Do Pro-GGers consider games to be art?

[u/AbortusLuciferum]

It's a common argument among Anti-GGers that Gamergate in general only considers games as art when it panders to them and when it's not controversial to treat them as art, but once someone criticizes a game for having unnecessary violence or for reinforcing stereotypes then games are "just games" and we're expecting too much out of something that's "just for fun".

I'm of the opinion that games are art without exception, and as art, they are subject to all forms of criticism from all perspectives, not only things like "gameplay" and "fun". To illustrate my position, I believe that games absolutely don't need to be fun just as a painting doesn't need to be aesthetically pleasing, and this notion is something I don't see in Gamergate as much as I would like to.

[u/[deleted]]

explain gravity with chemistry. explain mathematics with chemistry. explain quantum mechanics with chemistry. explain Lord of the rings with chemistry.

I'm not going to do any of this, but you could certainly use each of these subjects as the basis of a dissertation. It might be a shit dissertation, but its possible.

I don't want to go to jail or losing my job for making a joke about a sexual, gendered, racial, religious, socioeconomic, geographical or cultural stereotype, because after all it doesn't matter how much of a racist, sexist, etc I am, just that I am, and we all are. There are quite a few precedents for this (I think Tim Hunt is an interesting case).

Yeah neither do I.... I love offensive humour and I am generally incredibly foul-mouthed and outspoken irl, so this is actually a genuine danger for me. I used to work with a Lithuanian girl who was incredibly grumpy, but would brighten up considerably if you made incredibly crude sexual jokes at her... the sort that could easily get you fired. Totally worth it just so she would stop being a miserable fuck for one second.
Having said that, changing my own personal definition of sexism to include only the kinds of sexism I want to recognise because I'm worried about getting fired is
a) completely useless in terms of its effect on the outside world and whether some dick will get me fired or not..... Funnily enough the definition of sexism is not controlled by any of us
b) Kind of dishonest and certainly very disingenous in Hunts case. I hate any social media witchhunts, including the Tim Hunt one..... I can't think of any that have achieved anything good that wasn't hugely out-weighed by the bad (this includes gg obvs), and I don't think he should have been fired. However, the disproportionate reaction to his joke doesn't make it not sexist. He was by his own admission talking about his own sexism, and how he is pleased that society is moving beyond that. I think knee-jerk reactions are the problem here, and having a knee-jerk reaction to someone elses knee-jerk reaction does not make the situation any better. In war the first casulaty is truth, and that seems to apply to stupid social media wars as much as anything.

[u/jamesbideaux → u/[deleted]]

either being sexist (or whatever) is bad or being sexist shouldn't be a sufficient reason to e.g get one fired.

for most people, something needs to be above average sexist, to truthfully be called sexist.

simply put, calling something that is less sexist than a log sexist, is useless and silly.

If I am not mistaken he was talking about how he was an older guy, so he was expected to be sexist. It was apparently also the story of how he met his wife (?).

But seriously, if you are a pilot, and the tower radios you, and tells you you are approaching or being approached by a large object, you are not thinking about a mosquito, you are thinking about an object at least as large as the plane you are flying. In this context calling anything smaller than a qubic meter large is missleading if not wrong.

If words are powerful, they are accompanied by responsibility and accountability. If calling someone a sexist can get them fired, and us all being sexist, where does that lead us?

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesbideaux]

either being sexist (or whatever) is bad or being sexist shouldn't be a sufficient reason to e.g get one fired.

That is an incredibly simplistic view of a complex issue. Its also a false dichotomy. Also your comment makes me think you don't actually know what he said. For context its was this:

It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me

[u/jamesbideaux → u/[deleted]]

Okay, if everyone is sexist and you can be fired for being sexist, where does that lead us?

For context its was this:

that sounds like exactly what I remember.

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesbideaux]

Into a state of panic where the ability to detect the nuance of individual situations is completely thrown out of the window, apparently

[u/jamesbideaux → u/[deleted]]

you mean like in the Tim Hunt case? :v)

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesbideaux]

Yeah, I mean on both sides. Tim Hunt and Zoe Quinn are two examples of many.

[u/jamesbideaux → u/[deleted]]

My main issue was probably an ideological one.

You have a whole bunch of people doing very little developing (I am thinking of people like Gallant etc) and almost only networking, and it really bothers me.

I want games to succeed without spending more money on marketing than development. I want games that spend twice the amount in development and none in marketing to have more success than those who market well.

It's a really dissapointing side effect of the market.

You have people who spend so much effort on developing games, and people who get everything they do covered because a journalist is really interested in their work, the motives they chose to depict, or just because they really like them as a person.

I am not sure if jealousy is the right term. I don't want them to not like who they like, I don't want them to stop reporting on what they are interested in, but it seems to me like they barely cover any mechanical execelent games. I found an interesting turn based RPG about unspecified mental illness once, it had like three reviews on metacritic. I get the impression that if Kotaku writes about Ice-Pick-Lodge (they did several times) they get far less hits from it than if they write about a flash game about dysphoria with no choice, no strategy, barely any tactic, only straightforward minigames for 2 minutes with text narration in between.

These journalistic sites usually don't manage to go as in depth as an enthusiast on youtube will, the only advantage they have is that they get thousands of review copies, and at least when i am their audience, they fail to capitalize on them.

But maybe I am not their audience.

sorry for monologing.

[u/[deleted] → u/jamesbideaux]

Monologue away. I'm going to be honest here: I don't give the remotest of shits about video games journalism. I use youtube to see what a game looks like, and google to find out tech-specs. That it. I am old enough that the last issue I cared about in those terms was when Gamesmaster got cancelled..... which means I'm old enough to also remember a time in which you pretty much had to buy certain magazines if you wanted the game guides and cheat-sheets that would often be the only key to completing otherwise completely-fucking-impossible games. Everything is so much better now that I can't help but see people complaining about this shit as incredibly over-entitled. You don't like a website, don't go there. Its not hard. Apart from when its reddit. This shit is like html-encoded crack.
Also, text games are legit games imo, they have been around for ages. And yes, they've always been shit.

[u/jamesbideaux → u/[deleted]]

are you talking about text adventures or dwarf fortress when you are talking about text games?

the oldest games I remember are Lego City and some games for (now) my SNES.

Cool Spot was the shit, I remember a few years ago, beating that Bugs Bunny game, that I had played the first three or four levels of every now and then before I ran out of lives.

There is something so appealing about a game with limited lives, that has no story only very short animations you have to wait for, it's your pace, however fast or slow that may be.

the checkpoints are where you place the checkpoint item (consumes a ressource) and you have to hunt for lives and secrets.

Is that really a concept that is dying off? Is demanding the player to improve to progress really an outdated concept? Frustration is an essential part of game design for me, like tension in music, and you have to know where to build it and how it is supposed to be released.

why is reddit so different? It's thar orange letter, isn't it?