Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?

[Duff-e]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magaz ... mes-t.html

So I'm reading my Megan Fox interview in the NYTimes magazine today and noticed this interesting bonus. Thought you game industry types might like it if you haven't already read it.

[FrieChamp]

Great article, well worth the read. I hadn't played "Passage" yet and checked it out right away but didn't find it all that spectacular..."Today I die" moved me a lot more.

Also:

But among indie designers, there is a wide spectrum of commercial engagement, from Jenova Chen’s small shop under the banner of Sony to Jonatan Soderstrom, a 24-year-old designer who is content to transmit his bizarre output free to the world. “Yeah, the big publishers come around and want to talk to you,” said Soderstrom, who until a few weeks ago lived in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house in Gothenburg, Sweden, and goes by the handle Cactus. Soderstrom, who has made more than 40 video games in the past five years, gave a talk in a filled-to-capacity Room 131: How To Make a Game in Four Hours. (“Games don’t need to be fun,” he said. “They can get intensely weird and freak you out.”)

Now he and some friends were wandering down Haight Street holding a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and drinking from paper bags. “I don’t care about money,” Soderstrom said. “I just want games to be something like art.” The indie scene was leading his medium in the right direction, he said, but “games are still not like great films or books that really affect a lot of people in a special way.”

Last year, Soderstrom had a game in the Independent Games Festival that generated interest from the big publishers. “They all wanted to talk to me about my games,” he said, but he was too busy hanging out with his friends, drinking, staying up all night, playing and talking about video games. Several companies at the conference, he said, left their cards at his booth. He never called them.

Give this man a cigar!

[Taylor]

Great, Gamasutra is going to be unreadable for a month.

Once people work out if things like fl0w and Passage are art, the next question is going to be are they games?

I didn't know you could dumb-down snake.

[Sentura]

my word if i am going to see more semantic questions regarding definitions of what immersion, games, art etc. are i am gonna BARF.

[Erratic]

Must resist urge to troll.

[twiz]

art- The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.

game- An activity providing entertainment or amusement

Pretty sure video games fit in both of those quite comfortably. The fact that it is a collaborative effort doesn't mean it isn't art.

I do find it kind of frustrating when games try to imitate movies. Movies have the luxury of pacing and direction, artistic shots. Trying to emulate these in a game where a player is controlling a character just ends up confusing the player with moving/changing cameras and tends to shatter immersion, and immersion is what I believe sets games apart from movies. While this hasn't happened very often for me, there are certain games which had me immersed to the point of obsession. There is no movie at all that could ever keep me seated for 8 hours straight, let alone for multiple days in a row. Most games, even mediocre games, can keep my attention longer than even a really good movie.

Movies generally don't make a person make any decisions, while that is the focus of games. I think the more this gets embraced and explored, the better(and more immersive) a game will get. A truly diverse choice system could be extremely compelling - not this good/evil bullshit. Decisions with no clear right and wrong, but will color the game experience slightly. That would be true immersion.

[Duff-e]

better to let it flow freely erratic, I do it all the time.

[Rick_D]

Must resist urge to troll.

troll about what/ you don't think a game can be art? got any actual reasons why it _isn't_ possible for a game to be art? or just some strawman fallacy you read on neogaf?

[Erratic]

I just don't care, mostly.

Also, why did the industry get thrown into a shit fit when one old guy said some stupid shit like it mattered? God forbid your dad doesn't take them videogames seriously. Goddamn.

Plus, a lot of this discussion tends to circle around a bunch of games like flOw, which is pretty much gamings equivalent of a bag floating in the wind.

[KungFuSquirrel]

Flow is awesome, but it in itself is not the future of games. Nor is Braid, or Call of Duty, or Today I Die, or Uncharted, or anything else. Sony and MS don't need to make motion control stuff just because the Wii did it (though Natal could be interesting). Nothing should be supplanting anything. This is a huge industry and we're only just cracking the surface of the different ways we can reach people. Doesn't matter if you're big budget AAA or shoestring indie.

For all people complain about linear games, everyone seems to want to treat the game industry as a linear progression when we're all better off recognizing it as the branching path that it is.

[Duff-e]

I think a lot of people make the mistake of connecting "independent" with the aesthetic of something like flow. The most interesting D.I.Y game would be one that can make an FPS interesting on a low budget instead of these neo-environmental hipster games. Not to say they're all like that but it's the same bad rep film/music get with the independent tag, it turns into US (progressive 'intelligent' gamers) and them (halo playing general public) which is what should be avoided.

I know these games exist I'm just saying your next-gen game doesn't NEED to be barren environments with analog only input.

[Izuno]

Intrinsically, whether video games are art is irrelevant. Note, though, at how many people who strongly believe games are not art declare so in an attacking matter.

As a rule, you only attack what you fear.