These are two conflicting design philosophies in video games. One treats video games as a toy and focuses on player agency. The other is for artfags that is begging for Roger Ebert's approval by focusing on artistic expression. While there is nothing wrong with a little bit of both, Atmosherefags are the ones that are pushing for more of the modern game design cancer.
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I've never heard atmospheric used in the context you're using it.
I could call devil may cry atmospheric, the creepy piano music, crumbling hallways and dilapidated tapestries all create an nerving atmosphere, which contrasts with high octane action.
pic unrelated.
sorry, I meant to say "unnerving"
Wow, we had an emergent gameplay thread just recently that also had a retarded OP. What a coincidence.
maybe it's just because it's morning.
What the fuck happened to that guy? How can that gigantic man pussy create UT 2004 and then become a huge pretentious faggot? It just doesn't make any sense.
I fucking love UT2k, I still play it from time to time. It's full on action and masculinity, it doesn't give a shit about being sensitive, even the taunts in game reflect that. Who stole Cliff and replaced him with an entirely different person? Did he actually design the game or was it the other people around him?
Nobody creates a video game unless they're kojima.
I don't agree with this definition. The game's mechanics are almost always static and they never change, it is only the scenario that changes. For example, in Skyrim the player can encounter a number of random scenarios, but every potential scenario is merely a derivative variant that is built upon a basic schema. Say you're walking along and you encounter a bandit. Bandits are an enemy type, their actions and behaviors are subject to their AI patterns, which never change (i.e. static game mechanics). However, bandits have subcategories, of which you can find archers, one handed swordsmen, two handed swordsmen, and various types of mages. So it's possible to find humanoid enemy types that attack with an assortment of offensive and defensive abilities and equipment, even if their patterns of behavior are always identical.
This is a better definition.
Anyway, I don't think emergent gameplay and atmosphere are somehow in conflict with one another. I would argue that atmosphere can play a complimentary role in any game's system, both aesthetically and in terms of gameplay. What would Silent Hill be without it's spectacular sound design? It'd be a lot less tense, because the sound is used to indicate that enemies are nearby, and it's also used to give "color" to those enemies, by making them emit strange and unsettling groans and screeches. In this way, sound is being used to inform gameplay, and it's also being used to bolster the atmosphere. This principle can be applied to pretty much every element in a game; textures, character and environmental models, the control scheme, etc.
What does this have to do with anything? Ludonarrative dissonance describes how player agency can unravel a poorly conceived plotline. As long as the gameplay restrictions are in agreement with your character's abilities and principles, as they are presented outside of gameplay, then you're golden.
Yes, I bet BAZINGA made UT2k4 all by himself.
So when is kojima going to make his first game?
At least take a game that isn't fucking garbage.
W A I T A M I N U T E T H A T C A R D
There's a reason we keep seeing this over and over.
How can Warren Spector be credited for the creation of Deus Ex and then shit out Invisible War (and turn himself into a feminist cuck)?
How can Ken Levine make System Shock 2 and then run his studio into the ground making BioShock Infinite?
How can Peter Molyneux participate in the making of some of the most iconic and groundbreaking games in the industry and then spend the rest of his career making Fisher's Price: My First Fantasy RPG and its sequels?
How can a bunch of industry veterans, people that made the most iconic and best written cRPGs in the industry come together and shit out Torment?
Truth of the matter is that their creative spark as a shelf life. As they get older and get themselves a tumor called "wife" they lose the edge, they become pussies, they don't want to make games that people want to play, they want to make games they, pudgy, lazy, libcuck, 40 something guys want to play after work and during the weekend. They want to make the kind of games that never challenge you, in any way, so your cunt of a wife doesn't scream in your ear about muh sexism, they don't want them to be complex so they wife's son goes into an autistic tard rage because the game is too hard for his halfbreed genes.
Slow down that audio!
Jhonson, analyse the tapes!
Bioshock 1 pisses me off in how it keeps stopping from doing things in order to maintain this experience that Ken Levine wants for everyone.
For starters, Skyrim is full of breaking its own rules like unkillable NPCs.
What in the actual fuck is wrong with you OP
Atmosphere and emergent gameplay are not two sides of a coin, they're completely unrelated concepts that can both exist in a game at the same time
What does that even have to do with anything? What the hell are you talking about? Did you think it was somehow relevant to the rest of your post because the paragraph mentioned Bioshock?
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Eh, it was the first example that came to mind.
"Game mechanics" refers to things like health bars, hit detection, the game's physics, and other abstract concepts that determine your mode of play. Skyrim's unkillable NPCs are deliberately crafted that way; that you can't kill them might qualify as a breach in consistency, but the NPCs are still subject to the game's mechanics. They follow a script, they are prone to various types of damage in accordance to their attributes; they typically have allegiance to a faction and will attack enemies of that faction if provoked; they're essentially the same as their killable counterparts. You can technically kill them using conventional means, it's just that they're flagged so that their health automatically replenishes upon death.
Games are toys first and foremost, their main draw has always relied on mechanics that keep the player coming back for more over long periods of time
Sure art and story are nice and all, but you don't see many people replaying those type of games, usually they just watch a cutscene video on youtube whenever they wanna refresh their memory
It really bothers me that no games with barelly enough gameplay to qualify as games are labeled and sold as such (See Telltales, David Cage, etc) then the Jewlywood reject SJournoWs praise and hype them the fuck up using criteria better applyed to movies (muh heart warming story, muh relatable characters, muh narrative). This atitude of looking down on Vidya as an inferior form of entretainament to film is what caused shit like Nu God of War being a walkie talkie feelsathon without a "game script" but a (((script))) because everyone wants the praise and hype The Last of Us got despite it's gameplay being a lobotomize mix between an Uncharted minus plataform and puzzles and the Evil Within minus resurse scarcity and survival horror
Then there's the elephant in the room
These fucking hipsters do not mean real art, like Okami, Vanilla Ware's vissuals, or Nintendo orchestal music when they say the word art, they mean (((art)))
Postmodernist bullshit, intentionally ugly and underachiving garvage where the stethic value takes a backstep to whatever retarded subliminal social message the (((artist))) wanted to convey through their work, remember Gone Home, Sunset and Depression Quest? all of these turds fit right in with the postmodernist modus operandi, and you can't critizice them for being lazy and ugly cus beauty is subjective and lays in the eye of the beholder, nor can you criticize them for being "non games" because they are sold as (((interactive experiences)))
By normalizing postmodernism within Vidya (((they))) achive 2 things:
>Solidify their nepotist corrupt circle jerk where only the (((club memebers))) get to publish something because (((journos and critics))) will hype it to no end as it currently happens in art musseums
Thank god games are a consummer product, the free market destroyed ay chance of Postmodernism to flourish, bacus postmo is shit and it doesn't sell no matter how hyped it is
I think all games with emergent gameplay naturally lead themselves to atmosphere. Atmospheric gameplay is awful, that's how you end up with all these style over substance games that just don't feel right and the atmosphere feels tacky because of it.
Oh, shit, how did I miss that. Anyone who ever uses this term is guaranteed to be fucking retarded.
Press-X-to-win makes any game unatmospheric. If the game is so easy and boring that you don't need to pay any attention, it's hard to appreciate the pretty graphics atmosphere.
That whole divide sounds like something that an academic wanker would come up with because he's forced to write a paper about something.
You can do both though if your team's competent.
Not only does Thief have atmosphere oozing out of the level and sound design, but the gameplay's done in such a way that not only do you have to figure your way through a level (emergent gameplay) but it also meshes well with the character's personality and goals, along with the atmospheres. Small details like Garrett having to pay someone for a map of the place he's gonna rob but if it's a hard to enter place or the map's hard to get then all you get is an incomplete map, which affects your gameplay since reaching the objective becomes more confusing.
Thief managed to perfectly mix gameplay with story with atmosphere in order to enhance each other significantly. Your actions become the story within the map which enhances immersion and in turn improves the atmosphere. You really feel like you're Garrett, a master thief, right down to the gameplay and the data you're given before a mission. Example, there's a mission where Garrett uses the money from the previous mission to buy some new tools for his job. The missions starts with Garrett just having bought the tools and your objectives are to just go to a local temple to try out the new tools and get some loot. As soon as the mission starts, the shopkeeper gets hit with an arrow meant for you and now the goal is to follow the two goons back to the guy who requested the hit, they go towards a mansion and the goal now becomes robbing the mansion and its owner as revenge. It remains in character and the surprise the player gets at the sudden change of objective and having to deal with that change is the same surprise Garrett had. The player's challenge is Garrett's challenge, same with his accomplishments.
Fuck off and die reddit
Plot heavy games aren't atmospheric. Okami, Metroid Prime, Deus Ex, and E.Y.E are all extremely atmospheric but none of them do it through emphasizing their story. It's done through exploration of the environment and fleshing out the world through the extra information about the world and interesting side quests that don't have much to do with the main story. Games that force you to stick exactly on to the story have terrible atmosphere, there's never any reason to explore and usually they're too up their own ass about the main story to add interesting details to the world. I haven't played Bioshock Infinite but I have to imagine that the original Bioshock is a much more atmospheric game solely because you get far more opportunities to explore and don't have some cunt yelling at you to go to the next objective when you don't really give a shit and want to see if there's anything interesting around.
Bioshock 1 is literally a bunch of people constantly telling you what to do.
Yeah, it definitely takes away from agency exploration. However they still don't immediately start yelling at you if you ignore the main objective for 10 seconds like most modern partner characters do. You get the chance to poke around, even if the game isn't as built for it as it could be.
You might have a point if it was something consistently applied like "You just can't kill children.".
I was shitting on that idea.
Emergent gameplay requires giving players more agency and consistently applied rules. Atmospheric games require deception and the game oversteping its bounds to change the rules to redirect the player to the correct experience.
Atmospheric titles concerns itself more on Luddonarrative dissonance because that interferes with the artistic expression bit. Trying to prove that artistic expression can be preserved in a game is their biggest attempt to make Senpai notice them.
archive.is
Atlas was an annoying faggot.
It just locks you in a room with nothing else to do, waits for you do it, and shit on any progress that you outside the objective.
Remeber Sonic 2?
Remeber Tails and how she followed you around like a submissive little bitch?
Remeber how she never got in your way or slowed you down despite her IA being completly retarded?
Remeber how you could issue commands to her bia contorller so she would take those suicide jumps to grab that hard to reach life or kill that hard enemy?
Remember how she became even more usefull in the sequel by doublin as a helicopter?
Those were the days
Hand holding IA partners that double as an escort mission just make want to hang the devs by the balls
What?
Why not use both? Cant you make an atmoshpheric 4th wall breaking fun game that has amazing gameplay?
Atmospheric is purely an aesthetic quality, user. Metroid Prime 2 is one of the most atmospheric games ever created. It's also a buggy as fuck mess of a game (though fun). The gameplay and the atmosphere have nothing to do with one another.
Emergent mechanics, on the other hand, are simply mechanics that, when combined, are more than the sum of their parts and/or have effects unintended by the developer.
Using drawbridges in DF to atomize garbage is an example of emergent gameplay - the abilityto atomize garbage emerged unexpectedly from the unorthodox use of a mechanism designed to block pathing.
This is a false dichotomy, looks like you're just using "atmospheric" as a synonym of lazy game design.
Elaborate on this, because I don't understand what you're saying.
Don't conflate "atmosphere" with "story-centric". Atmosphere is thematic and aesthetic dressing. It can be applied in practical ways to enhance a game. Okami's cel-shaded graphical style lends itself to the cartoon-esque art direction, for example. You're talking about heavily scripted and story driven sequences in a game that do not permit player interference. There are plenty of examples; John Marston's death scene at the end of RDR, for example.
"Self expression" is perfectly possible to achieve within a game's systems, both from the developer's and the player's standpoint. The developer can create unique and interesting mechanics, environments, and challenges that demand a certain mastery over the game's systems. This can be considered admirable craftsmanship. Additionally, the player can develop mastery over a game's systems and use said mastery to express something. Games have an innate potential to be created as a work of art and utilized as a tool of self expression.
Tails looked female in the game
The magazines i've read all descrived Tails as female
Tails was female in the cartoon
i will always see Tails as a girl
Sorry, i meant AI
what did she mean by this?
One does not need allot to have or create a great atmosphere.
Bloodborne as an example only has the level design and soundtrack plus the creative bosses to back it up. To be a really atmospheric game.
The same could have been said to NieR: Automata also but the level design is OK, but the story and the sounddesign and animations gives it a mysterious atmosphere
Porn doujins aren't canon, user. Maybe it is a localization thing. What language were those magazines?
There is no hard rule on what NPCs are invulnerable.
People usually just refer to that as an art style. When people talk about atmosphere, they mean things like Silent Hill and Bioshock which prioritizes storytelling over player agency.
That is like saying that a paint brush itself is art.
No, they don't. Stalker is an example of a game everyone uses as an example of an atmospheric game, and almost everything in Stalker happens because the player stumbles upon mostly random scenarios while exploring the open world.
The rule is usually that the specific NPC in question is essential to some major quest, or that they're children. Let's not get confused here, the initial assertion was, "emergent gameplay is a game design term that refers to video game mechanics that change according to the player's actions". The mechanics do not change, even in Skyrim. Essential NPCs are still subject to the rules of the game, they're just marked as essential by the developer. The original assertion is suggesting that some element of the game itself changes in accordance to the player's actions, and that's not true. The player's actions will always be subject to the game's systems, which are static.
Atmosphere has no bearing on a game's story, aside from its ability to make the world convincing. Again, do not conflate "atmosphere" for "story-centric" because even games that are more reliant on their gameplay, or games that don't have a story at all, have good atmosphere. Atmosphere describes the game world, and how said world is presented.
Who says a paintbrush can't be a work of art? Anyway, I'm not going to get into a convoluted exchange with you about what constitutes the "true definition" of art.
Ludonarrative dissonance is not whatever hipsters frame it as tho.
An example of ludonarrative dissonance would be Boones character plot. He tells you how he shot his wife to spare her the legion life instead of trying to save her because that would be impossible according to him.
The next minute you go and completely wipe out the entire legion camp with him working heads like nobodys business.
What it does is disable suspention of disbelief because what he tells you and what is logical within the games terms couldnt be futher apart.
Except it extents beyond those two reasons. You can't tell me that a third of the named NPCs in Skyrim are necessary to the main quest or children?
He had help. Actually, I agree with you but the idea came from a place of cancer and fosters cancer like post-modernism. Order 1886 had the MC character demand not to kill anyone and started to kill everyone.
They're relevant to a quest that is considered important and not necessarily the main quest.
nah ludonarrative dissonance would be Mario trying to save the Princess but this in fact dooms her to living in an Orwellian nightmare patriarchy.
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Dwarf Fortress > Videogames
Except you are wrong. All of those NPCs basically play no role in the main quest.
Except atmosphere comes from visual/sound design and story, and emergent gameplay comes from mechanics. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I said a quest that is considered important. There are numerous major quests in Skyrim. You should probably stop trying to argue that Skyrim's essential NPCs are somehow exempt from the game's systems, and instead defend the initial statement.
Care to give an example of a game whose mechanics change during emergent gameplay?
Nothing but the civil war affect the main quest so there is just two major main quests.
I didn't write that definition but I'm guessing it means unintended solutions to problems.
There are more major quests in Skyrim than just the main quest and the civil war quest. There's the guild quests - so Thieves, Dark Brotherhood, Companions, Mages, and Bard's College - and each major city in the game has its own major side quest, and there are certain dungeons that have major quests tied to them, and there are Daedric quests.
You wrote it in the OP. Maybe you didn't come up with it, but you got it from somewhere. I looked at both the Robert Egbert article and whatever the fuck that is from stack exchange, and that particular quote isn't taken from either of those sources.
My immersion with emergent ludonarrative dissonance discussions is hindered by my atmospheric and thematic predisposition to disapprove of overly verbose and pleonastic blowhards. Synergistically speaking, of course.
You'd make a great journalist
ha
You're confusing atmosphere with story telling, which is what that article is about OP. Atmosphere is the overall sense of feeling the game gives you. narrative is, besides the whole 1984 shit that goes one with journalists always using that word, primarily involved with story telling and things that show the story.
You have lots of people responsible directly or indirectly for Unreal success. If you change everyone in the team except the Bazinger Z then, surprise, new game sucks
The levels of bullshit some countries will go to preserve the heteronormative agenda never fails to surprise and appall me.
Why must you bait me so?
It's not bait if it's true.
good game make user feel good. Is that better?
What an ultramaroon.
See look, there you go again baiting like that.
…are you actually going to provide an argument, or just scream "BAIT!" and hope in vain that people will side with you?
Now, where does Knuckles fit in with all that?
FOUR. KNUCKLES. DEEP.
Knuckles is friends with NOBODY!
Knuckles is an avatar of the narcissistic autoerotic proclivities of our modern consumeristic social agenda.
With very few exceptions games are made by teams not individuals.
For the faggots who can't seem to agree or understand what "emergent gameplay" is, here's the most pure and simple example. The actual rules of the game are so simple and trivial that nobody even bothered to officially list them until the mid 20th century, yet from those simple rules things are inferred, such as "a group with two eyes is alive unconditionally."
Interactions like this and many others commonplace to Go aren't even remotely covered in the rules, they're just a consequence of those rules and their simplicity.
It's an absolutely perfect example of what it is to have "emergent gameplay".
Simple things can create complexity. You're not exactly a genius for figuring this out.
That only reinforces my point. It's hardly that I'm special for "figuring it out", but how stupid others are for arguing over wrong or inaccurate definitions.
Besides, a simple thing in and of itself doesn't automatically make complexity. It can be (and often is) quite the opposite. Whenever that is the result, however, there's your emergent gameplay.
The game of life is pretty good as an example too.
Also, "ludonarrative dissonance", in addition to being such hipster bullshit that it almost hurts to type it out, is more of an argument against the "narrative" part than anything.
OP, your link doesn't even use the word atmosphere anywhere. How the hell did you get it in your head to use that word to refer to art-centric games?
Pic semi-related
If it's black to move, can black kill that large white group in the center?
aw shit i love connect 4
Both approaches can result in cancer.
Scripted (basically a non-retarded word for what OP is calling "atmosphere") gameplay is the shit which can lead to games which rely more on presentation than actually good gameplay. Resulting in "cinematic" games and in the worse-case scenario walking sims.
At the same time Emergent gameplay is why we get so many fucking "survival" games being made. Game developers that think they can just create an open world, throw a bunch of half-baked survival mechanics and hope something fun "emerges" from the player fucking around.
Probably not. From the looks of this game, it's unlikely that white's player would ever allow it, and trying too hard to kill it would probably mean a big loss elsewhere. But I'm pretty terrible, all in all.
I dunno, when I read it out, that black atari on the right gives black enough liberties to win a capturing race.
Op must be really bored and have no vidya to play so he just started a conversation on Holla Forums.
you know the game UT2k came from has a woman as the main character, right?
Its a fantastic fucking game and you should all play it
Yeah, but she was naked and hot.
Get on my level
But ludonarrative dissonance is just a pretentious term for "broken suspension of disbelief," a concept that's probably as old as criticism of fiction, but named in the fucking 18th century.
To be fair, it's more specific than that. It's suspense of disbelief that's broken by an inconsistency between gameplay and narrative. Having a separate term for that is useful, but it could be a less pretentious one.
Broken suspension of disbelief is broken suspension of disbelief regardless of what breaks it.
It's important to note which component broke it, but not so much so that you need to invent a new term for it.
And those are completely unimportant even then there are NPCs that you couldn't kill that doesn't fit that category.
I have just one.
No they're not
It doesn't matter, because even those NPCs are subject to the game's systems.
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Basically, the game make an incredibly long list of exemptions to its rule. Another example is enemies in FO3: Point Lookout will always do a flat amount of damage regardless of what armor that you wear.
There's no explicit rule that states that every single living creature should be able to be killed. The essential NPCs still behave according to the game's mechanics - they use the same weapons and spells, they're subject to the same traits of their race, they're affiliated with a faction, they use the same animations, they're prone to the same physics and AI, etc - and they can even die. Their status, which you can call a breach in consistency but not a violation of the game's mechanics, has been deliberately implemented; these NPCs are marked essential by someone at Bethesda, for one reason or another. If you remove their essential status, you'll find that they're no different than "normal" NPCs.
That is just circular reasoning. A game is like a government and Skyrim is as corrupt as Hillary. You can't get around essential status. It isn't an ability or plays with the game's logic. It is just there.
It serves an intended purpose. You may not like the intended purpose, and that is fine, but it's evident that someone thought it was necessary. The more pertinent point to consider is that the essential flag is nothing more than a piece of code that gives the NPC an infinite pool of health. Therefore, you could say that it does play with the game's logic. It's a deliberately crafted exploit that is implemented by the developer in order to achieve a goal. That means it is a part of the game's mechanics.
That is the whole game you retard. Again, circular logic.
Not an argument.
Neither is what you said faggot.
No, I made an ironclad and well thought out series of statements that it appears were too astounding in their logical consistency and credibility for you to debunk. Oh, well. Perhaps you can try some more, but it appears that you've relegated your effort towards making basic and feeble slights against my character. How disappointing.
The true argument here is not if games are art or not. They are art. It's just that this new breed of faggot council has decided to become the elitist cultural dictators of what constitutes art or not. SF3 is art just as much as Bioshock Infinite is. The problem we are dealing with here is that there is now a council of the videogaming cultural elite who have highjacked the consensus on what should be considered "art." We are just witnessing a usurpation just like painting was usurped by abstractions and post modern kitsch. For example the golden age of gaming was like the renaissance now we are experiencing a decline in overall quality and the "council" have declared that they are in fact making artistic progression. This council of faggots needs to be rooted out and destroyed. Their idea of art is corrupt, soulless, and meaningless. They wouldn't understand atmosphere if I strapped them to a failed elon musk rocketship.
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Video games are games, they can be art but that doesn't mean they are inherently art. The very faggots you're talking about are the ones that have been trying to make games be perceived as an art form instead of just a medium of entertainment.
How can someone just get worse and worse at making video games and still make video games?
Also, what the hell is wrong with Sony's talent scouts?
technically everything is "art" whether it's good or not is up for debate. Shitposting is art. What you just wrote is art. Whether it's worth acclaim or recognition is up to the cultural elite. Our cultural elites are poison therefore what will be decried "fine art" will also be poison.
also I'm a retard shitposter and I meant to write decreed.
You're a pretty funny guy.
Because they're not trying, because they're not interested in making an actual game. And Rodger Ebert once said video games can never be art, butthurt ensued.
That's just one of many ideas of philosophy exploring what art is and that's one of the most retarded ones and is exactly the sort that hipsters love to use to justify their garbage, conveniently labeling anything as art by confusing it with just any old bog standard entertainment instead of things that would actually hit you close to your heart. Especially that "cultural elite" bullshit, if people consider something to not be a piece of artwork then it's not art.
Also it is in my personal view that the cultural elite that should determine what games are considered "fine art" should be the players of the game and the top tier players at that. For example I was watching a top tier Tenchu 3 perfect run and maybe the player himself isn't articulate enough to explain why that game is high tier gaming art, but his playthrough explains it for himself. The amount of pure comfort he experiences controlling the characters and his creativity and flawless execution speaks for itself. That kind of stuff is art, however I guarantee you that you will never find a Bioshock Infinite playthrough that can even compare. Another example a high level fighting game tournament, let me just throw out the most overused example Daigo vs. Justin super parry, into super combo etc. This is video game artistry at it's finest the crowd was elated as if they were witnessing St. Peters cathedral for the first time and it was a moment enshrined in videogame history forever. These game journos and alot of these fucked up "interactive storytelling" developers are a cancer upon videogames. What I define as true videogaming art is character depth in aesthetics and originality, control schemes with intense depth, physics done in an engaging way, atmosphere revolving around art style ambience etc., soundtrack, etc. etc. etc. Not narrative, Narrative itself is what is driving these "interactive story" faggots. Narrative should be the last thought in the mind of a game developer. When faggots like Blezinski(who don't even understand why their own games are good in the first place and this is time tested we have seen him strike gold and then repeatedly fail over and over again in his sequel titles) decry that "BIOSHOCK INFINITE IS HIGH TIER ART" and then he mentions a pleb like fucking Roger Ebert….. Roger Ebert is worse than reddit tier when it comes to reviewing films.
That's not an argument cue Molyneux.
Yea except my argument did say that even if it's art it doesn't mean it's not total shit and dumpster fire worthy. Just because something is "Art" it doesn't mean it's good or worth your time. Pre school refrigerator drawings are art whether you like the idea or not. Anything that allows a creator to apply his own ideas is the definition of an artistic medium. Minecraft houses are art they are just really low tier shit art. It's our responsibility as the arbiters of game knowledge to lash out against the plebs who proclaim that their generic, boring, narrative driven slosh fests are fine art. It's our job to tear their house down and refute their insanity with better arguments and showing them better examples of the artistic merit in videogames.
Yes it is, you view art as being literally everything that could possibly express a view or make someone feel something. And I'm saying art isn't the medium it is made in, it is what is made in that medium.
yea and my argument is that everything that is made in that medium is art(whether it's good or bad is another discussion). The worst sculptor in the world is still an artist applying himself in his trade. He may be a terrible artist, but he is still creating art.
My argument wasn't that the art itself has to express a view or even make anybody feel anything. My argument was that art itself can be completely and utterly meaningless. The cultural elite of our society are the ones who inform the plebs of what art they should be digesting. This is the main problem. Our cultural elites are rotten therefore the art they recommend will also reflect upon their own vapid meaningless existences.
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Also my main problem with the current cultural elite and their artistic preference is that one day we will literally get Rothko tier videogames decreed as GREAT ART LULZ because the cultural elite will become such projectionists(like they did with Rothko's "paintings" literally projecting any random thought that comes into their head and insisting upon it having a deep meaning etc.) that there will be a game much like gone home with literally nothing happening in it and it will be lauded. Due to the acclaim of bad art like "Gone Home" we will continue to see more and more of it.
It's more than that.
It's the team around them.
Vidya used to get the best programmers in the world thanks to high wages and weekly parties. Now they hire pajeets and womens studies graduates, what sort of programming quality do you think they're outputting? What extra stuff are they going to contribute?
I heard that Tim Cain provided the recipes for Fallout related food due to his love of cooking, do you see any employee from modern studios doing anything similar?
This is why there's so much race, sexual and gender diversity in games nowadays. That's all the employees are able to contribute to the game, their cookie cutter identities.
I don't know if it's already has been commented on, but it is funny how atmospheric games are so focused on story, yet Emergent games generally gives the best player based stories. There are for example entire sites just dedicated to stories people have about dwarf fortress. I believe it's a case of less is more in a sense.
Here is an example of a story someone might tell about the game Dungeon crawl stone soup (a roguelike):
Stuff and stories like that, with that amount of player involvement is nearly impossible with Atmospheric games.