"Artsy" Wii? A Rant *spinoff

[fearsomepirate]

You are misunderstanding me then. I'm not talking about the grahics being more realistic.

Neither am I. And I think at this point, your opinions are based more on a bad analogy than they are on the facts. The fact is that the 360 (my cardinal example) has nothing different in substance from what the Wii offers, at least on the silicon front. It's different in degree. You had an example in disparate substances, and then you talked about art that is disparate in substance, all while ignoring that X360 and Wii are same in substance and different only in degree.

I agree that the degree makes a difference, a difference that truly does matter to people (incl me). Where I maintain that you are completely wrong is when you posit a that we will see a radical, substantial difference. The difference between what Wii and X360 are technologically capable of is like the difference between the number 5 and the number 13. You speak in your analogies as though it were the difference between the number 5 and the color green, and yet when it comes to talking about concrete examples of what can or does actually occur in video games, you're unable to come up with anything not following the pattern "Well, the Wii can do this, but the X360 can do a better this." That's because we're talking about two consoles that differ in the amount of information they can fool around with at any one time by a factor of slightly less than 6, utilize identical capacity storage media, and work on and output essentially similar kinds of information.

At this point, I would like you to come up with a good, concrete "big picture" example of what you mean by something to be realized on X360 that could not be accomplished on Wii to a lesser degree...other than online gaming, since that's due to Nintendo being stupid, not lack of capability. So give me a concrete that instead of yet another example of better this.

 

[oli2]

You could just as readily have a choreographer stand up at GDC and say "thank God for Nintendo adding more art to their console than MS and Sony! Only Nintendo are reaching out to the motive arts".

In this case, if there were some posters here saying the guy is right, you would find me saying this is "complete nonsense".

I agree when certain games are so "magic" that we can end by spelling the Word "art" when speaking about them. But starting a sentence with the word "art" and ending it by gaming in a general manner is a step i am not ready to make.

The day most of the public applies this way of thinking, this word will have lost its "excellence" meaning.

 

[oli2]

Maybe i will be OT but ...

When i see those debates and the way some questions are put, i think this is a sign of a great problem of this industry :
At each coming of a next-gen, there were a gap during the transition, clearly identified by the mainstream :
- SNES era to PS one : 2D to 3D
- PS / N64 era to dreamcast : the visual difference was easily seen (remember Soul Caliber and Sonic Adventures, at that time)

When Xbox360 arose, do you remember that most of the public had difficulties to see the visual difference with first Xbox ?

With Wii, the difference with last gen is easily noticed (clearly not a visual one ...)

The way Hecker is speaking has a taste of : "you don't see the difference, this is normal, this is art"

OT off.

 

[Corwin_B]

About Nintendo and art, has anyone here tried Electroplankton for the DS ? The game tanked horribly sales-wise, but was hyped a lot by Nintendo themselves (including a live demo at E3 2005), and they took the pain to bring it to US and EU (not that it has much text, of course).

I think that game is an excellent example of Shifty's point of using the platform offered by videogames to create "interactive experiences". And it runs on the very underpowered DS, using its unique features in unique ways. It's the result of a collaborative work between Nintendo and experimental artist Toshio Iwai. While there is not much to do in Electroplankton, I still find myself starting it from time to time, to spend a couple minutes goofing around and producing some soothing sounds and lights.

 

[cthellis42]

Electroplankton was neat, but unfortunately not compelling enough to fascinate me much, even though I like pointless doodling activities.

Definitely a cute, artistic "interactive experience," though.


Should serve as a reminder to those who seem to be taking umbrage that in the end, any differences likely wouldn't amount to a hill of beans anyway; "artistic" titles seldom sell systems or even themselves, and mainly attract some critical acclaim and spawn a few cool message board posts, so it's not like anyone is doomsaying or... whatever.

Especially since "artistry" is a huge palette and covers a myriad of tastes, it's simply about why some developers might make the comments that they do.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You speak in your analogies as though it were the difference between the number 5 and the color green, and yet when it comes to talking about concrete examples of what can or does actually occur in video games, you're unable to come up with anything not following the pattern "Well, the Wii can do this, but the X360 can do a better this."

At this point, I would like you to come up with a good, concrete "big picture" example of what you mean by something to be realized on X360 that could not be accomplished on Wii to a lesser degree... So give me a concrete that instead of yet another example of better this.

Well, everything can be accomplished to a lesser degree on a lesser platform, evn if just at 1/10th the framerate! So pointing out unqiue things that aren't just better than can be done on Wii is hard.

The problem is that at a certain point, the degrading in quality is such that the original idea has lost its worth. You can take a photo and render it in a way where you can still see what it is, maintaining the major information, at 320x200 in maybe 4 colours. But playing a movie in that quality destroys the experience. You coud play Soccer at 11 players a side. You can play it 6 a side on the same size field. You can play it 2 a side on the same large field. It's fundamentally the same, but the whole experience is watered down to totally lacking and not worth watching. From that perspective, everything XB360 can do, like physics are animation, Wii can do to a lesser extent, but is that lesser extent worth having? Whether or not Wii's degraded extent affects the experience dramatically or not depends entirely on what you're trying to do. For visceral emotional reactions, for example, the graphics of XB360 could create a gut-wrenching reaction to a warzone, where Wii will look like a computer game and lacking realism, lacks empathy with the situation.

For concrete examples of technologies I think that aren't reproducable on Wii, I'd point firstly to LucasArts use of behavioural physics and material technologies as tools which can contribute to art, which Wii probably won't have. Fluid dynamics and advanced audio synthesis are also situations where Wii could struggle. As are bizarro fractal creations. As to how these technologies can be used to create art, I'll leave that to the artists to decide! I'm just saying that more power offers more artistic tools.

 

[Corwin_B]

I remember an interview from some game developer that said something interesting : he said that graphics becoming more advanced had some unfortunate consequences because moving toward realism (but not achieving it) made characters "creepy". His example was that if he made some sprite/model that looked, say 50% like a "real" human, the player's imagination would do the rest of the work, while a more advanced model being 90% realistic would not look like a human, but like a robot to the player's imagination. This developer didn't advocate going back tech-wise, of course, but rather moving away from trying to reach realism at all cost, and more toward stylistic experiences.

 

[cthellis42]

There is that, but then eventually you hit paydirt.

It's not like we should have resisted the first forays into 3D gaming, even though at the time they were more offputting than quality 2D games, and now they just straight-up give us headaches.

 

[3dilettante]

I remember an interview from some game developer that said something interesting : he said that graphics becoming more advanced had some unfortunate consequences because moving toward realism (but not achieving it) made characters "creepy". His example was that if he made some sprite/model that looked, say 50% like a "real" human, the player's imagination would do the rest of the work, while a more advanced model being 90% realistic would not look like a human, but like a robot to the player's imagination. This developer didn't advocate going back tech-wise, of course, but rather moving away from trying to reach realism at all cost, and more toward stylistic experiences.

That sounds like a version of the "Uncanny Valley", which I've seen discussed. I've seen graphs people have drawn up that indicate some psychological phenomenon where people experience more negative responses to an increasingly realistic but flawed human image.

I haven't run into anything that really substantiates the claim. There are those that say it exists, and I can see how it is conceptually possible, but I haven't seen the body of work to back it up.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I remember an interview from some game developer that said something interesting : he said that graphics becoming more advanced had some unfortunate consequences because moving toward realism (but not achieving it) made characters "creepy".

It's termed the Uncanny Valley phenomenum. And it's only relevant to this conversation if the art you're trying to create is realistic looking people, which is a subset all visual art, which is a subset of all the art possible on a console. You could, for example, use advanced emotional animation techniques on non-photorealistic models, which is the basis of Pixar's 'The Incredibles'. Rather than creep people out with not-realistic-enough photorealism, they went for charicatures to avoid Uncanny Valley but still keep human visual emotions and viewer empathy.

There's no need to worry about Uncanny Valley if the art you are creating is an audio-visual fractal adventure, or an attempt to get users to empathize with Mung Beans through complex animations and audio stimuli that represents the world in a hugely zoomable macro to micro-scopic camera.

 

[Turok]

I believe you're describing a good game, but not necessarily a qualification for art.

Art has different qualifications based on its medium. It also happens to be very subjective, meaning this argument will get us nowhere.

 

[dobwal]

No, I don't think that. Art is a word that takes 'subjective' to a new level. And this is in response to you too, Dobwal. Art means different things to different people, and it's a very difficult subject to talk about. Just look at some of the crap that wins the Turner prize which people call 'art'. Art as a concept (and a word) is impossible to pin down exactly what it is. That's why I used the terms this and that, rather than using specific concepts like 'emotional experience' and 'dynamic gameplay'. This and that are whatever artistic ideas the artists have; quite possibly things I myself would never consider to be art. IMPO (in my personal opinion), art is just a certain something indefinable that a thing may have. It's a feeling that I can't define in logical terms. In Hecker's comments, art has a meaning for him, for which the art he would create, he cannot create on Wii, because of technical limitations. No one here can have any idea of what that 'art' might be, or if we would even consider it 'art' outselves. All we know is Hecker feels Wii could be more powerful to let him create 'art' in his image.

As for Wii getting less art, in realistic terms I don't think that's the case, because art is, again IMVSO (in my very subjective opinon!), very lacking in most games. You can get visual artwork in games, and artistic music, but few games ever appear to me to be art. One I would class as art is ICO, which was far more art than game. And as we see last gen, not many 'artists' created art on the consoles like ICO. For someone else, art may abound on consoles due to their definition. If Mario is art to you, Wii will have buckets of that art. Generally though developers are creating games, and that'll be the same throughout IMO. We'll see things pushing boundaries like Heavy Rain is trying to do, where the term 'game' is dropped in favour of 'interactive experience', but overall I think games and fun will still be the main focus. And where art does appear, it'll appear on Wii but in different forms. One area Wii could have art (in my definition which will be different to others) where the others can't is in movement (or dance). Artistic motions through the Wiimote would be unique. Think Tai Chi. You could have a dozen games for Wii that are artistic in their use of movement, and 4 games on PS3 that are artistic in emotional content powered by hardware abilities, and the Wii would have more. We've no idea where art will find it's home this gen, if anywhere. My guess is it'll spend its time sidelined and marginalized like always, where it probably belongs. We'll see... But it is also telling that Sony make mention of art a lot in their website, and Nintendo don't. Sony obviously are encouraging the idea of art on their platform. Nintendo aren't.

Art has a very simple definition that covers a broad spectrum. Art can simply be defined as "the products of human creativity". Sony mentioning of art means very little as it probably more of a market strategy than it is a sincere expression with the intention of promoting art itself and not Sony's bottom line.

 

[ninzel]

It's probably been said but at the risk of sounding redundant, humans create art not machines.
This argument over hardware being the catalyst for great art,reminds of this friend of mine that has been trying to play guitar for years but without much success. So he keeps buying better more expensive guitars,and yet he still sucks.
We have this other friend who has this old beat up Ibanez that he probably bought in high school,and he can make that sing.
Yes great hardware helps to make greater art in the right hands,but the human factor is first and most important. A great artist will take a stick and sand and create,and overcome whatever obstacles that exist. And all hardware has obstacles anyway,just to varying degrees.
So when I here someone say that the hardware is a limiting factor to making great art,I get where they are coming from,but in the end it's a copout.If you have the desire to create art,you put your head down and do what it takes to make it happen no matter what you are working with.

 

[Pete]

Well, Hecker's talk certainly qualifies as a rant, and I think we're all wasting time reading any more into it. He's a dev working on Spore, Spore seems to emphasize AI uber alles, Wii isn't strong in that department, big shock he's not hot for Wii. All his other rant points--Wii is GCx2, Google proves MS & Sony art, Nintendo hates him and his little dog, too (cthellis wins the thread, but then I'm judging on fun, not art )--are just there to flesh out his rant. I think he hit his intended target, and I think that target was to provoke emotion more than thought.

In other words, he presented a rant, not a talk. The context was made clear in IGN's opening paragraph (and seems to have been duly ignored by Kotaku and everyone else):

During a session at GDC this morning entitled "Burning Mad - Game Publishers Rant," time was taken about half way through to allow developers a chance to spew their own rants. One speaker, Chris Hecker, currently working on Spore at Maxis, took the opportunity to call out Nintendo for not taking games seriously.

Much ado about nothing, IMO. I'll agree with his core argument, the seed of his rant (apparently a carry-on from previous GDCs), that interactivity differentiates video games from other media. I'll also say that I'd prefer smarter AI in my games. Now, is AI the sole measure of interactivity? Is the AI's degree/depth/complexity/sophistication the sole measure of its worth as art? Because he seems to be talking about interacting with more sophisticated AI actors, in which case we're back to someone's (IMO shaky) point that all actors are the same. Why not skip AI and go directly to multiplayer? Surely humans provide the potential for the most variety, intelligence, and unpredictability in repeat interaction? And in that case, the art becomes how the developer frames the interaction, no?

Shifty, I have to comment on the example that color allows for superior expression. :smile: Does color make The Shawshank Redemption any better than Casablanca? Is Seven Samurai less of a movie b/c it's in b&w? Color may allow for new avenues of expression, but I'm not sure it diminishes the impact or potential of previous media. To each his own, and Hecker (and Spore) seem to prefer AI.

If we insist on comparison to video, then I think it's fair to say that a twenty minute show is potentially more limiting an art form than a two hour film or a six hour miniseries, in which case I get Hecker's desire for more in the sense that more means fewer limits. But color me skeptical that 360 or PS3 can be significantly more artful than Wii, and that industry leadership is required to make a medium an accepted format for art.

(I'm also a little curious about Nintendo's reason for shipping a relatively underpowered system, and if it relates to what I understand was some weakness in Nintendo's share price back in '02. Perhaps that weakness forced them to invest less and so aim lower in power, or maybe they've been on that path for a while.)

Anyway, gamesindustry offers some more seemingly direct quotes than Kotaku and the original IGN piece.

 

[ninzel]

Another way to look at it is that if creating art could be boiled down to some technical formula based on specs,then everyone can learn that formula and do it.

 

[Natoma]

Might as well link it here, too: http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/11595/Chris_Hecker_Doesnt_Really_Hate_The_Wii.html

As expected. His company is making games for the Wii since it's selling so well. Mister Hecker will probably be developing on it too.

 

[fearsomepirate]

at 320x200 in maybe 4 colours.

Bad comparison. Wii has widescreen 480p resolution and at least 24-bit (poss 32-bit) color.

the graphics of XB360 could create a gut-wrenching reaction to a warzone,

In what, a cutscene? Nothing that a two Gamecubes duct-taped together couldn't do passably well with either FMV or special cutscene-only models. Otherwise, how would you be forced to watch this animation? Also, have you ever seen a movie where just an expression on some guy's face made all the difference in the world? No. It had to have a story you cared about, characters you cared about, and events you cared about. And by that time, an expression using 1/6 the polygons isn't going to be a deal-breaker.

where Wii will look like a computer game and lacking realism,

Have you played any XB360 lately? The games still look like video games.

to LucasArts use of behavioural physics and material technologies as tools which can contribute to art

Is this something fundamentally different, or merely better ways to do stuff that can be done passably well otherise? I don't really know what this is. Is that system that's supposed to make models self-animate naturally as they walk over terrain rather than using motion capture? In that case, all we're looking at is "better animation."

Fluid dynamics

....are a beautiful thing in that they can be scaled to almost any machine. Back in th 70's, my adviser was working on tiny 10x10 grids. Now, we can do 100Kx100K or more. However, the problem with a changing velocity field is the Poisson solve. It isn't all that other stuff. On a 2 GHz machine, all the decomposition and whatever probably took up around 5-10% of my runtime, and he still has a big-ass Poisson solve sitting in there. But anyway, I haven't read the algorithm in "Real-Time Particle Based Fluid Simulation" closely enough to see if there's something keeping the Poisson solves under control. But supposing there are, and supposing that an Xbox 360 can do it in real time...guess what? Any mesh the X360 is computing on could be scaled down to Wii, unless the mesh is already so coarse that nothing interesting is going on...at which point you could hack together something that looked just as good using another method. Now, there are some particle methods that the X360 may be just powerful enough so that you could get a neat blob-based puzzler that would just lose too much granularity to be any good on Wii. So that's one thing...I think.

advanced audio synthesis

You should say more advanced audio synthesis. That's not a "fundamentally different thing." Is it advanced enough to bring us into a truly new paradigm of expression? I don't think so. I don't think we've really seen any new paradigms in audio since Unreal introduced the world to dynamic score almost a decade ago, unless it was an earlier game. We've already got in-game audio that rivals movies, which are not constrained by the pesky limitation of realtime. If there was somewhere radically new to go here, it would be seen in movies already.

As are bizarro fractal creations.

Mojoworld isn't happening in realtime on the Xbox 360.

The only thing you almost have a point on are the primitive fluid effects you might be seeing on X360. However, will this really open up a whole new world of expression, or will it just be better-looking smoke, fog, and water effects?

P.S. One of the more interesting artists in the video game world is working on 3 Wii projects:
http://wii.ign.com/articles/771/771974p2.html. Who else is out there? Miyamoto, a coupla internal Sony studios, Michael Ancel (strong Wii supporter), and Shinji Mikami. Everyone else just makes video games (Sorry, Molyneux).

 

[cthellis42]

Nintendo hates him and his little dog, too (cthellis wins the thread, but then I'm judging on fun, not art )--are just there to flesh out his rant.

Hooray! What do I win?

If it's a puppy, wait a bit; Miyamoto's got that crazy look in his eye again.

 

[Corwin_B]

(I'm also a little curious about Nintendo's reason for shipping a relatively underpowered system, and if it relates to what I understand was some weakness in Nintendo's share price back in '02. Perhaps that weakness forced them to invest less and so aim lower in power, or maybe they've been on that path for a while.)

Slightly OT, but there are a few theories on that, one being that Nintendo deliberately chose to keep the GC architecture in order not to scare off publishers by offering them a quick and dirty money-printing machine that would allow them to keep their old PS2/GC engines running one more generation... Wii needs exclusive titles because of its controller, and I suppose publishers wouldn't want the extra costs, especially on a Nintendo system...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Bad comparison. Wii has widescreen 480p resolution and at least 24-bit (poss 32-bit) color.

It was a rhetorical example to illustrate how the same technology to a different magnitude actually provides a different experience.

In what, a cutscene?...
...
Have you played any XB360 lately? The games still look like video games...
...
Is this something fundamentally different, or merely better ways to do stuff that can be done passably well otherise...

You seem to be totally hung-up on specific implementations, and missed my earlier point that nothing can't be done to a lesser a degree. The question is, like my rhetorical example above, does a lesser degree affect the artistic experience? Does 'Hero' (the movie) become less art if it's the same movie but in 320x256 24 bit colour? What about 320x256 24 bit colour, 10 fps? What about 320x256, 256 colour? Or 16 colour? As the technical quality is reduced, the artistic impact is too, to a point where the film is nothing like the original art, even though conceptutally it's exactly the same thing with the same major information, just presented in lower quality.

Will Heavy Rain be the same experience with half the poly-counts? What about a tenth the poly-counts? What if the shaders are lost? And ifthe facial morphing is replaced with a small selection of fixed expressions? Obviously not. At some point the reduction in technical ability will destroy the artistic representation (in Heavy Rain's case, realism) to the point the same artistic expression is not attained. How much of a technical reduction would Wii have, and would it be enough to destroy the artistic impression? Depends what you're doing, but obviously some people think it will, and certainly in some case it will.

You also seem to be looking at what XB360 is doing now as predicting everything it'll do in the future, as if there'll never be any more ideas than those that appeared in the first year.

Well, I can't really argue with this POV. If you can't see potential, I can't really explain it to you through current examples, which is what you are looking to for understanding. Potential is just something people either do or don't see. That's fine. Our different points are made. No point banging them out over and over!