Games as a Service is Incompatible with Art | Extra Punctuation
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22.10.2023
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It’s definitely harder to analyze topics in motion. But it’s not impossible, name any ongoing war and people are constantly analyzing them, either for strategic or humanitarian benefit.
I would argue even games that don’t get updates, you are reviewing a point on a line. It feels very different to play mario 64 now than it did when it came out. And that’s excluding games that we simply no longer have access to, such as lord of the rings two towers. Would a review of that game at launch hold up today? Maybe, maybe not.
Even archaeology, a study of the past is often in flux as we discover more and more of what time forgot.
That said, I don’t think financial models inherently lend themselves to art in general. I don’t think most people pick up a brush and pause to consider upward revenue streams before continuing. But I could be wrong lol
It’s definitely harder to analyze topics in motion. But it’s not impossible, name any ongoing war and people are constantly analyzing them, either for strategic or humanitarian benefit.
I would argue even games that don’t get updates, you are reviewing a point on a line. It feels very different to play mario 64 now than it did when it came out. And that’s excluding games that we simply no longer have access to, such as lord of the rings two towers. Would a review of that game at launch hold up today? Maybe, maybe not.
Even archaeology, a study of the past is often in flux as we discover more and more of what time forgot.
That said, I don’t think financial models inherently lend themselves to art in general. I don’t think most people pick up a brush and pause to consider upward revenue streams before continuing. But I could be wrong lol
What about the Iliad and the Odyssey? Homer wrote them down, but they used to be encoded in an oral tradition that regularly changed and expanded them. Calling those earlier forms "not art" would be unreasonable.
What about the Iliad and the Odyssey? Homer wrote them down, but they used to be encoded in an oral tradition that regularly changed and expanded them. Calling those earlier forms "not art" would be unreasonable.
that's not a hot take , it's a conceptual and physical fact…….
You made me wonder how no rapper has ever said they're pushing the rock like Sisyphus lmfao
You made me wonder how no rapper has ever said they're pushing the rock like Sisyphus lmfao
You made me wonder how no rapper has ever said they're pushing the rock like Sisyphus lmfao
EA and Activison: noitis
EA and Activison: noitis
EA and Activison: noitis
"I'm doing my own research, dear."
"I'm doing my own research, dear."
"I'm doing my own research, dear."
Disagree about Fortnite. It's too easy to get snobby about it, when it's gameplay, player customisation and atmosphere come together for a pretty unique and atmospheric expierence. Games don't need to reference Ayn Rand to be considered art, that seems to be more of an insecurity than anything else.
Disagree about Fortnite. It's too easy to get snobby about it, when it's gameplay, player customisation and atmosphere come together for a pretty unique and atmospheric expierence. Games don't need to reference Ayn Rand to be considered art, that seems to be more of an insecurity than anything else.
Disagree about Fortnite. It's too easy to get snobby about it, when it's gameplay, player customisation and atmosphere come together for a pretty unique and atmospheric expierence. Games don't need to reference Ayn Rand to be considered art, that seems to be more of an insecurity than anything else.
that's not a hot take , it's a conceptual and physical fact…….
that's not a hot take , it's a conceptual and physical fact…….
Seems short-sighted to state games that it has to stop 'moving' to be analysed. Why not – this iteration brings xyz to the game, an upgrade from last year's whatever. Be more like football season commentary.
Looking at this from a different perspective: Many people design games to be fun and entertaining, and that is their art that they seek to master. For them, the magnum opus would be to make a game that is never repetitive or boring, something endlessly open to player experimentation and interpretation. Sandbox games like Minecraft, Skyrim, and BotW, or eSports games like Counter Strike and League of Legends.
2:14 Is Ghost of Tsushima exactly like Assassin's Creed games? Because I really enjoyed it, but if it had been an Assassin's Creed title I probably would never have played it.
Imagine if the people who made Cuphead had to constantly update their game. That sounds like a fucking nightmare. They spent six years drawing that game frame by frame. They had to get it right
Now that game is a piece of art !
Games as a service are really Services as Gaming Substitutes.
They are inherently incomplete and temporary. A proper game is in a finished state, can be finished, and most importantly, can be archived. Saving a copy of the client does you no good if the servers are shut down because you only have half the game.
You may get the feeling of playing a game in the moment, but it's a substitute because you can never see the ending it doesn't have and by being in a state of constant flux, you can never finish it by seeing all the content, as the publisher just keeps adding more. More importantly, you can't revisit it later, due to its anti-archival design, and even if the developer were to release the source code on shutdown, you likely still wouldn't be able to properly revisit what you remember just due to all the changes made since you stopped playing.
It's like Services as Gaming Substitutes are the perfect medium for developers who can't write an ending to save their lives. By dragging it out endlessly, they never have to write an ending, and if they were ever forced to, it'd be as lacklustre as those TV series that were written by just making stuff up as they went along.
I mean, look I do miss AC1-AC2's style of narrative and gameplay. I don't care how much people whined about the lack of difficulty or the repetitiveness of the combat. Combat was over in seconds, because you're a combat master by order of the story itself. I don't trust them, so I certainly won't be grabbing it day one. But if they bring back everything I used to love without muddying it with bullshit, a TALL order for them these days, I'll probably like it. I liked Unity. Was really amazing after they patched out the bugs imo, but I missed the old combat and I missed the old narrative that they abandoned.
Amazing video, I completely agree. Thank Zeus for the indie games.
art is an iffy concept anyway, i dont think you can definitively classify anything as either art or not art, or at least not without people arguing about it.
Is soccer art? Digital games are multi-faceted, and while many games contain art, they aren't inherently a cohesive artistic expression in any particularly direction. Fortnite, I would say, firmly sits in the category of pure "game" – this is made blatant by its seasonal content and focus on cosmetics, play the game in a new hat! Not to say I don't agree with the message of the video, just that we do need to make distinctions between kinds of games. Some are more artistically driven, some more narratively driven, some more ludologically/mechanically driven. The perfect storm, of course, is a mixture of all three – but the philosophical discussion about whether Rocket League is art is sort of unnecessary if you acknowledge that games as a medium have a ludological backbone, and while it can become art in the right context, it is at its core, "play".
I disagree on some of this. Namely that art can't stop changing, or can be analyzed when its "done." Life is an inherently transient thing, after all, and on a long enough time scale nothing stays the same. I think there could be a lot of value in an art piece that does constantly evolve, and isnt the same from one week to another. A previous version was something for that moment, valuable, but now is something different. We are no different. Who i was last week is a different person than who I am now.
I agree that I would struggle to call live service games art, but I think there is something to be said about the ever changing chaos that is Fortnite. I say this as someone who has never played it, but I think its impact is profound in its own way. Ask anyone, from a boomer to a zoomer, and they probably know what Fortnite is, at least as a general idea. The specefics of what it means probably differ from person to person, but theres something very interesting about that on a sociological scale.
So to that end, maybe it could be art. I don't know.
4:50 I will, Developers should be making sure every game is perfect (or at least good) and complete to the moment of release. And while I agree that nobody should feel like they have to play a game the moment its out, they also shouldn't have to cross reference reviews from the last year or more of the game being released to see if they've fixed the game yet. When the game is released it should be good enough, You can make a good game better but if I look into the game and it's bad why would I check if you made it good now? I'd rather have the game be delayed by a few months or even years and have it be good at release instead of having it be a broken mess that takes a few month or years to be finished.
I stopped getting excited about it, but for roughly a decade there has been talk about a massive bi-partisan bill that was being worked on and was "waiting for the right moment when it couldn't fail" that was supposed to deal with a lot of problems coming from technology, IPS, the internet, etc… as well as private control of information platforms of all sorts that were becoming increasingly needed to even function in today's world.
Live services are tangentially related to that whole mess of issues, and beyond the whole issue of how it affects games as "art" it raises questions about what games are. One of the big problems the industry always had was justifying how someone could not actually own the game they bought when it was a physical product as they were claiming ownership of the information. Beyond greed and monetization I think the term "live service" is intended as a pre-emptive legal strike for this inevitable able to to argue that especially with little physical owership right now the concept of things like EULAs and claiming they are simply selling access or a right to use something is now more justified.
Of course on the other side of things you have greater issues involving the technology itself, and the very right to own information, especially if your not the actual inventor of something and merely bought the rights. I mean right now if you look at a lot of the tech we use right now one has to ask what companies are even giving you. On paperwork at least a company like Apple can claim you don't actually own your iphone which is why they can lock you off from a lot of what it can do and prevent you from fiddling with it's operating system or electronic bits. Things like the internet and stored information increasingly exist "in the cloud" unlike the old days when everything needed consistent physical storage. When it comes to a lot of things nowadays you have people pretty much claiming the ownership of the intangible, and half the point of something like a live service is to pretty much take an actual something… like money, in exchange for nothing, as it's simply access to an idea they don't even have to maintain and can choose to take away at any time, so what did you even pay for?
Things will get interesting in the near future from what I hear, but then again as I said the battles over this kind of thing have been coming "any day now" for a log time.
If a bill like the one suggested does pass, I think things will change and games will become more condusive to art as Yahtzee puts it, when they are actually forced to provide a tangible product again. Even when it comes to information I've been hearing the idea that any kind of "virtual property" will likely need to be backed by a trust as part of it's development. That trust being established to maintain the continued existence of anything they accept money for, and access to digital property. One stumbling block is finding a way to make this retroactively applicable given how the laws are written out of context to the current problem so they can say force Valve to make sure STEAM has an ongoing trust in place to ensure if the company goes under people can maintain access to their virtual property in perpetuity. Something which we probably now realize should have been done to begin with. This also means if they keep making "live service" games they would all have to including financing to make sure that service never goes away and there will always be somewhere ensuring access to the virtual property as if money changes hands the buyer is going to be entitled to it… or that is how I understand the intent here.
Feels a bit like a narrow definition of art. From my experience Art is a really difficult concept to define, especially consistently. I often don't even like to draw such heavy boundries around it as it also seems so fluid at times. There's a lot of stuff we call art now that has either never existed or never been called Art. Take for example the guy who taped a banana to a wall or the one who signed a urinal and put it up at an art auction. Also the guy who sold jars of "100% real Artists Shit" as artwork. One mans art is another mans fancy wall decoration.
not all games are art. as not all images are art. would you call my passport foto art?
In fairness to you, James Stephanie Sterling did manage to keep up the energy railing against microtransactions and everything else that became insidiously normalized, even saying in advance how they'd be normalized, as did a vocal minority of gamers, but it still happened. Something has to be so offensive people won't buy or it risks seriously damaging a brand to be stopped. Otherwise the industry will force it through because there are so few large publishers now to choose between anyway and in a decade you'll have a new generation of gamers who never knew of anything better.
I'm completely fine with people making bad games, people making soulless games, and people making games that only exist to make money and have absolutely no other value whatsoever.
However, I am NOT fine with people making games that can easily be preserved, but instead are designed to eventually get lost forever. Because each of those games is a potential holy grail for someone living now, years from now, or maybe even generations from now.
The line about turning grandma into a nazi actually made me laugh out loud, which is rare. Good one Yahts
I would merely make the analogy that a singular "game" that keeps going and is continuously updated is not so much art the way a single meal at a fancy restaurant is art, it's the restaurant itself. The restaurant continues to do business, serve an endless stream of customers every day, and put out individual works of art as the service it provides, that individual "meal" being the play experience for whoever plays it for however long each day.
So I think Yahtzee just needs to review a live service game as more reviewing a restaurant than reviewing a painting or excitable dog.
Counterpoint: There a numerous forms of art that are inherently temporary, and many times that is the entire point. That the here and now is what counts, so enjoy it, or to reflect on the cycle of life that all things go through. But an unfortunate side effect is that history books can't really use those as examples, because, well, they are temporary.
The age range of the average commenter here is high enough that we all remember when we could buy a complete game and just play it how we wanted. I think it will be interesting to see how newer generations, who have only ever grown up with live service games that constantly expect more money from you in order to enjoy all it's content, will look upon and feel about the more historically acceptable methods. I could actually see it going many ways, but hopefully they realize the fun in the freedom and learn to reject the design format that is seemingly raising them right now.