The ‘made by fans’ thing is pretty insidious these days, I see it in everything.
the problem with this kind of thinking is that the experience of having not seen a dog bear its fangs (or whatever–that strikes me as a rather corny example) is just as real as the experience of having seen it. the idea that the specific tenor of your experience determines the quality of your artistic output is inane; it is just as narrow and empty as the deference of facsimile. I don’t know what a true piece of art is, but I do know that being “inspired by life experience” is at best a tautology, at worst literal nonsense, and either way as default to human existence as, say, breathing. it’s not an artistic privilege or mode.
what you’re actually saying is that the people that only followed directions in order to create a copy of what they experienced in the past are poor artists. they are, in fact, not talented. of course people copying miyazaki’s tics won’t produce work of the same quality. they aren’t him. but the problem is not that they can’t put the True Human Experience of having been attacked by a dog into a movie with a dog in it, it’s that they are producing movies that depend on something that they do not have and yet do not recognize the nature of this problem because they have no artistic talent. if you want to turn yourself into an industry, as miyazaki has done (intentionally or not), them’s the breaks.
I don’t know if Undertale is good, because I haven’t played it. But I do know that the experience of being a True Mother Fan is as legitimate as whatever empty experience prodded Itoi into Mother’s particular brand of, I don’t know, hopeful disquietude. If Undertale guy failed it’s only because he failed.
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You know, fans of anything are about as good as non-fans of the same thing when it comes to crafting stuff.
That is to say most are not very good. A few are competent in their craft. Fewer still are legitimately good. Whether they are passionate about part of the art and culture they grew up with has little to do with it, I think.
I mostly agree with jodeaux, though. You can say that a life experience of being a war survivor and one of sitting in the sofa watching kids movies are equally valid, and in the most superficial way they are. But one is much more direct and genuine when it comes to expressing yourself artistically.
If I’d fought in a war I’d find Miyazaki’s work less effective probably
where is the evidence of this, though? does some high percentage of trauma survivors become notable artists? I mean, it should be pretty clear that this is not true. maybe this has the potential of making you a more well rounded or sympathetic person (it also has the potential of making you a violent sociopath), but what that has to do with art is not clear, and certainly not exclusive.
at any rate, the core experiences of life are universal. the fact that you can even argue for the artistic benefit or primacy of what I guess we can call extreme life experience is testament enough to that. you’re not a war survivor, I presume, so your ability to determine the effect such a thing might have on one’s perspective relies on your ability to conjure a frame of reference and project it in some direction or another. and if you can do this to judge, who is to say you can’t do it to create? we make the world in our image, and judge it against ourselves. if we have no cause for pain, we will make one. if we find too great a cause for pain, we will inure ourselves to it out of necessity. plenty of major artists lived lives of no consequence outside of the force of their art. where it came from is, I think, a pretty empty question.
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I’d say the key is in the specificity jodeaux mentioned with the fangs example.
The low-level, detailed reality of living through an experience is bound to give you that something extra that you won’t get just by evoking a simulation of that experience in your mind. We are imperfect thinkers, and it’s the unexpected variables of reality that lend that genuine flavor to works of art.
I suppose that would be true if you created a movie that depended on the realism of a dog’s fangs in order to have an effect. but there is nothing forcing you to create that movie, or even operate in that mode as a general principle. proust spent most of his life lying in bed doing nothing. beckett wrote about characters that only even bothered to exist in the strictest sense of the term.
I mean, the experience in this particular example is inane. whether you have specifically seen a dog’s fangs is, I think we can all agree, of no consequence. you are only using it as an instance of a particular, and I think it should also be pretty clear that we all have plenty of inane experiences that we can draw on. we imbue inanities with any number of consequences, because that’s what people do.
This seems like a really privileged point of view given that most people rarely have such a reflective opportunity when experiencing most things, especially true of experiencing war or other danger. I also tend to think that it is the lack of being genuine that attracts me to art, while I am attracted to people for their genuineness.
It’s a product of my age and breeding that I’m always going to be driven to appreciate stuff that wants to kill its dads more than think fondly of them I think
This approach will disappear if it isn’t nearly gone already
You’re essentially denying Toby the fruits of his achievement based upon his lack of membership to the exclusive club of “being older than he is”, that his game is born of a moddycoddled generation that exists exclusively in the pages and minds of other right-wing old people with news channels to sell, and that he should forever carry the burden of not having lived in an era before the internet became so universal. Remember that children are stupid, and that the message has nothing to do with the comparative lack of opportunities or outlandishly higher barriers to workplace entry that were never even remotely a concern for baby boomers who could just up and walk into any number of high-end positions by just asking back in the day.
I hate to break it to you, but the Holy Throne that is Studio Ghibli is, like Disney, also a studio made up of several people paid poorly spending their lives drawing endlessly to satisfy the vision of a director, even if the vision is ultimately less committee based than the annual by-the-numbers dreck that Pixar knocks out. Toby Fox, on the other hand, is a single guy who probably had input from a few other people still working on a much smaller budget than either Studio Ghibli or Disney, and still knocked out something that got the acclaim of people older than himself. Is that even feasible?
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The fact that most people lack the privilege of a personality prone to reflection doesn’t make the reflections of those who do any less valid.
Also, most people aren’t artists, or aren’t interested in art and that’s fine.
That was just an example in line with the Miyazaki mention. The principle doesn’t have to apply exclusively to such extreme experiences.
Depended in what sense? It’s impossible to qualify something like attention to detail or the evocative brush strokes of a particular author because only that author has made that particular work.
Obviously not. That’s why soulless dreck exists.
Witcher 3 is almost certainly mine. I’m perhaps two-thirds of the way through Witcher 3 and playing it with my girlfriend, Reader of The Books, has impressed on me the breadth of the world in that game. Characters from the previous adventures of Geralt show up in logical places, e.g., Reuben. There are many small improvements on 2 (not sure if @Felix prefers 2 for its structure, mechanics, or story) in the combat and traversal and the game provides a good simulation of being a professional Witcher if you ignore or sideline the main story for a bit.
I can’t say it’s a better action game than Bloodborne.
I wouldn’t quite say that I prefer 2, only that 90% of what makes 3 great – the structure, mechanics, and story – was already in place in 2, and given less opportunity to wear out its welcome.
as for undertale, I could do with fewer people feeling obliged to compare it to earthbound.
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definitely wordfiltering toby fox to tony fox on here
Word filter Toby Fox to Tony Taka.
Word filter Earthbound to 80s ennui.
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I could word filter all of them to Tony Danza
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metroidvania/castleroid should definitely be hemorrhoidmania
My personal GOTY by both hours sunk and how much I love it is clearly Bloodborne. If not for a few inexplicable regressions* in game design and a slightly less compelling overall game cosmology/plot compared to Dark Souls, it’d probably be my favorite game of all time.
But it’s only a small exaggeration to call it the only new game I played this year.
I did not spend any time with many of the other big name GOTY candidates; I haven’t played Splatoon, MGSV, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Undertale, and my only time with Mario Maker was at a Best Buy kiosk.
On 2015 games I did play:
I loved Until Dawn and was pleased to finally play a horror game in this style that was fun straight though. I’ll probably go through it again to do an all-die run and explore the options I haven’t seen. Kero Blaster’s new hard mode is excellent but I haven’t finished it yet. I started Titan Souls, loved it, but got distracted and haven’t gotten back to it. Jamestown+ was fun but I didn’t get obsessed with it. Axiom Verge was worth playing but didn’t quite get under my skin the way I was hoping it would; I liked it enough to beat it though. Despite being really pleased with it, I’ve only played Life is Strange episode 1, because I want to play the rest with my wife the way we did Until Dawn. I’ve played a couple hours of Dragon Quest Heroes and look forward to sinking some real hours into it before Dark Souls 3 launches. I’ve booted up Transformers Devastation and played about 10 minutes and again, seems like a fun time with great vivid colors, and will return to it.
Oh, and I platinum’ed Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin. Still the “worst” Souls game, but I love it plenty anyway.
*Grinding for vials/bullets is ok, but that they don’t refill from your stock after winning in Co-Op/pvp is just plain bad. And when you die in Co-op, it throws you back to the lantern, but doesn’t refill your stock either. So you have to warp back to the dream and then back to the lamp. If it’s an intentional move to change the pacing of co-op from Dark Souls, I’d like to hear a compelling argument for it, because all it does is apply unnecessary friction to multiplayer.
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Mine is definitely Undertale. Faulting it for supposedly aping Mother seems disingenuous when most of the interesting stuff it does is through exploration of choice on a level the Mother games never even bothered with. It unites its themes and mechanics into a real dialogue with the player regarding the way they do or don’t play games and empathize with them, and not just to produce “gotchas” like stuff like the Stanley Parable or binary alignment choices.
There’s ample room to argue the kind of players who will even discover that is exactly the kind of players the game criticizes, but it’s anything but shallow.
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hmmmm, I’m not sure I agree with that part. I think it is actually fairly shallow, which is exactly why a comparison to mother is not favourable, but I still like undertale quite a bit on its own terms! it’d be somewhere near the bottom of my top ten for the year.
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