...but is it Art?

This is a debate that I've had many, many times... Are games ready to move into the big boys realm of media/art where people are profoundly touched (like choir boys?) or affected by them? For me, the answer is occasionally yes. However, I do have to emphasise the occasional there...

For no good reason I'm going to split games into groups which I'll half-heartedly analyse for artistic merit! Thankfully most games fit into a very small group of niche categories.

Shooting. These appeal predominantly to guys and every so often an occasional girl (who wants to be a guy, no doubt). Age is irrelevant as I've seen all groups from eight years old up to 70 years old get involved in some old fashioned virtual gun play. There's very little scope for a game that's based on the concept of pointing a shooty thing at someone/thing and then killing them/it, to be artistic in itself. Some games do use art as a way of making themselves stand out from the crowd. Recently Madworld on the Wii could be considered "artistically striking", and in common terms that would be enough to label it "art". In fact, for me it is enough. I used to consider myself an artist and did all the studies and work involved in becoming one, yet most pieces that people currently call Art, I call crap. There are many games that have more feelings in their depictions of characters, better technical skills in anatomy and expression, are more thought provoking and excel in every other individual component that can be used to define art. Actually, I say "many" games... Really I mean "some". When I say some, really I mean "a few". In fact, when I say a few, I mean "a couple". The point is though, that they do exist!

Strategy. The art in these games is on a similar level to drawing landscapes. Actually, wait a minute... It IS drawing landscapes (and tiny little people)! It's sure as hell my least preferred form of art, but it is still considered as art; mostly by dull people, but apparently they have opinions as well, so I'm told...

Football Management. No, actually I'm joking... The most artistic thing related to these games is which font they use to display the database. Excell spreadsheets are not art, as far as I'm aware, neither is Football Manager... Unless you're some kind of astounding moron of course!

MMO's and RPG's. These have a massive amount of (in my opinion, generic) Art used in them. Both in the creative process and in the final product. I'm not a fan by any stretch, but I absolutely concede that Fantasy and Sci-Fi art is a massive percentage of the worlds complete paper based artwork. So even if there are about six hundred million variations on a lady Elf with big cleavage, and then about the same amount of large helmeted warriors, it's still classified en masse as art...

Other Genres. I can't really be bothered going into more than this currently... Maybe some day I'll add to this and start listing micro-genres aswell, such as "Native Indian Axe Throwing Simulators", but for now I'll stick with what I've got!

Something else to consider, is that the concept art used to build games, is all drawn/painted/designed by genuine and sometimes even talented artists. They draw a picture. That's art in itself isn't it? That picture then gets turned into a three dimensional model, usually made of clay; which is also art. The model then gets scanned into a computer and turned into a virtual three dimensional model and gets tweaked at that point. Like an artist going back over a picture he's not happy with, improving the end result. Now that one scanned item or character, which is already characteristic of three forms of art (Drawn, modelled and digital), will get added to tens of thousands of others to be placed in the game world, which is then populated by all of these items of art... So really, if it looks like art, is made up of art and can have the same effect as art, is it not art?

This process is similar to the Sistine Chapel. One overall end result, or piece of art, comprised of many separate and smaller pieces of art. The Chapel was of course painted by many more people than just Michelangelo; there was a whole team of artisans working on it under his instruction (much like game developers working under a project leader). Consider also that the chapel is made up of many smaller "works of art" that combine to form the complete "masterpiece". As I previously mentioned, games are made up of lots of little pieces of art also. In many cases lots of pretty rubbish pieces of art, but still the analogy is there...

Where the disagreement really stands is in the perception of what Art is. We live surrounded by various forms of art, in buildings, furniture and occasionally even fashion, though maybe not so much here in Scotland... Our TV's broadcast Art at us occasionally, we read it in books, we rent and watch it sometimes and we even view it in (very VERY rare) adverts. Most things that have a creative process involved in making them can be termed art by certain people, so maybe the problem is really that I've not been talking to the right people? There are undoubtedly many people who consider games artistic, yet I have a fondness for the media and want to see it accepted by more than just it's existing fan base as something truly creative, so I prefer to debate it with heathens, I mean "non-believers"...

On top of the points already made, the single biggest factor that weighs in on this argument are the waves of "indie" games that are starting to take a bigger and bigger slice of the games market. Some are truly bizarre, ugly, poorly executed and can even be in very bad taste, yet there are others that are so captivating because of the artistry involved in them that there can be no debate at all as to whether they're art or not once they've been experienced. I've no real notion to tell you what games in particular I'd classify as Art, as that's down to each of you and your own opinions... I'd suggest that you go and look further into the matter for yourselves though!

Actually, let me suggest one single title that's both indie in it's enthusiasm and freshness, but also mainstream-ish... Beautiful Katamari. Just. Rolling. Awesome. Ness.

You should go and google the Museum of Bad Art. Genius in a bottle... (paint remover).

Some kind of phone hex?

Phones... Mobile Phones... The saying "Can't stand the evil ugly petulant over-used crap little bastards!", springs to mind... Maybe it's not a saying for you lot, but for me it's a life statement. They've seemingly become the most important lifestyle accessory for the masses. Vital communication tool or status symbol for those lacking in real things to do?

Over the last few years mobile phones have improved so much, gaining so many features and accessories that's it's becoming harder to classify what their actual function is. The theory that I had when I got mine at first was "form of contact in an emergency". Your car breaks down (*train for me, and yeah, it broke down every damn day); you phone someone to come and collect you/fix it. You're running late for a meeting with someone; phone ahead and give warning you're going to be late. There are many functional reasons for them, if I try to look, however it seems that their only real purpose nowadays is for girls to tell each other what shoes they're wearing that day, what happened in the daily soap operas and to send mostly crap jokes to each other. There's always the bitching conversation that's most commonly found on UK trains where some poor absent person gets repeatedly insulted by their apparent best friends. Nice...

On their plus side, they now have pretty decent-ish cameras built in. They're getting more powerful graphically and can handle some ok-ish 3D game graphics. Which would be lucky for those of you with no partners, adult magazines, videos, TV, or the Internet (how'd you get here?!), as around 90% of the games are themed around breasts or sex! Although maybe not so lucky if you're a woman, unless you happen to be the type of woman that likes women as well! However, lady or not, the graphics are so downright crap on the "adult" games that you may aswell get your porn from a magazine recovered at the local dump, covered in kitchen leftovers and shat on by all the resident seagulls... Back to the good points: They have good-ish sound quality as MP3 players and the batteries seem to be lasting just as long as they ever did, considering all the extra stuff the phones themselves do. It is a bit strange however that for being the ultimate device in communication, that the games themselves seen to have a complete lack of ANY worthwhile online features... Maybe I should be speaking to Sony and Nokia instead of whining to myself on here!

The games though; there's a fundamental and MASSIVE flaw. The controls. Really, we're expected to press those tiny little bunched together clicking things and hope in vain that we're pressing the correct ones... If the manufacturers want them to be considered as games machines, give us D-Pad style controls. Cars that expect to move anywhere all have wheels, shouldn't phones that expect to play games have a worthy input thingy? It's a crushing experience, and one that my better half has considerably more expertise and time with than I, as her previous job was testing those (mostly) boob-laden games for eight... hours... per... day... Oh... my... god!

My own personal grievance with them, and which is the only thing about them that genuinely affects my life, is that people try to phone me! Argh! For fuck sake! Really, don't they realise? It feels like the "pop in"; that visit that a family member or friend does, turning up at your door unannounced and empty handed (not even a bottle of wine!). The mobile phone call is the vocal equivalent.

So excuse my rant, and I should apologise for this not being an article type thing; but there's very little of interest or of humour to do with mobile phones. Well actually, I do remember a guy at an old job I did, who had a set of cards with various phones on them (mostly of the mobile flavour); the Unique Selling Point of these cards were the ladies who were, ahem, "using" the phones... I really doubt they could hear much with the speaker up/in there! Cue all the vibrate jokes...

The humour part: People use Bluetooth to transfer things from Phone to PC, the PC end is called a "Dongle"! Dong le, geddit? Ho ho ho... I'm reminded of the Watchmen (tm) every time I hear/read the term...

Also pretty funny is the opening picture; that's a real product. Honestly, what complete fucking mentalist designed that thinking that the general public would buy it?!?

* - As a footnote, I'd like to state for the record that I didn't actually own the train, as such...

A heroic proton types; does it write a classic?

So I've been playing Prototype for the last week-ish... It's a pretty good game; nice graphics, good sound, excellent controls, good central character, decent story (for a superhero game) and all the other pretty good features that make it above average. The character is also a hoodie! How cool is that!? However the game isn't what I'd call amazing. The graphics could be from an eighteen month old (but good for 18 months ago) game and the game play itself is very akin to Assassins Creed. Even the controls are very similar, and Altair's a bit of a "historical hoodie". I've probably spent around five or six hours playing through the story, and what's unusual about that is that I've played at most three single-player games for more than two hours in the last few years. I have no patience for them. Even the genre breakers and classics; I get bored. Prototype however, no sign of boredom yet. I'm surprising myself playing this game as I've surely played technically far better games and put them off after an hour... Are classics really classics then?

My games library is pretty much a concise A to Z of triple A titles from the last ten years. I've completed GTA:Vice City, Tribes Vengeance, COD 4 and a bunch of driving games. Half-Life 2 lost my interest after Ravensthingy. I just don't really finish games anymore, which continuously does surprise me as I used to finish several games in any given week... None of the games that I do finish though, are what you'd call "hardcore gamer all-time classics" (or any actual term that I can think of). Yet I'm undoubtedly a hardcore gamer. I'm not sure that I really understand my own gaming preferences...

So what is it that makes any single game a AAA title... Let me run through the obvious features that apparently make a game awesome!

• Graphics? Quite obviously not. Gears of War had some of the best graphics on offer for the PC at it's time of release; yet it got uniformly slated by PC consumers and several reviews.

• Audio? Definitely not. The only games that you ever hear mention of the audio in are either part of the Halo franchise or Horror games. It really is that under-valued. Unless you count all the Guitar/Band/Audio games that are mostly out on the consoles.

• Story/script? Hmm... To go back to Gears of War. There was a story. Something about aliens and soldiers. Actually, let me refresh that memory... Halo, Crysis, Half-Life, AvP, etc, etc, etc. Probably 75% of all FPS games ever released are goddam motherfucking aliens versus goddam motherfucking soldiers.

• Playability? Well, I found World of Goo much more playable than Crysis. Crysis was meant to have bucket loads of playability... Where was it?!?

• Controls? I'm actually laughing at this part of gaming on the PC; if you've read my other posts here, the one about WASD highlights a tiny part of the problem in PC games' controls. Let me restate that whole post in one tiny sentence... "Fuck WASD!".

After having played "so much" (ho ho ho) of Prototype, I'm re-evaluating what I believe makes a G R E A T game...

The things I'm enjoying about it are the character, the controls (Assassins Creed also managed to syphon several hours of play out of me) and the story unravelling continuously in-game. Really, the AI is distinctly average and the character models are also fairly non inspiring, but the whole game just gels so well, that it's easy to just keep playing and find out the next piece of the story or open the next power. Why didn't Gears of War grip me like that? It's also a massively powered third person game, but it's so "butch" and the characters are the most cliched stereotypes that are around in contemporary games, that it's almost impossible to relate to. It's similar to watching an early Arnie film: plenty of action and big men with big guns (Ooooooer!) being all manly with and against each other. Unfortunately I have no latent homosexual tendencies, so maybe that's why this is all lost on me, along with American Wrestling, UFC, Football, pub bonding and Rob Halford from Judas Priest.

Well, I've wandered off topic, as I always do... What I'm essentially getting at is that Prototype, contrary to not being revolutionary is the best "this gen" game I've played since Assassins Creed, which was the best I'd played since GTA (mostly Vice City, though I like 'em all). Did I mention you can consume women (and men as well, for you Wrestling fans) whole? It's genius, they explode in a shower of gore and then you look exactly like them! Did I not mention my 'TV' tendencies? No... Ah well!

Sounds like...

My first memory of what I would call "good" music in games was probably International Karate. I was around 11 or 12 and listened to a lot of strange music as a child. I should say it was strange music FOR a child, not strange to listen to. I'd grown up with hardly any television and an awful lot of cassette tapes with music like The Doors, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, Cockney Rebel, The Stones and many other 60's/70's psychadelic-ex-hippie-style music! When I was around 7, my scene became dancing in a retarded style in our living room window; much to the amusement/chagrine of our neighbours... Somehow, on that foundation of fantastic music, my musical taste built into a fantasy themed Heavy Metal obsession!? It was a handful of years into my Iron Maiden era, that I first played IK on my friends portable black & white TV. The melody and structure of that chip based tune on the MSX quite literally left my jaw agape and many years of listening to game music on badly recorded cassettes began...

The next times that I was as impressed with game soundtracks were upon hearing the soundtrack to 720degrees, the Skateboarding arcade conversion, and then The Last Ninja on the C64. The soundtrack to 720 was given away with some 8bit games magazine around the time the game was released, as the B-Side of the Outrun soundtrack. I listened to it over and over. It became so ingrained into my subconscious that I unknowingly wrote two or three songs about 12 years later that you could say "borrowed" a little from that cassette... It was Skate Punk before modern Skate Punk existed. It preceeded all the Extreme sports themed punk/metal that would soon follow in it's wake. This may have been the Nostradamus of the music world (bearded and full of shit?). Look at that man, would you believe a word he said? Now that I look again at him, I think he's actually the man with the finger in his eye from my last blog entry, sinister looking fucker! I should also add that bearded doesn't necessarily mean full of shit, but then again, I DO have a goatee beard, and this blog... Well... Ahem!

The Last Ninja however, took the idea of a games soundtrack to almost cinematic levels; obviously excluding the technical limitation of chip driven sound at the time. The game had at least seven fully seperate pieces of music for the six levels and the loading screen. Each one of them was masterfully programmed and had a genuine taste of the far east. I can actually still listen to it, twenty-three or so years later, and still be impressed and actually enjoy the tunes. I liked a little bit of Jean Michelle Jarre at around the same time, and hearing his music nowadays stimulates my gag reflex! So my conclusion is that JMJ doesn't age well (and is a bit of a cock), whereas TLN is eternal.

For me, it was a sad day when the first band driven and orchestrated soundtracks appeared in games on CD. Two of the only exceptions I can think of, where I genuinely enjoyed the music were Command & Conquer and Interstate '76. The latter was a damn fine driving game, inspired by the road battles in Mad Max. The soundtrack was a re-imagining of classic 70's funk and was absolutely fucking fantastic! Aside from those two games, I can't think of anything that I would actually listen to outside of the games themselves.

There's a massive underground scene for "Chip" music, still going strong on PC's and retro computers/consoles. People playing gigs to a few hundred rabid fans, using only an original Game Boy hooked up to a P.A system. It's not what I'd choose to go and see, but it's certainly a refreshing change to all the production-perfect pop crap that blights our lives nowadays!

I've been writing music for 20 years now, and of all the stuff I've done in the past; the tracks I can listen to the most are the ones where I had the most technical limitations on creating the tunes. The old Atari ST songs are (in my own very biased opinion) my favourites, composed using two samples; bass drum and snare drum with a synth sound editor. Then the Amiga songs with simple one pitch samples and up to 8 (wooo!) tracks and finally the stuff that has aged the worst is the stuff I wrote on guitar... How odd, or rather how typically predictable that the one thing I consider myself the best at, is the one that I like retrospectively the least.

I suppose, thinking on this a little more, that it's really a reflection on my opinion for the whole music scene in general. I'm discovering and re-discovering nothing but old bands. The new bands almost categorically bore me... Long live the old!Amazing; this is actually an O.A.P friendly blog thing site whatever!

The WASD dominatrix needs whipped

Comparatively speaking, the WASD keyboard layout is rubbish. There's two sets of keys that gamers use, and sadly in my opinion, the most logical and functional of the two is on it's last legs... WASD is a shoddy setup that was created by short visioned FPS developers that sadly, as has always been in the PC games market, seem to get off on overcomplicating things for us poor end-users! So, the logical alternative is that old classic: the Cursor keys.

I'm what most contemporary (childish) gamers would call old. Thirty six years old in fact. At this age, the landmarks in my life to come are supposedly forty, fifty, retirement and finally death... Over the course of my life so far, I've had a few people read my palm, and luckily for the planet, I'm due to hit my expiration date any day! So really, my next landmark is likely to be a bridge, church steeple or mountain that I plumet to my death from...

Considering that I'm now astrologically (apparently) in the twilight years of my life, do I really want to spend months of my precious time adjusting my playing style to a keyboard layout that has only become the gaming standard in the same way that Limp Bizkit outsold Radiohead? No, of course I don't, I'm stubborn for these things. It's my left! Right, I mean. Left, right, left right eft ight, hut! Sorry, flashbacks to military training camp there... *

So WASD came about, singularly because of the early generation of multi-player FPS games. Gamers with regular mice were limited to only two buttons. Most often assigned to Shoot and Aim or Shoot and Jump. There were no wheel mice as standard with PC's in the mid to late 90's, so people realised that if they would surrogate the four cursor keys with four other keys beside the direct-weapon-switch keys (1-0 above the QWERTY keys), they didn't have to stop moving and reach over half-way across the keyboard to change weapon! It did makes sense, for a very short period in time... About two years later though, even the most basically packaged Office PC's were shipped with that amazing luxury item, the Wheel Mouse; completely negating the need to use WASD. People don't like to learn new things too often or change technique if they can avoid it, so unfortunately for budding new gamers, in the course of that time WASD completely took over the market.

Where the wheel mouse fits into all this is quite straight-forward: Roll the wheel up, change weapon forwards, roll the wheel down, change weapon back-the-way. It's such a simple and elegant solution, it puts every other weapon selection method to shame. This single item cancels the need to use 1-0 for weapon switching, as making sure you press the right numeric key means a quick glance away from the screen and in the case of games with a lot of weapons, you STILL have to move your hand away from your movement controls (contrary to the point of this selection existing in the first place); bringing your in-game character to a stand-still for a single life threatening second...

There's a further huge advantage to Cursor keys for movement. They're located entirely on their own. There's no chance that if you place your hand on the keyboard (not your organ) in the dark, that you'll confuse any other keys for the cursors. I'm sorry, but a pin-head sized plastic dot on top of the WASD keys doesn't exactly cut it for me!

I use just about every key around the cursors for secondary commands. CTRL to duck, Shift to walk/run, Enter to reload. I use the 0, 1 and 4 numeric pad keys and the DEL, END and PGDN keys all for activities that aren't as time essential as swapping weapon in a gunfight. Because of their easy to find placement around the Cursors, I don't have to worry about losing my position or alignment on the correct buttons.

Now, there is a slight addendum to my whole argument, that throws it askew slightly... "Customise Controls". This is almost always built into every game released. However, the majority of gamers dont bother customising anything about their game anymore. They switch on, and want to be able to play without doing any "work" setting the game up to their own preference, understandably, of course. The problem I have with this, is that developers still leave the default controls set to WASD! It's so newcomer unfriendly it defies belief? How on earth are non-gamers, trying an FPS for the first time, supposed to relate to WASD after they've been used to the simplicity of a console control pad?

The first political party to put forward Cursor over WASD as a compulsory selection for games, gets my vote; my first vote since 1994... Politics appeal to me in the same way that nailing my genitalia to a door and slamming it over and over and over does! Or maybe as much as pushing my fingers slowly into my eyeballs until they touch brain. Even less than asking someone to use fish-hooks to attach my nipples to a horse about to bolt. Actually, is there a point to politics anymore? Do I even care? Hmmm...

The answer to this debate I'm having with myself is, ehm, I'm right and the rest of the planet is wrong... Yup!

* - actually, I was never in any military camp, though I do have a shotgun, Desert Eagle and .38mm in my house; all of the BB variety... Perfect for keeping pesky youngsters at a safe distance!