"Art" Is Not the Opposite of "Fun" - Why Analyzing Games Makes Them Better - Extra Credits

[Music] guest art Marathon continues you remember a while back when that guy proposed to his girl in our outro credit did you know the girl can draw she can draw it's my pleasure to introduce miss analy kretchmar her friends call her gab glad to have you with us today let's get to it shall we I'm going to be honest we've been a bit hesitant about doing this episode I feel like all the stuff should go without saying but the subject just keeps popping up week after week maybe it's better if we just go ahead and address it here it goes studying games thinking more intently about games giving them the same amount of attention and respect we give any other medium is not going to make them worse considering the potential that games have to explore the Human Condition and investigating where this medium might go is not going to make games Less Fun looking at games as a whole and suggesting that there is Artistic potential in there we've barely begun to tap into isn't going to drain the joy out of playing them and yet for some reason without fail week after week

we get a handful of people accusing us of wanting to make games Less Fun that is ludicrous and it's not necessarily the accusation itself that bothers me because when you take it at face value it's just sort of silly I love how fun games are we love games we want more people to enjoy them and we want the people who already enjoy them to enjoy them even more I feel pretty secure in that it's the reasoning behind that accusation that gets me it's the suggestion that we shouldn't explore games further that all of this inquiry and study and tampering is going to just ruin our favorite hobby and that is a claim that needs answering it makes noing sense look at any other medium when has study made an entire medium universally less accessible or enjoyable when has it made it worse ever take film filmmakers have been exploring and developing their craft for decades yes a small percentage of the films that come out every year can definitely be called Art films and that's totally okay if you don't get into them I think the world is better for it but they're not for everybody but that's all right because there are still piles and piles of really fun movies coming out every year no matter how much artistic exploration has happened within the media that has

never changed and you know what that artistic drive has actually made the fun movies even better movies like Inception the Harry Potter series even Star Wars wouldn't be half the movies they are today if it hadn't been for artists within that Medium spending over a century pushing the boundaries and redefining what film can do even the Transformers Trilogy there's no way in hell Michael Bay could have made the Transformers movies as they are today without the advances made in cinematography from people consciously studying filmmaking as an art so unless you want to go back to Flash Gordon serials you have to accept the fact that the study of film making has made even our high-budget popcorn flicks more exciting more engaging and overall more fun the same is true of literature too over the past 200 years we've made books more and more engaging and fast-paced part of this is due to an expanding audience but it's also due in a large part to people exploring what could be done with literature when it finally came to be a true Mass medium read lamort dor wow I bet I said that wrong read that and then read Game of Thrones I won't make any comparisons about quality because they're fundamentally very different works but I think it can pretty definitively say that Thrones is the easier read literary device have

come a long way and what about trying to do something more with the medium what about trying to explore an idea or an emotion what about trying to educate while we entertain to those of you who've said that doing so sucks the fun out of a game do you think any of these films would have been more fun if they'd avoided exploring ideas do you think any of these books would have been more interesting if they had backed away from looking a little deeper but enough about other media let's just stand where we stand Are you seriously trying to tell us that games would be better if we never talked about what they mean or how we might improve them would World of Warcraft be better if Bartle had never made his tax omy would Age of Empires be the same without Mark Toronto's hierarchy of needs look it up would Bioshock even work without it being an exploration of ir Rand look we've been playing games our whole lives no one in this show wants every game to try to be Gaming's ulyses or even Gaming's Blood Meridian but we would really like to see a few more mass effects portals Bioshock even more Call of Duty 4S and yeah we'd like to see a few more games like Shadow of the Colossus in there as well that's why we explore games here because better games are made by better understanding the medium we make them in but really the sad thing is I think there's

something deeper going on here I don't think most of the people who mail us or post in the comments with these complaints are actually suggesting we shouldn't explore and shouldn't study because it'll make games less fun not really I think the real subtext behind most of it is simply a cry of we don't want games to change and I get that for many of us games were our refuge growing up they were our special thing that the rest of the world didn't have they were the place where we found community and engaged in a better world and many of us are afraid we're going to lose that going forward I understand believe me I even respect it but we can't just keep this to ourselves forever social games the Wii and the Casual world have blown the door wide open and there's no closing it again there's no going back to the way things were before but I'll tell you what we can do we can try to preserve the things that always made games great to us we can try and shepher the medium towards something more and try to make sure gaming avoids the Trap of easy quick profit shovelware and lowquality social cashins and right now we may not be winning that fight no one here wants to make games Less Fun quite the opposite we want to see games become more engaging but I'll tell you art

games or even the whole concept of games as art are not the threat the threat comes from the fact that you no longer need to love games to be in the games business the biggest danger icr medium facing right now is simply becoming stagnant and safe as the industry discovers it can sell the same five titles over and over and over again every year the greatest Pitfall in front of us is the idea that you can take people who care nothing for games have them clone an existing product and be more successful than the guys who made the original even though the knockoff isn't half as good the biggest threat to games is not people caring too much but rather people not caring it's not the scary Prospect of moving forward it's what might happen if we don't thanks for hearing us out we'll see you next week [Music] oh

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