Live Blogs The Mad, Mad World of Icycalm

OurGLORIOUSLeader2011-06-09 19:59:43

Thanks to this cultural paradigm shift, there is now a market for games that are art. I have identified the following games as being art, with reasons.

Ico is art because it is a 3D platform game with nice graphics. The dialogue has subtitles, thus raising its artistic status, and it uses timeless storytelling techniques to tell its timeless story of a boy with horns who is in a castle who escapes but then falls in a hole and then escapes again, and is then on a beach. I cried at this point, although I am not sure why. The horns are possibly a metaphor for something.

The game uses advanced storytelling techniques, such as making the controls and combat really annoying as this evokes the real frustration of being a boy with horns trapped in a big castle. Also, at the end, you discover that you are the monsters. This is a twist. In a way, we are all monsters made out of smoke in a big castle.

This game uses the art of games to raise important moral questions, such as whether pointlessly killing massive things for your own selfish purposes is a good thing. It does this by playing sad music whenever you kill a massive thing. The game uses a technique called 'repetition' to increase the impact of this sadness, by repeating the bit where you kill a massive thing and sad music plays sixteen times. This makes the game more effective than if it had repeated this fifteen times. If it had repeated it seventeen times, this may have been too much repetition, as it may have made you so sad that you kill yourself.

This game appears to, on the surface, not be art as it is about shooting and killing and driving like other not-art games, i.e. Fifty Cent: Blood on The Sand, Army of Two, and Hard Drivin'. However, the surface image of a game about killing people endlessly is a façade, and the game is a satire of these things. An example of the satire in the game is the brand of beer called 'Pisswasser'. This is a satire of beer.

Other satirical games include Fifty Cent: Blood on the Sand, which is a satire of Fifty Cent, and muslims, and Damien Hirst, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City which is a satire of the years 1980-1989.

This is art because the music is classical music, and the graphics are done with a pen. The story is something about a woman. I could not understand much of this to be honest, which makes it even more likely to be an art.

Heavy Rain is art. Older games, such as Pac-Man and Thundercats had no characters, with no emotions. Heavy Rain has three dimensional characters, who are living, breathing people, such as a man whose wife is dead and who has a son. He displays complex emotional states, such as sadness. The other character is a woman, who not only wears lipstick, but dances around. She is basically a real woman inside your television.

The game is also art because it has a script as good as a Hollywood movie, although I am not sure which one.

Rez is a game about synaesthesia. This is when colours appear as sounds, and tastes become other things. The game recreates synaesthesia by making the graphics wobble a bit in time to the music. In order to explore the relationship between drugs and art, I took a drug and played Rez, which made me feel a bit hot and then tired.

Space Harrier and Microcosm are a bit like this game, only they are not art. I think this is because Rez was inspired by a man called Kandinsky who made art with lines. If Space Harrier had been copied from a man (i.e. Robert Maplethorpe), perhaps it would be art?

Half-Life 2's status as art is best defined by its relationship to Goldeneye. Goldeneye had Natalya who was rubbish and died all the time, and had a head like a Picasso painting. This is deceptive, as Goldeneye is not art. Half-Life 2 has Alyx, who is a step forward for women in games because she has small tits and a gun. Alyx is also a step forward for emotion in games, as her facial mapping is so realistic you can tell her emotions quite easily, such as when she says 'stop pointing that torch at me' or 'ow'.

Half-Life 2 is also a quantum leap for narrative because it does not have any cutscenes which break the illusion of immersion in the gameworld, and instead has unskippable sequences where characters explain things to you at great length while you jump around the room knocking things off shelves and not saying anything.

Bioshock also pushes forward the boundaries of storytelling in games, by using a plotline worthy of a book (art) of over 300 pages. The story is about a mad scientist who creates a magic city under the sea, which is taken over by monsters. The monsters demonstrate the dangers of implanting sea slugs into kidnapped children and using their sick as a magic potion to alter people's DNA, while also turning tramps into cyborg deep-sea divers with drills for hands who speak in whale noises.

The game forces you to make important moral decisions, such as whether to kill the little girls or to save their lives. This choice is made more difficult by the fact that killing the girls gives you some of the magic potion, and saving them gives you slightly less magic potion and also loads of other stuff.

Flower is a game that is based on the greatest art ever to have been made in the world, which is the film 'American Beauty'. In 'American Beauty', there is a bit where a plastic bag blows around in the wind for a bit. This is the beauty to which the title refers, and also a metaphor for life. In Flower, you blow around in the wind for a bit and then I couldn't understand how to get to the next level. It is difficult, like all great art.

Passage is like Gauntlet on the C64, except there are no enemies and you cannot go left. The music is frightening. This game is a metaphor for life, in that you walk right for ages and then the floor changes colour and you die. Your hair falls out and you get a wife, who also dies, so this is an accurate metaphor for life. The bit of the screen that you can see is very small. I do not know why this is. There is a number on the screen.

This is probably the most art it is possible for a game to be.

There are a number of factors that make this game art. The game is very short. You don't have a gun, except a gun that fires portals, which is like an art version of a gun. The portals make my brain hurt. I got to the second room and then I thought I was still playing Rez with the drug in my head and I had to lie down for a while.

I was too scared to play this game for much longer, but I read some things on the internet about a cake and apparently there is a song at the end, so it is probably art on the balance of things.

No idea what is going on here.

An important thing in art is when you break the fourth wall. This is when someone tells you that something is art, like that time in the Tate Modern when I needed a wee and got confused by an installation. Metal Gear Solid 2 says "you are playing a game" at one point, which is a witty use of recursive tropes in a ludic environment, and is also useful because I had been watching two people talk for half an hour and thought I was watching television.

Metal Gear Solid 2 breaks the fourth wall a lot, which is clever and revolutionary. For example, when you die it says 'GAME OVER', which means you are playing a game. Metal Gear Solid 2 asks important questions of games, such as 'what is a game?'. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game. Or is it? It is. It says so.

Silent Hill 2 uses clever techniques to make the game more scary, like the bit at the start where you have to walk down a path for a very long time and nothing else happens. This is like a technique that horror writer Stephen King does, where he mixes the mundane and the scary. This makes the scary bits even more scary. An example would be an episode of Coronation Street with a skeleton at the end.

The game uses this technique a lot. There is a bit where you row across a lake for ages, and a bit where you walk down some stairs and down a corridor. Then there is a scary thing, such as a monster or a woman. This game scared me so much I blacked out.

Chime is a game which is a game that is a unique fusion of music and graphics, in that music plays during the game and the graphics are rubbish. In this sense, it is like other arts that contain music and rubbish graphics, like the video to 'Money for Nothing' or Ceefax. You put blocks down on a square and a line thing moves across the screen and then some music plays. It gives you achievement points for buying it. This game is a charity.

Other charity art include Band Aid II and that version of 'What's Going On' with the man from Limp Bizkit. This game is on a par with those.

Presentation is important in art, for example when I submitted my novel to JK Rowling, I wore a clean t-shirt and made sure not to get paint on my hands climbing over her fence.

Space Giraffe has graphics. Loads of things appear on the screen, on top of loads of other things on the screen, while Monty Python samples play and there are colours and then you die. In this sense it is a bit like suffering a lethal drug overdose in a student house in about 1972. In the game, a picture of J Allard appears. This is an example of self-referential post-modern humour, as J Allard worked for Xbox ages ago, and the game is on the Xbox. This is funny.

I once attended an interactive music installation, where I went into an empty warehouse and some students who'd been smoking drugs looked at me and I pressed a button on a thing and it made a noise and I got scared and ran out. Wii Music is a bit like this.

In Wii Music, you and some girls hold the Wii controllers and shake them at random and 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' comes out. This is a good game for girls, because there are no chainsaws or explosions or rapes, and the 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' is the kind of music a girl would like and is also tinkly and soothing, rather than loud and terrifying like 'Guitar Hero: Metallica'.

This is like a game, except it doesn't look like graphics. Lots of children in America did not like this, because Link, a child, looked like a child and did not have an earring. As such, the game does not handle mature themes, as all art must, and therefore I am inclined to agree with the assessment of the children in America.

However, it is also a bit art because the graphics are a tribute to classic animation, such as Walt Disney. I think there is a bit in classic Walt Disney Animation 'Fantasia' where Mickey Mouse sails across a featureless blue ocean for about two hours. This game is about 19% art.