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I would add that games also have higher literacy requirements than movies/books/TV. Their design typically expects the player to be able to perform a lot of cognitive skills that are specific to video games. For instance, modern games typically require the player to independently navigate their character through a simulated 3D environment with the left controller stick/WASD keys, while simultaneously managing the position of the camera with the right stick/mouse. Even this simple example is a pretty niche skill that is very difficult for non-gamers to pick up. Razbuten's video series "Gaming for a Non-Gamer" does a great job of showing how impenetrable games can be for people who don't already play them. I think this impenetrability can make it hard for non-gamers to understand and appreciate video games as an art form, and limits how quickly video games can diffuse into the broader culture.
I agree. I always point out that the reason why the school system didn’t call me completely stupid, and why I’m so literate now compared to when I was younger is because of my love for video games and how they made my literacy better among a plethora of other things like problem solving and critical thinking. Without video games I’d be filed for disability most likely within my country, at least that’s what I believe or be severely hindered in life. Also as a side note gaming as a culture I find myself proud of because of how people from all over the world can connect with something so passionately no matter who they are or what they believe and so on. (It’s universal)
Tho it's interesting that games on smartphones are uniquely accessible, since unlike PC or console games they can just label the movement keys that the player needs to touch on screen
The tricky thing with measuring the size of the games industry is that nowadays mobile games are often included which make way more money, but have little to zero cultural impact.
Exactly mobile games might as well be a glorified version of checkers/Rock, Paper, Scissors. This video might as well be I am old man who just lives in past media but need to branch out since it so bad.
While it's mostly true that games made for mobile only tend to have little cultural impact, that's glossing over very culturally important games that have a massive mobile player base: Minecraft, fortnite, roblox, etc.
@@adamp_ I like roblox because it such a clever way around child labor laws. All the games started as PC only to start out with then became multiplatform. Also those games didn't start with any story and one was originally a zombie shooter.
I disagree with the "little to zero cultural impact." Thousands of people who don't have internet at home or access to a computer do have a smart phone. Mobile games are a major way for people who have little money to play online games. There are thousands of games "free to play" with in-game purchases or ad revenue. The cultural impact of these games is nearly impossible to measure unless you ask the advertisers who pay to advertise on them, and the people who actually play the games. The most productive way to get the poor to answer questions about their game usage is to pay them to take surveys, which skews the results. So yes, there is a cultural impact, but it's not unified and it's not easily observable.
They don't have cultural impact? According to whom? No single thing had more cultural impact than Pokemon GO in recent years. And that's just one thing that crossed over to normal, non-gaming audiences.
I love how metal gear has had so much influence in media even with its sounds alone but not a single person on the street could name the person in the cover art lol
Its also interesting how influential it is considering it’s never been adapted in any other medium, no movie, no tv show, not even an animated direct to dvd movie, or even tie in novels available in English
In Sony's documentary about the development of God of War (2018), Christopher Judge (best known for playing Teal'C from Stargate) recounted how he was a bit dismissive about auditioning for a videogame until he ended up reading the script for it. He was surprised by how the dialogue was more akin to something from a movie or tv show. After that, he was on board and delivered one of the best performances of the year as Kratos.
@@Khaled-otigod of war is pretending to be a movie: its cinematic, great graphics that strive for realism, heavy on the story. It follows in the footsteps of TLOU a game that wants to practically be a movie, like even ND wants moment to moment gameplay look like a cutscene.
god of war pretends to be a movie because of its lack of interactabillity, you see progression of the main characters story, but you arent going through this with him. the example of a game that has a lot of interactabillity is the first portal. portal has this eerie athmosphere where you feel for yourself that something isnt right about this facility, the music and visual style help this a lot but what sells you on the fact that the situation you're in is not good is the gameplay. you have to carefully dodge energy balls, try to not fall in into the deadly goo or get shot by turrets, and while you're at it, you also find later text scribbled on the walls of not easily accessible areas by some delusional guy who warns us through those scribbles that the stuff going here is not good and that we need to escape this place and oh god i just ended rumbling about portal 1 agai oh god forgivd me please
Video games rose to their current level of popularity alongside the internet, meaning that validation from traditional sources - established news outlets or magazines- has remained much less important because there are so many alternate, Internet-based sources of information on the medium.
I was thinking about this when JJ kept bringing up the New York Times. I would argue the main reason videos games are never mentioned there is because the target demographic reader doesn’t care about them. New York Times is a business after all and if readers don’t read articles about videos games then they won’t get published
The amount of people reading those magazines he mentioned is miniscule compared to the countless discussions that occur across the internet. Video games have had artistic merit for decades, and so fans of the medium took to the internet since the mainstream media considered games childish and unworthy of discussion.
You know, I am 13yrs older than my brother (he is in elementary) and one of the things I make sure he has access to are videogames. My parents didn't with me (immigrants) and I got by fine but I still felt left out once in a while. But nowadays not knowing about minecraft, or zelda, or smash bros REALLY alienates you. It is a huge part of American culture for the newer generations.
Good point, it reminds me of when a Korean guy (whose parents were immigrants) around my age who I worked with asked me what I did for fun. I said I play games with my friends, like Smash Bros, and he had no idea what I was talking about. Not a language barrier. He had just never heard of Smash before. It was baffling, coming from a guy in his early twenties
@@dubudubudan Good for you! As I said, older generations are less likely to feel alienated. But if you know little kids you'll know the talk of the land isn't what new cartoon is out, or what new toy, but what new videogame, skin, etc (Roblox is a big one rn). And this carries over. I still speak to my friends about cartoons growing up: SpongeBob, Samurai Jack, Dexter Lab, etc, my parents and their generation speak about Thundercats and He-Man. I am very sure kids will speak about videogames in the future to bond with others.
I find the best way to avoid alienation on a particular topic like this is to just be honest and curious when someone brings it up. "Oh tbh never heard of __. Is it good?". Even if people are shocked at first many times they'll look forward to the chance at getting to get you to experience your first time and witness it. The main problem is people are afraid of embarrassment so they either get defensive or they pretend like they know more about the topic than they actually do. People love to share knowledge!
I think discrediting it as an art form due to its “linear nature” is silly, books and movies are also linear. Games have the ability to put you into a story and experience it in a way other media can’t, there just is not a valid argument against games being an art form.
If I understand his argument that's not really the issue. I think Ebert views games the same way he would view poker or golf with occasional animated films inserted (cut scenes) to provide context. I'd bet that he probably considered the cut scenes art but not the game itself.
@@ADADEL1I didn't quite understand the argument he made. You seem to understand it a bit more so I want to ask. Do you think that he would consider interactive performances art? For example there is a famous performance in which a person has offered up their body to be used as the onlookers seemed fit. In this way I see it shares the progression of a game since there's only "one way to go" making the performance linear. It's okay if you can't tell me I just wish to understand the argument being made.
@@ADADEL1well there are plenty of games which use their game play mechanics and enviorments to tell story's and make statements. Games are also different from sports because they are fictional representations which have worldbuilding and characters and sports do not. If you had a sport in which people dressed up and role played and were allowed to be creative then that would be art
@@ADADEL1 Golf and Poker don't have a storyline, backstory, characters, a narrative written by someone, they are sports/competitions, Video games on the other hand have all that and a lot of them can be non linear with multiple outcomes depending on the player's interations. it's just a bad argument. He seems to only take the "interactive" aspect of video game in order to compare it to other interactive activities, while video games are just way more than that. Also we consider a painting as Art, so why video games aren't when most are filled with painted illustrations, and drawings, landscaped and designs drawn by artists (on top of all the narrative aspect and gameplay creativity that is also very much artistic) ? his argument just doesn't make sense
@@williamlongjon9649 I feel like there is something to be said about the fact that the way sports culture idolizes athletes to the point that we stop seeing them as individual humans and we start perceiving them as "the person that makes my team win". I definitely think that eSports/speedrunning get into the territory of being very culturally similar to sports. A lot of the times the excitement of watching eSports/speedrunning is the human drama behind the person performing it. I still think the individual performances in a vacuum can be seen as art too but the element of competition adds an extra boost of value.
One factor is that playing a game is such an individualized experience. We all saw the same version of Luke Tatooine and training with Yoda, and blowing up the Death Star. But nobody had the exact same experience of playing Skyrim. That really stops video games from having the sort of cultural touchstones you get from a memorable line or scene or whatever.
Nah, I would disagree about that. Even in games with large amounts of freedom you still have common experiences. Since you used Skyrim as an example, know that everone back in the day understood the "Arrow to the knee" meme, and if you go to any vidya group nowadays, people will still understand memes about Meridia's Beacon, despite it being a random optional side-quest.
@@SkySumisuI disagree yes there are stuff thate everyone did in Skyrim becaus eit was part of teh main narrative but most of the tiem people wer ejust doing whatever tehy wanted and experienced different stuff, everytime i speak with my friends about games with losts of freedom like Elden Ring or Skyrim we speak weir epic or crazy stuff it happened to use and pretty much no one has the same experience, that's way more evident in Elden Ring because the game is one of teh biggest examplos of non liniarity in games you start the game pass teh tutorial and then you just go wherever you want.
A good sign of video games' cultural importance is in the way they have influenced/driven people's engagement with _other_ media and topics. The ones that particularly stick out to me are history and music. Blue from OSP has openly spoken about how _Assassin's Creed_ got him interested in history, and certainly in the history space of UA-cam video games have a huge influence on what topics we talk about and when. And of course the resurgence of young people's interest in classical, jazz, and other instrumental music can easily be chalked up to their utility in video games.
Agreed, my absolute love for history came from watching playthroughs of Ck2 eu4, vicy 2 and Hoi. So I guess thank you paradox games for the introduction lol
@@tomservo5007there is nothing today that doesn't stands on the shoulders of other creations and so on. Nothing is original, nothing is new, everything is recycled and everything needs to be transformed or bended to create something further. Gaming culture is just the same as any piece of media, redundant, if seen with a cynical lens.
@@tomservo5007 That's like saying being inspired to research WWII because you liked Saving Private Ryan means movies are culturally empty. It's myopic.
Definitely reminded of how every kid (including me for a brief time) wanted to learn how to ride and do tricks on a skateboard because of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
I do think that the interactivity of games gives the medium an opportunity to engage in stories in a way that movies/tv shows can not. Though usually the games that engage in such a thing are indie productions that are not highly known even within the space of video game culture - Few of these examples are: Return of the Obra Dinn, Pyre, Hades, Papers Please, Disco Elysium, Inscryption. While the biggest games in the industry feel the need to include more "gamey" characteristics, like area grinding, collectables, ten minutes walks; the likes of God of War, Last of Us, Uncharted, Elden Ring, Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption end up getting most of the attention and representing the whole medium. I feel it is comparable to analysing the whole film medium. If you approach it through the biggest releases/box offices of the year, you'll face big blockbusters that are more occupied with broad entertainment, and will end up passing by the more artful and thought provoking stories that represent the depth that movies can attain. At the end, it is like J.J said: Video Games are a fairly recent medium that is still finding out where they will sit in the culture room. Will they be able to get to the big table or content themselves to the side couch, will be up for the future. As for me, I do think that games are able to deliver powerful stories in a whole different way that movies/music/tv shows can, and each one has its owns strenghts and weaknesses in doing so. As for always, very interesting approach to the topic, and thought provoking video. J.J always delivers and it's so good seeing the channel doing so well. Big Hugs!
All it takes is someone to get into critically successful games like Witcher, Final Fantasy 16, Baldurs Gate 3 or Zelda to see the big difference or even Cyberpunk 2077. There are many video games that would blow the minds of anyone who never got into video games.
I would argue that even the games you listed have an aspect of interactivity that cannot be replicated in other forms of media. For instance, I have vivid memories of Ezio's journey in Assassin's Creed II. I remember Ezio's bloodlust when he killed Vieri, because *I* was the one who killed him. I remember Leonardo da Vinci's enthusiasm when Ezio flew his flying machine, because *I* was the one who flew it. Video games like those put the player in the protagonist's shoes in ways that literature or movies simply cannot do, and for that reason, I think Ebert completely missed the mark when he said video games could never be art.
@@patyos2 I agree, though I feel that getting someone from outside the medium to engage with these games is a very difficult thing to do. Aside from the time commitment to play them to completition (Same problem that some Tv Shows have), there is aslo the problem of familiarity with game concepts in order to fully engage with them. This is something that was brought up in one of these comments. Playing games - specially modern ones - requires some degree of familiarity with gaming skills and concepts. Similiar to a "language barrier", that can be very offputting and stressful to newcomers to the medium. Perhaps these people would need to essentially watch someone play, or have someone guiding them throughout the game to make them fully interact and engage with the material.
@@ExplosiveBrohoof Great Examples! I definetely agree. I also don't agree with Ebert assertions about video games, though I believe he was thinking of games like Space Invaders, Pacman and OG Super Mario when he said that. At least it is my theory, as I find it difficult to make such a statement if you research more about the medium.
I still remember how the game Dear Esther would have you play as your character working at a fish processing plant and simulate daydreaming at a boring job by having you cut fish with one hand and play a simple walking simulator with your other hand, I thought that was a brilliant way to get you into the shoes of the protagonist using interactivity and which would be impossible in any other medium.
I feel like this can go back to that video you had about generational culture. The people who made video games did make that culture, but like the part about the high school films, people who grew up with the "golden" period of video gaming in its early days haven't reached the zenith of their social power at this point.
Generational is spot on, I gamed sonic and golden axe, now I have 3 kids playing fortnite, when kids have time games are the thing. I was a movie nut as an early kid. Kids could care less about what movies are coming out.
@@SteelSculptor It doesn't help that films have indeed gotten worse since you or I were kids. I grew up in the 90s, so I was inundated with the likes of Jurassic Park, Home Alone, Back to the Future, and so on. Nowadays, there are few hard hitting movies like that whereas in the 90s, there seemed to be a never ending supply of them. Disney is a stark example, where the 90s were considered their Renaissance, and nowadays all they do is put out live action remakes of their good movies.
@@SteelSculptor Considering what they put out as movie these days all take video games over any other video media plus you can only be a gamer if you play on consoles or PC, cell phone gaming is the equivalent of those that use to play minesweeper or solitaire.
You hit the crux of the issue with "Death of THE MONOCULTURE". Very good video. The few friends I have in real life have completely different tastes in - well, everything - from me. We can typically find some compromise with a bit of searching, but that's very different from common preferences. While you could argue that this is better because everyone gets what they want - I feel the exact opposite. Much better for my friend and I to both get a video-game we're 85% aligned with that has a $10 million budget, than for each of us to get separate video games we're both 100% aligned with that only got a $5 million budget.
I think Roger Eberts analysis does not account for many videogames that are still focused on “winning” or have points and mechanics, but use the expectations of other more traditional video games to make commentary on game culture, or just on a wide variety of moral or human issues lots of other forms of art try to make. Consider under tale, or games like inscription, that don’t make this game vs. immersive experience spectrum so linear.
Neither Undertale nor Inscryption existed while Roger Ebert was alive. It's entirely possible that his quote was more on point when he made it than it would be today.
He said this in an interview: “I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place,” concedes the critic. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself. My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.” If he experienced games like God of War and RDR2, I think his opinion would be a bit different than it was around 2010.
I think a unique thing about gaming is that as a medium it is so broad, which makes it hard to define what even IS a video game. The fact that something like Rocket League, VRchat and Life is Strange all fall under the same category really shows this. The "limits" of what you can do with a movie and song are pretty well defined, but that isnt really the case for games.
JJ's estimates for video game revenue apparently did not include the Mobile Game market. which in the US is expected to bring in $69 Billion in 2023 just by itself. Together with that, related tie-ins, and merchandising, the video game industry is WAAAAY bigger than what was discussed in this video
@@TNTITAN My guess is that the 400 number represents the list of games that were released via registered publishers in North America, which is a lot more regulated.
I think it was within the last year that NPR (National Public Radio) in the US finally started a regular column (at least on their website) for critique/commentary on video games. That's one barometer of mainstream acceptance.
I think The Last of Us is a really interesting case study for this topic. The HBO series was well received by critics and by all accounts stood at the same level we'd expect for a TV series by HBO. But at the same time, many people who both played the game and watched the show will attest that the narrative felt more impactful in the game. I think there are elements of the video game medium that can make stories like The Last of Us more impactful. One of the main things the show was missing relative to the game was the small moments between major plot points where Joel and Ellie would have a short back-and-forth about something they come across. These small moments wouldn't warrant their own scene in a show, but they fit naturally into the game since you're already spending time doing more "game-like" things like solving puzzles or navigating the environment. It manages to extend the run-time without boring the viewer, which gives the narrative and character relationships more room to breathe. Games also benefit from the more direct connection between the player and the protagonist. One of the main themes explored by The Last of Us is the level of brutality that otherwise good people are capable of in extreme circumstances. I think that by putting the player in the driver seat for that brutality, it makes the exploration of that topic much more visceral. There are times that the game will make you feel disgusted at what you as a player are doing. The enemies will panic when they see their friend was shot, they'll call each other by their first names, they will beg for their lives when you get the upper hand. There's a big difference in the experience between watching an actor on screen do something that we feel conflicted about and actually initiating that action ourselves. So given all that, I don't think it's fair to say that when a game has a strong narrative, it stops being a game. The game elements themselves give the writers new tools for creating a narrative, and in certain cases, they let them tell the story better than they could have in other mediums. I think games get a bad rap because it's true that the large majority of games focus on gameplay first, with narrative added as an afterthought to justify why you're going after some gameplay objective. But there are games that prioritize narrative and use the unique medium of video games to do things narratively that couldn't be done in other mediums. I think it's too reductionist to say that these games just "become a representation of a story, a novel, a play, a dance, a film." It's the same reason why it would be wrong to say that a good film is just "a representation of a story or a novel," film as a medium brings unique narrative tools that transform the story being told. Games can do the same.
Piss off with that contrived garbage. Games prioritize gameplay cause the gameplay is the entire reason you need a 1000$ computer to play them. The best scene in the Last of Us is worse than the worst scene in Citizen Kane...........a movie made with 1940's technology. Games need to start focusing on coming up with ways to tell a story where the player's agency isn't thrown away. Stop showing me some cutscene or forced in game dialogue and actually develop ways of telling a story which takes my agency into account. If you want to prioritize story over deep gameplay like Last of Us, then stop having gameplay bits that are completely disconnected from the story bits. ACTUALLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE INTERATIVITY OF THE MEDIUM WITHIN THE STORYTELLING! Cause otherwise what the hell are we doing here? If you're just telling me a story then make a movie/show......which I can cheaply stream and don't need some overpriced junk console to enjoy. Last of Us emotional elements are also complete BS since the game's only alternative to violence is avoidance. And even if you avoid bloodshed, IT HAS ZERO EFFECT ON THE STORY. For example the last level of the Last of Us can actually be completed without killing anyone. Now does the game recognize this and adapt?..........NOPE! Even if you refuse to kill the Doctor at the end, THE GAME FORCES YOU TO KILL HIM ANYWAY. This is why Last of Us 2 was so stupid. Joel wasn't some mass murderer in my playthrough of the first game, I didn't kill anyone except for the people the game forced me to kill.
Additionally I take issue with the perspective that a game that focuses on a tight gameplay loop or experience without narrative focus is somehow _not_ art and simply an entertainment product. Such games are carefully designed and iterated and it requires a certain rarified skillset which can only be described as artistry to craft. As we have in the past, our definitions of what could be considered Art are too narrow and we must allow room for new types of creativity, dialog, and criticism. Would you consider Superhot, Getting Over It, or even Rocket League not art?
100% this. It is one thing to watch Joel shoot the surgeon in a TV show. It is another thing entirely to BE Joel and pull the trigger yourself. It is a completely different experience.
@@jarvy251 It's also another experience to choose NOT TO SHOOT THE SURGEON, only for the game to make Joel stab him anyway. Nothing is more immersive than fake decisions.....🤮🤮🤮 The show was good, the games sucked. They're movies with shallow bits of gameplay inbetween. Nothing wrong with movies when they're movies, which only require a movie ticket or a streaming service subscription. When I have to spend 70$ on a game plus the overpriced console to run it and I end up with some wannabe movie that's only pretending to be a game..............I tend to get annoyed.
Personally, I think it is just time. When I first got into video games, they were often seen as "for kids" or "nerdy", but as time goes on... It grew in popularity. We are at the point that kids want to grow up and become streamers, reviews, join esports, and so on. It has had a very huge shift in the last 20 years.
I think this is in part credit to those people who played those initial "for kids" video games (though many of them were not strictly for kids) growing up and both making their own, as well as becoming an audience that still wanted games made for them too, with the industry continuing to adapt for them. Even specific video games have taken this path of growing in maturity. The Kingdom Hearts series for example started with most of its players in elementary and middle school, but those people are now in their 30s and still playing it. The series has continued to grow, age, and mature along with those initial players, with its content intending to keep and cater to those same exact people who got into it as kids and are now adults, the story and characters becoming more "adult" to follow tis fanbase. Whereas other games series might continue to try and make things for new generations of kids all the time (Pokémon is a good example of that opposite approach).
As for how video games don’t really have “figure heads,” like how movies have recognizable directors and such, I think one of the reasons for that is because a lot of them happen to be foreigners. Japanese people with hard to pronounce or remember names. The only figurehead that comes close to a Scorsese or Nolan would probably be Shigeru Miyamoto. And that’s only because he created Mario-basically the Mickey Mouse of video games.
Agreed. Like the biggest individual names in American/western gaming - big-name voice actors like Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Troy Baker, studio heads like Todd Howard, Phil Spencer or Neil Druckmann - are only well-known among a really niche subset of hardcore gamers. Like I could tell my friends about an upcoming movie starring Leonardo di Caprio or directed by Christopher Nolan and they'd all know who I was talking about and could use their knowledge of them to form an opinion about whether the movie is worth seeing. You can't really do the same with video games to the average gamer. Saying that, one could maybe make an argument that in gaming, the gaming studios are kind of the replacement for the gaming figurehead in gaming cultural discourse. While naming a specific game director might not mean anything, saying a game is made by a studio like FromSoft, Bethesda, or Nintendo would likely be much more resonant.
Yeah, but I couldn't tell you who is behind Call of Duty or Last of Us and I believe those games were originated by Americans. I say the reason we don't have figureheads is that most of the creators work behind the scenes, unlike movie stars or singers who are often on camera where people can bond with them. (And even though Scorsese and Nolan are behind-the-camera people, they still get a lot of on-camera exposure.)
Shigeru Miyamoto is more like Spielberg or Disney. Nolan or Scorsese's video game counterpart is Hideo Kojima. David Cage might be Video Games' answer to Zack Snyder.
@@benjaminrobinson3842-Amy Hennig- (My bad, she worked on Uncharted only.) and Neil Druckman for The Last of Us, and Jason West and Vince Zampella for CoD pre-MW2.
That last bit hits me hard. With how easy it is to access new games, it's hard for new games to become household names as much as Mario, Sonic, Pacman etc. Hard to become a big part of the cultural zeitgeist when there's so many options. I feel like the last series to have that sort of impact was Minecraft
I think Fortnite & Roblox have had a huge impact at least with the kids I worked with. Before that five nights at Freddie’s had a grip on so many children it was shocking! Even if indie games don’t become household names they do find loving fanbases. Undertale comes to mind for one!
I am thinking that the missing gap that would make video games larger would be in-app purchases (DLC and consumable purchases). Those are now a fairly significant portion of game revenue outside of console, software and accessory sales.
@@cassinipaniniI am thinking they may not, because in earning reports game publishers now separate that revenue into its own category. Or at least most do
It honestly depends on the game. Games like Pac-Man, Mario, and Doom (as random as it may seem to group those games together) are examples of ones I’d say made a huge cultural impact worldwide. Some games obviously have little to no cultural impact. But in other cases, the cultural impact is much smaller, but is highly concentrated. A great example of this is how the PS1 game Wipeout was tightly linked to club culture in Britain during the mid nineties.
I love video games. As a kid, I would’ve done anything, hours of house or yard work, just to get 30mins on the family computer. I was continually told I would grow out of gaming. In my 30s, now and my enjoyment of video games has only grown.
Sure, but those words are much rarer. Just looking at google trends, you can easily see the huge divide, with consistently over ten times as much searching of "gamer" when compared to "cinephile" and "audiophile".
I’ve only ever heard cinephile used jokingly by movie fans, but I have never heard anyone be called an audiophile, unless they are an audio file on a computer. The term “gamer” has definitely been ruined by the internet, both from memes, various scandals such as gamergate, and big tech companies trying to connect with the youth and using the word in their ads and marketing.
I think that's because these terms are more relevant when an art form is emerging. Over time, as these art forms get more culturally accepted, less people try to define themselves or are defined by others on the basis of it, because it's not new or interesting anymore. At this point the label becomes less used and less relevant.
If you really like music, you're not classified as an audiophile. You're usually classified based on the genre/band/artist you like. Whereas with video games, people don't seem to be as conscious or care as much about the specifics.
I find it hard to say that a game like Shadow of the Colossus could be considered anything other than both art and a game. If you've played the game, you'll know why.
I wonder how big of a impact that part has actually. You can't just have anyone sit down and experience games like they can movies music or shows. The level of effort required to enjoy most of them is so much higher than other forms of media. You can tell someone they're missing out on a piece of culture because they've never seen Star wars if you tell them the same thing about Pokemon they may just expect to sit down and watch something instead of investing many hours of actual effort paying attention and doing something. Higher barrier-to-entry so to speak. Not on all of them, but many. Like I couldn't get into Shadow of the Colossus because my guy just kept missing the jump up to a pillar like six times in a row after it working once inexplicably. Could have just been outdated controls and such but really didn't drown me in and I couldn't just sit back and enjoy the world because I was having to get to it. Like scraping some peanut butter out of a jar that keeps running around.
@@busterbeast999To a certain extent, that's true. Video games, by their interactive nature, occasionally have problems with accessibility. However, there are plenty of other books and films that are critically acclaimed and are notoriously difficult to parse. I doubt that most people have the patience or the ability to read something like Finnegan's Wake. Also, everyone assumes that just because a video game is interactive, that means that it is challenging or has a win state. There are games like Lose/Lose, where the purpose isn't even to play well, or the countless walking simulators which have little to no mechanical difficulty and still tell a story. Then there's visual novels, which, while only video games because of the medium that they inhabit, can easily be experienced by anyone who can read. Then there's countless examples of video games that aren't even linear and still tell a decent narrative. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the quintessential example where despite having no predetermined start and more or less playing out like a game of Civ II, it still creates a dystopian atmosphere and a solid critique of political and economic ideologies. While most critically acclaimed narratives will probably remain linear and tied to a win/lose state, to boil down video games as just simplistic reflex tests is like calling all movies Marvel films.
@@busterbeast999 High barrier-to-entry doesn't make something any less "artistic", though I agree that it can affect how much less impactful it can be if it makes it hard for people to experience it
Yeah, I found myself understanding and agreeing with many of JJs points today, but I just completely and utterly disagree with Roger Ebert on that and JJs thoughts following it.
I think a huge reason video games tend to be overlooked as "serious" culture that you didn't touch on is related to the age argument. Music can be listened to anywhere, and while doing other things. TV shows and movies can fill your time for a few hours at a time. Some quick Google searching and back of the napkin math shows that, in order to watch the ENTIRETY of the Simpsons franchise, one of the longest running and most successful TV shows of all time, it would take around 400 hours, and that is a generous estimate. Games can be played for days on end, with people sinking thousands upon thousands of hours into a single title. The older you get, the more responsibilities you must take on, and the less time you have for leisure. Adults simply do not have that kind of time while kids and teenagers certainly do. An adult can justify watching an hour and a half movie, but they can't justify playing a new video game for a week straight. In summary, the older a person gets, the less culturally relevant video games become to them.
You’re 100% right about this. I graduated college and started working about 2 years ago, and basically lost interest in video games for the first year of working because I simply did not have the time to put 20 hours into a game like I did when I was younger.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and claim otherwise that many working adults do still indulge in gaming. The generation that grew up playing action shooters like Halo have now grown to be full adults, with some even drawing inspiration on their career choice based on what they played. These adults now have jobs and incomes and form a different type of market, but still a market, for games to target. A small subsection of this market is war games- a genre of games populated quite extensively by players of middle age and older who used to be veterans and who will pay quite the markup for the privilege to drive a properly modelled, rivet counted AbramsX main battle tank in a virtual arcade. Some adults do game quite extensively, sometimes as a de-stressing mechanism from a long day at work, and often they can make a substantial contribution to a game's revenue stream by spending money to make up for their lack of game time, or by affording and buying perks and cosmetics that suit their tastes. I'm not saying that many people don't drop gaming out of a lack of time, but I think it is still true that many adult gamers- sustainably spending gamers- are still out there.
👴As I got more adult responsibilities, I just stopped enjoying games that have such a long _minimum_ number of hours. If I can keep playing the same sandbox game for months on end that's great, but I need to be able to put down any game after half an hour and pick up where I left off next week. (And still get some enjoyment out of it.) Short one-night or weekend games are increasingly good for me, similar to a movie or shorter TV series.
My dude, binging tv series is a cultural norm now days. People are watching whole seasons in one sitting. Its just cultural thing, its not about lack of time.
From my perspective, the vast majority of people my age (around 20) have video games as their primary or secondary form of at home entertainment. It feels rare to find someone who doesn’t regularly have some genre of game they play. Maybe partly because it is one of the cheapest hobbies, compared to reading or movies, in terms of the amount of time you can get for x dollars.
That's an interesting point, because some could also say gaming is the MOST expensive form of entertainment, on par with attending a major league sports live game. But on the other hand, like you said, you can replay the game over and over while you can only see the Yankees play the Red Sox once.
@@JJMcCullough some games, like survival or simulation games, can easily have 1000 hours of replayability. I think the popular sports games fall into this category too. It’s true that story games don’t fit this as well.
@@JJMcCullough Each individual game can be expensive in and of itself, but by far it is cheaper depending on the game and some like counter-strike or Valorant are technically free outside of cosmetic items and people clock *thousands* of hours into them. Elden Ring for example takes around 60 hours to beat just the main game, and there's far far more value in terms of optional content and replayability. 1$/hour of high quality content at 60$ isn't really all that expensive compared to say seeing 6 movies at the theatre is around 12 hours even if they're 120 minutes long each for 66$.
So music is art, storytelling is art, cinematography is art, acting is art, character design is art, visual design is art etc But if you put them all together they supposedly wouldn’t be art. I find that weird.
Yes, but controls and/or gameplay mechanics aren't. And these attributes form the fundamental essence of what defines a video game. Color TV Game 15 doesn't have any of the qualities listed by you. And yet people still acknowledge it as a video game without any doubt whatsoever. On the other hand, Telltale has those qualities you listed, yet a lot of people don't like the severe lack of player control in these games and some are even debating if they're actually worth being called "games". Games can be aesthetically enhanced by artistic attributes such as artstyle, storytelling, music etc., to a degree that any other sort of toy is incapable to as of now. But they don't need to have these qualities. The fundamental essence of video games as a whole is that their consumers have some form of control over moving pixels in the context of a risk-reward system. Which pushes video games into the category of toys instead of art.
Not surprised to be honest. They've said the same thing about Rock & Roll, and Metal when they first started to gain ground. Now you hear that about Rap. It seems like it's inevitable when a new cultural medium/genre starts to get known outside of the underground.
Well it’s easier to just blame a single thing old people don’t like than face the complicated social, economic, and mental health issues that are really at fault without an easy answer
All, if not most, types of art have an interactive component to them to be enjoyed, like how with film you must be able to see and hear it (or be able to read subtitles). Video games has extra steps, but can still be used to tell a story, to entertain, and be art
I disagree in part. That one is experiencing sensory phenomena is not interaction but reception so at best passive interaction in that most art exerts without any audience control. There's nothing you can do but watch Luke Skywalker get his hand cutoff no matter how many times you watch it. Even notable exceptions like a "choose your own adventure" book are limited in order and ending as determined by the writer. Various other thoughts.
the only issue with viewing games as lower is that some games are actually deeper story-wise from the interactivity. a game like half-life (which defined it's era and genre), is such a deeper experience when you interact with it first hand, in a way a show can never replicate, cause you are so integral to what happens.
@@JJMcCullough it didn't really feel like a prize. like when you see a scientist run twords the military you thought was there to save you, only to realize they are there to "clean you up and cover up the mistake", and this is all done in-game, it's not a separate cut-scene for beating a level, its intertwined and married to the game, being that HL has no cutscenes. or you subtly hear the military talking about the depravity as you crawl though the vents. it's a story and feeling only a game really can have.
@@Tommy-the-coffee-addict yeah the interactivity of gaming is often given short shrift when it comes to outsider analysis, which is disappointing because its the most unique and revolutionary feature of the medium.
Rather than gameplay detracting from the "artistry" of video games, I'd go so far as to say it's another form of art itself. Anyone who has gotten immersed in video games can tell you about the "flow state" and how things just click. Gameplay is just one of the many artistic components, alongside the visual, audio, and storytelling components, that form a cohesive whole. As such, gameplay can serve to enhance any or all of those elements just as aesthetic or musical choices can vastly impact the viewing experience of a movie.
Nearly all video game journalism is online only on UA-cam, twitch or other news websites. This will inherently mean that less of the older demographics ever come across video games as you usually have to seek out these places, unlike tradition news and radio where music, movies, sports are advertised heavily.
even the sites that do report on gaming are usually exclusively video gaming and nothing else. for instance it would be unusual to read about a pinball machine on those sites, even though you could consider that a game.
I think it's important to note how recognizable characters like Mario or Sonic are, even if many can't name them, they know they're "the guy from the game". I think Nintendo as a brand is also very widely known, my grandparents still call every platform i play on "the nintendo". I think video games have been in the background culturally for a while, and they're slowly gaining significance, especially with Nintendo continuing to cater to a casual market and bringing newcomers in
That is amazing the New Yorker hired it’s first TV critic in 1992! I graduated high school in 1990 (making me officially an Old) and one day my Grade 12 English teacher (sorry, I guess that’s Senior Year English teacher to translate for JJ 😂) brought in her brother as a guest speaker, who was the TV critic for our city’s leading paper (and being well known as such would have been in the role for many years at that point)
The problem is that the interactive nature in itself can be used for expression. There's ways video games can be art in a way that movies, books etc. can not be and this has been ignroed by many people until quite recently. For example, Dark Souls makes you get through the experience of being beaten down and having to get up again and again in a way that is coherent with its story and message. The story of the game is trying to get something across to the player through the gameplay itself.
Outer Wilds is a game I’d use when it comes to using interactivity to its benefit as well, where the only way the player to progress through the game is to explore the worlds of the solar system to learn its story, and with every planet having a timed gimmick you need to learn it’s quirks so you can explore efficiently before the window of opportunity closes, all of it works because your the one interacting with the world
I'm almost 35 and I have been gaming literally since I can remember. There is and always has been a stigma around being a "gamer". I stream video games and whenever I tell someone this I hold my breath for a second because I'm bracing myself for the judgemental attitude a lot of people (especially older people) have about gaming in general. It's really unfortunate because some of the best people I know I met while gaming!
I'm still shocked that there's a stigma attached to gaming despite it being a passtime for almost half a century. The real shocker is when it comes from somebody our age (32 here!) where you'd expect at least some basic familiarity with the subject.
@@MrWyzdum Pong in 1975 dude. I mean even without it, the qualifier "almost" is enough to leave room for the 2600 in 1977 and the first consoles, which were large enough to have an impact. And while you can argue that video games weren't as popular as they are today, the fact is that at least three generations of kids in privileged countries have had exposure to them at the bare minimum. More than enough time for the first generation to be familiar with them as a medium. I mean, even back in the 90s, it wasn't a stigma to like video games as a kid and it was popular enough for it to be a discussion topic. Who the heck do you think bought all those cartridges of Red and Blue?
@@MrWyzdum You are correct, but I'd like to add the 80s arcade scene. My friends and I used to go to arcades in the 80s and played games. There was a decent variety too. Street Fighter started in 80s arcades.
The only equivalent I can think of to "gamer" in other realms of entertainment would be the term "book worm" for people who read a lot. Can't think of one for movies, but I suppose there are also terms like "metal head" in the realm of music.
It’s kinda frustrating to get so engrossed in the incredible experience that is the latest Zelda game, and yet hear absolutely nothing about it outside niche gaming websites despite it selling huge numbers. It feels like such a private experience that I desperately want to share.
You need to find a community or friends (or both) that like Zelda then. It's the same with other things like rock music or Dungeons and Dragons, there are plenty of people that you could easily find, it's just the average Billy Bob on the street who can't talk about it with you.
12:30 “we don’t have special terms for people who watch movies or sports or listen to music” we do tho. Listener and viewer and reader Also being a sub culture doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a impact on culture if arguments it means it has a bigger impact if anything
I would have to disagree when it comes to Ebert's point of view on games. I believe that video games, no matter how linear or 'game-like' they may be, can still very much have inherent meaning to the player. I recommend KingK's recent video, which is a retrospective on the 3D Zelda games and what all of them mean to him on a personal level. Video games have their own ways of communicating ideas, and taking control of a character is and continues to be an exciting and innovative way for people to engage with storytelling and art. I'm hoping with my art history degree to flip this narrative in any way I can. A wonderful video overall though, I've been waiting on a video like this from you, JJ!
I consider video games to be my favorite medium and include my favorite storyworks but struggle to put it on the same level as other mediums. Interactivity is both a blessing and a curse, allowing players to challenge themselves and change the plot, but it is a basic fact that spending ten minutes walking around an area grinding enemies or searching for collectables makes the stories of games have radically different pacing than other mediums.
Using interactivity artistically is high risk high reward, its hard to do well but allows for games to have a stronger emotional gut punch than any other medium since you can feel like you *are* the main character. OMORI is the best example I've experienced, despite being unpolished in places it made me the most emotional a story ever has.
I’ve played dozens of games that are 10-20 hours of pure greatness. The industry is getting bloated, but there are still so many great experiences with no slow experiences that can tell stories in ways a movie or song never could. The Forgotten City is a perfect, recent example of video games being art.
I believe there is one argument that was not covered here, which is that video games have a barrier to entry in the form of "knowing how to play videogames." What I mean is: a book's barrier to entry is knowing how to read, which most people can. A movie's barrier to entry is just having eyes. But for a game you need to have learned the basic skills necessary to play. That automatically requires a higher commitment when deciding whether to consume a particular piece of entertainment if you need to learn how to do it first. In short, you can recommend a song or a movie to any human with working senses, but you cannot recommend a video game to anyone who doesn't already play videogames to some degree
Some have also noted that the amount of time a video game asks you to invest is also very high. People act like Oppenheimer is a great burden of a movie just because it is three hours long, when an average story based game is around 20 hours long..
I really think the generational gap here is key. Very few people under the age of 40 have video games as a major part of their media diet. I did a master's degree in popular culture in 2020-2022, and more or less all of my professor were dead-center Gen X. And while they were very well versed in music, film, and TV through the present day, video games were something that they were generally aware with but did not engage with on the same level as the media types that were prevalent when they were young. I suspect there's a very similar pattern in media journalism. Even if individual writers are of a "post video game generation," I suspect most of the people making editorial decisions are of a 'pre video game generation."
Even back in the 90s, games like the Final Fantasy series were putting out sprawling 120 hour long interactive stories that no movie could ever match in depth of concepts and chatacter development.
And with that being so much bigger it's more daunting for people to get into it. they can't just sit down and watch it like a movie. probably keeps a lot of those who would just do it to review it away. Unlike people who just scroll through streaming services and just watch whatever shows up
@@busterbeast999 Yeah I was surprised time was left out of the video as a possibility for why they aren't as easily spread. The video games that are super short and/or easy to pick up and drop (Nintendo games especially) are the ones that have become the most culturally acknowledged. Assassin's Creed as a series is incredibly well-known and most people will have heard of it, but it's still rare that the average person will easily commit to sitting down and gaming for the 100-300 hours it takes to fully complete the modern games in the series.
One other thing to consider is that most of the 'old school' media is being consumed as background during other activities. With the access to streaming it's getting more and more common to have a music or a movie playing in the background (even audiobooks) while you work, do some housekeeping or... play videogames. The thing is that they are interactive, so that's another barrier to the experience. You can't play a videogame while you are activelly doing something else (most of the time). Again, I believe that's just another part of the conversation :)
Great analysis I have to disagree pretty heavily about videogame restrictiveness. I have played video games that were at least if not far more impressive than movies coming out at the same time. In fact for certain types of media such as horror there's no better medium because you have control over the character which becomes more terrifying because you know you're not want to set LINEAR track like a movie. You're actually part of the experience unlike other parts of media. And that means you can have a unique experience then no one else has had. Even in the less "artistic" video games like first person shooters they are less story focused on plot but you make your own little stories with your friends like C4 car in battlefield or creating your own game mode in call of duty or halo. When tom Holland Spiderman came out when the PS4 game did I enjoyed both but preferred the game because I could swing around almost feeling the momentum and walk the streets as Peter Vs seeing only the impactful story plots in the movie
I don’t think looking at the number of times a song was streamed is an accurate comparison. If someone buys one copy of a game, they are going to just play it one time if they like it, but if someone really likes a song, they are going to stream it multiple times. Saying a song has X number of streams isn’t easily comparable to the number of times someone buys the right to use an item as much as they want.
As someone whose gaming experience is entirely made up of 3d pinball for windows and solitaire years ago I’m shocked at just how much revenue video games pull in
To put it in perspective. A game called Baldurs Gate 3 just released on August 1st priced at 60 USD. As of August 16th it had sold 5.2 million copies. That's 312 million dollars in two weeks... For one game, albeit quite a successful one. An even crazier example is back in December of 2022 a game called Dwarf Fortress released on Steam. It had been developed by two brothers for 20 years. Available for free of their website that entire time. The Steam release added (I kid you not) graphics as its big selling point as it used to be entirely based on ASCII characters. In one month these two brothers sold over 500,000 copies for 7.2 million dollars. And both of those games have avoided the microtransaction nonsense that @calibmatlock mentioned which is how the big companies really rake in the money.
@@robertgronewold3326 Yes, this is the big miss. A movie ticket is around $10, which means that you would have to attend multiple films to equate it to even a budget game. I'm not so sure that I will write this off as disingenuous but is a grey area.
Yeah that why this video is not correct because people that play these causal simple games are not really gamers just people passing time due to their simple nature versus BG3/Disco Elysium or open world epic like RDR 2/Elden Ring.
The rest of the money you didn't account for is 'mobile gaming'. Trust me, grandma might not think she is a gamer, but every time she buys gems for Candy Crush she's sinking money into the game industry without knowing it.
I definitely think a huge part of the lack of cultural importance is that the average blockbuster video game is inaccessible to most people. Only a small subset of people have the free time to play through a 100 hour RPG, or grind through the ranks of an online shooter
This is the biggest thing for me. I may be hooked into gaming culture, but I rarely get the chance to play anything. And the ones I play are usually short and far from the mainstream games that are part of the culture. Also makes sense why TV shows are more niche than movies - they take longer to watch.
I always hated the term "gamer". I'm 23 so grew up in an era of big AAA games. When literally everyone you knew was online after school playing COD, FIFA, GTA, HALO, and you literally saw them all on your friends list, it surely made more sense to come up with a term for those who didn't play video games. Even as a young kid it felt cringe and a little invalidating.
Okay, so I had to write a whole essay responding to Ebert's take on video games, and I wanted to say that his definition of what a game is is completely incorrect. The second half of the quote is "when someone presents me with a game that doesn't fit my definition, I simply move the goalposts to not include it as a game." The things he defines as being quintessential to a game are simply not. Among Us is a game that doesn't have points, Tetris is a game that doesn't have an outcome, Minecraft is a game that doesn't have rules, and Yume Nikki is a game that doesn't really have objectives, at least not in the way that I imagine Ebert was thinking. The best working definition of what a "game" is is an interactive piece of media. There are a lot of weird edge cases, of things like Choose Your Own Adventure books, or like in the Peter Pan musical how the audience has to clap to save Tinkerbell, where there is interactivity but a lot of people wouldn't define them as being games, but there are things like that on the boundaries of all the different mediums (puppetry for animation, why are films and tv separate mediums, is a novel a different medium from a poem, and do articles and speeches get included, etc.). Yume Nikki is a great example of a game that feels like it lacks most of those "gamey" vibes. It's a non-linear exploration of the dreams of a troubled mind, with no direction given, and no points for doing well. The only method of progression the game has is in the collection of various "effects", which change the appearance of the main character, Madotsuki. Some offer an actual benefit, like the bike making you go faster, but others just make the character blonde or play a flute with no impact on the gameplay. After collecting all of the effects, Madotsuki jumps off a building and the credits roll. You could look at this and say, "well, the objective is to find all the effects and get the ending", but that misses the entire point of the game. The game is about trying to piece together the shattered psyche of the main character, through the most abstract and vague context clues imaginable. It is a game that really only works as a game, not as a representation of a movie, dance, or whatever else. It is most certainly not a game that you play to win. I have a friend going to DigiPen for game design, and we have had numerous conversations over one of the concepts that was taught in his class, which is the notion of there being different types of engagement that you can design for. Their list included ten different reasons why people play games, purely from a design perspective. They are achievement, which is to say the feeling of finishing a game or accomplishing everything that there is in a game (Mario games are a good example), challenge, which is to say enjoyment from experiencing a game's difficulty and overcoming it through repeated attempts (Dark Souls, Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy), mastery, which is to say getting to the point in game where there is no more challenge or striving to be the best at a game (Celeste, Pizza Tower, or any game Speedrunners like), competition, which is enjoyment through victory over others (Shooters, MOBAs, and many board games), fellowship, which is through experiencing a game with others or enjoyment from just playing with other people (Co-op puzzle games, D&D, Let's Plays), discovery, which is through finding as much as you can on your own within a game's world or mechanics (Yume Nikki, Hollow Knight, Zelda), fantasy, which is the act of becoming fully immersed in the game world and enjoying the feeling of impacting the world as you play, including power fantasies (any Bethesda games, Assassin's Creed, also D&D), expression, which is the enjoyment from having your actions and appearances represent you or an idea you have (Bethesda, Disco Elysium), drama, where the enjoyment comes through the experience of the unraveling of a narrative and the tension and intrigue inherent (Uncharted, Visual Novels, many JRPGs), and catharsis, which is deriving enjoyment from large emotional releases (ending of RDR2, Hinawa's Death, ending of LISA: The Painful). The reason I felt it necessary to list out all of these various reasons people play games is to refute the notion that people only play games to win or to beat them. I certainly enjoy the feeling of finishing a game, but pretty much every person who plays games can look at this list and say that they enjoy aspects of all of them. I don't really care for fellowship or expression, but I still can appreciate and enjoy that aspect when i play D&D with my friends, even if I care more about the characters, the world, and the progression of the plot. Games are most similar to animation, in the sense that there is a great deal of people who think that the closer that they get to emulating movies or real life, the better they will become, and can be respected as art. But this is simply not the case. Animation is at it's best when it's portraying visuals that are impossible to recreate in live action, and plenty of games are going in the same direction away from realism. The idea that realism equals maturity is an idea that needs to be broken in order for games to be respected as art on their own terms. Also, one last footnote, I think there's three main reasons why newspapers don't talk about games as much as other mediums. The first is that most people who are avid gamers don't really read the Atlantic, and get their media analysis of games primarily through independent content creators. Game Reviewer is a whole genre of content on UA-cam, and the people who do it are primarily people who grew up with games their whole lives. The second reason is that games journalism that does take place in a more traditional medium like news articles tends to be relegated to game-specific sites, like IGN, Kotaku, and Polygon. Sports journalism is equally segregated. The third is probably because of the harsh disconnect between game journalism and the audience that consumes games. You can point to gamergate as being a good example of this extreme disconnect, but you can also look at the Kotaku guy who spent 17 minutes in the cuphead tutorial, or the many articles saying that DOOM Eternal or Fromsoft games are too hard. It's a cocktail of incompetence and toxicity that leads to journalists not trusting the audience, and gamers not trusting the journalists, which drives them to independent content creators. I think this wins the award of the longest comment I've left on a video.
To add onto your gamer culture point, those that have interests in higher level art, literature and cinema rarely involve themselves in video games. People who are into video games usually also have interests in anime, marvel, Brandon Sanderson, Lord of the Rings, Rick and Morty, etc. So the medium has a limited range of artistic expression.
It’s true and the desire to appeal tends to only flow one way. Someone might make a movie targeting the gamer crowd but no one seems to make a game targeting, say, the prestige drama tv crowd.
@@JJMcCullough I wouldn't necessarily say that's true, there are story based "games" like telltale games and many others that would probably be good for those crowds but they never seem to do all that well. It seems that people not already in the space seem highly resistant to go outside of their comfort zone and give games like that a shot.
I think game development is a unique artform that is underapreciated and unnoticed in part because it's often paired with many other artforms. If you asked someone playing BotW for the first time they might say that the story was bad, the music was underwhealming, and the art direction was about as good as any other Zelda. Why then was it a worldwide phenomenon? Because it captures a human experience that other mediums can't very well: fun. Just like a painter captures beauty in images, a musician in sound, or a chef in taste, the game designer captures the experiential beauty of fun through interactivity
This is why I consider video games to be toys rather than just another medium of art. That's not to say there isn't a lot of art going into them during development.
@@Breakhammer82 Ah I see your point now, though I still think the process of dreaming up and refining mechanics to invoke a sense of fun is the same process that produces any other kind of art
Think you're really onto something on calling it "Low Art." During a job interview, they asked what my hobbies are, what I do for fun. I listed off a few things, but ended on games. By the faces they made, I might as well have said I like hardcore pornography
I think this is the reason for your last point re: popularity of individual games: Video games often take a long time to complete - at least dozens of hours. A song takes a few minutes to listen to. So you can listen to many songs and share that experience with many. But you're only going to play maybe a few big video games a year due to the time commitment. Same with TV shows. Movies are somewhere in between. Because of this, lots of people will have heard the same song because you can hear so many different songs in a year. But only a few people will choose to dedicate the time to watch the same TV show or play the same game as you, since you need to choose them (relatively) wisely and rarely.
This made me think about how I talk with my buddies about games. When I start playing a game, I say "Has anyone else played [video game title]?" and it's common that nobody has. I feel like if you had a friend group of movie fanatics, the question would be "Have you seen [movie title] yet?" and there would be an assumption that people have or will see that movie. Just an interesting thought along similar lines.
Having just clicked, I'm sure you'll mention it, but I always love the example of the Polish president giving a copy of Witcher 2 to Barack Obama. Really goes to show how important video games had become as a vessel for culture.
Started playing in the very 1st console generation (Magnavox Odyssey!), so love this topic. Think another reason why video games aren't taken seriously is for the first 5 generations or so (1970s - 2000) developers weren't able to tell meaningful stories. Sure, some random instruction manuals might share a "backstory".. but these had zero effect on gameplay, and plenty of kids never even read them! Thus, no emotional attachment. Today's games are both 1) real enough that we can relate to what' we see, and 2) games now allow choices that affect outcome
Something missing from your analysis: an average person might watch a movie they like once or twice, a few hours of engagement total. Someone may engage with a game they like for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours.
One point that I think you haven't quite understood is that while a Video game may have say 15 - 20 million sales, players will usually spend much longer consuming this product than tv shows, movies or music.. Video games especially the large online games like Fortnite, League of Legends or Call of Duty are frequently played for many hours each week and these games stay relevant for years on end. This builds a much bigger impact in peoples lives than a songs and movies which in current culture are much more 'flavour of the month'.
Very true. The average person is more willing to throw out 15 bucks to see a movie but will just as likely also move on and not think about it much or rewatch it. They'll get their 2 hours oout of it, maybe a few more hours thinking about it at best, and that's that. Games are often gigantic emotional investments, and that's part of why the fans tend to create subcultures. If they play a game, their whole life during their free time briefly becomes all about that game in a way people don't really do with movies.
Man, I think you and Ebert missed the mark big with that one. You could make the same argument about films (or any other medium): "they're just a visual novelty, some silly pictures to stimulate your senses, otherwise it is just imitating a book or a play."
I think one aspect left out of this video is how decentralized gaming is, and always has been. TV and movies only recently split off with streaming, but video games have always been fractured by PC vs. console, competition between consoles, and for about 15 years mobile games too. There was never one device, one method, for any lengthy period of time, under which the artform could be "standardized", so to speak.
Yo JJ! Just wanted to drop in and say I got into Sociology as a result of your channel - I completed my A-Level exam on sociology back in June and got a B, which I’m pretty happy with as I only studied it for 9 months! Thanks for helping me discover such an interesting subject :D
13:27 there is another equivalent I thought of immediately-“weeaboo” for anime watchers (and subsequently “koreaboo,” the term for K-pop and K-drama fans, used particularly before stan culture became prominent in the English-speaking world). but even so the point remains the same, it’s terms specifically to isolate people for their entertainment preferences, and therefore cultivates sub-cultures
I'd like to add as a "gamer" that I usually don't go to places like The New York Times for gaming related news/journalism; in my opinion that's not really what they're for. I'd actually prefer going to gaming related news outlets like Polygon or Kotaku. I feel like maybe the reason that games aren't as culturally influential as movies or TV is partially because gamers tend to be rather introverted and prefer to stick to their own spaces.
@@lainiwakura1776 thanks lainiwakura1776, clearly a true american patriot who will save our country from people with slightly different opinions on inconsequential topics
@@eX1st4132I would say they are more incompetent and bad at videos games. Thus they are having to lay people off. Hence the insult of game journalist.
Video games in some people's eyes across generations, including mine (22), are either a crippling addiction or an interactive movie to pass time. I've heard of plenty of people my age who think video games are for kids and are a waste of adult time and money and others who hop on to warzone every day after their shift. But either way there is no denying the cultural impact they've had since they first emerged as a major entertainment source
I would put "gamers" on the same level as audiophiles and cinephiles. While we all listen to music and watch movies most of us do not engage with the medium on such a passionate level. While your nephew may play fortnite on his phone and watch Minecraft yotuubers he is not a gamer. Neither are the young women who play mobile games or the plebs who buy the copy paste sports games every year. Those type of people do not engage with the medium the same way we do. They're not going to watch video essays and comment about the cultural relevance of gaming because it doesn't matter to them. And to be fair pop culture relevance doesn't matter to me either. It's when the mainstream appeal starts forcing it's way into gaming changing the culture to pander to non gamers that I become irritated. We enjoyed being toxic assholes. When the children, thin skinned and culture vultures showed up we lost the ability for even friendly banter. What a shame.
I find the direction in which the video game industry is moving to be really interesting. While shorter forms of entertainment are getting more and more popular, single player video games are getting more and more narrative focused, deeper and longer. I think that a big reason that I never really enjoyed youtube shorts and tik tok much is because of my love for single video games which take hundreds of hours and several months to complete.
1. Taking in money doesn’t equal cultural relevance. If you think about it for more than a couple seconds, of course the gaming industry takes in more money than say films. If I want to enjoy a movie I need to buy a ticket which typically costs between $10-15. If I want to enjoy a video game I need to buy a console for almost $500, then I can actually buy the game for around $60, assuming I don’t have to buy any extra controllers or accessories so that my friends can play with me. 2. While there are gaming communities, many video game consumers are content with simply enjoying a video game alone. The medium just doesn’t always lend itself to community and discussion in the same way that a sports game or movie theater experience do.
another factor I think is that elite art conversations tend to celebrate elite artists. John Lennon and Pablo Picasso and George R.R. Martin are easy to isolate and celebrate for their talents as individuals (even though much of their work is the result of collaboration). for most of their history videogames have lacked that kind of face. People knew Nintendo made Mario, but it was a deepcut to know Shigeru Miyamoto's name. Interesting to me that the rise of video games as cultural influences has included isolating individuals credited with those games - Neil Druckmann is having a moment as a celebrated individual while Scott Cawthorn is on the way down. American culture (and its British and French influences) love the idea of a genius. We love to celebrate that genius, and we love to take them down. Even with a few celebrated creators, video game production is still mostly faceless, which I think dulls its cultural presence.
Roger Ebert said this in an interview: “I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place,” concedes the critic. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself. My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.”
@@jijitters his original statement at the time was when gaming isn't what it is today in terms of scope, production values, music, etc. He might change his mind today seeing and experiencing games like RDR2, God of War, Minecraft, Elden Ring, etc.
You're so skillful at cultural analysis it's crazy. The last point about about having more anachronistic figureheads because entertainment is just so spread out now is something I never thought about. It is crazy that we live in a world where millions of gamers like myself can know and talk about every new release and it feels like such a huge thing, but I could talk to my neighbor and he might not be able to name a video game past mario.
I had a similar ththought. Like, I could know who the biggest names in gaming culture are like Masahiro Sakurai and Shigeru Miyamoto, but most mainstream people wouldn't know their names, just their work. Sorta like how in movies, people could know a famous actor, like Leonardo Dicaprio, but not a famous composer like Hans Zimmer.
I heard the Persona 5 track “So Boring” on NPR a couple months ago during one of their bumpers. It’s the one that plays in the classrooms segments in the game
The comparison of industries is based on revenue, forgetting the cost. Music industry might be much smaller in terms of revenue, but it also costs way less to make a music album than to make a video game. Starfield might make a lot of money, but it also costs $200mln. Book publishing industry might be 5x smaller, but the cost to write a book (or buy a book from the author) is also probably 20x less. Video games might be a big industry in terms of money, but cultural relevance should be judged on the base of size of the audience.
as someone who loves the horror genre, the interactivity of video games makes them more terrifying to me than movies. it is much scarier to force yourself to do a something frightening than to simply watch a character do it on screen. this actually holds true for watching lets plays as well, because even though i am not the one directly interacting with the game, the fact that it IS interactive makes it more inherently unpredictable than a movie.
Totally agree, as someone whose main loves are horror and video games! It is not scary to me to sit back and watch someone else be scared. But when it feels like I am in the situation myself or responsible for the situation? Much more potential! The horror video genre is really special in this regard.
Great video, JJ! I especially liked the discussion of the monoculture at the end there, plus the simple fact of there having not been as much time for video games to mature as a category of entertainment. I think as time goes on, video games may well become more and more culturally relevant as the wealthy, influential people in society are increasingly people who grew up playing video games. However, one thing you didn't mention that I think is really important to the discussion of video games as American cultural products specifically is that many early video game hits were foreign imports, like Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and others. This lead to them being othered in the culture, both by people who thought their foreignness was a bad thing, and by those who thought it was a good thing - it's a big part of video games being counterculture, I think*. Because of this, it was and still is hard to consider video games a part of the American cultural canon.
Until recently many japanese games would be censored or poorly translated during localization for american audiences, if they even released at all. These days most major foreign games release simultaneously in america, making them much more accessible, but that only really started happening with the two most recent console generations. Most americans are used to being specially catered to by the media world (because it is dominated by american media), so this is a relatively large difference between video games and other forms of entertainment.
So on the subculture thing... Do hardcore gamers see themselves as separate? Yes. But this is absolutely not unique to gaming. Just look at people like Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren't cinema. Every single thing that can be loved and appreciated has people who love their selected version of it so much that they adapt an elitist attitude. I've met avid readers who would swear up and down that Harry Potter is low-brow trash that will eventually be forgotten while in the same breath praising Shakespeare who was, in his time, known for creating low-brow trash. Every form of media has these people, and they do not define those media. This is, quite simply, a non-issue. Those people are relatively few in the broad scope, and while they may be loud with their opinions, they are not particularly influential outside of their own in-groups.
As a member of gen z I actually disagree pretty strongly with video games place in culture being small at least in my age range at school slang from video games is common among everyone and references are also everywhere A reason I think that video games are still not on the level of movies is because the price most games big games are 60 dollars where as movie tickets are far cheaper and more consistent with prices between big productions and smaller ones Another reason is that the format of video games is hard to understand if your new to it there is things that you need to understand to simply move around a basic function if you didn’t grow up understanding how to do it, it would be like asking George Washington to find a Netflix movie it has so many small thing that can be hard to navigate
Video games are HIGHLY segmented. My partner and I both game several hours a day - but there's no overlap in the games we play. He plays "Path of Exile", I play Zelda TOTK. He plays Disgaea, I play Borderlands. He's been trying to get me to play Final Fantasy (with no success), and I've been trying to get him to play Half-Life or Portal (with no success). My "normie" friend at work games too, but he plays sports games. Ick. My friends from high school (I'm 35) still game, but they all play League of Legends. I tried playing it, but found the community too toxic. My partner's son games, but he plays Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy's. I played Minecraft a decade ago, but lost interest in it. And then there's his nephew who keeps talking about "Undertale". The nephew also plays "Genshin Impact", which I refuse to consider playing for political reasons (Based in China). I still haven't played a single Sonic or Mario game, despite loving Zelda BOTW and TOTK. Point being: "Gaming" is SUCH a wide range of material, there's almost no commonality. I didn't when touch on people who play "video games" like Farmville, or Candy Crush. Rather than think of "video games" alongside "movies" and "television", I think the highest buckets should be "interactive media" and "passive media" - THEN you get into action, horror, sci-fi, and whatever else. Video games are SO diverse, it's effectively impossible to identify a singular cultural impact.
I can easily explain the missing billions: mobile. You note in your video that mobile devices are now the most popular gaming platform, but you appeared to miss the fact that the numbers you quote do not include mobile gaming revenue. Mobile gaming on iOS and Android brings in huge dollars. It’s also likely that at least some of the digital distribution of video games, especially on PC, was not included in your numbers. So, yes, video games revenue is easily bigger than those other three types of entertainment put together, and your scepticism was misplaced.
It’s also worth mentioning that Video Games still kinda act as a self contained large subculture with their own rules, critics, media, and self sustaining cultural ecosystem that’s basically independent of most large legacy institutions. Given a few more years it’ll probably become so large it’ll just be culture like how superheroes became culture, but we are just on the edge of that. Also the industry has causal, average, and hard core gamers who show different levels of engagement with game culture. For example mobile games tend to be the ones to breach the subculture to normal culture barrier because they reach the casual demographic, but most console or PC only games tend to only reverberate with the median or hardcore demographic that’s tuned into the subculture specific media.
Another interesting part of the Collapse of the Monoculture is that the most listened music is not widely liked by everyone, it's just kind of tolerated. People can like what they want, but personally speaking I'm tired of listening to Taylor Swift in every restaurant and Walmart.
I enjoy how JJ both manages to go relatively in depth, while starting from the very beginning, explaining the most basic cultural aspects to lay a foundation so that even aliens could understand his content
There’s in game monetization for some IPs, also. I suspect though, that it’s sort of “hidden” in terms of culture, because “pay to progress/win/flex” is a subculture even among gamers.
Enjoyed your work, as always. Re: video games as art, it is an extremely varied and rich medium. What Ebert's position misses is that any medium can incorporate other mediums. Film scoring is not a poor-man's-version of music any more than film cinematography is 'trying' to be visual art. Games have the unique advantage of having the consumer undergo a given effort; for example, by *actually* putting in the effort to investigate and discover a cosmic mystery in Outer Wilds (2019), you get a different emotional experience than you would watching a movie with a more pre-determined perspective. Celeste (2018), an outstanding example of its genre, integrates a story about fighting anxiety and self-defeatism with very difficult yet well-designed platforming challenges. The *doing* of the task *enhances* the story. That's the real strength of games as art. Often I resist saying 'games' in favor of 'interactive media', but that's obviously too unwieldy of a term to stick.
@@JJMcCullough Stories are always a reward though, a story in a book is a reward for actually doing the effort of reading, also a lot of paintings in order to understand them you should do the effort of actually learning what they are about, what the painter's intentions were, what they represent and that is "a reward for doing something" when of you don't do it paintings will just be a bunch of colors and lines. Same for video games where stories are a reward for actually interacting with the medium and it doesn't always take the person to win or loose or even being a "good gamer" to fully experience the story in a video game
I think there are games that are far less linear than you’d expect, despite having many deeply artistic elements. Just like with blockbuster movies that may be more mainstream and “safe”, and smaller films that take more risks, there are AAA games that are more mainstream and many “indie” games that are impressively artistic (in many ways, not just visually).
Great video as always. Very insightful. If I could tip my hat into the ring as a game designer, I think the vast majority of games can be considered art, as they are created with an artistic and emotive intent. Be it to make a person feel guilt for their actions (Spec Ops: The Line), a varied globetrotting adventure aimed at a younger audience (Mario: Odessey), or ever something as basic as mindless stimulants to keep the money flowing in (Clash of Clans)
There are words for people who watch movies, cinephile, or people who listen to music, audiophile, but even those words have a sort of high culture connotation, and only apply to a select type of almost obsessive person. I do find it interesting that there isn’t an equivalent word with similar connotations to those as far as I know for video games.
Loved the video. I think its worth noting that a video game usually has a much greater impact on someone than a movie. Even if Overwatch and the new lion king had similar amounts of people who consumed them, a person who got Overwatch has likely played the game for many hours, maybe even dozens or hundreds of hours, rather than just the 2 hours someone watches a movie.
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How did you go about making a UA-cam video about gaming without mentioning Minecraft even once?!!
@@tanyalc22 I did
Congrats, boomer. You just learned something.
@@JJMcCullough you’re the best jj
I would add that games also have higher literacy requirements than movies/books/TV. Their design typically expects the player to be able to perform a lot of cognitive skills that are specific to video games. For instance, modern games typically require the player to independently navigate their character through a simulated 3D environment with the left controller stick/WASD keys, while simultaneously managing the position of the camera with the right stick/mouse. Even this simple example is a pretty niche skill that is very difficult for non-gamers to pick up. Razbuten's video series "Gaming for a Non-Gamer" does a great job of showing how impenetrable games can be for people who don't already play them. I think this impenetrability can make it hard for non-gamers to understand and appreciate video games as an art form, and limits how quickly video games can diffuse into the broader culture.
I agree. I always point out that the reason why the school system didn’t call me completely stupid, and why I’m so literate now compared to when I was younger is because of my love for video games and how they made my literacy better among a plethora of other things like problem solving and critical thinking.
Without video games I’d be filed for disability most likely within my country, at least that’s what I believe or be severely hindered in life. Also as a side note gaming as a culture I find myself proud of because of how people from all over the world can connect with something so passionately no matter who they are or what they believe and so on. (It’s universal)
Tho it's interesting that games on smartphones are uniquely accessible, since unlike PC or console games they can just label the movement keys that the player needs to touch on screen
The tricky thing with measuring the size of the games industry is that nowadays mobile games are often included which make way more money, but have little to zero cultural impact.
Exactly mobile games might as well be a glorified version of checkers/Rock, Paper, Scissors. This video might as well be I am old man who just lives in past media but need to branch out since it so bad.
While it's mostly true that games made for mobile only tend to have little cultural impact, that's glossing over very culturally important games that have a massive mobile player base: Minecraft, fortnite, roblox, etc.
@@adamp_ I like roblox because it such a clever way around child labor laws. All the games started as PC only to start out with then became multiplatform. Also those games didn't start with any story and one was originally a zombie shooter.
I disagree with the "little to zero cultural impact." Thousands of people who don't have internet at home or access to a computer do have a smart phone. Mobile games are a major way for people who have little money to play online games. There are thousands of games "free to play" with in-game purchases or ad revenue. The cultural impact of these games is nearly impossible to measure unless you ask the advertisers who pay to advertise on them, and the people who actually play the games. The most productive way to get the poor to answer questions about their game usage is to pay them to take surveys, which skews the results. So yes, there is a cultural impact, but it's not unified and it's not easily observable.
They don't have cultural impact? According to whom? No single thing had more cultural impact than Pokemon GO in recent years. And that's just one thing that crossed over to normal, non-gaming audiences.
I love how metal gear has had so much influence in media even with its sounds alone but not a single person on the street could name the person in the cover art lol
I’ve heard the “!” sound on the Mexican news network once and had to do a double take to make sure I wasn’t making stuff up
Its also interesting how influential it is considering it’s never been adapted in any other medium, no movie, no tv show, not even an animated direct to dvd movie, or even tie in novels available in English
Snake plissken ;-)
I thought his first name was metal, last name solid. Duh.
@@curiodyssey3867 metal snake solid?
In Sony's documentary about the development of God of War (2018), Christopher Judge (best known for playing Teal'C from Stargate) recounted how he was a bit dismissive about auditioning for a videogame until he ended up reading the script for it. He was surprised by how the dialogue was more akin to something from a movie or tv show. After that, he was on board and delivered one of the best performances of the year as Kratos.
@Antonio-GransciYou think God of War is pretending to be a movie because it has good writing?
@Antonio-Gransci No
@@Khaled-otigod of war is pretending to be a movie: its cinematic, great graphics that strive for realism, heavy on the story.
It follows in the footsteps of TLOU a game that wants to practically be a movie, like even ND wants moment to moment gameplay look like a cutscene.
god of war pretends to be a movie because of its lack of interactabillity, you see progression of the main characters story, but you arent going through this with him. the example of a game that has a lot of interactabillity is the first portal. portal has this eerie athmosphere where you feel for yourself that something isnt right about this facility, the music and visual style help this a lot but what sells you on the fact that the situation you're in is not good is the gameplay. you have to carefully dodge energy balls, try to not fall in into the deadly goo or get shot by turrets, and while you're at it, you also find later text scribbled on the walls of not easily accessible areas by some delusional guy who warns us through those scribbles that the stuff going here is not good and that we need to escape this place and oh god i just ended rumbling about portal 1 agai oh god forgivd me please
Because it basically was nothing but an interactive film. Not the usual game.
Video games rose to their current level of popularity alongside the internet, meaning that validation from traditional sources - established news outlets or magazines- has remained much less important because there are so many alternate, Internet-based sources of information on the medium.
such a great point
I was thinking about this when JJ kept bringing up the New York Times. I would argue the main reason videos games are never mentioned there is because the target demographic reader doesn’t care about them. New York Times is a business after all and if readers don’t read articles about videos games then they won’t get published
i was just thinking maybe twitch streams as part of the video game revenue
The matter JJ talked about with the negative posturing of being a “gamer” is probably due to how some people let it consume their lives.
The amount of people reading those magazines he mentioned is miniscule compared to the countless discussions that occur across the internet. Video games have had artistic merit for decades, and so fans of the medium took to the internet since the mainstream media considered games childish and unworthy of discussion.
You know, I am 13yrs older than my brother (he is in elementary) and one of the things I make sure he has access to are videogames.
My parents didn't with me (immigrants) and I got by fine but I still felt left out once in a while. But nowadays not knowing about minecraft, or zelda, or smash bros REALLY alienates you. It is a huge part of American culture for the newer generations.
Good point, it reminds me of when a Korean guy (whose parents were immigrants) around my age who I worked with asked me what I did for fun. I said I play games with my friends, like Smash Bros, and he had no idea what I was talking about. Not a language barrier. He had just never heard of Smash before. It was baffling, coming from a guy in his early twenties
as someone who has literally never played a video game in my life: I am completely fine and not alienated at all
@@dubudubudan Good for you! As I said, older generations are less likely to feel alienated. But if you know little kids you'll know the talk of the land isn't what new cartoon is out, or what new toy, but what new videogame, skin, etc (Roblox is a big one rn). And this carries over. I still speak to my friends about cartoons growing up: SpongeBob, Samurai Jack, Dexter Lab, etc, my parents and their generation speak about Thundercats and He-Man. I am very sure kids will speak about videogames in the future to bond with others.
American culture, Minecraft, Zelda and Smash Bros?
Let's see, one was made in Sweden, the other two are Japanese through and through
I find the best way to avoid alienation on a particular topic like this is to just be honest and curious when someone brings it up. "Oh tbh never heard of __. Is it good?".
Even if people are shocked at first many times they'll look forward to the chance at getting to get you to experience your first time and witness it.
The main problem is people are afraid of embarrassment so they either get defensive or they pretend like they know more about the topic than they actually do. People love to share knowledge!
I think discrediting it as an art form due to its “linear nature” is silly, books and movies are also linear. Games have the ability to put you into a story and experience it in a way other media can’t, there just is not a valid argument against games being an art form.
If I understand his argument that's not really the issue. I think Ebert views games the same way he would view poker or golf with occasional animated films inserted (cut scenes) to provide context. I'd bet that he probably considered the cut scenes art but not the game itself.
@@ADADEL1I didn't quite understand the argument he made. You seem to understand it a bit more so I want to ask. Do you think that he would consider interactive performances art? For example there is a famous performance in which a person has offered up their body to be used as the onlookers seemed fit. In this way I see it shares the progression of a game since there's only "one way to go" making the performance linear. It's okay if you can't tell me I just wish to understand the argument being made.
@@ADADEL1well there are plenty of games which use their game play mechanics and enviorments to tell story's and make statements. Games are also different from sports because they are fictional representations which have worldbuilding and characters and sports do not. If you had a sport in which people dressed up and role played and were allowed to be creative then that would be art
@@ADADEL1 Golf and Poker don't have a storyline, backstory, characters, a narrative written by someone, they are sports/competitions, Video games on the other hand have all that and a lot of them can be non linear with multiple outcomes depending on the player's interations. it's just a bad argument. He seems to only take the "interactive" aspect of video game in order to compare it to other interactive activities, while video games are just way more than that.
Also we consider a painting as Art, so why video games aren't when most are filled with painted illustrations, and drawings, landscaped and designs drawn by artists (on top of all the narrative aspect and gameplay creativity that is also very much artistic) ? his argument just doesn't make sense
@@williamlongjon9649 I feel like there is something to be said about the fact that the way sports culture idolizes athletes to the point that we stop seeing them as individual humans and we start perceiving them as "the person that makes my team win". I definitely think that eSports/speedrunning get into the territory of being very culturally similar to sports. A lot of the times the excitement of watching eSports/speedrunning is the human drama behind the person performing it. I still think the individual performances in a vacuum can be seen as art too but the element of competition adds an extra boost of value.
One factor is that playing a game is such an individualized experience. We all saw the same version of Luke Tatooine and training with Yoda, and blowing up the Death Star. But nobody had the exact same experience of playing Skyrim. That really stops video games from having the sort of cultural touchstones you get from a memorable line or scene or whatever.
I used to consider an opinion like yours, but then I took an arrow to the knee
Nah, I would disagree about that.
Even in games with large amounts of freedom you still have common experiences.
Since you used Skyrim as an example, know that everone back in the day understood the "Arrow to the knee" meme, and if you go to any vidya group nowadays, people will still understand memes about Meridia's Beacon, despite it being a random optional side-quest.
@@SkySumisuI disagree yes there are stuff thate everyone did in Skyrim becaus eit was part of teh main narrative but most of the tiem people wer ejust doing whatever tehy wanted and experienced different stuff, everytime i speak with my friends about games with losts of freedom like Elden Ring or Skyrim we speak weir epic or crazy stuff it happened to use and pretty much no one has the same experience, that's way more evident in Elden Ring because the game is one of teh biggest examplos of non liniarity in games you start the game pass teh tutorial and then you just go wherever you want.
Wlyte put the flaw in your position very succinctly. Now don't try to talk your way out of this arrest, I've heard about you and your honeyed words
So, your finally awake
A good sign of video games' cultural importance is in the way they have influenced/driven people's engagement with _other_ media and topics. The ones that particularly stick out to me are history and music. Blue from OSP has openly spoken about how _Assassin's Creed_ got him interested in history, and certainly in the history space of UA-cam video games have a huge influence on what topics we talk about and when. And of course the resurgence of young people's interest in classical, jazz, and other instrumental music can easily be chalked up to their utility in video games.
or a good sign of how empty of culture and art video games are that people seek other avenues for a better experience
Agreed, my absolute love for history came from watching playthroughs of Ck2 eu4, vicy 2 and Hoi. So I guess thank you paradox games for the introduction lol
@@tomservo5007there is nothing today that doesn't stands on the shoulders of other creations and so on. Nothing is original, nothing is new, everything is recycled and everything needs to be transformed or bended to create something further. Gaming culture is just the same as any piece of media, redundant, if seen with a cynical lens.
@@tomservo5007 That's like saying being inspired to research WWII because you liked Saving Private Ryan means movies are culturally empty. It's myopic.
Definitely reminded of how every kid (including me for a brief time) wanted to learn how to ride and do tricks on a skateboard because of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
I do think that the interactivity of games gives the medium an opportunity to engage in stories in a way that movies/tv shows can not. Though usually the games that engage in such a thing are indie productions that are not highly known even within the space of video game culture - Few of these examples are: Return of the Obra Dinn, Pyre, Hades, Papers Please, Disco Elysium, Inscryption.
While the biggest games in the industry feel the need to include more "gamey" characteristics, like area grinding, collectables, ten minutes walks; the likes of God of War, Last of Us, Uncharted, Elden Ring, Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption end up getting most of the attention and representing the whole medium.
I feel it is comparable to analysing the whole film medium. If you approach it through the biggest releases/box offices of the year, you'll face big blockbusters that are more occupied with broad entertainment, and will end up passing by the more artful and thought provoking stories that represent the depth that movies can attain.
At the end, it is like J.J said: Video Games are a fairly recent medium that is still finding out where they will sit in the culture room. Will they be able to get to the big table or content themselves to the side couch, will be up for the future. As for me, I do think that games are able to deliver powerful stories in a whole different way that movies/music/tv shows can, and each one has its owns strenghts and weaknesses in doing so.
As for always, very interesting approach to the topic, and thought provoking video. J.J always delivers and it's so good seeing the channel doing so well. Big Hugs!
All it takes is someone to get into critically successful games like Witcher, Final Fantasy 16, Baldurs Gate 3 or Zelda to see the big difference or even Cyberpunk 2077.
There are many video games that would blow the minds of anyone who never got into video games.
I would argue that even the games you listed have an aspect of interactivity that cannot be replicated in other forms of media. For instance, I have vivid memories of Ezio's journey in Assassin's Creed II. I remember Ezio's bloodlust when he killed Vieri, because *I* was the one who killed him. I remember Leonardo da Vinci's enthusiasm when Ezio flew his flying machine, because *I* was the one who flew it. Video games like those put the player in the protagonist's shoes in ways that literature or movies simply cannot do, and for that reason, I think Ebert completely missed the mark when he said video games could never be art.
@@patyos2 I agree, though I feel that getting someone from outside the medium to engage with these games is a very difficult thing to do. Aside from the time commitment to play them to completition (Same problem that some Tv Shows have), there is aslo the problem of familiarity with game concepts in order to fully engage with them.
This is something that was brought up in one of these comments. Playing games - specially modern ones - requires some degree of familiarity with gaming skills and concepts. Similiar to a "language barrier", that can be very offputting and stressful to newcomers to the medium.
Perhaps these people would need to essentially watch someone play, or have someone guiding them throughout the game to make them fully interact and engage with the material.
@@ExplosiveBrohoof Great Examples! I definetely agree. I also don't agree with Ebert assertions about video games, though I believe he was thinking of games like Space Invaders, Pacman and OG Super Mario when he said that. At least it is my theory, as I find it difficult to make such a statement if you research more about the medium.
I still remember how the game Dear Esther would have you play as your character working at a fish processing plant and simulate daydreaming at a boring job by having you cut fish with one hand and play a simple walking simulator with your other hand, I thought that was a brilliant way to get you into the shoes of the protagonist using interactivity and which would be impossible in any other medium.
I feel like this can go back to that video you had about generational culture. The people who made video games did make that culture, but like the part about the high school films, people who grew up with the "golden" period of video gaming in its early days haven't reached the zenith of their social power at this point.
Great observation
Generational is spot on, I gamed sonic and golden axe, now I have 3 kids playing fortnite, when kids have time games are the thing. I was a movie nut as an early kid. Kids could care less about what movies are coming out.
@@SteelSculptor It doesn't help that films have indeed gotten worse since you or I were kids. I grew up in the 90s, so I was inundated with the likes of Jurassic Park, Home Alone, Back to the Future, and so on. Nowadays, there are few hard hitting movies like that whereas in the 90s, there seemed to be a never ending supply of them. Disney is a stark example, where the 90s were considered their Renaissance, and nowadays all they do is put out live action remakes of their good movies.
@@SteelSculptor Considering what they put out as movie these days all take video games over any other video media plus you can only be a gamer if you play on consoles or PC, cell phone gaming is the equivalent of those that use to play minesweeper or solitaire.
@@southcoastinventors6583 Not as much anymore there are more and more Triple AAA games coming out for Mobile Phones nowadays
You hit the crux of the issue with "Death of THE MONOCULTURE". Very good video. The few friends I have in real life have completely different tastes in - well, everything - from me. We can typically find some compromise with a bit of searching, but that's very different from common preferences.
While you could argue that this is better because everyone gets what they want - I feel the exact opposite. Much better for my friend and I to both get a video-game we're 85% aligned with that has a $10 million budget, than for each of us to get separate video games we're both 100% aligned with that only got a $5 million budget.
I think Roger Eberts analysis does not account for many videogames that are still focused on “winning” or have points and mechanics, but use the expectations of other more traditional video games to make commentary on game culture, or just on a wide variety of moral or human issues lots of other forms of art try to make. Consider under tale, or games like inscription, that don’t make this game vs. immersive experience spectrum so linear.
Neither Undertale nor Inscryption existed while Roger Ebert was alive. It's entirely possible that his quote was more on point when he made it than it would be today.
Was thinking the same thing 👏
@@benjaminrobinson3842Yes, but JJ is saying he agrees with that quote now
I agree a game like bioshock or spec ops the line only works as a game and if they where any other medium they would fall apart.
He said this in an interview:
“I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place,” concedes the critic. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself. My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.”
If he experienced games like God of War and RDR2, I think his opinion would be a bit different than it was around 2010.
I think a unique thing about gaming is that as a medium it is so broad, which makes it hard to define what even IS a video game. The fact that something like Rocket League, VRchat and Life is Strange all fall under the same category really shows this. The "limits" of what you can do with a movie and song are pretty well defined, but that isnt really the case for games.
JJ's estimates for video game revenue apparently did not include the Mobile Game market. which in the US is expected to bring in $69 Billion in 2023 just by itself. Together with that, related tie-ins, and merchandising, the video game industry is WAAAAY bigger than what was discussed in this video
That's not even counting streaming platforms, setups, ad revenue for websites, etc.
Also he said 400 video games were released in a year which didn’t take into account Steam (I assume he just meant retail).
@@TNTITAN My guess is that the 400 number represents the list of games that were released via registered publishers in North America, which is a lot more regulated.
I think it was within the last year that NPR (National Public Radio) in the US finally started a regular column (at least on their website) for critique/commentary on video games. That's one barometer of mainstream acceptance.
I think The Last of Us is a really interesting case study for this topic. The HBO series was well received by critics and by all accounts stood at the same level we'd expect for a TV series by HBO. But at the same time, many people who both played the game and watched the show will attest that the narrative felt more impactful in the game.
I think there are elements of the video game medium that can make stories like The Last of Us more impactful. One of the main things the show was missing relative to the game was the small moments between major plot points where Joel and Ellie would have a short back-and-forth about something they come across. These small moments wouldn't warrant their own scene in a show, but they fit naturally into the game since you're already spending time doing more "game-like" things like solving puzzles or navigating the environment. It manages to extend the run-time without boring the viewer, which gives the narrative and character relationships more room to breathe.
Games also benefit from the more direct connection between the player and the protagonist. One of the main themes explored by The Last of Us is the level of brutality that otherwise good people are capable of in extreme circumstances. I think that by putting the player in the driver seat for that brutality, it makes the exploration of that topic much more visceral. There are times that the game will make you feel disgusted at what you as a player are doing. The enemies will panic when they see their friend was shot, they'll call each other by their first names, they will beg for their lives when you get the upper hand. There's a big difference in the experience between watching an actor on screen do something that we feel conflicted about and actually initiating that action ourselves.
So given all that, I don't think it's fair to say that when a game has a strong narrative, it stops being a game. The game elements themselves give the writers new tools for creating a narrative, and in certain cases, they let them tell the story better than they could have in other mediums. I think games get a bad rap because it's true that the large majority of games focus on gameplay first, with narrative added as an afterthought to justify why you're going after some gameplay objective. But there are games that prioritize narrative and use the unique medium of video games to do things narratively that couldn't be done in other mediums. I think it's too reductionist to say that these games just "become a representation of a story, a novel, a play, a dance, a film." It's the same reason why it would be wrong to say that a good film is just "a representation of a story or a novel," film as a medium brings unique narrative tools that transform the story being told. Games can do the same.
Piss off with that contrived garbage.
Games prioritize gameplay cause the gameplay is the entire reason you need a 1000$ computer to play them.
The best scene in the Last of Us is worse than the worst scene in Citizen Kane...........a movie made with 1940's technology.
Games need to start focusing on coming up with ways to tell a story where the player's agency isn't thrown away.
Stop showing me some cutscene or forced in game dialogue and actually develop ways of telling a story which takes my agency into account.
If you want to prioritize story over deep gameplay like Last of Us, then stop having gameplay bits that are completely disconnected from the story bits.
ACTUALLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE INTERATIVITY OF THE MEDIUM WITHIN THE STORYTELLING!
Cause otherwise what the hell are we doing here?
If you're just telling me a story then make a movie/show......which I can cheaply stream and don't need some overpriced junk console to enjoy.
Last of Us emotional elements are also complete BS since the game's only alternative to violence is avoidance.
And even if you avoid bloodshed, IT HAS ZERO EFFECT ON THE STORY.
For example the last level of the Last of Us can actually be completed without killing anyone.
Now does the game recognize this and adapt?..........NOPE!
Even if you refuse to kill the Doctor at the end, THE GAME FORCES YOU TO KILL HIM ANYWAY.
This is why Last of Us 2 was so stupid.
Joel wasn't some mass murderer in my playthrough of the first game, I didn't kill anyone except for the people the game forced me to kill.
Additionally I take issue with the perspective that a game that focuses on a tight gameplay loop or experience without narrative focus is somehow _not_ art and simply an entertainment product. Such games are carefully designed and iterated and it requires a certain rarified skillset which can only be described as artistry to craft. As we have in the past, our definitions of what could be considered Art are too narrow and we must allow room for new types of creativity, dialog, and criticism.
Would you consider Superhot, Getting Over It, or even Rocket League not art?
100% this. It is one thing to watch Joel shoot the surgeon in a TV show. It is another thing entirely to BE Joel and pull the trigger yourself. It is a completely different experience.
@@jarvy251 It's also another experience to choose NOT TO SHOOT THE SURGEON, only for the game to make Joel stab him anyway.
Nothing is more immersive than fake decisions.....🤮🤮🤮
The show was good, the games sucked.
They're movies with shallow bits of gameplay inbetween.
Nothing wrong with movies when they're movies, which only require a movie ticket or a streaming service subscription. When I have to spend 70$ on a game plus the overpriced console to run it and I end up with some wannabe movie that's only pretending to be a game..............I tend to get annoyed.
Personally, I think it is just time.
When I first got into video games, they were often seen as "for kids" or "nerdy", but as time goes on... It grew in popularity. We are at the point that kids want to grow up and become streamers, reviews, join esports, and so on.
It has had a very huge shift in the last 20 years.
I think this is in part credit to those people who played those initial "for kids" video games (though many of them were not strictly for kids) growing up and both making their own, as well as becoming an audience that still wanted games made for them too, with the industry continuing to adapt for them. Even specific video games have taken this path of growing in maturity. The Kingdom Hearts series for example started with most of its players in elementary and middle school, but those people are now in their 30s and still playing it. The series has continued to grow, age, and mature along with those initial players, with its content intending to keep and cater to those same exact people who got into it as kids and are now adults, the story and characters becoming more "adult" to follow tis fanbase. Whereas other games series might continue to try and make things for new generations of kids all the time (Pokémon is a good example of that opposite approach).
As for how video games don’t really have “figure heads,” like how movies have recognizable directors and such, I think one of the reasons for that is because a lot of them happen to be foreigners. Japanese people with hard to pronounce or remember names. The only figurehead that comes close to a Scorsese or Nolan would probably be Shigeru Miyamoto. And that’s only because he created Mario-basically the Mickey Mouse of video games.
Agreed. Like the biggest individual names in American/western gaming - big-name voice actors like Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Troy Baker, studio heads like Todd Howard, Phil Spencer or Neil Druckmann - are only well-known among a really niche subset of hardcore gamers.
Like I could tell my friends about an upcoming movie starring Leonardo di Caprio or directed by Christopher Nolan and they'd all know who I was talking about and could use their knowledge of them to form an opinion about whether the movie is worth seeing. You can't really do the same with video games to the average gamer.
Saying that, one could maybe make an argument that in gaming, the gaming studios are kind of the replacement for the gaming figurehead in gaming cultural discourse. While naming a specific game director might not mean anything, saying a game is made by a studio like FromSoft, Bethesda, or Nintendo would likely be much more resonant.
Yeah, but I couldn't tell you who is behind Call of Duty or Last of Us and I believe those games were originated by Americans. I say the reason we don't have figureheads is that most of the creators work behind the scenes, unlike movie stars or singers who are often on camera where people can bond with them. (And even though Scorsese and Nolan are behind-the-camera people, they still get a lot of on-camera exposure.)
Shigeru Miyamoto is more like Spielberg or Disney. Nolan or Scorsese's video game counterpart is Hideo Kojima. David Cage might be Video Games' answer to Zack Snyder.
I'd argue Hideo Kojima is a pretty recognizable figure as well
@@benjaminrobinson3842-Amy Hennig- (My bad, she worked on Uncharted only.) and Neil Druckman for The Last of Us, and Jason West and Vince Zampella for CoD pre-MW2.
That last bit hits me hard. With how easy it is to access new games, it's hard for new games to become household names as much as Mario, Sonic, Pacman etc. Hard to become a big part of the cultural zeitgeist when there's so many options. I feel like the last series to have that sort of impact was Minecraft
Fortnite?
I think Fortnite & Roblox have had a huge impact at least with the kids I worked with. Before that five nights at Freddie’s had a grip on so many children it was shocking!
Even if indie games don’t become household names they do find loving fanbases. Undertale comes to mind for one!
I would argue Fortnite also had that level of fame where basically everyone has heard of it
Minecraft was the last? So what about League of Legends & Five Nights at Freddy's?
@@tomcruz8615isn't league before minecraft?
I am thinking that the missing gap that would make video games larger would be in-app purchases (DLC and consumable purchases). Those are now a fairly significant portion of game revenue outside of console, software and accessory sales.
Plus merchandising (toys, card games, anime) and professional gaming events/eSports
Especially with so many games being free to play and surviving off of that huge amount of cash they pull in from in-game purchases.
i was also curious if the gaming totals J.J. was pulling from included microtransactions
@@cassinipaniniI am thinking they may not, because in earning reports game publishers now separate that revenue into its own category. Or at least most do
This gap was sponsored by RAID: Shadow Legends
It honestly depends on the game. Games like Pac-Man, Mario, and Doom (as random as it may seem to group those games together) are examples of ones I’d say made a huge cultural impact worldwide. Some games obviously have little to no cultural impact. But in other cases, the cultural impact is much smaller, but is highly concentrated. A great example of this is how the PS1 game Wipeout was tightly linked to club culture in Britain during the mid nineties.
"the PS1 game Wipeout was tightly linked to club culture in Britain during the mid nineties"
can you expand on that?
@@steamingpileofspaghetti9755I'm interested too lol
I love video games. As a kid, I would’ve done anything, hours of house or yard work, just to get 30mins on the family computer. I was continually told I would grow out of gaming. In my 30s, now and my enjoyment of video games has only grown.
My only problem with video games now that I’m in my thirties is that I don’t have enough time to play them 😂
I think the term “gamers” is definitely not alone.
“cinephile” for movie goers
“audiophile” for music fans
Sure, but those words are much rarer. Just looking at google trends, you can easily see the huge divide, with consistently over ten times as much searching of "gamer" when compared to "cinephile" and "audiophile".
I’ve only ever heard cinephile used jokingly by movie fans, but I have never heard anyone be called an audiophile, unless they are an audio file on a computer. The term “gamer” has definitely been ruined by the internet, both from memes, various scandals such as gamergate, and big tech companies trying to connect with the youth and using the word in their ads and marketing.
I think that's because these terms are more relevant when an art form is emerging. Over time, as these art forms get more culturally accepted, less people try to define themselves or are defined by others on the basis of it, because it's not new or interesting anymore. At this point the label becomes less used and less relevant.
If you really like music, you're not classified as an audiophile. You're usually classified based on the genre/band/artist you like. Whereas with video games, people don't seem to be as conscious or care as much about the specifics.
@@soyoltoi yeah like metal heads
I find it hard to say that a game like Shadow of the Colossus could be considered anything other than both art and a game. If you've played the game, you'll know why.
I wonder how big of a impact that part has actually. You can't just have anyone sit down and experience games like they can movies music or shows. The level of effort required to enjoy most of them is so much higher than other forms of media. You can tell someone they're missing out on a piece of culture because they've never seen Star wars if you tell them the same thing about Pokemon they may just expect to sit down and watch something instead of investing many hours of actual effort paying attention and doing something. Higher barrier-to-entry so to speak. Not on all of them, but many. Like I couldn't get into Shadow of the Colossus because my guy just kept missing the jump up to a pillar like six times in a row after it working once inexplicably. Could have just been outdated controls and such but really didn't drown me in and I couldn't just sit back and enjoy the world because I was having to get to it. Like scraping some peanut butter out of a jar that keeps running around.
Hard agree. A true adventure of melancholy.
@@busterbeast999To a certain extent, that's true. Video games, by their interactive nature, occasionally have problems with accessibility. However, there are plenty of other books and films that are critically acclaimed and are notoriously difficult to parse. I doubt that most people have the patience or the ability to read something like Finnegan's Wake.
Also, everyone assumes that just because a video game is interactive, that means that it is challenging or has a win state. There are games like Lose/Lose, where the purpose isn't even to play well, or the countless walking simulators which have little to no mechanical difficulty and still tell a story. Then there's visual novels, which, while only video games because of the medium that they inhabit, can easily be experienced by anyone who can read. Then there's countless examples of video games that aren't even linear and still tell a decent narrative. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the quintessential example where despite having no predetermined start and more or less playing out like a game of Civ II, it still creates a dystopian atmosphere and a solid critique of political and economic ideologies.
While most critically acclaimed narratives will probably remain linear and tied to a win/lose state, to boil down video games as just simplistic reflex tests is like calling all movies Marvel films.
@@busterbeast999 High barrier-to-entry doesn't make something any less "artistic", though I agree that it can affect how much less impactful it can be if it makes it hard for people to experience it
Yeah, I found myself understanding and agreeing with many of JJs points today, but I just completely and utterly disagree with Roger Ebert on that and JJs thoughts following it.
I think a huge reason video games tend to be overlooked as "serious" culture that you didn't touch on is related to the age argument. Music can be listened to anywhere, and while doing other things. TV shows and movies can fill your time for a few hours at a time. Some quick Google searching and back of the napkin math shows that, in order to watch the ENTIRETY of the Simpsons franchise, one of the longest running and most successful TV shows of all time, it would take around 400 hours, and that is a generous estimate. Games can be played for days on end, with people sinking thousands upon thousands of hours into a single title. The older you get, the more responsibilities you must take on, and the less time you have for leisure. Adults simply do not have that kind of time while kids and teenagers certainly do. An adult can justify watching an hour and a half movie, but they can't justify playing a new video game for a week straight. In summary, the older a person gets, the less culturally relevant video games become to them.
You’re 100% right about this. I graduated college and started working about 2 years ago, and basically lost interest in video games for the first year of working because I simply did not have the time to put 20 hours into a game like I did when I was younger.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and claim otherwise that many working adults do still indulge in gaming. The generation that grew up playing action shooters like Halo have now grown to be full adults, with some even drawing inspiration on their career choice based on what they played. These adults now have jobs and incomes and form a different type of market, but still a market, for games to target. A small subsection of this market is war games- a genre of games populated quite extensively by players of middle age and older who used to be veterans and who will pay quite the markup for the privilege to drive a properly modelled, rivet counted AbramsX main battle tank in a virtual arcade.
Some adults do game quite extensively, sometimes as a de-stressing mechanism from a long day at work, and often they can make a substantial contribution to a game's revenue stream by spending money to make up for their lack of game time, or by affording and buying perks and cosmetics that suit their tastes. I'm not saying that many people don't drop gaming out of a lack of time, but I think it is still true that many adult gamers- sustainably spending gamers- are still out there.
In my experience, I started playing more often as my kid got older. Not as much as when I was a teenager, but as kids get older you get more free time
👴As I got more adult responsibilities, I just stopped enjoying games that have such a long _minimum_ number of hours. If I can keep playing the same sandbox game for months on end that's great, but I need to be able to put down any game after half an hour and pick up where I left off next week. (And still get some enjoyment out of it.) Short one-night or weekend games are increasingly good for me, similar to a movie or shorter TV series.
My dude, binging tv series is a cultural norm now days. People are watching whole seasons in one sitting. Its just cultural thing, its not about lack of time.
From my perspective, the vast majority of people my age (around 20) have video games as their primary or secondary form of at home entertainment. It feels rare to find someone who doesn’t regularly have some genre of game they play. Maybe partly because it is one of the cheapest hobbies, compared to reading or movies, in terms of the amount of time you can get for x dollars.
That's an interesting point, because some could also say gaming is the MOST expensive form of entertainment, on par with attending a major league sports live game. But on the other hand, like you said, you can replay the game over and over while you can only see the Yankees play the Red Sox once.
@@JJMcCullough some games, like survival or simulation games, can easily have 1000 hours of replayability. I think the popular sports games fall into this category too. It’s true that story games don’t fit this as well.
@@JJMcCullough Each individual game can be expensive in and of itself, but by far it is cheaper depending on the game and some like counter-strike or Valorant are technically free outside of cosmetic items and people clock *thousands* of hours into them. Elden Ring for example takes around 60 hours to beat just the main game, and there's far far more value in terms of optional content and replayability. 1$/hour of high quality content at 60$ isn't really all that expensive compared to say seeing 6 movies at the theatre is around 12 hours even if they're 120 minutes long each for 66$.
@@JJMcCullough it's not always about replayability, a lot of video games take over 100 hours to complete
True! This is also why I knit as well as game. A $20 ball of yarn or video game will keep me entertained for many hours.
So music is art, storytelling is art, cinematography is art, acting is art, character design is art, visual design is art etc
But if you put them all together they supposedly wouldn’t be art. I find that weird.
Yes, but controls and/or gameplay mechanics aren't. And these attributes form the fundamental essence of what defines a video game. Color TV Game 15 doesn't have any of the qualities listed by you. And yet people still acknowledge it as a video game without any doubt whatsoever. On the other hand, Telltale has those qualities you listed, yet a lot of people don't like the severe lack of player control in these games and some are even debating if they're actually worth being called "games". Games can be aesthetically enhanced by artistic attributes such as artstyle, storytelling, music etc., to a degree that any other sort of toy is incapable to as of now. But they don't need to have these qualities. The fundamental essence of video games as a whole is that their consumers have some form of control over moving pixels in the context of a risk-reward system. Which pushes video games into the category of toys instead of art.
Crazy to think for decades people have been saying how video games are primary cause of violence
Not surprised to be honest. They've said the same thing about Rock & Roll, and Metal when they first started to gain ground. Now you hear that about Rap. It seems like it's inevitable when a new cultural medium/genre starts to get known outside of the underground.
@@moho472 Comic books too.
Well it’s easier to just blame a single thing old people don’t like than face the complicated social, economic, and mental health issues that are really at fault without an easy answer
It's happened with all new media since the dawn of time.
Oh hi Heisenbot
All, if not most, types of art have an interactive component to them to be enjoyed, like how with film you must be able to see and hear it (or be able to read subtitles). Video games has extra steps, but can still be used to tell a story, to entertain, and be art
I disagree in part. That one is experiencing sensory phenomena is not interaction but reception so at best passive interaction in that most art exerts without any audience control. There's nothing you can do but watch Luke Skywalker get his hand cutoff no matter how many times you watch it. Even notable exceptions like a "choose your own adventure" book are limited in order and ending as determined by the writer. Various other thoughts.
the only issue with viewing games as lower is that some games are actually deeper story-wise from the interactivity.
a game like half-life (which defined it's era and genre), is such a deeper experience when you interact with it first hand, in a way a show can never replicate, cause you are so integral to what happens.
Yeah but that also means the story is basically a kind of prize for being good at playing the game.
@@JJMcCulloughwhy even make this video when you clearly dont understand gaming
@@JJMcCullough it didn't really feel like a prize.
like when you see a scientist run twords the military you thought was there to save you, only to realize they are there to "clean you up and cover up the mistake", and this is all done in-game, it's not a separate cut-scene for beating a level, its intertwined and married to the game, being that HL has no cutscenes.
or you subtly hear the military talking about the depravity as you crawl though the vents.
it's a story and feeling only a game really can have.
@@Tommy-the-coffee-addict yeah the interactivity of gaming is often given short shrift when it comes to outsider analysis, which is disappointing because its the most unique and revolutionary feature of the medium.
@@JJMcCullough something else i forgot to mention, you can also lower the difficulty in HL if you lack skill, the story is accessible in that way.
Rather than gameplay detracting from the "artistry" of video games, I'd go so far as to say it's another form of art itself. Anyone who has gotten immersed in video games can tell you about the "flow state" and how things just click. Gameplay is just one of the many artistic components, alongside the visual, audio, and storytelling components, that form a cohesive whole. As such, gameplay can serve to enhance any or all of those elements just as aesthetic or musical choices can vastly impact the viewing experience of a movie.
Nearly all video game journalism is online only on UA-cam, twitch or other news websites. This will inherently mean that less of the older demographics ever come across video games as you usually have to seek out these places, unlike tradition news and radio where music, movies, sports are advertised heavily.
even the sites that do report on gaming are usually exclusively video gaming and nothing else. for instance it would be unusual to read about a pinball machine on those sites, even though you could consider that a game.
good point man @@cassinipanini
I think it's important to note how recognizable characters like Mario or Sonic are, even if many can't name them, they know they're "the guy from the game". I think Nintendo as a brand is also very widely known, my grandparents still call every platform i play on "the nintendo". I think video games have been in the background culturally for a while, and they're slowly gaining significance, especially with Nintendo continuing to cater to a casual market and bringing newcomers in
That is amazing the New Yorker hired it’s first TV critic in 1992! I graduated high school in 1990 (making me officially an Old) and one day my Grade 12 English teacher (sorry, I guess that’s Senior Year English teacher to translate for JJ 😂) brought in her brother as a guest speaker, who was the TV critic for our city’s leading paper (and being well known as such would have been in the role for many years at that point)
Class of '90 Canuck here too! LOL There are a few of us here long in the tooth.
Who even cares what newspapers say? They're in their own elitist bubble world. Kind of like awards shows
The problem is that the interactive nature in itself can be used for expression. There's ways video games can be art in a way that movies, books etc. can not be and this has been ignroed by many people until quite recently. For example, Dark Souls makes you get through the experience of being beaten down and having to get up again and again in a way that is coherent with its story and message. The story of the game is trying to get something across to the player through the gameplay itself.
Outer Wilds is a game I’d use when it comes to using interactivity to its benefit as well, where the only way the player to progress through the game is to explore the worlds of the solar system to learn its story, and with every planet having a timed gimmick you need to learn it’s quirks so you can explore efficiently before the window of opportunity closes, all of it works because your the one interacting with the world
I'm almost 35 and I have been gaming literally since I can remember. There is and always has been a stigma around being a "gamer". I stream video games and whenever I tell someone this I hold my breath for a second because I'm bracing myself for the judgemental attitude a lot of people (especially older people) have about gaming in general. It's really unfortunate because some of the best people I know I met while gaming!
I'm still shocked that there's a stigma attached to gaming despite it being a passtime for almost half a century. The real shocker is when it comes from somebody our age (32 here!) where you'd expect at least some basic familiarity with the subject.
@@MrWyzdum Pong in 1975 dude. I mean even without it, the qualifier "almost" is enough to leave room for the 2600 in 1977 and the first consoles, which were large enough to have an impact.
And while you can argue that video games weren't as popular as they are today, the fact is that at least three generations of kids in privileged countries have had exposure to them at the bare minimum. More than enough time for the first generation to be familiar with them as a medium. I mean, even back in the 90s, it wasn't a stigma to like video games as a kid and it was popular enough for it to be a discussion topic. Who the heck do you think bought all those cartridges of Red and Blue?
@@MrWyzdum You are correct, but I'd like to add the 80s arcade scene. My friends and I used to go to arcades in the 80s and played games. There was a decent variety too. Street Fighter started in 80s arcades.
There's a bit of intersectionality in effect there too if you're streaming games, since being a streamer also carries a stigma in itself.
Perhaps, if they were not so racist, gamers would be more well-received.
The only equivalent I can think of to "gamer" in other realms of entertainment would be the term "book worm" for people who read a lot. Can't think of one for movies, but I suppose there are also terms like "metal head" in the realm of music.
It’s kinda frustrating to get so engrossed in the incredible experience that is the latest Zelda game, and yet hear absolutely nothing about it outside niche gaming websites despite it selling huge numbers. It feels like such a private experience that I desperately want to share.
You need to find a community or friends (or both) that like Zelda then. It's the same with other things like rock music or Dungeons and Dragons, there are plenty of people that you could easily find, it's just the average Billy Bob on the street who can't talk about it with you.
12:30 “we don’t have special terms for people who watch movies or sports or listen to music” we do tho. Listener and viewer and reader
Also being a sub culture doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a impact on culture if arguments it means it has a bigger impact if anything
I would have to disagree when it comes to Ebert's point of view on games. I believe that video games, no matter how linear or 'game-like' they may be, can still very much have inherent meaning to the player. I recommend KingK's recent video, which is a retrospective on the 3D Zelda games and what all of them mean to him on a personal level. Video games have their own ways of communicating ideas, and taking control of a character is and continues to be an exciting and innovative way for people to engage with storytelling and art. I'm hoping with my art history degree to flip this narrative in any way I can. A wonderful video overall though, I've been waiting on a video like this from you, JJ!
I can see the movie industry falling behind. The drastic lack of any entertaining movies may play a factor in that.
I consider video games to be my favorite medium and include my favorite storyworks but struggle to put it on the same level as other mediums. Interactivity is both a blessing and a curse, allowing players to challenge themselves and change the plot, but it is a basic fact that spending ten minutes walking around an area grinding enemies or searching for collectables makes the stories of games have radically different pacing than other mediums.
Why is that a bad thing?
Using interactivity artistically is high risk high reward, its hard to do well but allows for games to have a stronger emotional gut punch than any other medium since you can feel like you *are* the main character. OMORI is the best example I've experienced, despite being unpolished in places it made me the most emotional a story ever has.
I’ve played dozens of games that are 10-20 hours of pure greatness. The industry is getting bloated, but there are still so many great experiences with no slow experiences that can tell stories in ways a movie or song never could.
The Forgotten City is a perfect, recent example of video games being art.
I believe there is one argument that was not covered here, which is that video games have a barrier to entry in the form of "knowing how to play videogames."
What I mean is: a book's barrier to entry is knowing how to read, which most people can. A movie's barrier to entry is just having eyes.
But for a game you need to have learned the basic skills necessary to play. That automatically requires a higher commitment when deciding whether to consume a particular piece of entertainment if you need to learn how to do it first.
In short, you can recommend a song or a movie to any human with working senses, but you cannot recommend a video game to anyone who doesn't already play videogames to some degree
Very good point
Some have also noted that the amount of time a video game asks you to invest is also very high. People act like Oppenheimer is a great burden of a movie just because it is three hours long, when an average story based game is around 20 hours long..
I really think the generational gap here is key. Very few people under the age of 40 have video games as a major part of their media diet.
I did a master's degree in popular culture in 2020-2022, and more or less all of my professor were dead-center Gen X. And while they were very well versed in music, film, and TV through the present day, video games were something that they were generally aware with but did not engage with on the same level as the media types that were prevalent when they were young.
I suspect there's a very similar pattern in media journalism. Even if individual writers are of a "post video game generation," I suspect most of the people making editorial decisions are of a 'pre video game generation."
Did you mean to write very few people *over* the age of 40?
"video games are inherently linear" is the most"I've never played a video game" take I've ever heard
Even back in the 90s, games like the Final Fantasy series were putting out sprawling 120 hour long interactive stories that no movie could ever match in depth of concepts and chatacter development.
And with that being so much bigger it's more daunting for people to get into it. they can't just sit down and watch it like a movie. probably keeps a lot of those who would just do it to review it away. Unlike people who just scroll through streaming services and just watch whatever shows up
@@busterbeast999 Yeah I was surprised time was left out of the video as a possibility for why they aren't as easily spread. The video games that are super short and/or easy to pick up and drop (Nintendo games especially) are the ones that have become the most culturally acknowledged. Assassin's Creed as a series is incredibly well-known and most people will have heard of it, but it's still rare that the average person will easily commit to sitting down and gaming for the 100-300 hours it takes to fully complete the modern games in the series.
One other thing to consider is that most of the 'old school' media is being consumed as background during other activities. With the access to streaming it's getting more and more common to have a music or a movie playing in the background (even audiobooks) while you work, do some housekeeping or... play videogames. The thing is that they are interactive, so that's another barrier to the experience. You can't play a videogame while you are activelly doing something else (most of the time). Again, I believe that's just another part of the conversation :)
Great analysis I have to disagree pretty heavily about videogame restrictiveness. I have played video games that were at least if not far more impressive than movies coming out at the same time. In fact for certain types of media such as horror there's no better medium because you have control over the character which becomes more terrifying because you know you're not want to set LINEAR track like a movie. You're actually part of the experience unlike other parts of media. And that means you can have a unique experience then no one else has had. Even in the less "artistic" video games like first person shooters they are less story focused on plot but you make your own little stories with your friends like C4 car in battlefield or creating your own game mode in call of duty or halo.
When tom Holland Spiderman came out when the PS4 game did I enjoyed both but preferred the game because I could swing around almost feeling the momentum and walk the streets as Peter Vs seeing only the impactful story plots in the movie
I don’t think looking at the number of times a song was streamed is an accurate comparison. If someone buys one copy of a game, they are going to just play it one time if they like it, but if someone really likes a song, they are going to stream it multiple times. Saying a song has X number of streams isn’t easily comparable to the number of times someone buys the right to use an item as much as they want.
As someone whose gaming experience is entirely made up of 3d pinball for windows and solitaire years ago I’m shocked at just how much revenue video games pull in
Now that games have a baked in the ability to spend a buck or two in microtransactions a bonkers amount of money is going to relatively few companies.
Each big game costs at least $60 these days.
To put it in perspective. A game called Baldurs Gate 3 just released on August 1st priced at 60 USD. As of August 16th it had sold 5.2 million copies. That's 312 million dollars in two weeks... For one game, albeit quite a successful one.
An even crazier example is back in December of 2022 a game called Dwarf Fortress released on Steam. It had been developed by two brothers for 20 years. Available for free of their website that entire time. The Steam release added (I kid you not) graphics as its big selling point as it used to be entirely based on ASCII characters. In one month these two brothers sold over 500,000 copies for 7.2 million dollars.
And both of those games have avoided the microtransaction nonsense that @calibmatlock mentioned which is how the big companies really rake in the money.
@@robertgronewold3326
Yes, this is the big miss. A movie ticket is around $10, which means that you would have to attend multiple films to equate it to even a budget game. I'm not so sure that I will write this off as disingenuous but is a grey area.
Yeah that why this video is not correct because people that play these causal simple games are not really gamers just people passing time due to their simple nature versus BG3/Disco Elysium or open world epic like RDR 2/Elden Ring.
The rest of the money you didn't account for is 'mobile gaming'. Trust me, grandma might not think she is a gamer, but every time she buys gems for Candy Crush she's sinking money into the game industry without knowing it.
I definitely think a huge part of the lack of cultural importance is that the average blockbuster video game is inaccessible to most people. Only a small subset of people have the free time to play through a 100 hour RPG, or grind through the ranks of an online shooter
Goo pointd
@@JJMcCulloughGoo pointd
This is the biggest thing for me. I may be hooked into gaming culture, but I rarely get the chance to play anything. And the ones I play are usually short and far from the mainstream games that are part of the culture.
Also makes sense why TV shows are more niche than movies - they take longer to watch.
That’s the biggest reason imo. Gaming is simultaneously niche and popular. It’s an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
I always hated the term "gamer". I'm 23 so grew up in an era of big AAA games. When literally everyone you knew was online after school playing COD, FIFA, GTA, HALO, and you literally saw them all on your friends list, it surely made more sense to come up with a term for those who didn't play video games.
Even as a young kid it felt cringe and a little invalidating.
You are very young so that's probably why. It wasn't always standard for most people to play at least some games. It used to be viewed as a niche.
I think that last reason you gave was the strongest. Video games are such a segmented industry that mass popular appeal is far less common.
Okay, so I had to write a whole essay responding to Ebert's take on video games, and I wanted to say that his definition of what a game is is completely incorrect. The second half of the quote is "when someone presents me with a game that doesn't fit my definition, I simply move the goalposts to not include it as a game." The things he defines as being quintessential to a game are simply not. Among Us is a game that doesn't have points, Tetris is a game that doesn't have an outcome, Minecraft is a game that doesn't have rules, and Yume Nikki is a game that doesn't really have objectives, at least not in the way that I imagine Ebert was thinking.
The best working definition of what a "game" is is an interactive piece of media. There are a lot of weird edge cases, of things like Choose Your Own Adventure books, or like in the Peter Pan musical how the audience has to clap to save Tinkerbell, where there is interactivity but a lot of people wouldn't define them as being games, but there are things like that on the boundaries of all the different mediums (puppetry for animation, why are films and tv separate mediums, is a novel a different medium from a poem, and do articles and speeches get included, etc.).
Yume Nikki is a great example of a game that feels like it lacks most of those "gamey" vibes. It's a non-linear exploration of the dreams of a troubled mind, with no direction given, and no points for doing well. The only method of progression the game has is in the collection of various "effects", which change the appearance of the main character, Madotsuki. Some offer an actual benefit, like the bike making you go faster, but others just make the character blonde or play a flute with no impact on the gameplay. After collecting all of the effects, Madotsuki jumps off a building and the credits roll. You could look at this and say, "well, the objective is to find all the effects and get the ending", but that misses the entire point of the game. The game is about trying to piece together the shattered psyche of the main character, through the most abstract and vague context clues imaginable. It is a game that really only works as a game, not as a representation of a movie, dance, or whatever else. It is most certainly not a game that you play to win.
I have a friend going to DigiPen for game design, and we have had numerous conversations over one of the concepts that was taught in his class, which is the notion of there being different types of engagement that you can design for. Their list included ten different reasons why people play games, purely from a design perspective. They are achievement, which is to say the feeling of finishing a game or accomplishing everything that there is in a game (Mario games are a good example), challenge, which is to say enjoyment from experiencing a game's difficulty and overcoming it through repeated attempts (Dark Souls, Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy), mastery, which is to say getting to the point in game where there is no more challenge or striving to be the best at a game (Celeste, Pizza Tower, or any game Speedrunners like), competition, which is enjoyment through victory over others (Shooters, MOBAs, and many board games), fellowship, which is through experiencing a game with others or enjoyment from just playing with other people (Co-op puzzle games, D&D, Let's Plays), discovery, which is through finding as much as you can on your own within a game's world or mechanics (Yume Nikki, Hollow Knight, Zelda), fantasy, which is the act of becoming fully immersed in the game world and enjoying the feeling of impacting the world as you play, including power fantasies (any Bethesda games, Assassin's Creed, also D&D), expression, which is the enjoyment from having your actions and appearances represent you or an idea you have (Bethesda, Disco Elysium), drama, where the enjoyment comes through the experience of the unraveling of a narrative and the tension and intrigue inherent (Uncharted, Visual Novels, many JRPGs), and catharsis, which is deriving enjoyment from large emotional releases (ending of RDR2, Hinawa's Death, ending of LISA: The Painful).
The reason I felt it necessary to list out all of these various reasons people play games is to refute the notion that people only play games to win or to beat them. I certainly enjoy the feeling of finishing a game, but pretty much every person who plays games can look at this list and say that they enjoy aspects of all of them. I don't really care for fellowship or expression, but I still can appreciate and enjoy that aspect when i play D&D with my friends, even if I care more about the characters, the world, and the progression of the plot.
Games are most similar to animation, in the sense that there is a great deal of people who think that the closer that they get to emulating movies or real life, the better they will become, and can be respected as art. But this is simply not the case. Animation is at it's best when it's portraying visuals that are impossible to recreate in live action, and plenty of games are going in the same direction away from realism. The idea that realism equals maturity is an idea that needs to be broken in order for games to be respected as art on their own terms.
Also, one last footnote, I think there's three main reasons why newspapers don't talk about games as much as other mediums. The first is that most people who are avid gamers don't really read the Atlantic, and get their media analysis of games primarily through independent content creators. Game Reviewer is a whole genre of content on UA-cam, and the people who do it are primarily people who grew up with games their whole lives. The second reason is that games journalism that does take place in a more traditional medium like news articles tends to be relegated to game-specific sites, like IGN, Kotaku, and Polygon. Sports journalism is equally segregated. The third is probably because of the harsh disconnect between game journalism and the audience that consumes games. You can point to gamergate as being a good example of this extreme disconnect, but you can also look at the Kotaku guy who spent 17 minutes in the cuphead tutorial, or the many articles saying that DOOM Eternal or Fromsoft games are too hard. It's a cocktail of incompetence and toxicity that leads to journalists not trusting the audience, and gamers not trusting the journalists, which drives them to independent content creators.
I think this wins the award of the longest comment I've left on a video.
To add onto your gamer culture point, those that have interests in higher level art, literature and cinema rarely involve themselves in video games. People who are into video games usually also have interests in anime, marvel, Brandon Sanderson, Lord of the Rings, Rick and Morty, etc. So the medium has a limited range of artistic expression.
It’s true and the desire to appeal tends to only flow one way. Someone might make a movie targeting the gamer crowd but no one seems to make a game targeting, say, the prestige drama tv crowd.
@@JJMcCullough I wouldn't necessarily say that's true, there are story based "games" like telltale games and many others that would probably be good for those crowds but they never seem to do all that well. It seems that people not already in the space seem highly resistant to go outside of their comfort zone and give games like that a shot.
I think game development is a unique artform that is underapreciated and unnoticed in part because it's often paired with many other artforms. If you asked someone playing BotW for the first time they might say that the story was bad, the music was underwhealming, and the art direction was about as good as any other Zelda. Why then was it a worldwide phenomenon? Because it captures a human experience that other mediums can't very well: fun. Just like a painter captures beauty in images, a musician in sound, or a chef in taste, the game designer captures the experiential beauty of fun through interactivity
This is why I consider video games to be toys rather than just another medium of art.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of art going into them during development.
@@Breakhammer82 Could you explain what you mean? My point was that videogames are an artform at the core, so I'm not following what you mean
@@micahrobbins8353 because you interact with them to have fun (play). That's what a toy is
@@Breakhammer82 Ah I see your point now, though I still think the process of dreaming up and refining mechanics to invoke a sense of fun is the same process that produces any other kind of art
Think you're really onto something on calling it "Low Art." During a job interview, they asked what my hobbies are, what I do for fun. I listed off a few things, but ended on games. By the faces they made, I might as well have said I like hardcore pornography
I think this is the reason for your last point re: popularity of individual games: Video games often take a long time to complete - at least dozens of hours. A song takes a few minutes to listen to. So you can listen to many songs and share that experience with many. But you're only going to play maybe a few big video games a year due to the time commitment. Same with TV shows. Movies are somewhere in between.
Because of this, lots of people will have heard the same song because you can hear so many different songs in a year. But only a few people will choose to dedicate the time to watch the same TV show or play the same game as you, since you need to choose them (relatively) wisely and rarely.
This made me think about how I talk with my buddies about games. When I start playing a game, I say "Has anyone else played [video game title]?" and it's common that nobody has. I feel like if you had a friend group of movie fanatics, the question would be "Have you seen [movie title] yet?" and there would be an assumption that people have or will see that movie. Just an interesting thought along similar lines.
Having just clicked, I'm sure you'll mention it, but I always love the example of the Polish president giving a copy of Witcher 2 to Barack Obama. Really goes to show how important video games had become as a vessel for culture.
Started playing in the very 1st console generation (Magnavox Odyssey!), so love this topic. Think another reason why video games aren't taken seriously is for the first 5 generations or so (1970s - 2000) developers weren't able to tell meaningful stories. Sure, some random instruction manuals might share a "backstory".. but these had zero effect on gameplay, and plenty of kids never even read them! Thus, no emotional attachment. Today's games are both 1) real enough that we can relate to what' we see, and 2) games now allow choices that affect outcome
Something missing from your analysis: an average person might watch a movie they like once or twice, a few hours of engagement total. Someone may engage with a game they like for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours.
One point that I think you haven't quite understood is that while a Video game may have say 15 - 20 million sales, players will usually spend much longer consuming this product than tv shows, movies or music.. Video games especially the large online games like Fortnite, League of Legends or Call of Duty are frequently played for many hours each week and these games stay relevant for years on end. This builds a much bigger impact in peoples lives than a songs and movies which in current culture are much more 'flavour of the month'.
So true, my flatmate still dips into Minecraft every so often.
yeah same honestly @@Redrally
Very true. The average person is more willing to throw out 15 bucks to see a movie but will just as likely also move on and not think about it much or rewatch it. They'll get their 2 hours oout of it, maybe a few more hours thinking about it at best, and that's that. Games are often gigantic emotional investments, and that's part of why the fans tend to create subcultures. If they play a game, their whole life during their free time briefly becomes all about that game in a way people don't really do with movies.
Man, I think you and Ebert missed the mark big with that one. You could make the same argument about films (or any other medium): "they're just a visual novelty, some silly pictures to stimulate your senses, otherwise it is just imitating a book or a play."
I've been playing Persona 5 for the past few months and it is basically a social commentary of Japanese society and one of the best RPG's ever made.
I think one aspect left out of this video is how decentralized gaming is, and always has been. TV and movies only recently split off with streaming, but video games have always been fractured by PC vs. console, competition between consoles, and for about 15 years mobile games too. There was never one device, one method, for any lengthy period of time, under which the artform could be "standardized", so to speak.
Yo JJ! Just wanted to drop in and say I got into Sociology as a result of your channel - I completed my A-Level exam on sociology back in June and got a B, which I’m pretty happy with as I only studied it for 9 months! Thanks for helping me discover such an interesting subject :D
Congratulations! That is remarkable!
13:27 there is another equivalent I thought of immediately-“weeaboo” for anime watchers (and subsequently “koreaboo,” the term for K-pop and K-drama fans, used particularly before stan culture became prominent in the English-speaking world). but even so the point remains the same, it’s terms specifically to isolate people for their entertainment preferences, and therefore cultivates sub-cultures
I'd like to add as a "gamer" that I usually don't go to places like The New York Times for gaming related news/journalism; in my opinion that's not really what they're for. I'd actually prefer going to gaming related news outlets like Polygon or Kotaku. I feel like maybe the reason that games aren't as culturally influential as movies or TV is partially because gamers tend to be rather introverted and prefer to stick to their own spaces.
lmao isn't Kotaku woke though? I would think a less biased site would be better, but gaming journalism is corrupted.
@@lainiwakura1776 thanks lainiwakura1776, clearly a true american patriot who will save our country from people with slightly different opinions on inconsequential topics
@@eX1st4132I would say they are more incompetent and bad at videos games. Thus they are having to lay people off. Hence the insult of game journalist.
@@lainiwakura1776 Complaining about something being "woke" is an instant clue that none of your opinions have value.
Of course you don't go to the NYT for journalism. They stopped being journalists years ago
0:40 video games are not a small part of American culture, but they're isolated from much of the rest of American culture.
Video games in some people's eyes across generations, including mine (22), are either a crippling addiction or an interactive movie to pass time. I've heard of plenty of people my age who think video games are for kids and are a waste of adult time and money and others who hop on to warzone every day after their shift. But either way there is no denying the cultural impact they've had since they first emerged as a major entertainment source
I don’t see how that’s any different than someone flipping on Netflix or UA-cam every day after work, though.
@bronwynbacon1768 Yeah, that's the way I see it
I would put "gamers" on the same level as audiophiles and cinephiles. While we all listen to music and watch movies most of us do not engage with the medium on such a passionate level. While your nephew may play fortnite on his phone and watch Minecraft yotuubers he is not a gamer. Neither are the young women who play mobile games or the plebs who buy the copy paste sports games every year. Those type of people do not engage with the medium the same way we do. They're not going to watch video essays and comment about the cultural relevance of gaming because it doesn't matter to them.
And to be fair pop culture relevance doesn't matter to me either. It's when the mainstream appeal starts forcing it's way into gaming changing the culture to pander to non gamers that I become irritated. We enjoyed being toxic assholes. When the children, thin skinned and culture vultures showed up we lost the ability for even friendly banter. What a shame.
I find the direction in which the video game industry is moving to be really interesting. While shorter forms of entertainment are getting more and more popular, single player video games are getting more and more narrative focused, deeper and longer. I think that a big reason that I never really enjoyed youtube shorts and tik tok much is because of my love for single video games which take hundreds of hours and several months to complete.
1. Taking in money doesn’t equal cultural relevance. If you think about it for more than a couple seconds, of course the gaming industry takes in more money than say films.
If I want to enjoy a movie I need to buy a ticket which typically costs between $10-15. If I want to enjoy a video game I need to buy a console for almost $500, then I can actually buy the game for around $60, assuming I don’t have to buy any extra controllers or accessories so that my friends can play with me.
2. While there are gaming communities, many video game consumers are content with simply enjoying a video game alone. The medium just doesn’t always lend itself to community and discussion in the same way that a sports game or movie theater experience do.
another factor I think is that elite art conversations tend to celebrate elite artists. John Lennon and Pablo Picasso and George R.R. Martin are easy to isolate and celebrate for their talents as individuals (even though much of their work is the result of collaboration). for most of their history videogames have lacked that kind of face. People knew Nintendo made Mario, but it was a deepcut to know Shigeru Miyamoto's name. Interesting to me that the rise of video games as cultural influences has included isolating individuals credited with those games - Neil Druckmann is having a moment as a celebrated individual while Scott Cawthorn is on the way down. American culture (and its British and French influences) love the idea of a genius. We love to celebrate that genius, and we love to take them down. Even with a few celebrated creators, video game production is still mostly faceless, which I think dulls its cultural presence.
Roger Ebert said this in an interview:
“I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place,” concedes the critic. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself. My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.”
I appreciate this admission of his but it's kind of hilarious how he says he still has that opinion even though he knows it might not be right lol
@@jijitters his original statement at the time was when gaming isn't what it is today in terms of scope, production values, music, etc. He might change his mind today seeing and experiencing games like RDR2, God of War, Minecraft, Elden Ring, etc.
You're so skillful at cultural analysis it's crazy. The last point about about having more anachronistic figureheads because entertainment is just so spread out now is something I never thought about. It is crazy that we live in a world where millions of gamers like myself can know and talk about every new release and it feels like such a huge thing, but I could talk to my neighbor and he might not be able to name a video game past mario.
I had a similar ththought. Like, I could know who the biggest names in gaming culture are like Masahiro Sakurai and Shigeru Miyamoto, but most mainstream people wouldn't know their names, just their work. Sorta like how in movies, people could know a famous actor, like Leonardo Dicaprio, but not a famous composer like Hans Zimmer.
I heard the Persona 5 track “So Boring” on NPR a couple months ago during one of their bumpers. It’s the one that plays in the classrooms segments in the game
the gamer is the most oppressed man in America.
The comparison of industries is based on revenue, forgetting the cost. Music industry might be much smaller in terms of revenue, but it also costs way less to make a music album than to make a video game. Starfield might make a lot of money, but it also costs $200mln. Book publishing industry might be 5x smaller, but the cost to write a book (or buy a book from the author) is also probably 20x less. Video games might be a big industry in terms of money, but cultural relevance should be judged on the base of size of the audience.
as someone who loves the horror genre, the interactivity of video games makes them more terrifying to me than movies. it is much scarier to force yourself to do a something frightening than to simply watch a character do it on screen. this actually holds true for watching lets plays as well, because even though i am not the one directly interacting with the game, the fact that it IS interactive makes it more inherently unpredictable than a movie.
Totally agree, as someone whose main loves are horror and video games! It is not scary to me to sit back and watch someone else be scared. But when it feels like I am in the situation myself or responsible for the situation? Much more potential! The horror video genre is really special in this regard.
If harry styles is considered “high culture” then I’m glad games are exempt
Great video, JJ! I especially liked the discussion of the monoculture at the end there, plus the simple fact of there having not been as much time for video games to mature as a category of entertainment. I think as time goes on, video games may well become more and more culturally relevant as the wealthy, influential people in society are increasingly people who grew up playing video games.
However, one thing you didn't mention that I think is really important to the discussion of video games as American cultural products specifically is that many early video game hits were foreign imports, like Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and others. This lead to them being othered in the culture, both by people who thought their foreignness was a bad thing, and by those who thought it was a good thing - it's a big part of video games being counterculture, I think*. Because of this, it was and still is hard to consider video games a part of the American cultural canon.
Until recently many japanese games would be censored or poorly translated during localization for american audiences, if they even released at all. These days most major foreign games release simultaneously in america, making them much more accessible, but that only really started happening with the two most recent console generations. Most americans are used to being specially catered to by the media world (because it is dominated by american media), so this is a relatively large difference between video games and other forms of entertainment.
So on the subculture thing... Do hardcore gamers see themselves as separate? Yes. But this is absolutely not unique to gaming. Just look at people like Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren't cinema. Every single thing that can be loved and appreciated has people who love their selected version of it so much that they adapt an elitist attitude. I've met avid readers who would swear up and down that Harry Potter is low-brow trash that will eventually be forgotten while in the same breath praising Shakespeare who was, in his time, known for creating low-brow trash. Every form of media has these people, and they do not define those media. This is, quite simply, a non-issue. Those people are relatively few in the broad scope, and while they may be loud with their opinions, they are not particularly influential outside of their own in-groups.
As a member of gen z I actually disagree pretty strongly with video games place in culture being small at least in my age range at school slang from video games is common among everyone and references are also everywhere
A reason I think that video games are still not on the level of movies is because the price most games big games are 60 dollars where as movie tickets are far cheaper and more consistent with prices between big productions and smaller ones
Another reason is that the format of video games is hard to understand if your new to it there is things that you need to understand to simply move around a basic function if you didn’t grow up understanding how to do it, it would be like asking George Washington to find a Netflix movie it has so many small thing that can be hard to navigate
Video games are HIGHLY segmented. My partner and I both game several hours a day - but there's no overlap in the games we play. He plays "Path of Exile", I play Zelda TOTK. He plays Disgaea, I play Borderlands. He's been trying to get me to play Final Fantasy (with no success), and I've been trying to get him to play Half-Life or Portal (with no success).
My "normie" friend at work games too, but he plays sports games. Ick.
My friends from high school (I'm 35) still game, but they all play League of Legends. I tried playing it, but found the community too toxic.
My partner's son games, but he plays Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy's. I played Minecraft a decade ago, but lost interest in it. And then there's his nephew who keeps talking about "Undertale". The nephew also plays "Genshin Impact", which I refuse to consider playing for political reasons (Based in China).
I still haven't played a single Sonic or Mario game, despite loving Zelda BOTW and TOTK.
Point being: "Gaming" is SUCH a wide range of material, there's almost no commonality.
I didn't when touch on people who play "video games" like Farmville, or Candy Crush.
Rather than think of "video games" alongside "movies" and "television", I think the highest buckets should be "interactive media" and "passive media" - THEN you get into action, horror, sci-fi, and whatever else.
Video games are SO diverse, it's effectively impossible to identify a singular cultural impact.
16:27 YES "Death of the monoculture" 1000%
I truly can't put to words how happy I am to see a notification from this channel. Always very entertaining and thoughtful!
I can easily explain the missing billions: mobile. You note in your video that mobile devices are now the most popular gaming platform, but you appeared to miss the fact that the numbers you quote do not include mobile gaming revenue. Mobile gaming on iOS and Android brings in huge dollars. It’s also likely that at least some of the digital distribution of video games, especially on PC, was not included in your numbers. So, yes, video games revenue is easily bigger than those other three types of entertainment put together, and your scepticism was misplaced.
It’s also worth mentioning that Video Games still kinda act as a self contained large subculture with their own rules, critics, media, and self sustaining cultural ecosystem that’s basically independent of most large legacy institutions. Given a few more years it’ll probably become so large it’ll just be culture like how superheroes became culture, but we are just on the edge of that.
Also the industry has causal, average, and hard core gamers who show different levels of engagement with game culture. For example mobile games tend to be the ones to breach the subculture to normal culture barrier because they reach the casual demographic, but most console or PC only games tend to only reverberate with the median or hardcore demographic that’s tuned into the subculture specific media.
Another interesting part of the Collapse of the Monoculture is that the most listened music is not widely liked by everyone, it's just kind of tolerated. People can like what they want, but personally speaking I'm tired of listening to Taylor Swift in every restaurant and Walmart.
I enjoy how JJ both manages to go relatively in depth, while starting from the very beginning, explaining the most basic cultural aspects to lay a foundation so that even aliens could understand his content
Looking at income might be the wrong lens. A single game sells for $60. It takes thousands of views for a TV show to make that same amount of revenue.
There’s in game monetization for some IPs, also. I suspect though, that it’s sort of “hidden” in terms of culture, because “pay to progress/win/flex” is a subculture even among gamers.
Enjoyed your work, as always. Re: video games as art, it is an extremely varied and rich medium. What Ebert's position misses is that any medium can incorporate other mediums. Film scoring is not a poor-man's-version of music any more than film cinematography is 'trying' to be visual art. Games have the unique advantage of having the consumer undergo a given effort; for example, by *actually* putting in the effort to investigate and discover a cosmic mystery in Outer Wilds (2019), you get a different emotional experience than you would watching a movie with a more pre-determined perspective. Celeste (2018), an outstanding example of its genre, integrates a story about fighting anxiety and self-defeatism with very difficult yet well-designed platforming challenges. The *doing* of the task *enhances* the story. That's the real strength of games as art. Often I resist saying 'games' in favor of 'interactive media', but that's obviously too unwieldy of a term to stick.
I think the argument would be that story should not be a reward for doing something.
@@JJMcCullough Stories are always a reward though, a story in a book is a reward for actually doing the effort of reading, also a lot of paintings in order to understand them you should do the effort of actually learning what they are about, what the painter's intentions were, what they represent and that is "a reward for doing something" when of you don't do it paintings will just be a bunch of colors and lines. Same for video games where stories are a reward for actually interacting with the medium and it doesn't always take the person to win or loose or even being a "good gamer" to fully experience the story in a video game
@@JJMcCullough Is the ending of a movie the reward for sitting through it?
@@kevinmitchell1011 no because we don’t think of movies as challenges to progress through.
@@JJMcCullough but in a movie you see character growth, conflict, and resolution/ending - a story, right?
I think there are games that are far less linear than you’d expect, despite having many deeply artistic elements. Just like with blockbuster movies that may be more mainstream and “safe”, and smaller films that take more risks, there are AAA games that are more mainstream and many “indie” games that are impressively artistic (in many ways, not just visually).
Great video as always. Very insightful.
If I could tip my hat into the ring as a game designer, I think the vast majority of games can be considered art, as they are created with an artistic and emotive intent. Be it to make a person feel guilt for their actions (Spec Ops: The Line), a varied globetrotting adventure aimed at a younger audience (Mario: Odessey), or ever something as basic as mindless stimulants to keep the money flowing in (Clash of Clans)
There are words for people who watch movies, cinephile, or people who listen to music, audiophile, but even those words have a sort of high culture connotation, and only apply to a select type of almost obsessive person. I do find it interesting that there isn’t an equivalent word with similar connotations to those as far as I know for video games.
Loved the video. I think its worth noting that a video game usually has a much greater impact on someone than a movie. Even if Overwatch and the new lion king had similar amounts of people who consumed them, a person who got Overwatch has likely played the game for many hours, maybe even dozens or hundreds of hours, rather than just the 2 hours someone watches a movie.