Have video games finally surpassed literature?

vars ska man annars få tag på böcker?

borkbork bork bork

>cheaper
Go to a library booksale or any major city where you can buy them from homeless guys that run mini sidewalk bookstores. I love talking to them and helping them out, especially because they aren't going to just beg for drug money. Point is you can buy great books for an average of $.50 US

Personliga samlingar. Kunskap och kultur är egendom, och egendom görs mindre av fördelning, för att inte tala om det aktuella värdet av bibliotekens utbud. KB, UUB och UB/LUB gör dugliga supplement.

It takes less effort to get more stimulation from them.

>judging a medium based on the ease in which it is consumed

Why?

Have orangutans surpassed baseball caps?

No, but you are on the right page, as far as I'm concerned. Medium has nothing to do with content; there is no real reason video games can't pass literature as art. Having said that, the current video game industry's marketing strategy tends towards get-rich-quick schemes in place of art.

>Medium has nothing to do with content
ROFL

because having multiple persons controlling different aspects of the production of an artwork couldn't POSSIBLY have a negative effect on its cohesiveness.

GOD BLESS YOU user

The orangatan market is bullish this year

Of Course

1. he didn't say it couldn't have an effect
2. cohesion =/= quality
3. even if it did, there are games made entirely by individuals, so what of them?

>1 ebook reader: $150
>as many ebooks as your computer can hold from libgen/bookzz: $0
>looks natural, is socially acceptable, and can help teach you more about the english language

>as many computer games as your computer can hold: $300+
>looks autistic trying to carry gaming around between classes or after studying or during lunch
>melts your rain into a nice soupy sludge that zombies will love slurping up

>I feel stupid for taking the bait....
The point is to take the bait, cus it makes you feel smart, or some other weird ego fulfillation.

Not even fucking close.

>Medium has nothing to do with content

Has user ever been more wrong?

No.
A few years ago video games just reached the point of fairly decent plot driven story. All these walking sims still fail to be much more than a pretentious video game because contentwise they're still decades, if not centuries, behind art, literature, etc.

In what respect?

If I think of the most thought provoking game this decade, I'd say it's probably Undertale. While Undertale might be better than a lot of shitty books, it's literally nothing compared to any book with real literary value.

>tfw this is my actual goal and I'm just reading books to steal concepts and prose from

Video games are the final step before the total artform and ignoring them is willfully embracing irrelevance.

Nice bait

>dota
lol
>undertale
lol

You guys got a game that tells a story like Undertale does, or is more thought provoking?

Skyrim? Mass Effect 3? Call of Duty Modern Warfare X infiity warfare sponsored by mountain dew?

That broken English in the picture says it all really.

I'm not sure why you're asking me. I'm here and not on /v/, aren't I?

But most people aren't very discerning when it comes to where they get their entertainment.

Lisa beats it (better handling of morality, writing that doesn't just strive to be emotionally manipulative, much better difficulty curve)

The Beginner's Guide has the most nuanced story-telling I've ever seen in a game and is (I believe) on par with many great books I've read, but people discount it because of its embrace of sentimentality and 2deep4u misdirection.

Book publishers put just as much if not more emphasis on sales

There are much more shitty books in YA genre than there are shitty video games put together

>Skyrim? Mass Effect 3? Call of Duty Modern Warfare X infiity warfare sponsored by mountain dew?
Stop baiting, please.

>(an industry plagued with rushed production and an emphasis on sales not content)

This has been a thing in literature for ages

...

IDK if i've witnessed it surpassing the best books but personally it isn't hard for me to see a few games every year as amazing art. Parts of pic related reminded me of Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Second-hand books are literally traded for pennies, and many are even free, like when libraries are making room on the shelves. When I was a poor student most of my bookshelf was filled with declassified books from the college library.

Are you me?

Reminder that for games to be high art, the gameplay has to not only reinforce the themes, but also not interfere with the internal consistency of the work. This means that, among other design choices, the traditional gameplay section/story section split disqualifies a game from being high art.

Agreed
here and I believe both make avoid the split (maybe Lisa having a bit of it)

Antichamber fits that definition easily also.

>melts your rain
Cute.
But you know the BRAIN actually benefits from playing games. Why not both? The books are cheap so you can easily afford your games as well

>aving said that, the current video game industry's marketing strategy tends towards get-rich-quick schemes in place of art.

Literature is exactly the same. There is a reason why crime fiction makes up 90% of the bookshop inventories

You should find another bookshop.

youtube.com/watch?v=zmYrdMKC-d4

>are video games literature?
>not “as good as literature”
>Georges R. R. Martin

Do you seriously expect me to play it?

You sure showed him user, dont play that vid.

if games can ever be considered artistic, they will be of either competitive or the puzzle variety. cleansed of the narrative category which should have stuck to literature, competitive and puzzle games do those things which only games can do. this is what happened with film, as well: the only "art" films are those that eschew (or at least subordinate to auxiliary roles) the categories of narrative and character in favor of visual experimentation.

of course this opens the door to more accurately judge the exemplary articles of the form; and the hegemony of Candy Crush and Call of Duty should speak volumes as to its aesthetic worth.

The cheapest bookstores are not even bookstores. Just second hand places like value village. But even there books will generally cost you $3-5 a piece. Library sales are cheaper but don't happen often enough.

As I said, the local library gave free books, like twice in a month. It would concern like five to ten books put on a shelf in the entrance. Regarding the second-hand store, mine frequently gives away books for 0.5$ to 1$. Of course it isn't luxury hardcovers but you can definitely find all the classics and pretty much everything else published as paperback.

Books have very little value per se and are frequently thrown away.

Video games are a medium where going "WHAT IF LIKE, KILLING PEOPLE IS BAD?!" gets treated like a massive "deconstruction" that treads groundbreaking territory. Or Chad Brosington going to Indonesia and doing drugs and being a white savior before saying "what have I become?!?!" while looking at his bloody hands wins a BAFTA.

Attempts to make actual art in the medium tend to fail because they're largely made by "arteeest" types who whine about how nobody respects their art when their attempts fail. Tale of Tales for example.

Best case scenario is you play a RPG or something that had the story written by Notable Genre Fiction Writer, or is drawing off their work, so you end up with a decent but otherwise generic and inoffensive story. Eg, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher, etc.

Where do you live? I live in rural Canada so there aren't so many patrician stacks at the second hand shops (though it does make it more exciting when you find something good) around here and the actual used bookstores are nearly as expensive as buying from Amazon.

I'm sure if I went to the libraries and used bookstores in the GTA or Montreal they'd be cheap as fuck though

>an industry plagued with rushed production and an emphasis on sales not content
name one industry for which that is not true

It was a moderately small college-town in Europe (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). The bookshop I still buy from is located in a medium-sized European town (~200,000 inhabitants). There are classics, more obscure titles and many history manuals. Still a cheap edition but in nice condition. I would also notice that, unlike video games, classics and many fine authors can be found in second-hand stocks. Used video games sold remain mostly expensive—as far as I remember, a generic 70$ PS3 game can drop to 25$ ~ 30$—unless they are really old, like the Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims CDs found in “three for 5$” baskets. Once a book is published, it's very likely to appear in the used market for barely nothing.

>people seriously arguing over whether books or vidya have better "value for money"
Poor people are disgusting.

Because there's no comparison between the benefits of reading critically and playing video games.

En mann dricker vatten

You should play Mother 3 sometime. I think it is a great example of a game that was made to tell a story, instead of the other way around. i.e., the story is the excuse for the game. The writer, Shigesato Itoi, took a lot of time and care with how he wanted the game to look and play and feel, and he even rewrote the script a few times. Mother 3's prequel, Earthbound, is usually mentioned in these threads, but I feel that game works more as a fun parody of JRPGs than a game with focus and a clear message. Mother 3 is my favorite game of all time, and the reason I still play video games. Here's a longwinded but beautiful review of Mother 3 from tim rogers: actionbutton.net/?p=422
I love you Veeky Forums!

To add to this, I think the final boss of this game is one of the few instances I can think of where the narrative's impact is heightened by the gameplay mechanics. If you know what I mean, it simply wouldn't be as poignant if you read it in a book or watched it in a film. Other games I can think of are Shadow of the Colossus and Ico.

Oh look, another
>If I can convince the world that games are art, I'll never have to read a book again!
thread

Thanks a lot for the recommendation. I enjoyed my time with the first earthbound game, but it was a little dated by the time I got around to playing it. I'll give Mother 3 a try tomorrow

>I feel stupid
That's what you get for reading books, you nerd.

Pathologic
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
Underrail
Age of Decadence
Planescape Torment
Vampire the masquerade bloodlines

Exactly. Which means, everything will be immersive to the average pleb. How will that evolve the artform?

It will degenerate into nothingness.

Literature and video games are so different I don't think games could ever surpass literature. I read books and I play games and I enjoy both in different ways. I'm wary of the notion of an art form surpassing another, but I'd imagine they'd have to be really similar, like literature and film. Has film surpassed literature?

Film has surpassed theatre, at least.

>SMT: Strange Journey
>not Persona 3
Gotta start with the greeks

nah

No video game has even come close to tackling the philosophical issues that literature has already covered and deconstructed to hell and back for centuries upon centuries.

All video games, even the "deep" ones deal in boring tripe and basic concepts like revenge, achieving a goal, depression, existentialism, war, the mind, what have you. Countless of books, some of which are timeless classics have already covered these subjects intensely and obviously far better than video games.

Video games, are, by definition forever doomed to just be escapist entertaining nonsense, rewards on a timer and not much else. I'm sorry to burst your bubble user, and they will also never be art. (Especially as long as E3 exists, which is an utter embarrassment and is mocked yearly).

What are some themes deeper than "the mind?"

Don't say God.

Well, to be honest, nothing. As everything depends on our perception of it - and that is the mind.

So I would argue that no theme is deeper nor higher than the mind.

roll

rolling

I don't think you're the same user

>rolling in epic bread

What about things like text adventures or visual novels? Interactive web pages? Where is the threshold at which interactivity renders it impossible to present deep themes in an artful fashion? Couldn't text adventures, and perhaps to a lesser exent Visual novels, be seen as extensions of certain types of literature? What about things that use the potential and convenience of computer technology to realize experimental literary techniques more conveniently--as a simple example, I'd rather read the Epub of Pale Fire or Infinite Jest with pop-up links to the footnotes rather than flip around and flip around? I think a creative author could go beyond choose-your-own adventure Hopscotch stuff or oodles of footnootes and come up with other interesting ways of formatting texts and bending narrative forms.

Could dialogue trees, stripped of their RPG roots, be interesting or useful as high literary devices? I dunno...I think we haven't had the right genius come along for any of this.

More importantly, the budget required for more low-fi kinds of games like text adventures and visual novels means more authorial control than games which rely on immersion by realistic graphics, games which need to make back a lot of sunk costs.

At what image-to-text ratio does a book become a graphic novel or, at the extreme end of the spectrum, a children's picture book? Does it matter if the author created the illustrations or just worked closely with the illustrator?

People that make video games aren't generally thinkers or philosophers.

They are essentially entertainers with a certain skill to make video games. Most people want to make video games because they are fun, not to impose meaning or create deeper themes because that would miss the target audience most games are for.

Therefore, because the creators lack any sort of philosophical thought (as there is no thought put into coding, it is a very mundane and monotonous task) no video game could overcome this barrier between other entertainment outlets like cinematography or literature.

It is forever doomed to be just that, games. And nothing else.

>Video games, are, by definition forever doomed to just be escapist entertaining nonsense
By which definition?

Rolling

vid·e·o game
noun
plural noun: video games
a game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen.

Which I elaborated on by saying that people who are good at manipulating images produced by a computer program are not generally philosophers nor thinkers and lack the mental capacity to produce deeper themes due to the restrictions of their monotonous and mundane craft.

imagine being this stupid

There is so much nonsense in this post, I don't even know where I would start. It's hard to believe someone so misinformed is confident enough in their thoughts to post them. You should read some game development blogs and maybe actually play a video game or two.

I'm not sure you know what "by definition" means.

coders don't create images for the screen

Not really, but there are a pack of great games that have stricken me harder than a lot of books I have read. It's all about how you utilize the medium to make your creation

They're also not very good thinkers. They're in the same business and in the same subcategory of video-game making.

When has the last time a video game produced really inspired and thought provoking thing other than "look at me i broke the 4th wall arent i meta".

why would someone want a deep ass story in a vg when you can fight giant robots with swords

What prevents someone with actual writing talent to work on a game, with game designers only giving him advice for better gameplay and bringing his vision to life?

>They're also not very good thinkers.

but they're not the only people who work on video games. there are plenty of different aspects to a video game. narrative, which seems to be the only example you have of where a game can be thought-provoking, is rarely ever handled by the coders, who you claim don't have the capacity to think deeply

and yes video games can and do make you think 'deeply' even if it's not about the greater questions of life -- and if this is what you think makes literature better than video games then you should probably leave Veeky Forums. the quality of literature isn't determined by how thought-provoking it is

If coding is so mundane, doesn't that imply that a properly motivated author could learn to code if they felt it expanded their bag of tricks? There are musical programming languages that contemporary composers learn not to mention all the DAWs and notation programs that are almost necessary to learn to function in today's musical world and which have expanded the available musical techniques. The number musicians can do "traditional" stuff with pen-and-paper composition aAND know how to use the modern technology isn't a very large number, but there really are people who can do it all.

Again, how about simple things things that take advantage of e-readers' ability to hyperlink--say a book with song lyrics that link to music for the song. A soundtracked book would have been realyl inconvenient in the old days but now it's easy.
Even if video games proper are incapable of becoming lit, I think it's still realistic to hope that the unber of literary techniques can be expanded by computers. I agree with you about "video games" but disagree about "all interactive or computer-dependent media."

YOu're thinking of programmers trying to become philosophers or thinkers, not thinkers who decide to learn how to code. Again, there are dudes who have mastered "traditioanl" musical techniques and also incorporated recording technology and sequencing. Not a perfect analogy, I know, but I'm trying to illustrate how .

Also, just because deep themes are difficult to express in games and don't come across well doesn't mean that the people who made the game are shallow or not deep thinkers. If the medium is the limiting factor, why assume that it's the fault of the creators? Maybe even the greatest authors of all time wouldn't be able to do better just because it's a game--isn't that what you're implying?

Also, there have been great artists who are also great businessmen. It's almost necessary these days. Business is not a skill normally associated with being sensitive and philosophical--does that mmean that anyone who is good at promoting their work is automatically a hack? Do all artists have to be idiot savants of some kind?

ALso, the composers who use musical programming languages tend to be thought of as very "deep" or at the very least "academic" and "difficult" and requiring a specially trained type of audience.

Or painters or visula artists who learn how to use Photoshop. Photoshop can be a mundane tool to fix muffin tops and enlarge boobs or it can be used to make real art.

Isn't it time for the potential of the novel to be similarly extended by new technologies?

*visual artrists who can already paint and draw but want to combine tradition with new ways of expression.

Centuries long tradition of art surpassed b-because the tits look real tits now dude I swear to god

If you can see the cock going in does that mean the movie can't be art?

sliding scale of art:

text videogames