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The importance of Braid is primarily that it was the first game which was intended to be a piece of art, rather than a toy for children, which had any kind of m
by empath75 8y ago
The importance of Braid is primarily that it was the first game which was intended to be a piece of art, rather than a toy for children, which had any kind of mass market appeal.
It was the way people engaged with it seriously, in terms of gameplay and narrative and how the two interacted that made it important.
I think Amnesia and Portal were two other games that came out around the same time that were also similarly important.
- pjc50 8y ago> the first game which was intended to be a piece of art There have to be earlier contenders than this, surely? Yes it's the ancestor of the modern wave of artistically-aspiring games but game development dates back to the 1970s.
- empath75 8y agoI dunno. I’ve been playing video games since the Atari 2600 and I don’t think I recall any mainstream games that interacted with the ‘art’ world in a serious way. There were rpgs and such with serious stories, but I don’t think they were taken seriously by art critics in the way that Braid was.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoGiven the primitiveness of the medium as one goes farther back in time, I think it is unfair to say that none of them really attempted to communicate artistically with the player. Notably Missile Command was made to be unbeatable as a statement about the futility of nuclear war, and Donkey Kong was designed by an artist who injected thematic elements not previously utilized in the medium. That the "art world" didn't really engage with them doesn't mean much because art, like all communication, requires shared understanding to have meaning, and very few people would have been exposed to the (still in its infancy) culture necessary to understand artistic expression in the medium.
- empath75 8y agoRight but I’m suggesting that it’s not important because it was the first game that was made as art, but because it was the first mainstream game that was intended to be presented as ‘art’ and was engaged with as critics _as_ art.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago> Missile Command was made to be unbeatable as a statement about the futility of nuclear war I'm a huge Atari fan and this is the first I've heard of this. Pretty profound if true. Thanks for the insight!
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoOriginally intended to be called Armageddon. End of game screen of "The End" instead of Game Over as a result of that same futility. Dave Theurer talked about it in some depth here: https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-command-dave-theurer https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/15/4528228/missile-c...
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- adamrezich 8y agoVenetian Blinds for the 2600 could be interpreted as the first "art game" (only being half sarcastic here)
- tgb 8y agoYou cut out the "had any kind of mass market appeal" part, which makes the claim much more plausible (though I couldn't rule out there being earlier examples too).
- ForHackernews 8y agoMyst?
- hiccuphippo 8y agoI'd say Shadow of the Colossus was regarded as a piece of art by critics on 2005 and the same for Ico, it's predecessor, released on 2001.
- WorldMaker 8y agoInfocom very clearly advertised/marketed/built their games as Literature, which counts for Art.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]