Aquanox
06-21-2007, 21:24
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/5436/humanuv1.jpg
Video Games: The Eighth Art - Blog #34
Barry Keith Grant,
Professor of Film Studies
In the previous blog, John Mitterer cognitive psychologist at Brock University, discussed the recent conference at Brock University – Interacting with Immersive Worlds. He used the metaphor of alchemy to describe the way academics and designers banded together at the conference to discuss video games. Perhaps the most daring of the alchemists to speak was Denis Dyack, president of Silicon Knights, who delivered the fourth and final keynote. Denis’ presentation was titled “Video Games: The Eighth Art.” Denis’ presentation, in essence, outlined why video games should be viewed as art and have the potential to transmute mere entertainment into an actual art form.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/798/798146/too-human-20070620043224591-000.jpg (http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/748/748783/img_4640814.html)
As Denis explained, Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923), who is considered the first theorist of film, considered cinema to be the "the Seventh Art." As Canudo argued in his manifesto “The Birth of the Sixth Art” (1911), cinema was "plastic art in motion." He understood that film incorporated the distinctive elements of both the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, and painting) with the temporal arts (music and dance).He later added poetry to the list in his 1923 better-known manifesto “Reflections on The Seventh Art”.
In the 1920s and for some time thereafter, it was common to hear movies referred to as "the seventh art." Today, almost 100 years after Canudo wrote his manifesto, video games have now become part of the “new art” discussion, i.e. the eighth art, and employ the elements of film, but add another new and crucial aspect – interactivity. Canudo understood early on how cinema, the medium of the 20th century, was a site of artistic convergence in its synthesis of the other arts. For Denis, video games mark a new site of convergence, one comparable to cinema. Video games are truly characteristic of our new century, in that they involve the audience through interactivity.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/798/798146/too-human-20070620043226029-000.jpg (http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/748/748783/img_4640815.html)
Keeping with this theme, Denis’ talk was an example of convergence in practice, as it was a collaborative presentation between Denis, John Mitterer and myself. We demonstrated during our presentation what disciplines, such as psychology and film studies, can bring to game design.
For my part, being a professor of Film Studies, I discussed some similarities and correspondences between film and video games. Yes, video games, like cinema before them, synthesize elements from the other arts, but there are other analogies between the two media. For example, apart from avant-gardes like Canudo, movies in their infancy (like photography before it) were not considered art. Like video games, cinema began as a popular entertainment, and the form was tainted by its very popularity, or low-brow cultural status. "Serious" actors (actors trained for the stage) disdained working in movies, because it wasn’t considered "real" acting, i.e. their performances could be built in bits, through editing. In film, “serious” actors were under the impression that they did not have to "act," but merely be in front of the camera. Although this attitude no longer holds, it is still the common view about synthespian performance in film now, like that of Andy Serkis in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) (http://www.amazon.com/King-Kong-Widescreen-Adrien-Brody/dp/B00005JO20/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-7359256-5583349?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1182432459&sr=1-2).
Early cinema was content to show movement, no matter what it was. Around the turn of the century, early films by the Lumiere brothers had titles like Train Entering a Station, Boat Leaving the Dock, and Feeding the Baby. Movies were at first motivated by spectacle alone. For this reason, historian Tom Gunning calls early film a "cinema of attractions." But as audiences became familiar with moving pictures, more than movement was needed, and so movies began to concentrate more on content, on story and character. Similarly, video games now are seeking to move beyond just good graphics and the mere capability of interactivity, to content-driven games, where story is important and integral to gameplay.
Until the late 1930s, Hollywood acknowledged the art director, who was responsible for set design and perhaps set decoration, as the artist. However, with David O. Selznick , who coined the term "production designer" to describe the contributions of William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind in 1939 , an additional artistry type was born into cinema. Today the production designer is the person responsible for bringing together into a unified visual all of the elements of set design and decoration, as well as costuming and even makeup. For Denis, a good game designer does essentially the same thing.
One might also point to the comparisons between the formal study of cinema and the study of video games. Thirty years ago, film studies, like gaming now, was viewed with suspicion as a viable academic discipline, much like other new disciplines in the past such as sociology, or even psychology. Film studies took textual analysis and interpretation from English – ideas about mise-en-scene and performance from the theater; the concept of iconography from art history; and theoretical paradigms borrowed from psychology, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, semiotics, and structuralism.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/798/798146/too-human-20070620043223513-000.jpg (http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/748/748783/img_4640813.html)
Interestingly, university film studies departments, which forward-thinking academics fought for in the 1970s, are today being folded into or absorbed by new academic departments with names like screen studies, moving image studies, and film and new media. Significantly, a few years ago the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS), the main North American scholarly association for the study of film, changed its name (amid considerable controversy) to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). As gaming grows in recognition and takes its place as a legitimate form of art, "new media" is a Borg-like concept that will engulf the preceding field of film studies, just as video games themselves supercede cinema.
In his famous book, “The Medium is the Massage” (published in 1967) (http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Massage-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1584230703/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-7359256-5583349?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182432649&sr=8-1), Canadian media visionary Marshall McLuhan observed, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." In other words, new technological forms always begin by looking to the techniques and paradigms of earlier forms. This is as true for video games as it is for other media, including cinema, which began by attempting to reproduce the perspective of a spectator at the theater during a play before discovering the possibilities of editing within a scene. Thus video games may use the language of cinema – a visual language with which everyone has become familiar. Silicon Knights’ forthcoming “Too Human” video game, for the Xbox 360 console for example, makes sophisticated use of subjective camera techniques and other aspects of film style, such as rack focus. However, as video games are viewed more and more as an art form, they will develop their own language of which cinema will be only a part. Again, “Too Human,” with its seamless flow between cinematics and gameplay points toward this new language.
Someone once asked science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (who wrote several Star Trek episodes, including the famous "Amok Time" that introduced the Vulcan mating ritual) how he could defend science fiction as 90-percent of it was crap. Sturgeon responded that 90-percent of everything is crap, but that the remaining 10-percent may be great. This has since become known as "Sturgeon’s Law," and it applies to video games as well. For despite the number of inferior games out there, it is the other 10-percent of, including games like “Eternal Darkness” and “Too Human” that are attaining the stature of art.
I'm getting dizzy with all these great games :no
Video Games: The Eighth Art - Blog #34
Barry Keith Grant,
Professor of Film Studies
In the previous blog, John Mitterer cognitive psychologist at Brock University, discussed the recent conference at Brock University – Interacting with Immersive Worlds. He used the metaphor of alchemy to describe the way academics and designers banded together at the conference to discuss video games. Perhaps the most daring of the alchemists to speak was Denis Dyack, president of Silicon Knights, who delivered the fourth and final keynote. Denis’ presentation was titled “Video Games: The Eighth Art.” Denis’ presentation, in essence, outlined why video games should be viewed as art and have the potential to transmute mere entertainment into an actual art form.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/798/798146/too-human-20070620043224591-000.jpg (http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/748/748783/img_4640814.html)
As Denis explained, Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923), who is considered the first theorist of film, considered cinema to be the "the Seventh Art." As Canudo argued in his manifesto “The Birth of the Sixth Art” (1911), cinema was "plastic art in motion." He understood that film incorporated the distinctive elements of both the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, and painting) with the temporal arts (music and dance).He later added poetry to the list in his 1923 better-known manifesto “Reflections on The Seventh Art”.
In the 1920s and for some time thereafter, it was common to hear movies referred to as "the seventh art." Today, almost 100 years after Canudo wrote his manifesto, video games have now become part of the “new art” discussion, i.e. the eighth art, and employ the elements of film, but add another new and crucial aspect – interactivity. Canudo understood early on how cinema, the medium of the 20th century, was a site of artistic convergence in its synthesis of the other arts. For Denis, video games mark a new site of convergence, one comparable to cinema. Video games are truly characteristic of our new century, in that they involve the audience through interactivity.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/798/798146/too-human-20070620043226029-000.jpg (http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/748/748783/img_4640815.html)
Keeping with this theme, Denis’ talk was an example of convergence in practice, as it was a collaborative presentation between Denis, John Mitterer and myself. We demonstrated during our presentation what disciplines, such as psychology and film studies, can bring to game design.
For my part, being a professor of Film Studies, I discussed some similarities and correspondences between film and video games. Yes, video games, like cinema before them, synthesize elements from the other arts, but there are other analogies between the two media. For example, apart from avant-gardes like Canudo, movies in their infancy (like photography before it) were not considered art. Like video games, cinema began as a popular entertainment, and the form was tainted by its very popularity, or low-brow cultural status. "Serious" actors (actors trained for the stage) disdained working in movies, because it wasn’t considered "real" acting, i.e. their performances could be built in bits, through editing. In film, “serious” actors were under the impression that they did not have to "act," but merely be in front of the camera. Although this attitude no longer holds, it is still the common view about synthespian performance in film now, like that of Andy Serkis in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) (http://www.amazon.com/King-Kong-Widescreen-Adrien-Brody/dp/B00005JO20/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-7359256-5583349?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1182432459&sr=1-2).
Early cinema was content to show movement, no matter what it was. Around the turn of the century, early films by the Lumiere brothers had titles like Train Entering a Station, Boat Leaving the Dock, and Feeding the Baby. Movies were at first motivated by spectacle alone. For this reason, historian Tom Gunning calls early film a "cinema of attractions." But as audiences became familiar with moving pictures, more than movement was needed, and so movies began to concentrate more on content, on story and character. Similarly, video games now are seeking to move beyond just good graphics and the mere capability of interactivity, to content-driven games, where story is important and integral to gameplay.
Until the late 1930s, Hollywood acknowledged the art director, who was responsible for set design and perhaps set decoration, as the artist. However, with David O. Selznick , who coined the term "production designer" to describe the contributions of William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind in 1939 , an additional artistry type was born into cinema. Today the production designer is the person responsible for bringing together into a unified visual all of the elements of set design and decoration, as well as costuming and even makeup. For Denis, a good game designer does essentially the same thing.
One might also point to the comparisons between the formal study of cinema and the study of video games. Thirty years ago, film studies, like gaming now, was viewed with suspicion as a viable academic discipline, much like other new disciplines in the past such as sociology, or even psychology. Film studies took textual analysis and interpretation from English – ideas about mise-en-scene and performance from the theater; the concept of iconography from art history; and theoretical paradigms borrowed from psychology, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, semiotics, and structuralism.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/798/798146/too-human-20070620043223513-000.jpg (http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/748/748783/img_4640813.html)
Interestingly, university film studies departments, which forward-thinking academics fought for in the 1970s, are today being folded into or absorbed by new academic departments with names like screen studies, moving image studies, and film and new media. Significantly, a few years ago the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS), the main North American scholarly association for the study of film, changed its name (amid considerable controversy) to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). As gaming grows in recognition and takes its place as a legitimate form of art, "new media" is a Borg-like concept that will engulf the preceding field of film studies, just as video games themselves supercede cinema.
In his famous book, “The Medium is the Massage” (published in 1967) (http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Massage-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1584230703/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-7359256-5583349?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182432649&sr=8-1), Canadian media visionary Marshall McLuhan observed, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." In other words, new technological forms always begin by looking to the techniques and paradigms of earlier forms. This is as true for video games as it is for other media, including cinema, which began by attempting to reproduce the perspective of a spectator at the theater during a play before discovering the possibilities of editing within a scene. Thus video games may use the language of cinema – a visual language with which everyone has become familiar. Silicon Knights’ forthcoming “Too Human” video game, for the Xbox 360 console for example, makes sophisticated use of subjective camera techniques and other aspects of film style, such as rack focus. However, as video games are viewed more and more as an art form, they will develop their own language of which cinema will be only a part. Again, “Too Human,” with its seamless flow between cinematics and gameplay points toward this new language.
Someone once asked science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (who wrote several Star Trek episodes, including the famous "Amok Time" that introduced the Vulcan mating ritual) how he could defend science fiction as 90-percent of it was crap. Sturgeon responded that 90-percent of everything is crap, but that the remaining 10-percent may be great. This has since become known as "Sturgeon’s Law," and it applies to video games as well. For despite the number of inferior games out there, it is the other 10-percent of, including games like “Eternal Darkness” and “Too Human” that are attaining the stature of art.
I'm getting dizzy with all these great games :no