the meaning pure. Meanwhile many people who may be attracted to formalist games are turned off from games because they view them as highly competitive dexterity challenges or adolescent fantasy narratives. Both sides are divining a self-fulfilling prophesy which limits the medium to avoid any dissonance with something they see no need to question. Not-games, walking-simulators, and screen-savers are broadening those expectations. The goal isn't to make sure that everyone appreciates formalist games, the goal is to create enough tolerance where they can exist for themselves rather than as an antithesis. 

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Ben Kuchera spends a lot of time and energy throwing around words concerning problems that don't require solutions.

 

Certainly you can't really use Ben Kuchera as an example of problems with game writing unless the problems are 'Ben Kuchera keeps getting hired and none of his peers seem to notice he's a hack'.

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I wouldn't normally find myself defending Kuchera, but I think skepticism in the face of certain types of art is not...unwarranted. 

 

I think it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if a joke is being played on you when you've got a person whose work history includes animations for the Hitchhiker's Guide; writing, directing and animating an Adventure Time episode; and a YouTube hoax featuring an invented 9 year old boy.  Fuck, given that history, I think Kuchera's response is far more honest than people who haven't (publicly) considered whether it is a joke.

 

I'll admit that I struggle to appreciate some minimalist art.  I rather like minimalist architecture and house design, but in particular  works of minimalist visual art just do absolutely nothing for me, even if I can recognize that real skill and craft went into their creation. 

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Well, that's the problem: there's a long history of pranks played on over-important fields that seem to have no critical facility to separate good works from works assembled at random - Naked Came The Stranger, Ern Malley, the Sokal affair - and it feels like the game press, to their credit, saw Mountain as a weird little Tamagotchi-like thing that had some charm to it but not a lot of gameplay, and that was fine because it was entertaining and charming on the terms it presented itself as. If it was a hoax, it was a poor one, because it felt exactly like the work of an animator making a game for the first time, big on ideas but short on making them accessible to players.

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So I don't really know what a "formalist game" is. I was thinking that it is a game where the distractions of objectives and agency are stripped away so that the polygons, sounds, and colors could be observed for what they are away from those dependencies. Does this mean that tech-demos are formalist games? When I see people discussing frame-rate and shaders, are they examining games through a formalist analysis?

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Well, that's the problem: there's a long history of pranks played on over-important fields that seem to have no critical facility to separate good works from works assembled at random - Naked Came The Stranger, Ern Malley, the Sokal affair - and it feels like the game press, to their credit, saw Mountain as a weird little Tamagotchi-like thing that had some charm to it but not a lot of gameplay, and that was fine because it was entertaining and charming on the terms it presented itself as. If it was a hoax, it was a poor one, because it felt exactly like the work of an animator making a game for the first time, big on ideas but short on making them accessible to players.

 

The difference with all three of those (if I'm remember the details correctly) is that they were all presented by credible creators, with the intention of pulling the rug out from beneath people eventually and revealing the hoax.  But O'Reilly has already made one hoax.  We have someone who has previously wanted to observe how YouTube viewers would respond to what they thought was an animated short created by a 9 year old, and then again how they would respond when the hoax was revealed.  Fair or not, once you've done that, I think you've invited skepticism about future works. 

 

I want to be clear that I do not think Mountain is a hoax, as his presentation of it does not misrepresent it or him in anyway.  It might be a joke or a prank, but he didn't seek to deceive anyone about what it is.  If it is anything other than an earnest attempt at a minimalist interactive audio/video experience, I would suspect that similar to the YouTube experiment, O'Reilly just wanted to see how people would react.  Positive or negative, it doesn't matter.  Which you could probably make an argument about it being the kind of work that draws the audience into becoming a part of the art, for those who choose to publicly write about it.  In which case Kuchera is now a part Mountain, forever.  He has symbolically crashed into the Mountain and become one with it.

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I should clarify that I don't think there is anything wrong with Mountain, even if the intent was as a joke or as an Andy Kaufman like piece whose primary purpose was the entertainment of the creator.  That doesn't detract from it for me, I just think it's a reasonable question to ask about it.

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The difference with all three of those (if I'm remember the details correctly) is that they were all presented by credible creators, with the intention of pulling the rug out from beneath people eventually and revealing the hoax.  But O'Reilly has already made one hoax.  We have someone who has previously wanted to observe how YouTube viewers would respond to what they thought was an animated short created by a 9 year old, and then again how they would respond when the hoax was revealed.  Fair or not, once you've done that, I think you've invited skepticism about future works. 

 

I want to be clear that I do not think Mountain is a hoax, as his presentation of it does not misrepresent it or him in anyway.  It might be a joke or a prank, but he didn't seek to deceive anyone about what it is.  If it is anything other than an earnest attempt at a minimalist interactive audio/video experience, I would suspect that similar to the YouTube experiment, O'Reilly just wanted to see how people would react.  Positive or negative, it doesn't matter.  Which you could probably make an argument about it being the kind of work that draws the audience into becoming a part of the art, for those who choose to publicly write about it.  In which case Kuchera is now a part Mountain, forever.  He has symbolically crashed into the Mountain and become one with it.

 

I just watched the

and I see something that I feel deserves distinction. Here is a quotation from the McMaster article:

 

In a recent article for Polygon, Ben Kuchera described David O’Reilly’sMountain as “a one dollar video game that seems to be laughing at people who strain to find meaning in abstract indie titles.” This is a problem.

 

and you seem to see a similarilty between Kuchera's sentiment here with Octocat when you say 

 

 But O'Reilly has already made one hoax.  We have someone who has previously wanted to observe how YouTube viewers would respond to what they thought was an animated short created by a 9 year old, and then again how they would respond when the hoax was revealed.  Fair or not, once you've done that, I think you've invited skepticism about future works. 

 

One of the connections between these ways of looking at a potential hoax is that the audience is a stooge. The pay-off of the piece is at the expense of the audience. To do this could be detrimental because it decreases the capacity for appreciation rather than increasing it. That is not at all what I get from Octocat.

seems to be an attempt to show that an MsPaint amateurish animation and the framework of being an 8-year old on Youtube are a viable tools for expressing something. I think Octocat increases my appreciation of Youtube videos by 8-year olds in a similar way as something like this.

Frog Fractions is a good comparison. Just because people don't know how the magic-trick works doesn't mean that they are being laughed at.

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I don't know if I like the way that Mountain is being described as minimalist. Visually, it's very lush and the text prompts which show up are sarcastic in a way that doesn't gel with my understanding of the minimalist aesthetic. The possibilities of interaction may be few and breadth of content may be small, but it still feels maximalist in the way it presents that content. In many ways, it provides a similar experience to looking at a snow globe, and I wouldn't consider a snow globe to be a minimalist work of art.

 

I suppose if you're comparing it with video games then it does feel minimalist, but compared to art in general (and I guess I'm thinking mainly of Minimalist visual art from the 60s and 70s), it gives the viewer quite a lot to work with. Personally, I don't think it's useful to judge Mountain based on comparisons to video games just because it uses real-time 3D.

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Between the interview with Klepick and the stuff O'Riely has been retweeting, I'm 90% sure it is some kind of troll.

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I don't know if I like the way that Mountain is being described as minimalist. Visually, it's very lush and the text prompts which show up are sarcastic in a way that doesn't gel with my understanding of the minimalist aesthetic. The possibilities of interaction may be few and breadth of content may be small, but it still feels maximalist in the way it presents that content. In many ways, it provides a similar experience to looking at a snow globe, and I wouldn't consider a snow globe to be a minimalist work of art.

 

I suppose if you're comparing it with video games then it does feel minimalist, but compared to art in general (and I guess I'm thinking mainly of Minimalist visual art from the 60s and 70s), it gives the viewer quite a lot to work with. Personally, I don't think it's useful to judge Mountain based on comparisons to video games just because it uses real-time 3D.

 

I agree with you. I could make an argument that the game should be considered as an minimalist excercise because it seems like an attempt to pare down interactivity, but that argument doesn't really work for me because of what you've stated. I just put it in this thread because I didn't want to start a new thread, Mountain analysis seems vaguely reminicent to analysis of minimalist paintings, and there was the extra bonus of being able to see Kuchera praising minimal-design principles in the same thread. My point is, you are right. But it's too late now. Unless someone else wants to start a Mountain thread.

 

Anyway, Ian Bogost wrote this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/you-are-mountain/374543/

-via JP LeBreton.

 

Here is an excerpt:

Instead, these koans are just prompts, prompts that invite you the player to ponder the nature of your separation from a mountain—or for that matter, anything that might embed itself in the slope of one. Think of them as little exercises, invitations the game extends to you to help you think through the impassible valley between your own experience and the unknowable experience of an entity like a mountain. “I sense overwhelming calm in this enigmatic night” or “This just feels like a colossal waste of time” are not clues about the 3D mountain’s internal state, but an invitation to speculate on a mountain’s version of such emotional or intellectual orientations. When Mountain declares “There is something missing,” or “I can do whatever I want!” it ventriloquizes the player rather than addressing him or her.

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I don't agree that Mountain can not be considered minimalist just because the design doesn't express the aesthetic of other minimalist works (particularly from other mediums). I think as evidence from the discussion itt it's safe to say that there are a multitude of frameworks by which an object can be analyzed. Sure if you want to talk about Mountain as an extension of capital M Minimalism in the 60s and 70s it doesn't exactly fit in. But that minimalism was a reaction to a very different historical background and using a very different tool set than what Mountain has emerged from. If you want to talk about a game as a minimalist creation sure compare it to other works in other mediums but games come with their own history of design that should not be ignored.

 

As an illustration of this consider something like pong which at least chronologically if not aesthetically fits in with the minimalism of the early 70s and is itself a distillation of table tennis. While Minimalist art at the time was taking hundreds of years of "technology" in the form of tools and technique and reducing it to its essential elements Pong was limited in its expression by technology. Now, more than 40 years later, almost anything expressible in traditional art can conceivably be expressed within a video game (though not without being passed through the lens of medium). Technology hasn't slowed for games either. Every day new hardware and software techniques are being developed to allow developers a broader tool set to inform their ideas. This is where minimalism can come in.

 

Because games aren't traditional art, developers have the choice to express themselves minimally in a variety of different ways. You can make your game with simple aesthetics and gameplay (i would argue gameplay is a formal element of games as well as an aspect of its aesthetic but that's a different conversation all together) like pong or you can produce something new that speaks with the vernacular of modern games but only discusses it in small parts. This isn't exhaustive of course but I think of Mountain as an example of the latter. Another example of minimalism might be found in the demoscene where a product is created through the use of the most basic tools. A video game might be made in tens of kilobytes written primarily in assembly language.

 

A framework by which Mountain can be observed that can be applied to any created thing is by distilling it to a series of decisions. Minimalist art can be observed this way. A series of lines on a canvas can be considered as thoughtfully (or not) placed just so and the result is an aesthetic product. In a game like mountain similar considerations must be made. Regardless of whether the intent of the author was to troll the games commentary community (arguably one of the easiest to troll yet) or not, Mountain had to be produced and decisions had to be made to get there. Maybe a measure of minimalism can be found in the number of decisions in a final product? If that was the case then games face a lot of buried considerations. For example whether the developer uses unity, unreal, or their own engine to produce a game can result in a widely different form of the final product.

 

I won't speak too much more here but I will say one last thing: Almost any game can be used to do an analysis on the form of games. A game itself can use the "text" of the game (i.e. its own form) to confer a notion about it and other game/artwork. Any game can be used to make a relative judgement of the form of games as a whole. As such, I think the term "formalist game" is a bit misguided

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I won't speak too much more here but I will say one last thing: Almost any game can be used to do an analysis on the form of games. A game itself can use the "text" of the game (i.e. its own form) to confer a notion about it and other game/artwork. Any game can be used to make a relative judgement of the form of games as a whole. As such, I think the term "formalist game" is a bit misguided

 

For you, what might a formalist game look like?

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I don't agree that Mountain can not be considered minimalist just because the design doesn't express the aesthetic of other minimalist works (particularly from other mediums). I think as evidence from the discussion itt it's safe to say that there are a multitude of frameworks by which an object can be analyzed. Sure if you want to talk about Mountain as an extension of capital M Minimalism in the 60s and 70s it doesn't exactly fit in. But that minimalism was a reaction to a very different historical background and using a very different tool set than what Mountain has emerged from. If you want to talk about a game as a minimalist creation sure compare it to other works in other mediums but games come with their own history of design that should not be ignored.

 

As an illustration of this consider something like pong which at least chronologically if not aesthetically fits in with the minimalism of the early 70s and is itself a distillation of table tennis. While Minimalist art at the time was taking hundreds of years of "technology" in the form of tools and technique and reducing it to its essential elements Pong was limited in its expression by technology. Now, more than 40 years later, almost anything expressible in traditional art can conceivably be expressed within a video game (though not without being passed through the lens of medium). Technology hasn't slowed for games either. Every day new hardware and software techniques are being developed to allow developers a broader tool set to inform their ideas. This is where minimalism can come in.

 

Because games aren't traditional art, developers have the choice to express themselves minimally in a variety of different ways. You can make your game with simple aesthetics and gameplay (i would argue gameplay is a formal element of games as well as an aspect of its aesthetic but that's a different conversation all together) like pong or you can produce something new that speaks with the vernacular of modern games but only discusses it in small parts. This isn't exhaustive of course but I think of Mountain as an example of the latter. Another example of minimalism might be found in the demoscene where a product is created through the use of the most basic tools. A video game might be made in tens of kilobytes written primarily in assembly language.

 

A framework by which Mountain can be observed that can be applied to any created thing is by distilling it to a series of decisions. Minimalist art can be observed this way. A series of lines on a canvas can be considered as thoughtfully (or not) placed just so and the result is an aesthetic product. In a game like mountain similar considerations must be made. Regardless of whether the intent of the author was to troll the games commentary community (arguably one of the easiest to troll yet) or not, Mountain had to be produced and decisions had to be made to get there. Maybe a measure of minimalism can be found in the number of decisions in a final product? If that was the case then games face a lot of buried considerations. For example whether the developer uses unity, unreal, or their own engine to produce a game can result in a widely different form of the final product.

 

I won't speak too much more here but I will say one last thing: Almost any game can be used to do an analysis on the form of games. A game itself can use the "text" of the game (i.e. its own form) to confer a notion about it and other game/artwork. Any game can be used to make a relative judgement of the form of games as a whole. As such, I think the term "formalist game" is a bit misguided

 

I think you're right that minimalism should be a flexible term which refers more to a way of working than to a specific visual effect. I think it's Mountain's post-modern sense of cynicism and insincerity which makes the minimalist label feel inappropriate. For me, minimalism seems to be born out of a sincere, almost faith-like belief that a given art form can be reduced to it's most basic essence, and that this reduction will result in a more pure form of beauty.

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I think you're right that minimalism should be a flexible term which refers more to a way of working than to a specific visual effect. I think it's Mountain's post-modern sense of cynicism and insincerity which makes the minimalist label feel inappropriate. For me, minimalism seems to be born out of a sincere, almost faith-like belief that a given art form can be reduced to it's most basic essence, and that this reduction will result in a more pure form of beauty.

 

On what are you basing these observations of cynicism and insincerity? I haven't played Mountain, but I watched some of his videos. Here is some of David OReilly's video-work. It doesn't strike me as insincere, but I do get a good hint of the cynicism from which existentialist struggle is born. That form of cynicism is incredibly optimistic in my view; you have to be optimistic in order to accept the fact that we are trapped in our own experiences with no objective purpose, but you are going to move onward anyway.

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I won't speak too much more here but I will say one last thing: Almost any game can be used to do an analysis on the form of games. A game itself can use the "text" of the game (i.e. its own form) to confer a notion about it and other game/artwork. Any game can be used to make a relative judgement of the form of games as a whole. As such, I think the term "formalist game" is a bit misguided

 

You're losing me here. Can you give me an example of what you mean?

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On what are you basing these observations of cynicism and insincerity? I haven't played Mountain, but I watched some of his videos. Here is some of David OReilly's video-work. It doesn't strike me as insincere, but I do get a good hint of the cynicism from which existentialist struggle is born. That form of cynicism is incredibly optimistic in my view; you have to be optimistic in order to accept the fact that we are trapped in our own experiences with no objective purpose, but you are going to move onward anyway.

 

Looking back on what I wrote, insincere might have been the wrong word to use. What I meant was that in another context (like say Skyrim), a 3D model of a mountain might be intended as a simple reproduction of natural beauty. This game also uses a relatively naturalistic visual style, but it doesn't seem intended to provide only aesthetic pleasure; I find that the game makes me conscious of the mountain's artificiality more than anything.

 

Anyway, I didn't mean to use 'insincere' as a negative value judgment and I like your thoughts on cynical optimism.

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