Khuutra said:
tarheel91 said:
Looking at something objectively in the arts means looking at it from a more technical nature. You take your personal reaction out of the equation. With more traditional art forms, it's relatively simple. For example, with a piece of literature, you can look at the prose, symbolism, diction, etc. The abilities of the writer and how well they accomplish whatever goals the author has for that piece of literature. The same thing can be done with paintings, sculptures, movies, etc. However, the problem with video games is that their fire and foremost goal is to entertain. Thus, while we can look at things like level design, controls, art design, etc., it's very hard to analyze how well they accomplish the main goal because it's all about entertaining, and that's inherently a personal reaction. Thus, in a sense, you really do have to look at how the majority of players enjoyed the game (although these people must be within the target audience). It's not really relevant that some FPS junkie hates Zelda because it lacks guns.
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This is a well-thought-out post and I appreciate you taking the time to make it but this isn't strictly true, either.
The thing about art interpretation - we'll take literature as an example since I am a literature student - is that little to none of it is really objective. The thing about symbolism, diction, and prose is that we can only quantify one (maybe two) of those, and interpretations of works are still immensely subjective. There are schools of criticism - probably the largest ones, actually - that say that the author's intent is not nearly as important as the interpretations of critics, which define the dialog around it, so the author has little or nothing to do with the meaning of a work. THere are certain objective criteria, yes, but htat's true in games too.
I appreciate what yo uare saying, bu I don't think that the arts in general are as fine-honed or objective as you may believe.
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I'm not trying to say there's a perfectly objective way to analyze art. No way. Outside of basic math and the most fundamental laws of physics, it's hard to look at much of anything from a completely objective point of view. However, there's certainly a subjective/objective spectrum, and my point was that in order to get as far over on the objective sides in traditional arts, you do what I referred to in my initial post. There's always going to be disagreement, but the classics are pretty well agreed upon at this point (except around the fringes). From there, I was saying that if you apply a similar train of thought to video games, you have to make the goal players enjoying it. In a sense, then, you get the furthest on the objective side of analyzing video games by looking at how much the masses (of the intended audience) enjoyed the game. It's kind of the opposite of most art where the elites are the most important people in determining how good something is. While video game journalists, developers, etc. will always be the ones to do that sort of analysis, their individual opinions of the game are relatively unimportant.
As a side note, I've taken several classes on that sort of thing as well (I've got my final for American Literature and Society a couple Thursdays from now), and I find that to be one of those most radical schools of thought. I realize language is inherently imperfect at communicating something, and what determines how great a novel is how people understand it, not what someone was trying to say. However, it's not like language doesn't work. Plus, these are some of the greatest writers of all time. Logically, they should be very good at conveying things. I'm pretty confident that meaning is not going to be significantly misunderstood. The only time real issues arise is when issues not relevant to the books main purpose become brought into the spotlight. For instance, The Heart of Darkness is often criticized for Conrad's controversial view of the natives. Likewise, Kesey is jumped on for his portrayal of women in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. However, despite these issues brought up by critics, I'm sure you'd agree the purpose of either book wasn't lost because of it. While critics do define the discussions about books, they don't/can't ignore the author's intended purpose, even when there are other major issues. Plus, authors themselves are generally major participants in those discussions themselves. Half of my readings outside the books themselves have been by the authors of the books.
