Comments: 4 Comments (Go to Comments)
Categories: Commentary
Tags: art, blog banter
Welcome to the latest installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza created by bs angel and coordinated by Game Couch. Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Lou Chou posed this question to me:
Are there any video games that possess a timeless appeal? Games that, despite constant advances in technology, retain a game engine or narrative that will forever be relevant. If so, why?
It’s a variation of the “games as art” discussion in which gamers draw parallels between an established media (movies) and the new media of video games. Yes, I believe games are art, but do we have a Citizen Kane — a game which will be discovered and appreciated by future generations?
The problem with video games is that they are technologically dependent in a way movies aren’t. They’ve moved from cave paintings to CGI works of wonder in 30 years, but they’ve done so on the backs of computers — unlike movies they are inseparable from machines which power them.
The experience of watching The Godfather on television, remastered for Blu-ray, or on the big screen at a festival may differ, but it’s still the same movie delivered through several access points.
If you want to play Ico, you need the game disk and you need a PlayStation 2 — or a backwards compatible PlayStation 3. Ico is a magnificent game — a work of art — but it’s essentially undiscoverable. I could name several, perhaps many Citizen Kanes, but most of them are islands trapped in time.
Participants:
CrazyKinux’s Musing: The Timeless appeal of Homeworld
Lou vs. Video Games, FIGHT!: Defining the Truly Classic Video Game
Silvercublogger: Lost & Found
Hawty McBloggy: Much Like Your Mom
Game Couch: Finding Citizen Kane
Delayed Responsibility: Oldies but Goodies?
Silvercube:
I have a PS2, but have not played Ico. I played a demo of it a few years ago, and it did not really appeal to me very much.
But to each his own :)
CrazyKinux:
How true this is.
I just hope that we can come up with emulators powerful enough to run any of those games from the past – console agnostic emulators that is!
Lou Chou:
Ico is a great example of gaming art that’s destined to be forgotten. For some reason there’s an added commitment to the idea of playing a particularly artistic game that ends up turning a majority of casual gamers away (not Wii Fit-casual, mind you. More, plays his/her XBOX an hour or two a week-casual)
The Plagiarist:
I disagree. Even if movies are disengaged from PCs, that doesn’t mean the new generation will just embrace the old which is kind of the point of this article.
Citizen Kane is one example where you will still find people thinking it’s overrated the farther the generation passes it by. It’s not timeless, it’s just most of the modern movies haven’t elevated past it because they’re more interested in special effects which forces those that would push the genre to be buried under the junk food.
For this same reason, near timeless games aren’t hard to find. You just have to sway your vision from the Portals or the Super Mario Brothers.
One exception to this will be Tetris but I can see many dissing this game for it’s lack of “plot” presentation so my vote goes to Harvest Moon.
The thing with this series is that it’s gameplay is so timeless and so rooted to a sandbox that it can be repeated generations over generations again and again because the only thing that needs improving with this game are the graphics and the balance. The rest are timeless.
Evidence:
-It has the same addictive quality as pokemon but it doesn’t need to constantly recreate pokemons
-It has the same addictive quality as the Sims but unlike the latter, it’s fun isn’t supported by items but rather by the plot which unlike most games don’t work so much towards telling the story but making the characters “timeless” and “memorable” so that you’ll keep playing a few more months until you get tired of the characters lack of new plot-ness
-It is both a casual game, an action game, a hectic micro management game and a hectic macro management game where the only flaw is that all these qualities aren’t retained in 1 game but are spread out throughout each iteration (SNES HM was more strategic, N64 one was more leasure and PS and GBA ones where more hectic while next gen ones were more threading on new grounds)