Video games are highest form of art! Why are they ONLY judged by gameplay?

[mr.cappadocia]

Because they lack a face. Meaning game designers are rarely famous. Their games are. Go ahead, name a game designer off the top of your head. I can think of *few*... Sid Meier, and that's because he (wisely) plastered his name onto all of his games, and Will Wright. Most of you have no idea who I'm even talking about.

But you all know the name of Todd Howard.

Compare that with the number of Film Directors you know, or famous painters, or poets, or rock stars...

 

[LeKill3rFou]

Just one, Ron Gilbert
But it's (very) rare when only one person manage to create a whole game (a game as big as Cyberpunk for example). In video games, that could be more a studio than one person

 

[-Nailes-]

While people might not know names(although I know quite a few like Ken Rolston, who led the development of Elder Scrolls before Todd Howard) people do know the names of game studio's like CDPR, Bethesda Game Studio's, Id Software, Bioware, Obsidian etc. Just like how people know the names of bands like Metallica or The Rolling Stones.

 

[Surma.]

There seems to be huge misconception what I initially wrote.

I don't try to say that gameplay is a meaningless category when judging a game. I'm just saying that there's more than just gameplay when it comes to judging game.

If the gameplay was 8 but the music, detailed environment 10 and story 9, but game suffered glitches that would drop the performance to 6, why not just judge all the categories and combine that into an individual score?

Many actual game journalists were praising this game to 8-9/10 scores but the angry critics who only saw the fluidity and lack of appearance of polish the biggest issues, they only rated the game based on worst aspects.

Spoiler: Spoilers about 'The Usual Suspects' movie

One of the greatest movies 'The Usual Suspects' has the one of the dumbest plots ever where basically whole movie is a suspect talking about fictional events that never happened, that all these stories were invented from mugs and posters.

It's still cult classic because of how the movie was acted, how there was this feeling for a grand story of Keyser Söze who was this myth, a legend of a criminal so feared that nobody has been left alive to tell a story about him. The way the music and sound was played was very thematic and every moment was acted to perfection.

Just little off topic but these are great parodies that originated from the previously mentioned movie.

If we only judge the movie by it's story like these angry critics judged cyberpunk by it's gameplay, the movie would have never become cult classic.

There's so many games that were given fair treatment by everyone like many indie games like Shovel Knight and Katana Zero, people were praising these games, even though in one of the game the story is pretty strange and not well explained and leaves million questions unanswered, the gameplay is excellent BUT doesn't offer a lot of variety. There's like 3-4 major enemy types spread across tens of different levels with very little difference in approach, and there's only 3 major boss fights with 1 hidden boss... but thankfully this game is getting DLC at some point. The other one is 2D platformer with very simplistic and might I say boring graphics and a mechanic of shoveling mud from ground to mine some minerals. A mechanic that is barely if ever utilized in any other aspect in game outside of specific armor giving ranged attack. It's still great platformer and has great soundtrack and has many interesting and unique bosses.

I mean these are all great games, but they do have weak points, just like 99.999% of all the games in existence. It's very hard to get 10/10 in all categories, especially in a big open world title with newly developed mechanics from a studio which hasn't done those aspects before.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition for PC game reviews & Metacritic score: With tense dungeon crawling and fearsome enemy encounters, the seamlessly intertwined world of Dark Souls is full of extreme battles, rewarding challenges, nuan...

www.metacritic.com

This same gamer attitude can be seen in Dark Souls PC port had just very outdated graphics without modding, and the game was still highly rated by the souls community, while hated by the casuals from it's lack of polish.

Remaster that fixed the graphics (though there was some bugs in release) along with dropped framerates in areas like blighttown, the score is actually even lower in metacritic, which just goes to show how little objectivity game scoring has in gaming community as a whole whenever there's something that visibly makes them annoyed a bit.

Even if they actually REMAKE old classic like Demon Souls for PS5 and the gameplay is buttery smooth, every single detail updated, better animations overall, bosses get introduced with cutscenes get far more detail and time on screen... and yet 17% of reviews are scored below 4... like what does man have to do to impress gamers these days?


I hope this clarified some of the confusion. I just would want the angry critics and the gaming community (the average users) judge the game by all of it's aspects combined, rather than pick the worst performer and judge game entirely based on that.

 

[Restlessdingo32]

I don't try to say that gameplay is a meaningless category when judging a game. I'm just saying that there's more than just gameplay when it comes to judging game.

It's a very fair point. Speaking for myself, I insisted gameplay was important to ensure the distinction was understood. Artistic qualities do matter. Gameplay qualities matter too. And from your post here it clears that part of it up.

If the gameplay was 8 but the music, detailed environment 10 and story 9, but game suffered glitches that would drop the performance to 6, why not just judge all the categories and combine that into an individual score?

This should happen and often does. When pointing out perceived inadequacies in gameplay citing artistic elements isn't exactly contributing though. At that point you're criticism is isolated to the gameplay. Bringing up art in that discussion distracts from the points trying to be made. Basically, for evaluating the entire game it doesn't make sense to isolate one area out from the rest. When being critical of one part or area it does.

Many actual game journalists were praising this game to 8-9/10 scores but the angry critics who only saw the fluidity and lack of appearance of polish the biggest issues, they only rated the game based on worst aspects.

Yeah well, that's because the game was receiving a lot of heat at the time. If you dig deep you can likely acquire evidence of those same journalists praising CP as the best game ever prior to it's release. At that point it's being hyped. As soon as it releases and gets met with backlash the vultures hop on the hate train. It's all about the clicks, website visits and views.

There's so many games that were given fair treatment by everyone like many indie games like Shovel Knight and Katana Zero, people were praising these games, even though in one of the game the story is pretty strange and not well explained and leaves million questions unanswered, the gameplay is excellent BUT doesn't offer a lot of variety.

Those are indie titles. They don't get as much publicity. Incidentally... less clicks, website visits and views. I'm sure you can fill in the implications .

I hope this clarified some of the confusion. I just would want the angry critics and the gaming community (the average users) judge the game by all of it's aspects combined, rather than pick the worst performer and judge game entirely based on that.

It'd be great if that were the case. It's fair to say it often isn't. I just don't know what there is to be done about it.

Welcome to the digital and information age. Where purchasing decisions are like going through a spy novel. A says it's great but can they be trusted? Let's check B. B says it's great too, surely we're getting a better sample size for "good". Whoops, B watched the video put out by A too, regurgitated it and changed some details. Let's spend a week running through 40 more reviews to see if we can make sense of anything. The creator said your choices ripple through the game world. Ride the ripples.

 

[Yllana_Ardais]

To be fair, apart from the Youtubers who make money by being outraged/hyped and a fraction of players who REALLY expected the game to be GTA 5 in a Cyberpunk world, I did not have the feeling that people only critizised the gameplay/bugs and unfairly disregarded the "art" parts of the game.
In fact, many of us focused a lot on these things (style, art, story, characters, themes, voiceacting etc). And while these are generally the points that get the most praise, they also get a lot of criticism, especially the story and some of the character arcs (or rather, the lack thereof). On this forum, new threads pop up constantly, discussing certain aspects of the lore, certain characters etc. So I don't really think people don't give these more purely "artistic" parts a chance to shine on their own, it's just that perhaps they also have their flaws and kind of drag down the whole experience? Even though I think some parts of the game are brilliant, and I really like the design and some characters, on the whole it just feels undercooked and not living up to its potential (to me).

 

[Don_the_brawler]

A lot of people have weird rules on what is and isn't art... If you call video games a form of art, good for you! I like to think similarly to you as well. I love seeing unusual landscapes and places. If you don't see it as art, I guess to each their own...

You will always have some people calling something art while others may disagree... People are funny that way.

 

[Surma.]

To be fair, apart from the Youtubers who make money by being outraged/hyped and a fraction of players who REALLY expected the game to be GTA 5 in a Cyberpunk world, I did not have the feeling that people only critizised the gameplay/bugs and unfairly disregarded the "art" parts of the game.
In fact, many of us focused a lot on these things (style, art, story, characters, themes, voiceacting etc). And while these are generally the points that get the most praise, they also get a lot of criticism, especially the story and some of the character arcs (or rather, the lack thereof). On this forum, new threads pop up constantly, discussing certain aspects of the lore, certain characters etc. So I don't really think people don't give these more purely "artistic" parts a chance to shine on their own, it's just that perhaps they also have their flaws and kind of drag down the whole experience? Even though I think some parts of the game are brilliant, and I really like the design and some characters, on the whole it just feels undercooked and not living up to its potential (to me).

Fair point.

I think in this specific forum it's easier to see the game as it truly stands now outside of the internet anonymous hate chambers. I think vast group of people if not everyone agree the game could have used an extra year in the oven and added more sugar coating before the final release.

However I'm not really mad at anyone. I have better things in life than just play a single game like it's a wife I can't get rid off.

I'm fine waiting for a little longer and even paying for the cut content to be released as an expansion (I find it stupid games are still costing 60€ like they used to cost 20 years ago). The experience isn't as severe as the picture posted below (quickly just copied this meme post in internet) but it's not exactly the standard that was in before new millenia.

This is all fair to say that this could have been more "complete" game when it first launched, with the promised free DLC already in the package rather than being showered in later in H2 and opening space for expansions eventually.

But nobody is really hurt if they release early. In fact the price upon it's early is only going to hurt CDPR and not the consumers, they're gonna get great deals getting the game in sale, for example in Steam it was recently 40€ I believe.

The reputation surely suffered a hit considering that Witcher 3 didn't receive such level of anger toward the game being buggy. The story of Witcher 3 was more linear and didn't offer the level of freedom that Cyberpunk allowed. This freedom however came with multiple sizeable problems with the... I would say... lack of purpose of certain side quests and gigs. Maybe they could have readjusted the story and made the game slightly more linear and cram more content into it that way, and make the community fell angry about game only being 40 hours long... even though according to Steam only 20% of people finished Witcher 3... so the real criticism of the people is really coming from those enthusiastic gamers who would finish the game no matter what length, which isn't really telling the real story of those 80% who wouldn't sit down for 100h story.

Of course there's a way to make both sides happy with adding some polish on both the gigs and extending the main story campaign with expansions, adding in mechanics that the game got criticized by lacking.

Games are a special in a way that the painting really isn't finished until the paint is dry, and that could take years. GTA 5 is still being bug fixed after 8 years.

 

[NorseGraphics]

There seems to be huge misconception what I initially wrote.

I don't try to say that gameplay is a meaningless category when judging a game. I'm just saying that there's more than just gameplay when it comes to judging game.

If the gameplay was 8 but the music, detailed environment 10 and story 9, but game suffered glitches that would drop the performance to 6, why not just judge all the categories and combine that into an individual score?

Many actual game journalists were praising this game to 8-9/10 scores but the angry critics who only saw the fluidity and lack of appearance of polish the biggest issues, they only rated the game based on worst aspects.

Spoiler: Spoilers about 'The Usual Suspects' movie

One of the greatest movies 'The Usual Suspects' has the one of the dumbest plots ever where basically whole movie is a suspect talking about fictional events that never happened, that all these stories were invented from mugs and posters.

It's still cult classic because of how the movie was acted, how there was this feeling for a grand story of Keyser Söze who was this myth, a legend of a criminal so feared that nobody has been left alive to tell a story about him. The way the music and sound was played was very thematic and every moment was acted to perfection.

Just little off topic but these are great parodies that originated from the previously mentioned movie.

If we only judge the movie by it's story like these angry critics judged cyberpunk by it's gameplay, the movie would have never become cult classic.

There's so many games that were given fair treatment by everyone like many indie games like Shovel Knight and Katana Zero, people were praising these games, even though in one of the game the story is pretty strange and not well explained and leaves million questions unanswered, the gameplay is excellent BUT doesn't offer a lot of variety. There's like 3-4 major enemy types spread across tens of different levels with very little difference in approach, and there's only 3 major boss fights with 1 hidden boss... but thankfully this game is getting DLC at some point. The other one is 2D platformer with very simplistic and might I say boring graphics and a mechanic of shoveling mud from ground to mine some minerals. A mechanic that is barely if ever utilized in any other aspect in game outside of specific armor giving ranged attack. It's still great platformer and has great soundtrack and has many interesting and unique bosses.

I mean these are all great games, but they do have weak points, just like 99.999% of all the games in existence. It's very hard to get 10/10 in all categories, especially in a big open world title with newly developed mechanics from a studio which hasn't done those aspects before.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition for PC game reviews & Metacritic score: With tense dungeon crawling and fearsome enemy encounters, the seamlessly intertwined world of Dark Souls is full of extreme battles, rewarding challenges, nuan...

www.metacritic.com

This same gamer attitude can be seen in Dark Souls PC port had just very outdated graphics without modding, and the game was still highly rated by the souls community, while hated by the casuals from it's lack of polish.

Remaster that fixed the graphics (though there was some bugs in release) along with dropped framerates in areas like blighttown, the score is actually even lower in metacritic, which just goes to show how little objectivity game scoring has in gaming community as a whole whenever there's something that visibly makes them annoyed a bit.

Even if they actually REMAKE old classic like Demon Souls for PS5 and the gameplay is buttery smooth, every single detail updated, better animations overall, bosses get introduced with cutscenes get far more detail and time on screen... and yet 17% of reviews are scored below 4... like what does man have to do to impress gamers these days?


I hope this clarified some of the confusion. I just would want the angry critics and the gaming community (the average users) judge the game by all of it's aspects combined, rather than pick the worst performer and judge game entirely based on that.

I take everything from so-called 'games-journalists' with a grain of salt.

 

[JohanLindh]

A single game could have more soundtracks than some artist makes songs in their lifetime.

Just an example of the music of the BEST games I've played:

If you only judge Golden Sun and the Golden Sun Lost Age by it's gameplay... or even dumber reason, the fact your characters cancel attack if their target is destroyed, rather than switch target... you're doing yourself, and everyone else a massive disservice, and you fail to appreciate everything the game has to offer. I used to plug my Gameboy Advance on gigantic TV speakers just to play this game on high quality audio. I used to search every little spot in the map multiple times to hunt down Djinns just to get the ultimate summons. Perhaps one of the greatest games I've ever played despite it's flaws... How the hell could have anyone given that game negative score just amazes me.



Similarly, in many other aspects, games like Cyberpunk 2077 combines music, art and story telling of books into something that is far greater even in each category.

This game has music crafted only for this game alone, nobody can doubt the battle themes from Heist or Maelstrom are 11/10.
There's is gigabytes worth of street art drawings.
Every single dialogue voice acted.
There's racing, combat, stealth, hacking, inventory systems, all the systems to make gameplay interesting.
TV commercials and shows to watch, plentiful of interesting side stories and characters to become friends with.

And this game was basically judged by "cops spawn behind you" like those exact critics who were against companies creating repetitive content with little updates, those exact critics who praised games for being a form of art against those people who were completely out of touch what games can do. (Granted the police system is still vital area of the game's immersion to the world and should have been on working condition on launch.)

I still got to applaud the people who make the game 10/10 for art, music and TV shows, everything that you managed to cram into the game.

So why was Cyberpunk judged ONLY as a GAME when it's more than that. It's an EXPERIENCE, a story that is very hard if not impossible to describe on a book format. The feeling of hopelessness in the face of certain death. Something that is NEVER even talked about. Story that is so exceptional... that people HATED the game for it?

The greatest irony is that the many people who hated the game for it's ending are the very same people that are staunch defenders of video games for it's ability to portray art.



I got inspired to talk about this after Watching "Hello Future Me" channel's video about Cyberpunk. Originally I meant to post longer wall of text with Fallout 1 pixel art and many other classics throughout the years... but I hope you can see what I mean without posting 10 different images and a wall of text.

Big triple A games need to be judged on more categories than "there's a bug, there's a bug!", it's so shameful to be a long time fan of these people who turn out to be soulless clickbaiters running after easy controversy.



I think best way to remedy this would be having the gaming community police itself, having critics commenting on each others content and pointing out the flaws of the reviewers, than letting these people basically stay unchecked through their career. Just an example I can't find a single person in YouTube criticizing Angry Joe for his shortcomings as an angry critic, and what makes his content good or bad. In gaming community we only mostly see this gigantic circle jerk of critics praising others reviews and stances and everyone in the independent media hating on the big guys at IGN. It's actually rather pathetic and sad how easily this type of power has left unchecked for so long while influencing so many people's purchasing decisions.

Because it is sold as a game first and foremost.

 

[bign]

 

[GVArcian]

Isn't Art about letting you know what the artist want to convey.

The artist's wants and intentions are largely irrelevant. As soon as their artwork comes into contact with another person, it will become something new and inspire emotions and thoughts the artists couldn't possibly predict or account for. That is the beauty of art, it is not created by the artist's hand, but by the mind of the beholder.

If you have the patience and the interest, I'd strongly recommend reading the essay "Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes, which goes deep into this topic by examining the interrelations of written works, their authors and their readers.

 

[Yllana_Ardais]

I'm usually more of the" death of the author"-faction than let's say the "word of god"-faction when it comes to interpreting cultural products and in gaming it works especially well, because there usually is not one single author whose personality and ideas completely shape the whole product (unless it's Kojima or maybe Miyazki, in modern times).
But I think the emotional reactions of players can never truly be divorced from what happens in the actual game and therefore from what the writers and artists have created and wanted to express. The emotions the players feel might be something new and unexpected, but they are still based on the product the artists have created. So I'd say this

That is the beauty of art, it is not created by the artist's hand, but by the mind of the beholder.

goes a bit too far, even though I generally agree that a work of art isn't simply "finished" once it has been flung into the public.

 

[KeldornOfLatria]

goes a bit too far, even though I generally agree that a work of art isn't simply "finished" once it has been flung into the public.

I think, that "bit too far" is you acknowledging that talking about the artist(s) is still part of how our culture perceives art. (Look in my post #14 in this thread. I'm copying some stuff from there.) When people want to convince others of something's art status, they sometimes use these language patterns:

IV. Connecting to whole oeuvre/the biographical layer
- Marking the status of the artists as authorities or innovators
- Connection to other works by the artists
- Retelling the idea/concept behind the work
- Anecdotes from the artists' lives
- Quotes from the artists
- Interpreting the socio-political background of the artists as a driving force or background for production
- Describing the habitus of the artists and their behaviour, drawing conclusions about the works

 

[wright1978]

While games writing can certainly have artistic merit I really don't like this art defence. At the end of the day games are a consumer product first and foremost.

This particular game failed spectacularly at the basic functionality at launch, bugs, pulled from platforms etc.
Storywise i think it's solid but hardly a masterpiece. The central story is propped up by the stronger character side stories imo. The endings are rather trite rather than groundbreaking but the main issue is they fail utterly mechanically in product terms. The premise is of the bulk of the game is a character moulded by our choices but at the end there are instead rigid characterisation paths decided not in relation to the choices that have come before but by a clunky heavyhanded unfitting mission choice.

 

[Yllana_Ardais]

I think, that "bit too far" is you acknowledging that talking about the artist(s) is still part of how our culture perceives art. (Look in my post #14 in this thread. I'm copying some stuff from there.) When people want to convince others of something's art status, they sometimes use these language patterns:

I don't really want to convince anyone of the art status of anything. I couldn't care less if other people think of what I like as art. Art is a pretty much a useless category nowadays, in my opinion. Sorry if that comes off as snarky, but I really don't want to be lumped in with a certain sort of art critic.

But I do think that if we talk about cultural products (art, entertainment, whatever), you can't completely ignore the creator, unless you live under a rock. You can try not to get influenced by what you know about the creator and I'm sure it somewhat works when you're young and don't know much about the history and circumstances of a certain piece of art, but once you get to know a little, you can't just erase it from your head.

For example, I really like Quatrocento paintings, architecture and sculpture. When I was really young, I visited Tuscany a lot with my parents and kind of soaked all the art there up like a sponge. So this is probably the basis of me thinking of that art as beautiful. But once I got older, I became interested in the history of that time and the persons who created that art. And while it did not fundamentally alter my perception of the art there as beautiful, it enhanced it.

Same when I first saw the Pre-Raffaelites in the Tate. I had enever heard of them before, but was sick and tired of the boring historical paintings from the 16th to 19th century and they felt like a revelation. This was definitely a personal reaction to art where I didn't know anything about the painters or their intentions. But of coure, then I got curious and wanted to find out more about these guys anf so my perception of the paintings evolved.

So you see, I think how you react to cultural products definitely is something very personal, but at the same time, the context they are produced in can enhance or even alter our initial perception of them.

This discussion is especially interesting when it comes to artists still alive today. [...]

What I absolutely disagree with is the tendency in Western art to kind of create this canon of what is perceived to be the greatest art and trying to convince me I have to like something, simply because "the author is so important, the themes are so important, people in the 19th century thought this guy was cool, so we also have to". This was espcecially annoying at school. Sorry, noone can convince me to like Effie Briest or admire The Trial, just because someone 100 years ago decided it was important.

 

[Draconifors]

Real-world politics and similar topics are against the rules and therefore do not belong on this forum. Some content deleted.

 

[KeldornOfLatria]

Sorry, noone can convince me to like Effie Briest or admire The Trial, just because someone 100 years ago decided it was important.

You've clearly gone through the german school system My teacher wrote her dissertation on Kafka so we had to read his texts a whole year. And guess what, it was all because of his father!

 

[Yllana_Ardais]

Yup, German literature in 12th and 13th broke me. T_T I'm sure there must be some kind of interesting/non-pretentious/entertaining German literature from the 18th to early 20th century out there, but we didn't read any in school. The absolute low point was the play Leonce and Lena I think.

 

[OdiousMortem]

You've clearly gone through the german school system My teacher wrote her dissertation on Kafka so we had to read his texts a whole year. And guess what, it was all because of his father!

Kafka is one of my favorite authors. I read a lot when I was younger. My favorite short story from him is "Before the Law." The Metamorphosis is pretty good, read that one in school. The Trial, not sure, never got through that one. Not much of a reader anymore, but if I got it on tape, might be able to finish it.

Classic literature is epic.

One read I found especially interesting, also having studied a lot of history, was the Epic of Gilgamesh; the oldest story we've recovered so far. It was on clay tablets. They had the flood story on there, too. I think it dates back to 2000 BCE in ancient Sumeria.