Interesting article about nostalgia and "the classics"
This morning I found this in the News list for BG:EE on Steam: a link to a Rock, Paper, Shotgun piece about the recent trend in remastering old games: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07/11/hd-remakes-nostalgia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+rockpapershotgun/steam+(Rock,+Paper,+Shotgun:+Steam+RSS)
It also features some input from Trent, although I thought it was most interesting for the overall message. I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts.
It also features some input from Trent, although I thought it was most interesting for the overall message. I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts.
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Why is this so? Because a good story will always be a good story, and because substance > surface. People still watch Casablanca and will continue to do so, whereas Deep Impact (the most expensive and groundbreaking film at the time in terms of special effects) is destined to disappear into oblivion due to its mediocre/generic story.
Games like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, or more recently Dragon Age Origins, all tell epic stories. Their principal appeal has never been awesome graphics but rather epic stories, colorful characters, immersion into a different world. Technology does get old however, and people will probably have a minimum standard of what are acceptable graphics / visual quality to them. Therefore I think that reviving/modernizing games that tell great stories is not only a noble pursuit (as it conserves something that might otherwise be lost), but also a lucrative undertaking (if done well) because people love great stories.
Like movies and television, gaming has had to evolve, overcoming its initial simplicity in order to tell richer stories, which I agree are central to any valid form of art. When we look back to its growth, Sierra and other like-minded companies took great strides toward this when they developed adventure games such as Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father (incidentally another game that is being remastered) and The Dig. However, there still appeared to be some technical limitations, and except in cases in which text superseded graphics, the stories were always constrained to a degree. By the late 1990s, I believe gaming technology had evolved enough through storage space and graphics capacity to allow much more immersive, in-depth stories. Games had, in short, become art.
Planescape: Torment is considered the pinnacle of storytelling in that era for a very good reason: though it incorporated a set of rules in the background (again, just as other art forms do) it provided no objective or rule beyond a simple impetus of self-discovery. If art should be defined as a work that is intended to provoke emotion and thought, and is primarily concerned with the expression of ideas, what game better represents it? The rules of the game are of secondary concern. Torment instead asks the player to consider the nature of sin, guilt and redemption; its very universe is based in the premise of ideas possessing power.
As gamers, particularly those of us who have been playing for more than two decades, we have been incredibly fortunate to witness the transformation of gaming to art. Yet I would also argue that, like Hollywood, the gaming industry has split between those concerned with gaming as an art form and those who seek to produce--or experience--the next big blockbuster. However, these are not always mutually exclusive, and despite its flaws, I think Mass Effect was a good compromise. Hollywood survives with trite like Furious 6 and quietly releases artistic films like All Is Lost, but it still produces meaningful films with commercial appeal such as 12 Years a Slave. Gaming is no different.
Because we have reached that point, I think we are now beginning to look back at the first games to bridge the gap that Ebert and other critics identified. While some remakes are being initiated simply because of the graphical aspects, the trend that appears to be growing is the rerelease of games that were central to gaming's evolution into art; as @TrentOster said, "it represents a rising connoisseur movement within gaming". Baldur's Gate, Gabriel Knight and Grim Fandango all clearly fit into this category. We love them not solely because of the gameplay, rules or objectives, but because of the ideas they inspire. We feel these games, and they connect to our human experience as any good art does.
It should thus come as little surprise that we want to revisit these games as we revisit our favorite books and films. Within any art form, certain works are held up as the pinnacle of their times. I think we've seen the first great era in gaming, and it's one that we don't want to lose. It's not nostalgia. It's art. If only Ebert had gotten the chance to experience Torment, perhaps he and many others would begin to recognize that.
Secondly, if one removes the troublesome "valid" qualifier from the sentence, it's dismissing out of hand any number of non-narrative oriented artforms, particularly abstract works.
This sort of discussion generally revolves around what one's particular definition of Art is. Until a definition has been mutually agreed upon, arguing whether something is art or not is pointless. By Ebert's definition, videogames can't be art. By your definition, they can. In the end, the only thing that matters is what each individual experiences and whether they consider that experience to be positive in some fashion (usually emotionally or intellectually, though spiritually, physically, and probably every other conceivable "-ally" are possible too.)
I could spend a week just responding to the three or four comments in this thread so far, but I'd probably get fired if I did, so I'll just cut it there for now.
As a person that owned an Atari 2600 (Okay it was my Dad's first, but I inherited it...), a spectrum Sinclair, Commodore 64, Atari STE (I spit in your eye Amiga fanboys! Wow, will anyone understand this now?), before progressing to an Amstrad Mega PC and then a range of HP, Acer, Lenevo (and to be frank quite forgettable PCs) technology has progressed to the point where I can now play my old NES64 titles (Did I mention I owned consoles as well... Nintendo, Sega MasterSystem, NES, NES64, playstation 1 and 2 to be precise... Oh and a Gameboy... and a Wii, less mentioned about that the better...) on an emulator on my Samsung S4.
Oh my Anduin! Your house must be filled with electronic junk! (partially true, but all my old computers are stored and boxed in the loft... I did crack out the C64 for a blast on Dizzy quite recently, but it was the load screen we wanted to really watch...) And why did I continue to buy electronic junk? Because at the time it was cutting edge and once for many years in the 1980s 64k random access memory was the bees knees.
But there is no point buying a computer with 64k of RAM or a PC with a nifty slider that converted it into a mega drive unless there was an amazing games to go with it.
And quite frankly, what you could do with 64k RAM was pretty much nowt.
Forget about high definition pixel rendering. I played games that used 3 colours. They were still awesome because they were playable, addictive, entertaining and fun.
They had to be. I would actually say the development of computers would have ended if not for good computer games!
But now we are at a levels of technology where the difference in the graphics or sound is imperceptible. We are going through a miniaturisation phase. Tablets and phones are the new gadgets. I can do more on my phone than what I could do on all my previous computers apart from the latest. I have more games on it because I have 16Gb of internal storage, with an extra 32Gb external... Back in 1994ish I once installed Doom on my Dad's PC. It took up about 17mb of hardrive space and that nearly filled it, I was cursed and told to remove it (I accidentally reformatted the hard drive... DOS you gotta love it)
We have these amazing devices yet not enough programmes to fill them up with (the storage is for you piccies and music it is now presumed... Not for programmes like Doom...)
And we have such a huge back catalog of games. Before they would be abandoned as there was no way you could carry it onward to the newer machine.
But you cannot just abandon it! That's like saying "The Beetles disbanded as a group in 1969, lets stop playing there music."
Or
"Lets stop reading Lord of the Rings, it's old tat now..."
Or
"Star Wars is full of 1970s hairstyles. Lets just burn your Beta-Max, VHS, DVD and Blue-Ray copies of it now..."
What!
Never!
I'm playing these games, because I love playing them, simple. And the best games will be replayed and replayed. And quite frankly if you have never re-played a piece of music you have liked, re-read a book you liked, or, yes, re-played a game you liked, then quite frankly I think your odd and you should!
Two retro games I am watching with interest are:-
Elite Dangerous is coming out soon. It has drop dead gorgeous graphics but really it is still the same game, that used 3 colours (white for the wire frame, green for the planet and yellow for the sun) released in 1984. This is a game that should be revisited because people want to play this game set in the future with graphics to match.
Baldur's Gate. It is being treated in the opposite way to Elite. Graphics have been tweaked, but it is the new content everyone is slathering after... Especially adventure Y... (and hopefully x and z!) because the story was so good, any extra detail to this computer created world is seen as a marvel.
As for effecting and slowing down game development? How can it? Computer innovations will soon abound again, and along with it will the games...
...
Perhaps, I will re-read this using my Box goggles while strapped into my kinectic gaming armour swinging my light sword, while my miniature familiarbot laughs out loud for me...
Please do keep responding! I think it's safe to say that most of the members of this forum would love to hear more from the team in areas not necessarily directly linked to the game, whether in this thread or others.
In this case I was arguing from Ebert's own statements, and I believe he overlooked the very games that would have run against his classification. His argument rested on delineating games from art due to their adherence to a set of rules, objectives and points--and came closest to contrasting this to film in citing the latter's "superior artistry and imagination". Yet the examples cited (in all fairness, drawn from someone else's presentation) were Waco Resurrection, Braid and Flower, none the type of work that gamers would likely hold as stellar examples of storytelling.
On the other extreme, abstract works may not tell stories in a traditional sense, but I do think they still convey a message of sorts through the use of specific techniques (which was again why I think Ebert overlooked the fact that all types of art follow certain rules).
As for a definition of art, I agree entirely that there will always be a degree of subjectivity present, but I don't think that makes it an irrelevant or insignificant discussion. Tolstoy argued that the simple debate of beauty--whether one work is appealing to one person versus another--does little to provide any overarching framework, as it pushes the question into an examination of the causes of that preference rather than focusing on the art work itself.
I'm inclined to agree with him. When we begin with the presumption that art cannot be defined at all due to subjective appeal being a part of it, we merely overlook the fact that we have already defined it as being all-encompassing. Yet that is precisely the point in question. Georgie Dickie made an excellent point in arguing that subjectivity in art can still exist within defined parameters: "All or some of the subconcepts of art may be open and the generic conception of art still be closed."
Many people would probably find the whole discussion pointless, but when others do this, I'd personally say it's one worth having.