1) This portion deals with the article found here(http://northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jcr13_1185605234_0&show_author=1&show_date=1)
This article is a discussion between Roger Ebert, Clive Barker and Jason Rohrer on videogames and "Art".
The notion tossed about the most in the article is the distinction of the various forms of art possibly considerable as "art", whether the experience is a guided journey or has facets of interpretation available, and what these mechanisms do to the works classification as a work of art or simply an experience with no value beyond entertainment. Personally, I agree that an initial flag that must be triggered for something to be art is that it must carry some form effect upon its audience, and must do something for them (very vague on purpose), whether that be emotional, superficial, intellectual it does not matter, as long as the effect is profound. Then, the work must prove some sense of value to the person as a valuable experience created by someone else.
I refrain from using any specific criteria due to the massive possibilities to list what makes art, but it is essentially arbitrary, it is in the eye of the beholder what art is considered, since as Ebert speaks of artistic intent and feels that art's message must be incapable of being influenced by any other than the artist, there are art movements accepted as high art such as Dadaism which put the value of art into the interpreters and the different interpretations possible. There would be no study of English and literature if everything was only viewable as the writer intended and nothing more, there would be less depth to everything unless the writer could manufacture every complex connection or tie explicitly in the text. Thus, to say something is "high" or "low" art as Ebert and Rohrer do is arbitrary, as is asking if it is art, because that could change from generation to generation, from person to person based on the type of experience they have with the works, as well as personal opinion.
2) Works of "art" that have been significant to me in a capacity similar to that discussed by Rohrer and Ebert include: the book "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Crowded House's song "Four Seasons in One Day".
The first was a book that I read first when I was in middle school as a side read, I simply read it because there was a copy present in my house that I could read, so I did so. The entire time I read it, I understood a great deal of the contextual issues at hand, with the focus being on Siberian work camps holding those who had broken the Russian laws. Covering a single day as the title suggests, I found this book to truly move me (naturally I read it later on as well when I could actually comprehend every facet of the story and actually interpret some of the latent content present). I have been so interested in the emotions expressed by the main character, relating to loneliness, the loss of hope, the wearing down of everything that makes you human through a punishing environment, and yet the subsequent rescuing of all that he was slowly losing within himself through seemingly light turns of luck, enough to save his mind from collapse. Even more, the experience led to my interest in the history surrounding the time period (Cold War/Post-War), and still holds a place on my bookshelf with few other books on it (I don't generally read that often).
The second personal example I have is that of music, Crowded House's "Four Seasons in One Day", a song which contests to be my favorite, introduced to me early in my life by my parents, and still has an effect on me today when I hear it. It relaxes me, I sing along and I ponder the melancholy lyrics, though I am incapable of explaining exactly why this song is so important to me, other than in value tied to my childhood and the presence it has had in my life as a favorite of mine. However, I find it moving, and it is an aesthetic experience of art in musical form. Perhaps it is the philosophical or fantastical imagery created in the lyrics, or an interest in the bleak over that which is forced positive, but I love it, and I think it is Art.
The aesthetic experience is simply that which governs some sort of emotion or reaction out of you, positive or negative. From there, interpretations are made further to assign value or artistic value to the work or thing, which would create "art", though "art" can be so broad as to avoid the possibility of a standard answer.
3) After having played Jason Rohrer's game "Passage" (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/) for the first time without having anything to prime me for the experience, I have to say I was slightly intrigued by the overall mood of the game, the music was melancholy and 8 bit, meaning it was very simple and nothing extremely elaborate to create a mood. The game itself is very simple as well, as a character you move, probably run into the female counterpart character, and from there continue to move forward with extreme tunnel vision to the right as a number in the upper right goes up (by 1 when you move forward alone, and by 2 when with female counterpart and moving forward).
With this, I feel that the point of the experience is tied to the progression of the game and how the game reaches an ending. As you move forward in the game, time passes, and the sprites of the characters you control warp and age in a natural manner, from adulthood to death it seems, with the female character dying first and the male character slowing once the female character dies (becomes a tombstone). With a title like "Passage", the game seems to be a representation of the path of life, with some movements and paths blocked due to the unity of the characters making your size greater and less able to move through the lower parts of the world. Boxes also exist which increase the points you have, as well as age, possibly symbolizing life events or rewarding the venturing from the straight shot forward provided by the path at the top in which you start.
Aesthetically, I enjoyed the game, the feel was cluncky and old do to the style, but it was interesting, and left me thinking a little bit about what the hell I had just played and why I played it a second time right after the first playthrough.
~~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix~~~~~~
No comments:
Post a Comment