61 Frames Per Second : yeah but is it art

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Crazy Taxi

John Constantine — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Time is both the best friend and worst enemy of art. Culture shifts and morphs daily into new language and new modes of expression, and the voice of the past either becomes timeless or unintelligible in tandem. Author David Lindsay was no one in the 1920s while he was still publishing. He was thirty years dead by the time his hallucinatory novel A Voyage to Arcturus was celebrated by academia. Alternatively, Our American Cousin was considered great comedy and great theater a century and a half back. Today, you’d be hard pressed to understand what the damn script even means. Enduring works persist for a number of reasons. They speak to an unchanging facet of human experience (love, loss, etc.) or they stay durable through sheer architectural integrity, perfect examples of their medium (I can find no other reason why people continue to read Melville.) Sometimes, though, art survives as a time capsule, something that takes a place and a time, no matter how insignificant, and preserves it.

Crazy Taxi, in its American Dreamcast release, is the millennial turn preserved in digital amber. More than even the early editions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crazy Taxi’s character models, its Offspring-laden mall-punk soundtrack, the growling “extreme” announcer and its pigeon-LA and San Francisco are a pitch-perfect distillation of pop-consumer culture in 2000. Its presentation is complimented by manic arcade-style driving, a kinetic representation of pre-war American tastes at the end of the ‘90s. It holds up too, fun despite comparing poorly to more dynamic contemporaries like Burnout Paradise; if you drive into a wall, you bounce off of it instead of watching a complex physics engine realistically crumple your taxicab. Burnout is a fitting counterpoint; while Crazy Taxi is concerned only with driving at top speed and bright colors, Burnout’s most visceral moments are during crashes, when everything is slowed to a stop, color becomes washed out, and the game halts to focus on destruction.

Of course, that’s just one argument. What do you say, reader?

More Yeah, But Is It Art?:

It Will Never Be the Same
Oh, wait, it’s already art.
Pac-man Championship Edition
Persona 3 FES

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Yeah, But Is It Art?: It Will Never Be the Same

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Perhaps before trying to answer whether or not It Will Never Be the Same is art or not, we should figure out if it’s a game. Wait, yes it is. You press one button and you move your mouse left and right to turn, driving into the night forever. It may be simple, but it lends itself to all sorts of marvelous projection. Put on a Songs: Ohia album and watch your monitor turn into a portal for delectable existential angst. Or pull out a script of Terminator 2 and re-enact the closing narration. Or, as my good friend who pointed me to It Will Never Be the Same said, just make some “reeeerrrrrrrrrrr, vroom” sounds for perfect satisfaction.

Enjoy and interpret here.

More Yeah, But Is It Art?:

Persona 3: FES
Pac-man Championship Edition
Oh, wait, it’s already art

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Oh, wait, it’s already art.

John Constantine — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You might think it’s pathetic, but I still buy cds. Yes, I am that guy. I go to record stores and I pay four dollars more than I would on iTunes for a bulky jewel case and a booklet that most likely won’t even have the lyrics in it. The experience of an album isn’t just the music but the entire artifact, the tactile feel of the case, the layout of the booklet, the art, the everything. Games are a little different. Artwork on games hasn’t exactly been incredible in the United States over the past decade, certainly not living up to the halcyon days of cartridge based games, when art almost always grossly misrepresented the play and was absolutely awesome. The Japanese artists behind 2008’s Famicase exhibition remember the days of the epic physical artifact. Each case is made for an imaginary Famicom game as envisioned by the artist. Here are a couple of my favorites.

Check out the rest of them here. Many thanks to Kotaku for pointing out the exhibition for us.

More Yeah, But Is It Art?

Pac-man Championship Edition
Persona 3: FES

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Pac-Man Championship Edition

John Constantine — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There’s no time like the present to revitalize fundamental game types. Like abstractionist painters finding new creative horizons in crafting a pristine still life, designers are going back to the well, throwing off the shackles of complex narrative and detail rich presentations to create more immediate, visceral experiences. Once June rolls around, we here in the United States will get our greedy little hands on Space Invaders Extreme and Arkanoid DS, stylized modernizations of Taito classics with gameplay rooted in thirty year-old tradition. The trend, however, kicked off one year ago when Toru Iwatani released Pac-Man Championship Edition. Iwatani’s swansong, Championship outwardly looks like little more than a gussied up version of the 1980 original. Get your hands on it, though, and Championship shows its true colors as a very different work. Championship and the original Pac-Man have the same fundamental goal: get the highest score. But Championship is a fluid, timed experience as opposed to a series of contained, linear challenges. Pac-man, the ghosts, the light house-techno music, the pulsing of the screen all increase in tempo as the clock winds down and the score rises, creating a hypnotic effect. When you make a mistake and it’s all momentarily halted, it’s jarring and drives you to keep the experience uninterrupted.

I claimed to Pete earlier this year that Pac-Man Championship was the best game I played in 2007. I still think that’s true. It is gaming at its purest: simple, elegant, and beautifully affecting.

Have you played it, FPSers? Do you agree? Am I mad?

Editor's note: Pete finally played it about a month back and told me, "It's just Pac-man." What an ass.

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Persona 3 FES

John Constantine — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It’s always strange when games filled with truly troubling imagery go unnoticed by the most vocal anti-game pundits. Persona 3, Atlus’ exceptional RPG in the long running Shin Megami Tensei series, has been released not once but twice in the past twelve months without eliciting even a peep out of Joe Lieberman or Focus on the Family. For those unfamiliar with the game, the reason Persona 3 might ruffle some feathers is its protagonists, a team of troubled high school students who control guardian spirits to battle demons. And oh yeah, they release these spirits by shooting themselves in the head.

This confrontational imagery isn’t a single incident in P3 either, as every single action you take in the game’s many battles finds your team pantomiming suicide. The second edition of P3, Persona 3 FES, was released during the last week of April and on my second time through its sprawling narrative, I’ve been wondering: Is it art? Absolutely. Persona 3 FES is the perfect post-modern genre piece, twisting the conventions of the traditional Japanese role-playing game on their head to comment on an entire culture’s youth population, the very demographic that made the genre an institution in the first place. Persona 3 is about the confusion of youth and its jarring portrayal of literal identity crises is anything but exploitive.

At least, that’s what we think. What do you say, dear reader? What is Persona 3 FES to you?