Jake

Idle Thumbs 162: Cavorting Amongst the Corpses

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Anyway, i would actually be very interested in what the global share of listeners looks like.

 

That would also have been the one I was most interested in the results to, but it's missing from the summary page at the end. :-(

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I wanted the Miracle Piano Teaching System. I know I saw ads for it, but a small tickle in the back of my brain is telling me I encountered it in person.

It's a weird feeling to be reminded of something that you once cared about but haven't thought of in more than 20 years.

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"Games are pretty different [from movies]."

- Chris Remo

 

The whole conversation about how (not) to pitch your game was interesting. The inability of the average consumer to differentiate between mechanics and theme is definitely something that has been an issue for a long time. Most of the time when people say "I have a great game idea" they really have a narrative idea. I think there's still a general lack of games-mechanics-literacy among those who purchase games, so people don't have the context to think about what the game is actually doing as a game, or the vocabulary to discuss it even if they did. Of course, it doesn't help that the field is so young that there's even today a relative dearth of critical thinking about game mechanics, and there's certainly no kind of consensus in the field about how various things should be considered or even a common agreed upon vocabulary for many concepts.

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I can totally understand why the guys are "done" with the "Ubisoft Game" template. It seems like for the last few years every open-world game Ubisoft has made has been a sort of iteration on Assassin's Creed II's gameplay loop. They've transplanted that into Far Cry and Watch Dogs.

 

Howver, I still want to believe when it comes to Far Cry 4 and AC Unity.

 

With Unity specifically, Ubisoft dropped words like "systemic" during their gameplay presentations. They specifically described that they're "fixing" the tailing missions by basically making them more open-ended. Like, the main objective will be just "find out where this guy's headed," and some choices might be either tailing him or just killing him and grabbing a note off his body or something like that.

 

At least Ubisoft is trying. I think I'll give Unity a chance. One chance.

 

"Games are pretty different [from movies]."

- Chris Remo

 

The whole conversation about how (not) to pitch your game was interesting. The inability of the average consumer to differentiate between mechanics and theme is definitely something that has been an issue for a long time. Most of the time when people say "I have a great game idea" they really have a narrative idea. I think there's still a general lack of games-mechanics-literacy among those who purchase games, so people don't have the context to think about what the game is actually doing as a game, or the vocabulary to discuss it even if they did. Of course, it doesn't help that the field is so young that there's even today a relative dearth of critical thinking about game mechanics, and there's certainly no kind of consensus in the field about how various things should be considered or even a common agreed upon vocabulary for many concepts.

 

This is very similar to what I used to have to go through. A few years back I reviewed games for a publication aimed at general (read: non-hardcore gaming) audiences, and what I chose to do is basically describe games almost purely in terms of what you actually do when playing them. Typically this would start out with a description of a situation you might encounter in the game, and I tried really hard not to fall into jargon like "first person shooter" or "action RPG."

 

Personally, I think that might actually be the best way to describe games or the most "right" way in terms of distinguishing games as their own medium. If the narrative is mostly told in cut scenes then that really shouldn't be the main draw of the game. Most average consumers also only really give a crap about what you actually do when playing a game, many may still ask the question "what's the object of the game?" like they would of football or something, because a lot of people sort of aren't aware of games trying to be cinematic or sitting you down to tell you linear narratives.

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For those who might be interested, here are the two articles about how art gets valued:

 

http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/grizzly-bear-shields.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/movies/the-paradox-of-art-as-work.html?_r=0

And here's another one for good measure, about bands much nearer and dearer to my heart.

http://therunout.com/post/88686417571/slacktivist-fan-entitlement-is-slowly-killing-punk

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Regarding 'sclusives, someone tallied up the actual exclusives, which turns out pretty hilarious since pretty much everything that Microsoft and Sony showed was described via some manner of exclusivity.

 

Di9kCQd.png

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I LOVE Rocksmith! I've been learning guitar for 6-7 months now, and am really enjoying it thanks to the different activities and songs available. I recently started a more structured way of learning, going from the basics with JustinGuitar.com, which is an amazing resource of tutorials and videos (hosted on the Justin Guitar youtube channel. It is entirely free, but donations are welcome. Whereas Rocksmith teaches songs, and some crazy advanced techniques, JustinGuitar goes through different chords in order of ease and use, and also shows you how to play various songs with the techniques so far. By contrast, Rocksmith can have huge difficulty cliffs, like when a power chord suddenly becomes a barre chord. I fear barre chords!

 

Judging by the Star Citizen discussion in this episode, the Thumbs REALLY need to check out Elite Dangerous! I was one of three Ambassadors from the backer community that was chosen to represent the game at E3.... it was utterly exhausting but also very rewarding thanks to the  huge positive reaction from everyone that we showed it to... we got a best of E3 award from Escapist plus one other thing I can't remember, and a nomination from IGN Italia. Here is the E3 trailer

 

It is exactly the kind of middle ground they were talking about... I have played it with a gamepad for the last 6 months, and it really works  thanks to some clever UI and fully customizable bindings (you can also rebind controls for docking for ease of movement), but it is best played with a throttle and stick.

 

And here is a live gameplay demo:

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/cy8p22/elite--dangerous-e3-2014--walkthrough--cam-

 

This franchise is 30 years old in September, and a surprising number of developers that came to try it out said that they got into game development because of E3.

 

Here is what Greg Tito, Editor-in-Chief of Escapist had to say:

"Elite Dangerous is the reason I play video games. I can't wait for it to come out in 2014 - Braben couldn't give me a date but he said it will be this year for sure - on the PC. And it will be the reason I get Oculus Rift."

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/conferences/e32014/11688-Elite-Dangerous-Oculus-Support-Puts-You-in-Infinity

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I don't mean to sound mean, but I have to admit that I don't quite understand where Chris Roberts' reputation comes from. He hasn't made a game in ages and back when he still was making games, I always found the X-Wing and later the FreeSpace series much better than any of the Wing Commanders. Admittedly, Wing Commander came first and I only first played WC after having already played X-Wing, which may have skewed my perspective, but still, is that such a minority view of the space combat simulation genre?

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I don't mean to sound mean, but I have to admit that I don't quite understand where Chris Roberts' reputation comes from. He hasn't made a game in ages and back when he still was making games, I always found the X-Wing and later the FreeSpace series much better than any of the Wing Commanders. Admittedly, Wing Commander came first and I only first played WC after having already played X-Wing, which may have skewed my perspective, but still, is that such a minority view of the space combat simulation genre?

 

I don't think that's an unfair thing to say, Roberts has been out of games for a long time, and his last project didn't even end up finished by him (Freelancer).  But, speaking with rose-colored glasses on, I remember being totally in love with the first three Wing Commanders, which I played before getting into either X-Wing or Freespace.  I'm personally more fond of WC than other games in the genre, but I recognize that is due to personal fondness and familiarity with them, not because they were objectively better space combat games.

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For those who might be interested, here are the two articles about how art gets valued:

http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/grizzly-bear-shields.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/movies/the-paradox-of-art-as-work.html?_r=0

That first article has done a better job of reminding me of my priorities as an artist than a few years of deliberation and lacking confidence. It's interesting to realize that an artistic lifestyle is just a temporary fragility that will die as soon as it is touched by anything. Being in a circumstance where you can focus on non-economically viable craft is truly a rare priviledge. Which would I rather have, a chance to record Gerroa Songs or health-insurance? It depends on whether or not I've ever gotten really sick or significantly injured.

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The stuff about pitching games is really interesting, especially when I think about it in terms of tabletop games rather than video games. I used to work at a board game cafe here in Toronto and a lot of my job was helping people pick a game to play, which often involved pitching several options to them. This is different than what Tom Francis was talking about, since they weren't games that I made, but it similarly required talking about the unique things in the game, the fantasy it provides, and situations you might find yourself in.

 

However, I found that it was pretty impossible to apply any sort of formula to the pitches. Some games worked really well with a one line elevator pitch emphasizing some unique or silly aspect: "Hey! That's My Fish is a game of tactical penguin deployment," "Bohnanza is a game about the brutal, heartless, unforgiving world of bean farming." Some games you could sell on the fantasy: "Smallworld puts you in the shoes of a god commanding civilizations of high fantasy races," "Battle Beyond Space lets you live out your dreams of commanding a squadron of space ships." Some games could only be described mechanically: "Genoa is a negotiation game where everything - your money, your resources, your objectives, even your actions - is fair game for trading." Most games had multiple ways you could pitch them and it was really important to know a) would this game appeal to this person and B) if a) is true, which pitch will convince them that they'll like it. I might think that a group would love Alien Frontiers, but whether I describe it as Settlers of Catan in space or a dice-rolling worker placement game with area majority elements entirely depends on which description I think would be most appealing to them.

 

Anyway, I'm not sure what the point of this post is, I just like thinking about how to describe games to people and the problems that surround the process.

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I'm starting to think about how much of a luxury it is to live in circumstances where art can be made without explicit use, value, objective, or sponsorship; and for chocolate in which to dip our diamonds during our zepplin parties, those fan-fiction collages are distributed through an infrastructure which is effectively owned by the commons. Looking around on deviantart, warpdoor, youtube, or soundcloud, I don't see people waiting for their break; I see an explosion of art whose value is more often determined by the tidal flood of its ilk than its level of craft. This is fucking amazing. Can you remember what it was like for the Church of the Subgenius or Devo to be the weirdest things you've ever seen?!

For a long time I've been thinking of art (in some mystic ideology) as some sort of akashic record that fills its shelves over the span of time. But as I use more digital tools, the content I'm exposed to tends to appear as a steady stream rather than an ordered collection. I used to think that art was largely dependent on technical breakthroughs, and now I suspect that it's mostly a matter of exposure. What stream of content was I in when I needed inspiration? What routine of internet sites was I checking everyday when I felt depressed and needed a reason to get out of bed.
This is a new way of thinking about consumption of art for me, so my description here is ambigious; overtime it will focus and refine. I'm sharing it here because I think that it is an essential part of what the value of content creation is to our culture. If Grizzly Bear's members get sick and no longer make albums, then we will just listen to something else. There is no shortage. We live in such a luxurious infrastructure that content-creation is inevitable. You can start to see this happen in computer-games. Sony, Xbox, Nintendo, Steam, and the front page of the app-store are the equivalent of radio-stations before ClearChannel bought them all. Curation sites like Warpdoor and FreeIndieGam.es are pretty much college-radio and Twitter is the CMJ. We can't play all the games, so we choose channels that funnel the selection because what we really want is to be able to identify through the art we consume by comparing and contrasting our individual experiences. I think that's the reason some people on Steam get upset about not-games and Greenlight; the syllabus is threatened and the shared experience is no longer possible through the funnel they've been using. Cory Banks on Gamers with Jobs talks about how there are too many Kickstarters. It's obvious that he values the ability to play everything that is being discussed, and that he sees that ability being threatened.
I think this is a really interesting and helpful way to look at art-consumption in our culture. The distribution and incentivization aspects begin to make more sense. It's similar to the difference between thinking that cats are territorial in terms of area and then finding out that they are territorial in terms of paths and schedules instead.

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I enjoy that the ability to push your work online exists, perhaps more so in terms of music and film.  That said there are things that I don't enjoy in terms of visual art.  I get that a lot of people posting on deviantart are probably fairly young, but the absolutely gigantic tidal wave of superficial painting and fanart is a little depressing to me.  Perhaps it's just a cultural thing where our new gods are Doctor Who, Malcom Reynolds, and whoever else is nerd flavor of the month.  I often see a technical proficiency that is great, but wasted on Harry Potter rather than something thought provoking or emotional.  It could also just be those artists I would enjoy are mainly staying in the galleries and not existing online outside of personal websites.

 

I'm just thinking out loud at this point I think.

 

Edit: Sounds kind of like I'm expecting masterpieces, I'm not, I just would prefer to see evidence of thought and process.

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I suspect that making fan-art and depicting unique subjects may not share as many skill-sets as you would think. I think that the two differ drastically on what the impetus is for creating them and (as is the case with accomplishing anything) the incentives often determine whether or not anything is made at all. If I thought that my time would be better spent refining a drawing I made for hours rather than doodling on a fresh page, instead of refining the piece, I would probably end up sleeping or watching korean rom-coms.

After reading your post though, I wonder if something about our circumstances encourages fan-art more than unique subjects. Maybe the huge flow of hobbyist content is completely dependent on massive consumption of art through narrow channels.

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Isn't all art in chapels and such basically fan art? The Divine Comedy is the first fan fic of our time! None of that shit was/is canon. Unless I remembered wrong.

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Well, fan art gets clicks. When people search for pictures they could either use vague terms that might hit upon original thoughts you've had orange they'll see if anyone has had an interesting take on the Doctor after last night's episode. Aside from that people do get deep into fandoms and care a lot about specific universes that might be the thing giving them impetus to create.

Also I think it's a little unfair to imply that fanart can't contain/contains less potential for emotional message or meaning. Sure there's plenty of shallow stuff but there's also the possibility of connecting to something at the core of the inspiration that lets the piece do so much more than one could with original characters, where you have no established back story.

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In part it's easier to do fanart.  You need to think about concept and content to a far less degree.  Where an original idea can take a much longer time to work through and is much more laborious.  The only areas those worlds overlap are technical skills; composition, color theory, proportion, etc.  In part it's easier to work with an idea that already exists, that's more than half the work done for you.  It's also the prevalence of nerd culture, people openly accept loving a piece of media; we're allowed to obsess over things with little to no ridicule which drives the production and consumption of anything related to an existing property through the roof.  I know my expectations are high, but when I view a piece of art I want to see a piece of the artist somewhere within it, not borrowed content that contains little to no trace of the hand that bore it.  I rarely see fanart that does much of anything other than exist, I can think of the Hawkeye Initiative being a collection that does something interesting.  But I don't know if I count that as fanart as it's real priority is to point out bias in how comics portray gender(which let's face it, a lot of those ridiculous poses carry over to media at large a lot).  I admit I don't exactly go trawling for fanart so I could easily have missed something that may be interesting, but in my experience I just haven't encountered much.  Admittedly I am far more excited by original ideas, at least in the sense that it comes from the artist rather than a property they enjoy.  All that said, I get the desire to do fanart, I certainly participated in that when I was younger,  I guess my frustration mainly lies with artists who are clearly talented that dedicate their time to something so boring in my eyes.  

 

Re: Classical art, I do have hard time being interested in it because of the religious content.  Beyond being atheist, it's hard to stay interested when you've studied Virgin and Child #534.  The content very rarely changes.  I can appreciate the technical skill and growth that happened but I'll just say it was very hard to stay awake during art history class.  

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The Disney executive rock star experience reminded me of a Sarah Vowell story about attending a "rock and roll fantasy camp," which I guess is where aging musicians try to let rich old people live out their musical fantasies while slowly dying inside. I don't remember which book it's in, but she read a version of it on This American Life. It's totally worth listening to.

There was an episode of the Simpsons about that, I mostly remember it having an improbable number of guest stars even for a Simpsons guest star focused episode.

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I suspect that making fan-art and depicting unique subjects may not share as many skill-sets as you would think.

 

I think the core requirement for making interesting art is having something to say, which is a much rarer skill than having the technical competence to say (or draw, compose, etc) something.

 

There may be some people who have been distracted from really compelling artwork by fanart, but I think that generally if you do have something interesting to say, that's going to come out eventually. There may be fanart that masks legitimately interesting content, and its status as fanart makes it overlooked for consideration, but I think those are rare outliers.

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I think the core requirement for making interesting art is having something to say, which is a much rarer skill than having the technical competence to say (or draw, compose, etc) something.

 

There may be some people who have been distracted from really compelling artwork by fanart, but I think that generally if you do have something interesting to say, that's going to come out eventually. There may be fanart that masks legitimately interesting content, and its status as fanart makes it overlooked for consideration, but I think those are rare outliers.

 

So I guess fan-art could be something that keeps the knife sharp until the artist has something to express that is better communicated with unique content. I do something very similar; I draw seussian buildings and animals by default. Then when I have something idiosyncratic to express, I already have the page open and the pen to it. 

 

Edit: Ok, I think I'm closer to figuring out what I'm trying to say.

The reason that fan-art or religious art might have diminished value for some could be generalized as lacking what is needed for receptivity in the consumer. I think this occurs when people involuntarily dismiss content because they assume that they have already learned its lesson; someone sees a painting of a Disney character and once put into that category, they may say "O.K. it's just one of those, I've seen those." But I think many of us have probably had the experience where some piece of art that we pass by all the time because we think we know enough about it (this dismissal is what I mean by lacking the potential for receptivity in the consumer) is transformed with new context (which has increased the potential receptivity). Some examples:

250px-Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%

 

Yeah, I've seen it before, kinda over-rated. My receptivity of this piece is low. But then! due to my routine paths on the internet, due to the channels I am tuned to I read this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/03/mona-lisa-3d_n_5256193.html

and suddenly I'm inspired. 

 

Another example:

220px-The_Head_of_Christ_by_Warner_Sallm

 

I'm like, "yeah, Jesus, what?", but then I heard an iconoclast's view of the portrait and its history and I became receptive to the art again. I'm having a hard time finding a link to the video though. Basically the idea is that some people are really upset about this portrait because they believe it's a false idol and their religious book has a thing against false idols, especially when they are supposed representatives of their own god. EDIT: I found something that is close enough. I love that this picture is possibly the most successful piece of fan-art ever created. Now everytime I see this portrait, I think of iconoclasm (which is cool).

 

What I'm suggesting is that we all have fairly consistent (but different between individuals) channels of information and that they fill with content somewhat effortlessly. Good curation can lead to more interesting content, but it will fill either way. When I was a kid, I didn't have cable television. That doesn't mean that I don't think about music-videos (no MTV), but it does mean that my references of pop-art are heavily influenced by westerns from the 70's and prime-time network sitcoms from the early 90's. So Grizzly Bear doesn't get paid. I'd be watching reruns if they weren't around. The emphasis is on the channel of distribution, that's who gets paid not the content creators. I'm so close to making sense. Our culture values the channels of distribution instead of the content so the destiny of art-creation isn't a matter of filling up an infinite area with all the potentials, it's a matter of creating circumstances where receptivity is high. 

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Well, sure, art is hugely about context, and there's been both serious study of it, as well as various buzzfeed-friendly shenanigans. That's basically what I was trying to imply when I noted that there may be popular/fan art that's overlooked for consideration. But, there's a lot of "serious" art that's overlooked for the same reasons (my view is that the modern fine art world is, basically, a big con job - but now we're getting into heady waters about what makes art worthwhile or valuable, and it's the kind of nuanced conversation that I find very hard to have in asynchronous text-block form.)

 

Stuff posted on Deviant art featuring Sonic the Hedgehog isn't ever going to be taken "seriously", the way some the same art in another context might be. Maybe the depiction of Sonic the Hedgehog as Jesus is actually a trenchant statement about the shifting relationship between media and religion and nature of idolatry. Or maybe it's just a Hedgehog on a cross. But, a lot of the work of the artist is to a) convince me that the artist had intent, and B) to communicate the intent to me, otherwise I'm justified in dismissing it as just noise.

 

Lest I seem dismissive, I should note that I consider myself amongst the hoi polloi who don't have anything "interesting" to say. I'm not an artist, but I'm technically proficient in writing, for example (not that you'd know it from my posts, har har), but I flounder even at trying something like NaNoWriMo because I realize I don't have anything to _say_, so I find it difficult to justify the words I'm putting down. I start telling a story, but I realize I don't know why I'm telling that particular story among the infinite possibility space, and sputter out.

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I should probably also mention I personally know somebody who is a technically great painter, however is obsessed with disney and pretty much defines herself that way.  It frustrates me to no end because if she just expanded her horizons a little; exposed herself to more of what's out there in the world she could do more interesting work.  So in part my annoyance is in my face a little, I could be placing assumptions on all people who do fanart through that frustration.

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