Revenge Of The Highbrow Games 90
simoniker writes "In the follow-up to last month's popular 'Where's Our Merchant Ivory?' feature, The Designer's Notebook author Ernest Adams responds to the wealth of feedback submitted by further examining what a 'Highbrow Game' might be, and categorizing the potential audience for such a product." From the article: "Several people pointed out that much of what we see as high culture achieved that status because it's old. Longevity imbues a work of art with respectability regardless of its original purpose — and of course, time tends to weed out the inferior works. For every Mozart there are dozens of classical composers who went to their graves and are forgotten."
The Natural Evolution of Games (Score:5, Insightful)
But I don't think we're through with the "flash" phase yet. Photorealism is still new and interesting to most of us -- and players still buy games for their graphical splendor. Once that stops happening, developers will really start experimenting -- after all, how else are we going to get your money?
(BTW, did anyone see Ernest Adams talk in Worcester yesterday? I missed it, but it must have been great.) _______________________________
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Perfectly achievable with art. In fact, my personal opinion is that the modding community has deteriorated the graphical splendor of my favorite game by persuing photorealism.
KFG
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Onslaught mode was also a big driver of UT2004.. It was the only mode I played that game in, except for some single-player to calibrate my controls.
ObTopic: What would make a video game "highbrow"? A RPG based on Hamlet or Midsummer Night's Dream? (Those could actually be pretty fun..) Perhaps Infocom games such as A Mind Forever Voyaging [wikipedia.org]?
IMHO the closest to "highbrow" out there these days are Bioware's RPGs (KOTOR, Jade Empire), but it may ver
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That's our highbrow? That's pulp. They're both fun games, but one has an anime-level of maturity and the other is, well, Star Wars.
it may very well be that there's no such thing as a "highbrow" game, and the closest gaming will get would be "art house".
Arthouse is good. I'd settle with arthouse for now. Unfortunately, most games don't want to persue anything that might force players to think too much, make decisions that will have any lasting effect on the gameworld (Oblivion, et al.),
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Then who made Darwinia? Your gripes seem to be well answered in the adventure game genre. Did you even play Indigo Prophecy? That game was better than most movies.
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Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't for everyone.
It isn't light weight.
You have to invest a lot of time/money/mental energy
etc
OTOH, you can claim that they're very narrow niches... but that is what 'highbrow' stuff is nowadays. Though normally something has to be expensive to create exclusivity.
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Guess what, "high" culture doesn't have to be meaningful, merely exclusive.
Once something hits mainstream culture, it is no longer highbrow.
It is mainstream.
Really, that's the easiest way to differentiate.
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Rosie's perfume would be lowbrow is it was appreciated by a common nose with no training in subtle odours.
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Highbrow games? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Highbrow games? (Score:4, Funny)
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I think chess falls squarely into the category of highbrow gaming. It is taken extremely seriously by many players, yet still considered to be a game. I'd say Go also fits the criteria, along with card games such as bridge, cribbage, even poker.
As far as computer gaming, the only ones I can think of are the Civilization games. "Highbrow" games, to me, seem to be restricted to strategy games. There are some FPSs th
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I would also consider the Europa Universalis [paradoxplaza.com] series and Victoria [paradoxplaza.com] to be 'Highbrow'. Pretty much any game with a steep learning curve that's geared towards an educated mature player.
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Re:Highbrow games? Highbrow humor = serious? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at chess (Score:1)
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Chess? [wikipedia.org] Go? [wikipedia.org]
What these games have in common is that they are abstract strategy games, zero sum, played under perfect information. Luck plays no part, nor does memory; nothing is random or chance. These are games - but they are very serious, highbrow games.
Highbrow != Longevity (Score:3, Interesting)
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I think defining a "highbrow game would be easy... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Does it mostly appeal to people with graduate degrees (especially to the point where the feel compelled to write papers about it)?
2) Do players of the game look down on all other gamers? Do other gamers feel like players of the game are priggish nutjobs?
3) Does it sell at WalMart, Target, Toys R Us? (If so, it's automatically disqualified.)
I can think of examples of games that meet one of the three qualifiers (#1: text-based Adventure, #2 Eve Online, #3 lots), but I can't seem to think of a single game that meets all three.
Re:I think defining a "highbrow game would be easy (Score:1, Insightful)
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Not that you necessarily were, don't be such a snob. It doesn't have to be scarce (usually artifically) and expensive (see last) to be special.
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Re:I think defining a "highbrow game would be easy (Score:2)
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i find problems with these 3 (Score:1)
1) one doesn't need a graduate degree to appreciate chess, othello, abalone, etc. i think you were mostly leaning towards the player being intelligent, thinking in three-dimensions and thinking further ahead? (speaking of which, has anyone played "space chess"? it looks really interesting)
2) i think this is fairly valid; i find myself looking down at people who don't understand games from #1 - particularly if it's some
Re:I think defining a "highbrow game would be easy (Score:1)
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from Wikipedia:
"Myst has sold over 6 million copies and held the title of best-selling computer game of all time throughout much of the 1990s before being overtaken by The Sims"
"it was also intensively criticised, mostly around the lack of "action" in the game, leading some to claim the game is boring
To address the great+ gra
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2) Myst players look down on players of games which resort to such crass mechanics as 'action' and 'excitement', and particularly those who look up the solutions to puzzles on the internet
I find that Myst was rather slow for an IF (e.g. the tram maze which you had to use twice.) While this could be a side effect of wanting action, it's rather a tiredness of "gri
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Re:I think defining a "highbrow game would be easy (Score:1)
Definition of "Highbrow" (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, I'm going to grump a little about another underlying assumption this guy seems to be taking axiomatically, which is that there are no games that have been high-brow yet. Be sure you understand what an "axiom" is: It is something you take as given to be true and bend the rest of your argument around. Axioms can not really be "wrong". The question is, does the implications of the axiom correspond to the real world in a useful or enlightening way?
My problem with taking this axiomatically is I think it sort of ends up begging the question he's trying to pose. If he actually took the time to formulate a definition of "high-brow", he could almost certainly find a game that matched the definition, which would wreck his point. Odds are, it would be one of the games he mentioned. Instead, he seems to simply take it as given that there have been no truly high-brow games.
I'm not certain that this "highbrow" adjective he's trying to develop is a useful distinction. (Note: The entire purpose of an adjective is to provide a useful distinction, between the nouns that possess the distinction and those that don't, with the obvious extension into fuzzy logic.) It splits the set of all of the thousands of existing games into two sets: "Lowbrow", containing all of them, and "highbrow", containing none of them. At the moment, this is the very definition of a useless adjective, and if nothing has met his bar yet (with the possible exception of a currently-unattainable technology component), nothing is going to.
(Note: While he doesn't state that he is using this axiom, I infer it from the previous paragraph; the best way to explain his tossing out every game in existence is that he axiomatically assumed none of them meet the bar. He claims it's because we're not there yet; I'm disputing this claim and claiming he stacked the deck from the get-go.)
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It seems to me that phrasing the question such that we are referring to "highbrow" games is an intentional mask to the real question: "Are there any games that are also works of art?" By talking about "highbrow" games instead of "artistic" games we can avoid the bad connotations that "art" has swirling around it. But it is also a tad dishonest.
The ambiguity of whether something is art or not plagues every genre. The author here is excluding every game that might be art (but also might not be) with th
The real question... (Score:1)
No. Games are simply not generally accepted as being culture. They are, in certain circles, and they'll become more and more accepted as being culture as more and more people play them (because, I think, it's only a question of age), but today? No, today there is no cultural acceptance similar to other genres. We will have achieved this acceptance when, next to reading Shak
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There is also a present-day example
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Haha (Score:2)
Nothing like a serious frag session smashing the bits out of your opponenets after day's sitting around coding. As intellectually devoid as possible. People's preferences do not lie with their capacities or relics of their own past. ie
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Hmpf... it's all for the best, really. You probably wouldn't understand such forms of art anyway. Pearls to swine and all that...
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Additionally, the concept of art serves only to boost the egos and reputations of artists and art critics while detracting from the works themselves.
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To me, "highbrow" entertainment, be it literary, cinematic, musical or gaming, is that which has multiple layers that can be accessed as you gain more understanding of the work and its context. These works contain stories within stories, if you will. To continue using Othello as an example, the story ca
Chris Crawford tried... (Score:4, Interesting)
Another way of looking at highbrow (Score:1)
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Give me a game (Score:2)
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I got games in low places (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend now that is obsessed with Flight Sims, he has a special chair, dual thrustmaster controllers and pedals, a triple monitor display and half the time he is nutty enough to wear a flight jacket while playing. I think he is half insane but he enjoys it. I think the bottom line is how you approach gaming it you obsess to the point were its a tedious job then you need to get out and get a life. If you look at it as a hobby and remember its supposed to be fun I dont see any problems.
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np: Sly & Robbie ft. Wyclef Jean & Bounty Killer - Bounce (Rhythm Doubles)
Spore? (Score:1)
Highbrow games can't include gameplay? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
That last sentence bothers me. Running, climbing, and "whacking things" is general requirement for many games. That's what makes it interactive entertainment. Is it a cliché of the medium? Sure, but frankly, there's a lot of clichés that even highbrow movies and literature have as well. You could argue there are always "wasted" and "throwaway" scenes and passages, although some may argue that those are just elements of the medium.
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There are plenty of ways you can interact with other humans. You can talk, touch, build things together, make love, share experiences, etc. Of all the things you can do, hitting them with a stick/shooting them with a gun is perhaps not the most highbrow and fulfilling, but it seem to be the one most simulated in computer games.
Games DO have interaction with other humans/chars (Score:2)
There are a ton of games with all the things you suggested (well, except the "make love" part, good luck getting through the ESRB with that), especially in many RPGs. By the end of so
They already exist. (Score:1)
There are plenty of ways to criticall
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Multi-layered approach (Score:1)
1) The action itself
2) References to other things in the pop-culture
3) References to things in current events
4) References to real history
5) A statement about something - even if it is trivial
6) Engaging characters
Start counting how many games have these elements and then you will have a real list.
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1) The action itself
2) References to other things in the pop-culture
3) References to things in current events
4) References to real history
5) A statement about something - even if it is trivial
6) Engaging characters
Start counting how many games have these elements and then you will have a real list.
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Off the top of my head:
Star Ocean: Til the End of time
Final Fantasy IV to VII
StarCraft
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This usually results in something anacronistic [netfunny.com]. Games are not always intended to be set in the "real world", and are free to use any world they want to - for example, they can have Hillary Clinton win the 2001 general US election.
The issues with stories that clamp themselves to the "real world" is that they don't factor in future events. For example, Star Trek II had Khan leave Earth sometime in 1980 or 1990, using technology that was e
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King's Quest (Score:2)
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A Tale in The Desert? (Score:1)
It's pretty much a game created by academics, played by academics, so as to have something to write graduate theses in video game studies about.
There's a couple out there (Score:2)
How about Simcity? (Score:2, Insightful)