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“I love playing video games! They’re just a really fun distraction from the day-to-day stress of my normal life. In a lot of ways I like them even more than movies or TV because you are kind of, like, interacting with the narrative, you know? We probably aren’t there yet, but I definitely think one day they’re going to have a videogame that just redefines storytelling as we know it. Roger Ebert claims that videogames can’t be art, and I think that’s just so short-sighted. One game, though, that I’m really looking forward to less as a counter-argument to what Roger Ebert said or as the paradigm shift of videogame storytelling and just because it’s going to be SO FUN is a game about the Holocaust set in a concentration camp. Yeah, I can’t wait to play that. I’m a total asshole.”
-You
I wish I was dead so that I could roll in my grave. (Thanks for the tip, Max. Via Kotaku.)
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Schlinder’s Fist!
Schindler’s First?
Shooter on the roof!
Inglourious Blasters!
Mentl
Fake and goy
The Opposin’ Chosen
Yikes, Shoah me the door, I’m outta here.
Schindler’s List 2: Schindler’s Pissed!
But is there a “slappers only” mode?
I made as far as :44 seconds. I don’t know how I made it that far.
Also, Raycast? Is that code for racist?
NO THANK YOU. Give me Robot Hitler any day.
I was gonna say, I’m pretty sure I wasted a good number of hours playing this in the early 90s, and back then it was called Wolfenstein. JUS’ SAYIN’.
Yes, I killed literally a million Nazis in the early 90s.
You’re welcome, Jews.
“Thank you.”
-The Jews
This was actually built off the Wolfenstein engine, so it should look a lot like it. I think he used Wolfenstein for obvious reasons, which I like.
Yeah, just did some research DSN and you were right, this is a performance-art-type-thingy. And to think, we (WE!) were so quick to be offended by something…
Why is there not an option to permanently disable Facebook Connect? We don’t want it! Make it go away, please, Gabe, c’mon.
I think you can disable it through your Facebook privacy options. I’m pretty sure. I think I did. Did I?
This has been done before by an Israeli artist who cracks games. I wrote about her in my thesis for college but I can’t for the life of me remember her name.
She had a show in Tel Aviv were the audience played a hacked Return To Castle Wolfenstein (I think) in which the player invaded Germany from Israel. You get it.
Did everyone have a great Hanukkah?
Blue warrior needs good taste badly.*
*Are the kids still playing Gauntlet?
Green elf is tired… (to answer you: no, but the old folks still remember)
In my ideal life, I have a full-size Gauntlet in my rec room. Also in my ideal life: I have a rec room. Also also: I have 3 friends who are constantly over and trying to get me to play Gauntlet with them. “Again? Aw jeez, you guys, well, alright… just once. And then Eva Mendes is cooking us garlic pork.”
Get. Out. Of. My. Brain. Hotspur!
Whatever you do, hotspur, when Eva Mendes cooks, DON’T SHOOT THE FOOD!
Gauntlet references are Spiderman Pie.
Thanks guys. I made one recently, totally forget what it was, but no one in the room got it.
Okay, now I have 2 of my 3 Gauntlet friends. That was easy! Up next: Gauntlet, rec room, Eva Mendes.
Three! Can I be three!?
Sure! Anyone else? If so, we’re gonna need a bigger Gauntlet.
You mean Uwe Boll was adapting this game BEFORE IT EVEN EXISTED?
What a champ.
I miss Jumpman Junior…
I don’t know, you guys, I thought the part where Aeris gets put into a gas chamber was very artistically done.
I know, right? Cloud turned out to be such a monster! A perfect, master-race monster. Those eyes… those mako-infused, baby-blue eyes…
Grand Theft Decency
Worst person shooter
Why are they rereleasing wolfenstein?
I can fix this… Replace the victims with strippers, the nazi’s with pigcops, the camp with postapocalyptic LA, and have the hero say ” Balls of Steel” thousands of times, and what do you get?
HAIL TO THE KING BABY!
also, why is it so bad to kill nazis?
I mean this with all due respect, because I think Roger Ebert is great, and clearly this doesn’t relate to this particular astonishingly offensive game being discussed…
But Ebert’s stance on video games is kind of bullshit.
People who rip on video games and haven’t played one since 1993 piss me off so much and I’m not even that big of a gamer.
Please, let’s be civil. “Uninformed bullshit.”
I was going to go with “baseless opinion” but that works, too.
I agree. I read the linked article and I’m shocked that he thinks Larry the Cable guy can be called an Artist, but games like Shadow of The Colossus are supposedly drivel. He says he’s not sure why game creators want to be known as artists, but his article seems more like he wants to keep the new money out of the country club.
I guess he’s going with the argument that games are innately viscerally masturbatory, but I don’t feel that argument holds, especially when things like Transbarfers 3: Barf of the Barf exist.
I read it as well, and I think you’re missing part of his point. He’s not calling games like Shadow of The Colossus drivel, he’s calling them *games.* Saying that video games can’t be art isn’t necessarily a pejorative – he also says that the game of chess can’t be considered art, which is not at all a denigration of chess. Games inherently are about achieving goals and objectives within a set of constraints. In contrast, true art is expansionary – it takes us beyond the constraints of its medium and asks us to consider or question larger things. Games, by definition, are self-limiting in a way that prevents them from ever transcending into art. That doesn’t mean they can’t still be entertaining, valid, and worthwhile uses of our time.
That being said, Sonderkommando Revolt is indefensible bullshit.
I agree. There were several points in his argument that are problematic, the worst being: “Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film.” I think he’s too caught up on the semantics of the word “video games” and not looking at the potential of the medium.
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see
That should read: “I -hate- to downvote you…” Sorry for the typos!
capsulekei, I couldn’t disagree with Ebert more. It’s especially frustrating because he hasn’t really experienced how far videogames have come in terms of narrative and emotional interactivity. He’s probably thinking videogames and still getting Super Mario Bros. on the NES as a picture. Or conversely, he’s thinking of commercial videogames as the pinnacle of the medium, which as we all know it not where the good stuff is found. It’s like saying movies aren’t art because “Transformers” was a shitty movie.
I don’t actually find that’s what he’s saying with the article at all. I agree most with his point that no matter how eloquent the rules and execution thereof, he doesn’t consider games to be art. Art and its definition are endlessly subjective, but that is where my opinion on the matter lands. Things that involve scoring, rules, and end goals that you have to get to yourself to find the conclusion don’t turn into art for me. I say this really, really loving videogames. There are a few games that have made me cry and I felt touched by them (Final Fantasies IX and X particularly), but to me they’re still not art. At the end of the day, it was still a game.
In terms of “bad” versus “good” as well, I thought he did touch on that;
“She quotes Robert McKee’s definition of good writing as “being motivated by a desire to touch the audience.” This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is “better” than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).”
NES games being “bad” like Transformers is a “bad” movie don’t colour all games or movies as bad, but which ones become art becomes taste.
I do understand that people who love videogames are frustrated that he’s an older generation out of touch with them as a medium. That is fair. I would like to see if he wavers at all playing some games that I consider truly the best examples of their kind (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Ookami), but given that he deemed all things resembling “games” as not art, I don’t think he would.
I just think Ebert is too focused on the object itself, whereas the relevance of a piece or its classification as art, for me, has always been in the way that a person responds to it. I’ve certainly been affected by games the same way I have by music, books or movies (which themselves weren’t considered art for the first few decades they were around, either).
I can, I think, understand that frustration and where it comes from. I wrote above to DirtySpaceNews that I think at the heart, it’s frustrating because Ebert is from a generation out of touch with videogames and their emotional and therefore cultural importance in our current culture. They mean something very different to people in the more current generations and thus their subjective, personal definitions of art have probably been widened to include videogames as a new art medium. I’m young, but I’ve still personally left them out. This argument on the whole is just difficult to have with my peers. I’m still fairly young, but I just can’t hold up even what I think are the greatest video games I’ve played next to my favourite music, painters, authors and think they’re on level.
But you’re holding up two things from entirely different mediums, of course they’re not going to be on the same level in many regards. They’re not really directly comparable.
In the end, I recognize that this discussion is somewhat futile, as we’ve all created our own definitions for the word “art” and are just defending those. The only thing I find to be kind of “bullshit” about Ebert’s opinion is how he takes such an authoritative stance on the subject, as if being a celebrated film critic puts him in the position to correct everyone else about what they consider to be artistic.
I think simply because of his celebrity as a critic of an art medium, the outside world gives him more authority than he was trying to give himself on the matter. This is his personal blog rather than an outside publication about art/video games/film/etc, so I thought he was just trying to have a human discussion about something that interested him. He’s stated before that because he can’t actually talk anymore, he uses his blog to keep discussions alive in his life and I don’t think his interests begin and end with film.
And you’re right, this does become futile. Time for the old adage, agree to disagree! I still love your posts here! Handshake truce with a picture of Macca and a kitten?
http://tinyurl.com/29mmodf
Ebert is right, but Mr. Ebert shares the similar and false viewpoint as the multitudes of old fogeys who hear about hookers and GTA and then claim the way you win Grand Theft Auto is to screw and kill as many hookers as possible (i’m looking at every congressman ever)
Hi! Videogame nerd here. This IS an important game to take note of. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why, which I know no one will be terribly interested in. But yeah. In the vein of Super Columbine Massacre RPG and Waco Resurrection (both real games, look them up), this game is more an exploration of the medium than a commercial release.
Hi videogame nerd! I am also a videogame nerd! It IS important, but also sort of terrible.
Terrible how? I think it’s ugly, mostly on purpose. I’m drawing a lot of connections to Inglorious Basterds, a revisionist history kind of vibe from it.
If this was 1996-7, this would be an important game. thankfully, it is 2010 and i have a 360.
If this was 1996-7, this would be an important game. thankfully, it is 2010 and i have a 360.
I just showed this to my brother and he said “Oh I’ve played that, it’s fucking class”. There’s zombie Nazis in a later level so…
Is describing things as “class” a thing now? Like saying it’s cool?
I guess I’d better turn up my hearing aid next time I walk by the 4H, so I can pick up on the new slang the kids are using.
I know, what happened to jive talk like in the good old days?
Describing something as class (read: great) is an UK/Irish. Is your brother UK/Irish?
He didn’t say this game is the craic!
Someone has done some research! But you’re not really using that properly but A for effort.
And C for Coffee.
The Videogum Dilemma: Is it worth posting about a horrible misappropriation of the holocaust if you know that it will inspire a comment thread of holocaust jokes?
[Soooogood.gif]
But Lego Sonderkommando Revolt should still be pretty good, right?
I know this old, but it still applies:
I love pairing that GIF with this one:
Hells to the yeah. Upvotes for you.
So I was actually kind of relieved that you are a prisoner and you’re shooting the nazis. My initial assumption was it would be the other way around because of how people are horrible, and Gabe’s commentary led me to expect the worst. But this is less horrible than that at least?
I don’t know how much credit you get for coming up with something less horrible than a game where you kill concentration camp prisoners.
Agreed. I’m mostly surprised at how my mind jumped right to terrible conclusions.
OMG, Let’s create an equally offensive party game
genocideplusceleb, I’ll go first
Rewanda Sykes!
I think we need more upbeat games…
Better bring your… “A-Game”! LULZ!11
I’ll show myself out…
I’d just been playing Minecraft for the past couple of hours and this was just NO.
There’s too much blue in that sky.