Hello StopGame, long time no see.Lately I have very little time and I don’t have time to blog in a more or less consistent manner.

Today we’ll talk about how video games have turned from ordinary entertainment into serious art. For you, as always, there are two ways to familiarize yourself with the material, the first is Video, the second is text. Enjoy reading or watching.

In the fifties of the last century, a computer implementation of crosses and toes appeared, in fact, it was the first video game, after almost 60 years video games will become like this (the video contains cuts from video games, accompanied by music, essentially nothing like that, so don’t waste time)

Welcome to the blog"Ghost in GameDev", and today we look at the moment when video games ceased to be just entertainment and turned into a new interactive art. It is necessary to highlight three events that forever changed video games and attitudes towards them, they all happened around the same time in the nineties. Well, let’s begin:

3D graphics

Historically, it is believed that this technology began to be used en masse at the beginning 90s, I was amazed by the very opportunity to design entire worlds, fill them with atmosphere, life and launch the player there. Although, at first, the transition to three-dimensional space was very painful, both for the developers and for the players themselves, the fact was that in two-dimensional space the developers were able to achieve incredible beauty and colorfulness of the picture. Looking at the latest games in 2D, it seemed that the favorite cartoons came to life and the player could control them when the first games in 3D looked, to put it mildly, ugly. The developers did not have enough experience and hardware power to make 3D models, at least not disgusting to look at, let alone compete with 2D in terms of level of detail and color. Although it is not entirely correct to compare these two technologies. One way or another, it became obvious to everyone that 2D was being abandoned in favor of the opportunities that 3D would provide in the future.

3D graphics allowed developers new genres, first-person shooters, real-time strategies and MMOs, it took developers only 5 years to fully master this tool in order make a revolution. And from the end ’95 – gaming will change forever. Developers will learn to create incredible things using this technology: Fallout, Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls, Diablo. WarCraft. All these games will give us incredible worlds that for the first time we will want to explore, interact with them, and most importantly live in them. In addition to the developed worlds, the developers also began to introduce the plot, their own lore, simulate dialogues between the character and NPC on a real-time game engine, insert into the game CGI videos, fill games with live sound and music. This is how three-dimensional space became the main technology in creating video games.

Motion Capture

For the first time, this technology was used to create Prince of Persia 1989, creator of this game Jordan Mechner, dressed up his younger brother in a white sheet and filmed him running, jumping and waving a sword, and then transferred it to the game, giving humanity to the main character. It is believed that the developer turned his attention to this technology after the guys from Midway made a splash by releasing Mortal Kombat V 1992, all the animations there were created using this technology.

So, Motion Capture, began integration into video games. From simple animations to emotional scenes. Motion Capture freed the hands of creators who wanted games to be something more than primitive entertainment. True, the full potential of this technology will not be revealed until the appearance of PlayStation 2, the technology was very expensive, both financially and technically. The power of computers at that time was not enough to implement all the developers’ ideas for this technology. But in the future, with the help of it, it will be possible to convey human movements, emotions and feelings to a computer character, this will force the player on the other side of the screen to empathize and experience emotions along with the characters. And today, we know that this technology has paid off. Motion Capture, like 3D graphics, changed video games forever.

PEOPLE

Around what in 90s video games were built? Around technology and gameplay. The developers were interested in creating an interesting and atmospheric world, making maximum use of existing technologies, or creating their own, for example, the creation of “living” fire or water, living shadows cast from the environment. Developers innovate, introducing more and more new technologies, improved AI, body physics, dynamic day and night changes. Almost all games the beginning of the 90s and almost until the 2000s, were like that, all for the sake of interesting gameplay and world. The developers tried to surprise and attract the player with technical performance rather than artistic approach to his works. Story-driven games, deep characters, all these concepts were unknown to the mass player and were not needed by the developer.Because the games were about entertainment, not about the plot. The more interesting and technologically advanced the games, the more money they bring to the developer.

But people appeared who were able to combine the technical part of the game and the artistic one, thereby changing the established paradigm.

The games stopped happening "just games". They have become an art that, along with films, can tell you an amazing story and remain in your heart forever.

The first to start doing this were the Japanese, back on PSOne:

Hironobu Sakaguchi with your Final Fantasy. Hideo Kojima with Metal Gear Solid showed how characters can be developed, their story can be sad, epic or funny. The heroes on the other side of the screen no longer seem like empty dummies, but began to be perceived as comrades with whom you make your way through a mountain of obstacles and experience all the hardships and victories together.

Gameplay has become a tool, who helped to feel the characters, helped to feel the difficulties that the characters endured.

The world around us was now created so that players believed in the story, helped them touch this story and become part of it, and not just be a dead decoration.

And despite the fact that technology has not yet made it possible to reach the level of staging certain scenes at the level of the same movie. A real revolution began, the emergence of a completely new art that was interactive.From the 2000s to the present day, the video game industry has given us dozens of people whose stories are told through video games, will change us forever.

Yu Suzuki with Shemue he will create the game genre of the so-called interactive cinema and all this in order to tell a story that we still love today.

Daniel Vavra, which will show how the surrounding world of a game, details and gameplay, can influence the player’s perception, releasing Mafia, which plunged us headlong into the skin of a gangster of the 30s of America.

David Cage will begin to elevate the genre of interactive cinema to the absolute level with his Fahrenheit, showing that the story can be non-linear, forcing the player through the gamepad to feel that the story is in his hands and every button press can be fatal for the characters on the other side of the screen.

Hideo Kojima will show how multifaceted and deep the story can be in games with its best creations, namely Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3.

Valve will give us Mr. Freeman and his adventures, the end of which we have been waiting for almost 20 years

You can name dozens more games and names of developers, but the result is the same everywhere, it was these people who turnedart games, It’s games like these that remain in our memories forever. Games you don’t play, but by which you live.

Thank you for being with me, see you soon)

Best comments

The text is too unpolished and the author has not proven that he is right. It was not worth just listing the famous creators of the gaming industry, and if anyone doesn’t know about them, why are they so good??
And now for some errors:

create an interesting and atmospheric world, making maximum use of available technologies, or creating yours, for example Creation

– avoid close proximity of identical words and their derivatives.

– why with a capital https://doctor-spins.uk/bonus/ letter?

– there is no space between words, please correct.

The surrounding world was now created so that players believed in the story, helped them touch this story and become part of it, and not just be a dead decoration.

Meaning:
The developers tried to surprise and attract the player with technical performance rather than with an artistic approach to their works. Story-driven games, deep characters, all these concepts were unknown to the mass player and were not needed by the developer.

Of course I don’t agree with the opinion lovegrudb about the plot, especially since he compared the adventure game with melodrama. In the latter, even critics mainly singled out the sex scenes and not the plot.

GhostInGameDev, Your enthusiasm is certainly encouraging, but in future you should work better on presenting the material. Good luck to you.

The plot is also entertaining. In principle, the entire narrative of the blog is based on this, reasoning is based on this, and, accordingly, fundamentally incorrect conclusions are drawn.
It’s worth starting with the fact that an entire movement cannot be art, because art is a work of art. But video games are not a work of art, a work is one thing, it is specific and it is wrong to generalize it with anything else.
Art is about uniqueness first of all, and not at all about the plot. Believe me, after watching a couple of thousand movies you will understand that the point is not in the plots at all, all the plots are the same and have absolutely no value. Especially in order to have the right to call oneself art.
Where does uniqueness come from?? From the context, thoughts, from the topics raised. By what means are these themes revealed, what new can the author offer?.
And may the Sonyboys forgive me, but of the masterpieces proposed by Sonya for the PCboyars, neither Horaizen nor beyond that Solsa with Detroit are even close. Not even close.
ps well, let’s talk about garlic, where is some uncharted, and where is Adele’s life?

One gets the feeling that this is just another worldview rather than a serious study. Yes, in the nineties there were much fewer “story” games. But there were quite a few of them. For example, LOOM and The Legend of Kyrandia series are hardly inferior to anyone in “artificiality” and gaming legends in general. And these are some of the first games of that decade. But here we must take into account that, in principle, there were much fewer games released then. In the 2000s there was a serious qualitative and quantitative leap. 2001 was probably the biggest year in video game history. But even this paragraph can be applied to this decade:

What were video games built around in the 90s?? Around technology and gameplay. The developers were interested in creating an interesting and atmospheric world, making maximum use of existing technologies, or creating their own, for example, the creation of “living” fire or water, living shadows cast from the environment. Developers innovate, introducing more and more new technologies, improved AI, body physics, dynamic day and night changes. Almost all games from the early 90s and almost until the 2000s were like this, all for the sake of interesting gameplay and world. The developers tried to surprise and attract the player with technical performance rather than with an artistic approach to their works. Story-driven games, deep characters, all these concepts were unknown to the mass player and were not needed by the developer.Because the games were about entertainment, not about the plot. The more interesting and technologically advanced the games, the more money they bring to the developer.

Adjusted for date, of course.
Now, it differs from then in the number of games released. You can pick up a lot of pearls in the last 20 years. But when compared with the total number, against the background of plotless games and games where the plot is present purely nominally, this is a statistical error. We can say that they don’t exist. Another thing is that these games stick in memory much better.
It’s the same thing in the nineties. The mentioned Final Fantasy launched on the NES in the late eighties. Chrono Trigger, which still hangs at the top of the world RPG charts – on SNES in 1995. And it’s in 2D.
And so on. The nineties – the golden time of quests and RPGs. And this is about the plot, characters, presentation and narration.

By the way, the emergence of high-quality 3D and equally high-quality sound is now also losing ground to VR, which is hot on its heels. Looking at flat (or curved) monitors is very different from what virtual reality can provide with a helmet on your head. So, we can just as well say that “artificial” games are still to come, but for now it’s just messing around with primitive technologies.

by the beginning of the 90s, I’m writing about this, that since 1995, video games began to acquire their own narrative language. They are no longer perceived as just something entertaining for one evening.

Metal Gear Solid on PS1. I meant

I wrote above that it’s not about the plot, it doesn’t matter what the plot is, what matters is how it’s told to you. And until a certain time, video games did not have this language, they borrowed from literature, in the form of a text story, later video inserts appeared, which, very often, had nothing to do with what was happening in the gameplay. But people appeared who learned to tell a story using interactivity, and such games, firstly, were, are and will be very rare, secondly, even now with all the available technologies there are simply good/bad games hundreds of times more than pearls. There is always a line that shows transformation, progress or regression in any creative field. in Video Games I brought them to you.

You don’t understand how it works, VR is a new stage in the development of immersion in the game, not a storytelling tool. Video Game Narrative Language – Gameplay. Previously it was used only for entertainment, since the mid-90s it began to be used as a storytelling tool.

Well, what are the storytelling problems with the Legend Of Kyrandia and Chrono Trigger I mentioned??
But there is a relatively recent game, To the Moon – is it like art or not?? And if she is art, why does she tell the story differently than in the nineties??

You don’t understand how it works, VR is a new stage in the development of immersion in the game, not a storytelling tool.

3D and Motion Capture are not storytelling tools either. However, you have repeatedly mentioned them as something important for the concept of art.

You are right, I don’t understand your division at all, because you don’t give specific criteria, Well, except for temporary ones, although there is leapfrog there. Indicating, as a milestone, either the middle of the 2000s or closer to their end. You don’t define the very concept of “art” in computer games. That is, even the subject of the conversation itself is unclear.
To exaggerate, new technologies appeared, they learned to use them and apply them for storytelling and games became an art. And then it turned out that, of course, not all, but only some.
And it’s unclear, a modern visual novel with 2D backdrops and a plot presented only in text – it can be art? And if an old game from the early nineties is re-released word for word but with new graphics, 3D, Motion Capture and all that, it will become art? How can you tell which games are art and which are not based on their narrative??

I don’t know how my subconscious gave it away, so I did it.

firstly, depending on what plot we are talking about, I agree that in most games and films the plot exists only for the sake of it being there. But the plot is still an artistic device. the more complex, subtle and multifaceted, the better, plus the plot is a tool in the hands of the authors, around which the narrative is built, it doesn’t matter what your plot is, what matters is how you tell it. Video games did not use this tool at all, it simply did not exist in a form that could somehow hook the player.
Video games are not works of art? If we take all video games in general, then probably yes. But if we take it point-by-point, then the games that I give as examples are works of art and this is art, with exactly the criteria that you give.

It is incorrect to compare cinema and video games; cinema is a passive art form that has existed for more than a hundred years. Video games, on the other hand, have learned to speak to players in artistic language just recently, and if cinema speaks to you visually, then video games speak to you, first of all, through gameplay, and this is interactivity, which has a completely different effect on human perception. Your comparison is tantamount to a comparison: where is Adele’s life, and where is crime and punishment?

I explained to you what is not even a problem, but a feature of these games,
I haven’t played To the Moon, so I can’t say anything about it.

3D and Motion Capture are not storytelling tools? Seriously? One is the shell of the entire narrative of the game, from the characters to the worlds of the game and allows you to make them such that you believe in them, the second allows you to humanize the characters, bring the behavior of real people, characters, emotions and feelings into the game.

The very concept of the art of defining and designating criteria is the same as pointing a finger at the sky, it all depends on the person’s perception. my article is not about that

It may well be, if the language of video games is used as a tool to tell a story. but novellas that can be classified as art are perceived as arthouse cinema, because in comparison with, say, RDR 2, you understand the difference between where and what. I love Hotline Miami, for the level of elaboration of style, gameplay and music, you can call this game art, I personally can, it’s comparable to, for example, the Last of Us or something else serious, it’s unlikely, but as an “arthouse” work it’s quite.

you are trying to systematize art, it doesn’t work that way, my story was only about those tools that helped video games acquire their own narrative language, with the help of which, with the proper skill. the developers were able to cross the line between simple entertainment and go into the category of art
The presence of these tools does not mean that the authors know how to use them in such a way that the game will be perceived as art.

Of course, I don’t agree with lovegrudb’s opinion about the plot, especially since he compared the adventure game to melodrama. In the latter, even critics mainly singled out the sex scenes and not the plot.

Why not? And in the latter, the barrier to entry is simply large. Even for me, I repeat, EVEN FOR ME, it took me a couple of days to figure out what was what.
And the example is so radical that the absurdity becomes clearer. A whistle-maker can, of course, be innovative, an art, I don’t rule it out, but since the whistle-maker form is more related simply to content and is oriented toward mass appeal, then its chances of being art tend to zero. Sometimes, in connection with this whistling business, they remember the concept of “Commercial art”. But this is completely different.

Thank you very much for your feedback, it’s really difficult for me to work with the text, I lack perseverance, but I will definitely improve this point. And you named the games that were from 95-96, when the paradigm began to change. Metal Gear solid 98 will also be on your list.

I don’t quite agree with the developers I listed, I highlighted certain points why their games border on the word art. I didn’t do this in detail, since it would have to be a very scrupulous work, and that’s not what the article is about.

I wasn’t trying to prove that I was right, I just cited the facts of what helped video games from primitive entertainment, to acquire their own narrative language and become something more.

Here it’s just not to be afraid of scrupulousness. On the contrary, big and good articles are welcome. Your blog could collect a lot of advantages and positive reviews in the year 2015-2017. But now the audience of this site
spoiled by deeper topics or delving into them. That is, if, for example, I write a blog “Kojima is a genius” and just briefly list his creations, the answer will be: “So what, who did you want to surprise, everyone who needs to know about it”. Or they’ll just throw down negative comments. I hope your next articles will be deeper and more interesting.

What’s special about? The fact that gameplay and technology prevail in them over the plot and presentation? So it’s not true. Gameplay and technology are primitive even for the year they were released. They remember and love these games precisely for the plot and its presentation in the first place.

More than. These are the same non-tools as VR, which you don’t recognize as a tool. 3D – method of modeling volumetric objects. Their stylistic content and fit into the narrative is another story. C Motion Capture the same song. Humanizing characters by giving them the behavior of real people is completely different from “infusing” the player into a character, allowing them to better feel the surrounding game world and associate themselves with it. *sarcasm

The very concept of the art of defining and designating criteria is the same as pointing a finger at the sky, it all depends on the person’s perception. my article is not about that

The fact of the matter is that in the article you clearly draw the line between art and non-art. You define it yourself, just “by eye”? At least you can personally voice your criteria, by which you can clearly determine whether the game belongs to art?

I’m trying to organize your blog. Because after reading it, I was left with a lot of questions. I have the strong impression that you have no idea about many of the things you write about.
Phrases like:

3D graphics allowed developers to new genres, first-person shooters, real-time strategies and MMOs

Story-driven games, deep characters, all these concepts were unknown to the mass player and were not needed by the developer.Because the games were about entertainment, not about plot.

my story was only about those tools that helped video games acquire their own narrative language, with the help of which, with the proper skill. the developers were able to cross the line between simple entertainment and go into the category of art

Here we go again. I understand correctly that without those two technologies mentioned in your blog, games cannot be art? That is, even if they are used in the game, the game is still not a fact that it belongs to art, but without them it certainly is not one?

This cannot be applied to this decade, at least because you can name at least 5 projects that are, in their essence, pearls of the video game industry, and in fact real art

It’s great that you call quests and RPGs of the early 90s, but now compare with the history of Metal Gear the same thing, even the first one was a huge breakthrough in terms of storytelling, and it felt like a holistic project, and not “here’s the text on the screen, and here’s the gameplay, go ahead and have fun”,

Well, actually, the first Metal Gear was exactly like that. This is a two-dimensional stealth arcade game with an extremely primitive narrative.

Your quests and RPGs from the early 90s are exclusively about gameplay and attempts to tell stories. you have the entire history of these RPGs and quests displayed in text on the screen, and this is a mixture of gameplay for the sake of entertainment and the language of literature, the video game industry has not yet had its own language.

It’s not clear here. If we talk about the plot aspect, then there were already games with strong and complex plots. Just because you haven’t met them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
If we’re talking about the technical and expressive aspect, then that’s why I wrote about VR. This is the next stage in development and new spaces for creativity and immersion of the player. Now there is also a huge gap between the narrative, core gameplay and general perception. The player is constantly faced with a bunch of gaming conventions, an interface that, for the convenience of the game, but to put it mildly, stands out from the gaming world itself. Current tools and experience allow us to do better. But how can one draw a line from this, they say, it’s not that there, but now that’s when the next round of development looms on the horizon??

Thank you for the advice, this article/video is previously creative, my first attempt at writing at all, I’m not promoting my channel, I’m just uploading random articles here, and today I’ve run out of small articles and the next article will be a huge one about my favorite game, so I hope you’ll appreciate it. thank you for your feedback, it’s very motivating and shows me that everything is not in vain.

you absolutely don’t want to hear or see my arguments, and you don’t understand what I was talking about in the blog and what I answered you. I give you arguments, but you ignore them and ask the same question, which I have already answered. Let’s end it here, it’s pointless

Judging by your comment, it seems that only art house is worthy of being called the highest art. Okay, what good movie scripts do you know??

?
Cartoons for the whole family have good scripts in 90 percent of cases. A good script is not uncommon.
Besides, a well-written script does not make a work of art.
We are talking about completely different planes now. This is the impression I get.

I read this text and comments with criticism and somehow I feel sad… Some go to the forest, some for firewood. Like a fight on public transport. And no, I do not support what is written in the article, to put it mildly. But you also need to criticize at the address, and not from the brink of floundering.

This cannot be applied to this decade, at least because you can name at least 5 projects, which in their essence are pearls of the video game industry, and in essence real art. And in percentage terms, take any industry, cinema, literature, painting, and there will be the same scattering in terms of the number of masterpieces that can be called art and simply good/bad works.

It’s great that you call quests and RPGs of the early 90s, but now compare with the history of Metal Gear the same thing, even the first one was a huge breakthrough in terms of storytelling, and it felt like a holistic project, and not “here’s the text on the screen, and here’s the gameplay, go ahead and have fun,” and you’ll understand what I mean. Your quests and RPGs from the early 90s are exclusively about gameplay and attempts to tell stories. you have the entire history of these RPGs and quests displayed in text on the screen, and this is a mixture of gameplay for the sake of entertainment and the language of literature, the video game industry has not yet had its own language. Those games that called it completely different. If you can’t see the difference, I don’t know how else to demonstrate it to you.