Amir0x said:
This assumes games are art; I just think they're toys.
You are conflating "art" with "high art" and responding to me as if I was talking about "high art". Toys also share characteristics with art in that they are basically designed to produce a response; that response is generally happiness, whether through pure visceral feedback or through the more rational pathway of causing mental investment in a challenge scenario.
Art doesn't mean paintings. Toys are not mechanical systems. A mechanical system can be evaluated solely in its ability to create output and the efficiency with which it does it. An engine is a mechanical system. An engine that accelerates and brakes faster and more smoothly, is more efficient, and delivers more power in a smaller, cooler physical package, and has a lower cost of production is a better engine. While toys, games, and art all have technical and tactile characteristics that greatly impact the user's experience with them, they are not purely mechanical. Games with bad controls are unenjoyable not because they have bad controls, but because bad controls get in the way of the tension/release dynamic, of the intellectual investment in the goal scenario, in the tactile connection of player to gameplay paradigm, etc. The failings of the bad controls hurt the player's response. The player's response is still paramount.
I'm not sure why I had to explain that art isn't just paintings and that games can't be evaluated the same way fulcrums and ballbearings can.
I do not value at any level the gut reactions and vague statements of child-like joy.
I'm not defending stupid posts, as I've repeatedly said.
First, all of your rational statements are thin efforts to couch a "gut reaction". "This game has a lot of variety in level design"--a claim you made in this thread--is a useless statement. It's not quantified and it's not intended to be. You are not mechanically analyzing the number of unique challenge-response situations per minute of gameplay. You are asserting,
emotionally, that your connection to the gameplay is strengthened through the constant additional of mentally stimulating alternate and puzzling scenarios, which in turn increase your ability to feel tension (tension/release, by the way, is the actual reason why your empty statement that "Kirby is too easy" is justified as opposed to just a useless statement -- tension/release is also the absolute fundamental paradigm in classical music composition and yet games are toys, violins are art) which helps for your emotional response when that tension is relieved through intellectual application.
Second, "gut reactions" aren't really void of rational context because they inherently have the rational context of the millieu they're situated in. Games are reviewed compared to other games, to the standards those games have set, to movies, to toys, to art, to sports, to the sum whole of human experience. It's fine if you disagree that a particular thing is charming, but you'd have to be willfully blind to say that when someone says "Kirby is charming", they aren't responding to the use of bright, vibrant colours, childlike voice tones, the juxtaposition of serious reality-grounded geography in level design with the use of creative, imaginary, craft materials, etc.
If I show you a picture of Kirby's Epic Yarn and say "this is cute", it's totally fine for you to disagree with that. What makes no sense is for you to pretend not to know what values, what emotions, and what rational descriptions I'm aggregating in my head to use that descriptor. You might not pick up on the exact same things as I do, but for the purposes of discussion, you know why I'm saying it's cute even if you don't agree.
Remember the first time you kissed your fiancée? Or your first girlfriend? Or your neighbor's mom? This is a common human experience. Most people experience it. Pretending that there's a difference between saying that My Girl "made me nostalgic for my childhood" and saying that My Girl "evokes a common set of courtship-beginning emotional responses found in modern western society" is silly. Everyone watching My Girl understands that's what it's about, and "it made me nostalgic" is immediately interpretable. I'm sure there are people out there who grew up as an ugly leper in the middle of a warzone and never had that childhood experience, but thanks to their adult experiences, their knowledge of common childhood experiences even if they didn't have them, and their knowledge of other fictional works, those people are still able to understand what someone means when they say "My Girl made me nostalgic".
Why did Pretty Woman work? "It makes me happy to see the underdog succeed". It worked because the tale of a prostitute who becomes a lady immediately creates emotional parallels to earlier works like My Fair Lady / Pygmalion (it is a work situated in time and culture), evokes the life experience that many people have where they were underestimated, stereotyped, etc but rose to the occasion with the help of someone who believed in them, and so improved themselves (it is a work situated in human experience). And because there's a primal urge to mentally and physically kick the shit out of the dumb bitches who act like dumb bitches (it is a work directly connected to our limbic, animalistic origins). Is my explanation really better than my gut reaction?
I love games as much as anyone, but I always know WHY I like them. I know the why of absolutely everything about what makes me like something, and I know that when I'm in a conversation with someone about that why, I don't want to hear "it's MAGICAL." That adds nothing to the discussion, ever, not once... and it never will. It informs my perspective zero.
I'm sure there are shitty posts that say "This is magical" and leave it at that. But most don't leave it at that. They still use the adjective magical, though. The vast majority of us who read that don't immediately say "Error! Does not compute! Magical is an insufficiently descriptive term! Reject normative description!"--no, instead, we have a set of video game experiences, movie experiences, life experiences, book experiences that are attached to the adjective magical, and we are able to combine those experiences with the media we've seen from a game (or our experiences playing the game, even if we don't agree with the reviewer who says it's magical) and so form an understanding of what the reviewer meant.
If you are truly, honestly assuming good faith on the part of other posters--which you should, and you truly, honestly don't have a clue where they're coming from and you're not just playing coy--which you shouldn't unless you're trying to set up a multi-post comedy troll by playing coy, just prompt them. "I don't know why you think this is charming, do you think <x> is charming? If not, what else do you think is charming? When I think of charming, I think of childlike attributes, which I don't really see here." is a reply you could give that has about a 99% chance of getting a reply that better furthers conversation then "Charming is a meaningless adjective your argument is vacuous"
So, summary:
- "Rational" arguments require a ton of context and aren't really axiomatically rational
- Non-rational arguments are fine provided that we understand the context and causes, even if we don't agree with them
- "Gut" arguments come pre-loaded with a ton of context and aren't inherently ambiguous, and so they satisfy the requirement in point 2
- If you really lack context for an argument, prompt for context instead of dismissing it.
