The Beauty of Life

A robot cannot create art, real beauty comes from a beautiful soul. Beauty comes from sense experience, irrationality, love, hate, the highest art is the art of life (Adam Muller 1779-1829). Art can never be mass produced, that would defeat the point, the emotions it would evoke would be counterfeit. Everything has to be original and fresh and real.

Where does the beauty of life really come from, can we really be sure of our eyes? Do our eyes see or does our brain see? Is art beautiful in itself or is the beauty in our own minds? Does the beauty come from the mind or the object? Is beauty an actual substance? Can we touch it? Can we taste it? Can we distill it or refine it? Can it be destroyed?

 We want to feel in some respect that our lives have meaning and that we are more valid a species than an animal who just lives out it’s life chewing curds in a field. We often cite the great achievements of man like the pyramids or the great wall as something only a human could dream possible is that proof that we’re better than animals or is it a desperate attempt to justify to ourselves that human life has more meaning?

We establish that we have rationality and logic which animals lack and we argue this because we can recognize beauty. So from this conclusion we've established two things; first that art or more importantly the beauty of art may or may not be established through rationality or some sort of logical reasoning.

The second point this makes is that animals lack the ability to recognize beauty, but Darwin argues that animals in fact can recognize beauty possibly as some sort of survival instinct, no one really knows the minds of animals, or how they perceive beauty just that Darwin says they can because supposedly certain animals choose mates based on their appearance. If this is the case the logical conclusion is one of two; Either recognizing the beauty of art does not require rationality nor logic, or that animals in fact have rational minds but have yet to make that evidently clear to us. I’m inclined to believe the first statement because we can never truly know what animals think or if they do at all.


  If beauty requires neither logic nor reason, then what does it require? Some believe the origin of art is in fact play which would make sense as both humans and animals play as a form socializing and play doesn't necessarily require either logic or reason. (Spencer 1873). Now to bring this back to Video games, they could in fact be the purest form of art because they actually serve their purpose (Kant); they are centered entirely on play, it’s as if art has come full circle.
 If you think about cavemen drawing on cave walls for entertainment, not really for record or instruction, they did it because they liked it, but art has become so bastardized that we don't know what it’s for anymore or why we’re supposed to like it.

 People pay to watch plays where actors take a shit in a bowler hat and they don’t know whether to clap or puke but games are fun and they actually serve that purpose. They are supposed to be fun and they’re supposed to engage your senses and take you on a journey, make you think, and most of them do (although a vast majority of them don’t i.e. COD/Assassins Creed 2/ Any game about football).

 You may not a like a game, I hate Call of Duty but I recognize that stupid people and easily impressed morons like it, so it serves its purpose. You don’t necessarily need any prior knowledge of history or politics to enjoy it as I imagine the vast majority of cod fans don’t. It’s just fun and its beauty lies in its simplicity and its play-ability.

 Art is about sharing an emotion or a feeling you once had with the populous, infecting others with your experience. It doesn't necessarily matter what that experience was just that it’s shared and felt by other people. So if the team behind Call of Duty’s intent was to release a series of pointless shooters with no stories or shred of originality, with literally throw away characters (as most of them die within ten seconds of you either meeting them or in fact playing them) each game exactly the same as the one before with only the accents, the scenery and the guns changing pushing the envelope in mediocrity, they have succeeded.

Game and Punishment

It wouldn't be far wrong to assert that; game designers in game worlds have more power than governments in real worlds. If they didn't want you to steal or murder they could just make it impossible to do so. So although we live in a state with laws that we are inclined to obey with the use of coercion. In a game world laws become natural laws like gravity but of course games can be just as coercive if not more so. For example moral choice systems often give you the option to commit atrocities, which is fair enough. It’s not strictly telling you to commit atrocities, it’s just made it possible for you to do so. Like a mad scientist making some sort of death ray, telling you how to use it, pointing it at France and leaving the room. You don’t have to do anything but you are given the option and the means to. This is why I find it slightly hypocritical when games like Infamous give you the power to make choices like this but then criticise your decisions. For instance you fire the death ray and France lies in ruins the scientist comes in and gives you an ear full. When ‘but for’ his actions my choice would not have been possible.

 The choices you make also affect the way the character looks in Infamous, it’s the same in Fable, perhaps it’s a visual metaphor for how the character sees themselves and thus how the character is perceived by others. The choices you make affect the types of powers you gain or the amount of power you gain so for example you become more powerful by committing mini-attrocities like in Bioshock.  In some games the moral choices we make effect the company we keep and the people that will follow us like in Fallout 3; bad people like to hang out with other bad people, shock horror. Maybe to justify their own actions or to mirror each other or maybe just talk about raping and pillaging on their days off. Personally I much prefer Prototype because you’re so monstrous all your actions are a massive grey area even eating people as health is just something a malevolent god just does.

 Although we’re given the option to be bad, games still deem it necessary to punish us and coerce us in hopes that we will eventually do the right thing. We chose to be bad because it was easy and fun and we were curious and now we get the bad ending and we’re left with a bad taste in our mouths. The fear of the bad ending, and all the in game characters disliking you for your actions is how a game coerces you into its idea of acting in a moral way.

Which is actually a lot like how morality works in the real world, we’re good because we want people to like us and we want good things to happen to us. We want the happy ending because we want to be happy, and we believe negative actions result in some form of retaliation from the game universe. So in this respect games are just as coercive as the real world but sometimes being bad and/or hated is still fun in a place where it has no consequence.   So the reason we obey laws is not because we’re obligated but because it ensures our future happiness. If you were a hedonist or a utilitarian and believed happiness were more important than law, you would agree that happiness should not be sacrificed for rule worship. In other words laws should not be obeyed if they don’t serve the purpose of making the most people happy.

 Utility undermines the political obligation to obey the law as you obey not because you want to but because the state has great power over your happiness; you obey because they basically have a gun to your head. It reminds me a little of the morality system in Bioshock as although you believe you're making moral decisions, it's just a subtle coercive tactic to make you believe you have power when in reality you have none. Games on the other hand are supposed to facilitate your happiness not dangle it in front of your face like a carrot on a stick, but what is happiness and who deserves it?

 T.H Green believed that moral ideals were more important and fulfilling than pleasure, he proposed that pleasure was in fact an accidental occurrence. We don’t play games necessarily for instant gratification it has to be more than that because otherwise why not just have sex and eat chocolate constantly? It’s not fulfilling enough for pleasure to be your only objective pleasure is a side effect of good living (Green), perpetuating moral ideals or stamping all over them. So in a game the fun doesn't necessarily come from just the swing of a sword or the firing of a gun (although some of it obviously can; in Max Payne for example, there's just something innately fun about jumping with two guns going 'ahhh'). the fun comes from, defeating the evil wizard and saving the village, or doing the opposite and raping and pillaging the village. Both are fun because in one you save the day and in the other you don’t. It’s all about fulfilling specific roles; it’s an extension of the fantasy of being someone else.

Law in regard to the spread of disease would be ineffective if those laws did not in fact stop the spread of disease, so it would be okay to break them. In the same respects if a law does not prevent crime then what is its point? The law has to contain ‘good advice’ for it to be observed and obeyed. If it costs more to obey a law than it actually benefits you, you should not obey the law.

 For instance I’m drawn back to this idea of obeying the speed limit or rather not and going on killing sprees in Grand Theft Auto. The laws in that game are pointless because they don’t stop real crime and they don’t have any permanence. They have no value as a deterrent against virtual crime because you’re just fined. Since there’s no other use for money in that game other than buying more guns to commit more crimes and get more money to pay more fines, it's redundant.

 So the whole game is about funding lavish killing sprees when all the storyline is pushed to one side. What do you do at the end of GTA (or any other games that let you continue on after the end for that matter)? I usually turn it off but the game allows you to continue somehow assuming that I want to wallow in the success or failure of all my crimes and cry and/or go on a killing spree in my fancy helicopter, it’s just so anti-climactic.

Spec Ops: The Whine

It’s basically Apocalypse now the game…. with Nolan North playing the part of Martin Sheen *rolls eyes*

  Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person shooter brought to us by Yager Development and published by 2K Games. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on June 26, 2012 in North America and on June 29, 2012 in Europe. First off I’ve got to say, I despise games like this, military games are like the kryptonite of video game plots, because you basically do stuff because you’re a soldier and it’s your job, your character has no motivation other than a pay check and a pat on the back so it’s doomed from the start. On the other hand I was pleasantly surprised by this game. I hadn’t looked twice at this when it first came out but I was put on to it by some respected sources and I thought it couldn’t hurt to check it out because it deals with philosophical issues I’m enticed by.

  First impressions

The very start of the game is a turret mission on a helicopter, so already I’m not impressed because mandatory turret combat is just annoying and really boring, I don’t know about you but manning a stationary gun isn’t my idea of excitement when I’ve been blessed with legs. Just to point out how little I knew about this game before I bought it, I was surprised when I discovered it was another cover shooter.
 I absolutely loathe cover shooters, it just seems like the most boring people on earth came together to come up with a way to make gun fights as interesting as an evening with Chris Hansen and what they created was chest high walls, and on that day jumping and shooting with two guns in slow motion going; ‘ahhh’ died. I like fps games because they’re challenging but covers shooters are just an exercise in turn taking and they’re painfully dull. Regardless the beginning of the game was pretty interesting because it feels a little more like a horror game than an action game, because you’re entering a no man’s land and you feel really unwanted, and that Dubai isn’t a natural place. Oh yeah it’s set in Dubai and you’re on a rescue mission to save survivors from a massive sandstorm that has swallowed the whole city, so it feels a little like the beginning of resident evil 4, your just on a rescue mission and then it goes tits up.

How does thy shoot?

Game play is fairly basic; Wait behind wall, shoot, move to other wall, shoot, rinse and repeat. You can give orders to have people killed if you don’t like shooting people yourself, since you have to aim the reticule over them to have them shot anyway, also oddly you can blind fire turrets which makes it ridiculously easy because you don’t really aim turrets anyway.

  I shoot therefore, I am.

So game play wise it’s fairly unremarkable, where it really shines is in its philosophical ideas in regards to combat. We’re used to killing hordes of ‘bad’ Nazis or Russians that eat babies for breakfast and never asking why, but in spec-ops you’re fighting rogue American soldiers and you don’t fully understand why.
You fight only to preserve your own life, there is no greater good, no overarching goal to save the world, you just want to live long enough to understand why. Also there’s this weird bit where the enemy uses white phosphorus and for those that don’t know what that is, let’s just say it’s a very unpleasant way to be burnt to death. You then get the opportunity to use it yourself and it seems like a moral choice.
 The game doesn't really have moral choices because it’s about survival but there’s a fine line because we want to kill our enemies but we also understand that they’re people and we empathise with them so we don’t want to make them suffer needlessly.
 You do it all through a launch-able mortar so you get an overhead view like in cod in the bomber, but your face is reflected in the screen and you’re close enough to hear the screams of the men being burned alive so it doesn’t let you make that disconnect between weapon and target. It doesn't let you distance yourself and then you actually have to walk through the dead and the dying that you created. Still it’s a little hard to swallow since they make this big deal about all the killing and they feel bad about the genocides they take part in but they still keep killing because it’s a game, you can’t just choose to become a Hari Krishna.

 It’s a little weird because the plot doesn’t really follow a pattern, there’s not much structure, it’s not really a journey, I don’t feel like much really happened.
 It starts to feel like the character you play might be worse than the villain you've yet to meet.

 I don’t really think this game is genius but I really respect it because it’s not just about combat. Cod is just ‘bang bang bang, oh isn't war horrible bang bang bang’ but this is really quite introspective, it’s not trying to say war is horrible it’s asking us what we think of war and soldiers in general. I'm not sure it really has a moral message, if there’s anything really to be learned is that people are no better than animals really and maybe sometimes they’re just better off dead. I think it’s hard to make a moral message in video games because it seems like the way you fix problems is the same way the problems are created, shooting people. How can you stop violence with more violence? All you can really do is just kill everyone and that doesn't make anything better just quieter.

  The Road  Home

I think it’s a great criticism on what soldiers actually do, and what they think they do, they think they’re heroes but they’re just killers. Overall I think the game wasn't that spectacular, it didn't try anything new with game mechanics or have any flashy gimmicks; it was just a game that put more emphasis into character development and asking difficult questions which I think is a good start. It didn't necessarily answer the hard questions but it’s just a game, you can’t expect it to, but I applaud this game for its balls. We live in this climate of half arsed, lazy games with no balls, that are too afraid to actually try to make an impact and this cuts through that.

 Pros; Good story/character development, dealt with serious subject matter quite intelligently.

Con; Mediocre game play, a little short, the plot formula was a little unsatisfying.

 6/10

Beauty in the Eye

Art is in the imitation of nature (Pere Andre Batteux 1675-1764) uniting the beauties of nature is what an artist does, and a game unites more than any other (Pagano 1748-99).

Although undoubtedly some games could be construed as visually beautiful, what is beauty? Where does it come from?

The beauty of art comes through the senses, all of them, so food becomes an art because of the beauty of taste as well as hairdressing and tailoring through the senses of touch and sight, perfume making through smell. All become arts because they give us pleasurable sensory information but beauty also is undefined. There is no rigid definition of beauty, it’s regarded of as is religion, that it is so obvious it doesn't require discussion, which is obviously just a lazy explanation. Then why isn't hairdressing and architecture and cooking and video games considered an art? Surely video games should be a super art because it gives off so much sensory information more than any other form of art, more than all the arts combined because that’s what games basically are.

  Games are like a Frankenstein’s monster of art, you get visual art like you would a painting, music as of an opera, storyline and acting as of a play, topped off with the film arts of cinematography and editing and one more of its own which is game-play. So where as art usually just stimulates the eyes and the ears and the imagination, games also stimulate that feeling of touch and control.
 So it’s like watching a play or looking at a painting but you can touch and play with the painting, you’re not on the outside looking in, you actually take part. Games only lack the ability to stimulate the senses of smell and taste but who knows what innovations await us. Smell could be the final frontier of video game immersion. Home defined beauty as;… that which is pleasant (Home 1696-1782). When all is said and done; beauty is a matter of taste and what is taste is impossible to determine.

Beauty in its highest form is expression regardless of good, beauty has no morale consciousness as art itself might have. What is pleasant to an individual could be abhorrent to another. Beauty is like the old adage of the tree falling in the woods; does a tree falling in the woods make a sound if there’s no one to hear it?
 It’s the same with beauty, how can it exist if there aren't humans to recognise it? How can it be good and evil if there’s no one to define it as such? That could mean beauty is not something external but something innate in humans, something internal, a filter we place on the world.
 We look at something like a waterfall and whereas animals or a machine might just see water we see something magically beautiful a gift from god or allah or budha or whomever is or isn’t killing us. Beauty is a comparison between our limitations and our idea of being free, in real life we are limited and fragile in games we’re immortal, we can fly, choose our bodies our skills, our potential is limitless in a game, exceeding our limitations is the essence of beauty (Fichte 1762–1814). Beauty is the gap between who we are and who we want to be.

“the aim of art, as with Kant, is beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical usefulness. So that art may be called play, though not in the sense of a worthless occupation, but in the sense of a manifestation of beauty of life itself, which has no other aim than” 

Tolstoy(1828-1910)

The German philosopher Kant saw beauty as something pleasing that has no practical use, if something is perceived as beautiful it just is, it’s beauty is subjective and thus serves no real purpose, it is pleasing just because it is.
 Play is beautiful because it serves no other purpose than to conjure up the beauties of life. Obviously one major drawback of this idea is a games sole purpose is not just beauty but also money. That doesn't change the fact that games are designed and crafted for the purpose of manifesting beauty and thus creating pleasure from that beauty, but it raises questions around the conflict of art and business which I intend to discuss at a later date (Schiller 1759–1805).

Dragon's Dogmanbearpig

Two minutes into the game and I already feel like a special needs teacher on a school trip.

Good day to you I beseech you read my wondrous Dragon’s Dogma review. Dragon's Dogma is an action role-playing game developed and published by Capcom for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game features an open world fantasy setting, in addition to hack and slash and survival horror elements, and was released in North America on May 22, 2012, May 25, 2012 in Europe, and May 24, 2012 in Japan. The game isn’t too dissimilar from most RPG games, the plot is basically; there’s a bad dragon that needs killing, go get’em tiger!
It plays a little like a mix of Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, because it’s got that JRPG trying to be a western RPG feel which is refreshing but there are also giant monsters you can climb and stab in the bum which is awesome any day of the week.
 The only things that are a little different is the class system is a bit like Ragnarok Online where it’s more like a job that you take on and you choose a base job and then can sort of be promoted and the vocation level and your actual level are separate. So your level basically determines your stats and your vocation level decides your skills and weapons and armour you can use, this isn’t exactly new but I like it.

  Pawn Stars!?

What sets this game apart from regular RPGs is slavery. Slavery apparently is back in fashion but it’s ok because they’re a subhuman slave race from an alternate dimension who lack free will and are very annoying called ‘Pawns’. Which you might think is just an elaborate and long winded way of getting out of putting any effort into NPC character development, but you’d be slightly wrong, because it’s all about pimping your pawns out to other players.

 You make your own pawn in the exact same way you make your own character and they follow you around and you choose their class and their weapons and armour and you even choose their skills. You also get to hire two more support pawns but the catch is these pawns are other players pawns that they’ve created, but unlike your pawn they don’t level up with you which is annoying because you make this nice team and then you get to a point when your ten levels above them and they’re just useless to you, so when you give them back you send them off with a little present and a pat on the bum. Here are a couple of ways you can tell this game is Japanese, you can dress your pawns in bikinis and g-strings, you’re encouraged to make your pawns look attractive so other players will ‘enlist’ them, there are horny monsters that get excited when they see women and harpies with big feathery boobs. I’m not complaining, it's just weird.

  Complaints start now

 The most annoying thing for me in this game is the sprinting systemy thing. In most games when there’s a sprint function there’s a sometimes a meter of energy because not every game character is the six million dollar man, and sometimes they get a bit knackered. On the other hand in those games you can usually still move, you just stop sprinting and in RPGs like Oblivion you can increase your regular moving speed anyway or buy a horse but in dragon’s dogma you have to stare at your character agonizing as he works through his stitch.

 This has happened to me at least fifty times in major fights with monsters the size of Grecian debt, my character is sprinting to avoid barbed appendages and he suddenly just grabs his knees and starts huffing and puffing away like a chain smoker in a wind tunnel. It’s just not cool, can you imagine Solid Snake fighting a metal gear but first needs to catch his breath after conquering the stairs. I don’t get why pawns have to be mindless hapless morons, why can’t they just be companions i.e. normal-ish people? You know people, with personalities and characters and all that, this just seems lazy. I love in Skyrim how you can just walk into an inn and meet someone interesting and have a conversation with them and have them join you on your quest, that’s cool because they’re your equals, they can even become a love interest and you can marry them.
 I think it cheapens the game really because instead of being followed by actual characters you care about and that can die, you’re just leading about a bunch of replaceable lemmings.

  Still better than Resident Evil 5

That being said I still liked this game, I’d really lost faith in Capcom recently, game after game just seemed trashier than the last but I think RPGs actually suit their style, I mean yeah the story was nothing to shout about but that’s Capcom for you. They literally have a room full of monkeys banging on typewriters, every time you enter a room it seems like you just walked in midway between a conversation because you have no idea what they’re talking about. I hate to compare it to Skyrim again but that is a game that is sure of its history, it’s establishes very well it’s back-story but this seems a little cobbled together at the last minute and open to interpretation, it just leaves too many holes, I completed it but I was left wanting, I feel like a missed a whole chunk of the game or something. That’s why I compared it to Demon’s Souls at first because the story seemed like peeling an onion; you just get a little further each time, but the story just wasn’t there.
 I heard a lot of people who talked about this game complain about how the main quest wasn’t obvious but I liked that, kept me guessing, I think I’m walking into a little fight for some gold and it turns out to be this huge part of the main quest, it makes all the quests seem important.

  Round up

Overall I really liked this game because it filled me with a new found hope for Capcom. It didn’t have a quick travel system, yeah you could buy magical stones that warped you home but to get somewhere you had to hoof it. As a result you manage to piss off every bandit and giant monster just lazing about in the game. I like how fluid it is because you could be on the way to a quest and then you stumble on a chimera and you’re just like ‘screw the quest!’ and start trying to tear it’s head off and collect it’s magical gizzards, to sell or staple onto your weapons and armour.
 You don’t really need a quest, you can just sort of make your own, you see a Griffin and you go after it, the end. One way it trumps RPGs like Skyrim is in every quest in Skyrim you know you’re going to talk to/stab some dude but in this you could be walking into a room with a hydra, it constantly keeps you guessing, there could be any mythical creature around the next corner and I love how it spans Greek mythology with it’s Hydras and Chimeras and Cyclops and western mythology with it’s dragon’s and giants and goblins.

 The ending was a bit hit or miss really, because the end wasn’t really the end, so basically it disappointed me twice. I mean I like how this game didn’t do the Hollywood handholding with the storyline, it didn’t keep reminding you over and over of the plot but on the other hand it didn’t make a lot of sense either. I did like it, the action is great I loved the blend of hack and slash with RPG, it really worked, visually very impressive but that goes without saying these days, It just left me wanting a little more.

 Pros; Lots of giant monsters and toys to play with bit of a refreshing take on a classic RPG style.

Cons; the pawns are incredibly irritating, it’s just being followed by an idiot that incessantly comments on everything he/she sees.

6.5/10

It's All Part of the Plan

“You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”
  The Joker

 Games evoke wonder which is what any good piece of art should do but I personally have always seen games as a form of catharsis, a way to unwind, take out all the stresses of life on someone that isn’t real, and if I had the figures to back it up I’d hasten to add video games have probably stopped more killing sprees than they’ve ever started, I mean I haven’t killed anyone… yet. There are uninformed people all over the world claiming video games create killers, but is it games or society that is criminogenic?

Evidence points to the later since murder was around a long time before games but there are still people that like to blame games for a deeper problem. Marx argued that capitalism created crime because it encouraged people to want more than they needed and then crime became a natural evolution of that goal. People want more than they need so they steal, people kill because they want a taste of the power society takes away from them and because of this it justifies employing police to control us and protect us from those people the system has created to scare us, and it’s all part of the plan.

  “A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”.”

Marx (Theories of Surplus Value 1861)

 Maybe one day a more realistic murder game will be created to prevent serial killers killing real people, like putting heroin addicts on methadone. I mean look at it logically if you were a serial killer and could kill a fake person and it would feel the same, smell the same be the same as killing a real person without all the pesky police investigations and trials and none of the messy clean up, you’d choose that over real murder any day.
 That is to say we assume serial killers think logically which it’s safe to say the vast majority are not but some of them are perfectly logical functioning members of society. For some reason that seems to shock us more, like it wasn't part of the plan.
 It makes sense if they were abused or they live in a cave and eat babies because we can classify them as ‘other’. I don’t do that so that explains why I’m normal and they’re not. I can distance myself from them, if they have a job and a family and collect stamps suddenly it becomes weird, turns everything on its head, every normal action becomes fantastic because it’s almost like they’re like you, the bottom line is of course they’re no different from you.

  "You know, madness is a lot like gravity...all you need is a little push." --The Joker

 People like to think that there’s a massive gap between sanity and insanity, murderer and ‘normal person’ but really it just boils down to choice and circumstance. We choose to deal with our problems or we lock them away and allow them to fester or redirect them, blame them on someone/something else. The idea of being controlled by an urge to kill is an excuse, it’s like saying you’re possessed by the devil.
 I suppose what I’m trying to say is that video games don’t influence violence in society, they are in fact influenced by a violent society.

Video games could have the power to rid the world of violence but in a sort of ghost busters ghost vault way, just imprisoning violence in games. I think getting rid of violence is impossible but instead of adding to it like some opinionated mothers might think video games could in fact channel it like in Max Payne when the two hitmen settle their differences with a kung fu video game.

 Violence will always exist until we’re all mediated by our machine overlords. Therefore would people given the choice, rather their violence take place in games or on the street outside their window?   Its part of being human, it’s that part of us that thinks fight club is a good idea, that part of us that walked out of Kickass and thought “I could do that”. Whether people like to admit it or try to pray it away, we all have little lizard brains telling us that you’d be much better off if everyone was dead and you had all their stuff.

 Now whether that’s just a capitalist slippery slope rationalisation or just a survival instinct is beside the point, people love violence, they live on it they feed it, they tacitly consent to it in regard to war and the death sentence, contact sports and torture, it permeates every square inch of our society, it’s the same thing that keeps us safe and makes us scared at the same time.
All legal systems boil down to a threat of violence, every rule we have, even school and religion hang the sword of Damocles over our heads if we transgress their important rules. Punishment and suffering and the threat of violence is so ingrained in our society I don’t see a time when we will ever be rid of it or even if living in a world without violence would be a good, because it seems punishment and fear of pain is what holds a society together.

  “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” 
- Friedrich Nietzsche 

 The fact of the matter is we like to think we live in a civilised society, but it’s just more civilised than the dark ages. The world we live in is a vicious, corrupt little rat trap where all the rats are eating each other  and it surprises people when a rat crawls out a monster, like that wasn’t part of the plan. Society pits us against each other and makes money and success out to be the ultimate goal that can never be fulfilled because you can never have enough of either and then is surprised when people value money and power over human life.

Ars Gratia Artis

Or art for art’s Sake. To answer the question that plagues video games namely whether or not they are an art on a par with plays or paintings you first need to answer the questions ‘What is art?’

You often hear people say, ‘you have to suffer for your art’ but why? Surely suffering for the purposes of entertainment is just suffering for the sake of suffering. It’s not like someone’s life depends on whether an opera is any good, just someone’s evening, so why all that effort? Does anybody like opera, does it make any sense? Who does ballet appeal to? What do they represent? Does anybody real act the way they do in plays or in movies? Do games represent real life or parody it, make a mockery of it? Does any of it matter?

 Actors and dancers are treated like performing chimps, for what? What is the meaning of art and why is it so important? The truth is there is no meaning of art, no definition that isn’t so convoluted and vague that not even the people describing it fully understand it. Is the importance of art dreamed up or is it real? Its possible art is like currency, or love purely important because of the importance placed upon, it has no real value on its own, just as money is just paper without people to spend it.

 The point I’m trying to make is that so much importance is put on what is and isn’t art, that the meaning of art is completely lost and instead it just becomes an impossible standard attainable only by those art forms that defame and kill off all the others.

 “like theologians of various trends exclude and destroy each other… In poetry, the old romantics deny the Parnassians and decadents; the Parnassians deny the romantics and the decadents; the decadents deny all their predecessors and the symbolists; the symbolists deny all their predecessors and les mages, while les mages simply deny all their predecessors; in the novel, naturalists, psychologists and naturists deny each other. And it’s the same in drama, painting and music”

 Tolstoy (1828-1910)

 Art is like a virus, it attacks and consumes all its rivals until it becomes the highest form of art and anything else is just swept away. Art is territorial like an animal and that’s why it refuses to acknowledge video games as an art, just like it refused to acknowledge films before it and Jazz before that and even plays because it fears for its own survival.  Art is just this conceptual mess of nonsense telling everyone else that they’re not the same as it, when art itself has no idea what ‘it’ is.

Art is the emperor’s new clothes, it’s nothing, it stands on the shoulders of the other mediums it mocks. This by no means answers the question ‘what is art?’ it just sort of tip toes around how the art community thinks, If anything it raises more questions. It’s often the case when you try to solve a riddle as old as this you find more questions than answers because the meaning of art is as elusive if not more so than the meaning of life.

 The true aim of art or what should be the aim of art is self preservation through commonality (Burke 1729-97). Much as with games, there are stories the world over of people making friends and getting married through games because what links them is commonality which is more powerful than the usual bindings that tie people together like money and convenience. Art is an educator, it teaches us about culture and people and more importantly how to be, it socializes us.


 “The aim of the whole life of mankind is the welfare of social life”
 -Sulzer (1720-79)

 It’s argued that the main aim of art is in fact beauty but it’s not as much beauty as it is ‘good’. Art’s ideals run in parallel with mankind’s in that they aim to improve life but beauty is not restrained by good nor evil, beauty is just beauty. Beauty could be a baby penguin feeding it’s chick as much as it could be a mallard duck gang raping a female mallard if you’re in to that sort of thing. So beauty is not a good way of defining art as it lacks intention and it can be found everywhere, in other words; beauty has no agency it’s ethereal, it’s subjective, art needs to have purpose behind it, it needs to make a point and convey some meaning or emotion from the artist.

 It’s important as a subject because being an artist and creating art is the closest to being god and even though I don’t necessarily believe in god I use that term because it adequately encompasses what I need to say. An artist is a creator; he/she is trying to encapsulate what was made by nature and what is captured by their senses, uniting not only the beauty of the natural world but the beauty of their perception of said world in something that they have created that they can share with the world. In other words their trying to make sense of the mysteries of life by duplicating them, they create to discover the meaning of creation.

Faaaaarrrrrrr Cry 3

Good day to you homogenous masses, behold my basically above board Far Cry 3 Review.

This swashbuckling FPS/RPG adventure comes to you courtesy of  Ubisoft Montreal in conjunction with Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Red Storm, Ubisoft reflections, and Ubisoft Shanghai and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

First impressions We've been bombarded for months with a plethora of mindboggling trailers, sort of giving you this ‘Beach meets Rambo’ the game feel and to be honest I was really excited and my expectations were through the roof. I kind of expected there to be this long set up intro where you travel to the island, look about a bit, meet some shady characters, then you get taken hostage.
 You know, give you some time to get to know the characters and the island itself but no, ten second intro video and bang, you’re in a cage. It was trying to be vaguely shocking but the only thing shocking is that they expect you to care about characters you've never even met. The person tied up next to you is supposed to be your brother, how am I supposed to know and like characters and care what happens to them if they’re just dangled in my face and thrown away as if they mattered? Seriously games designers know exactly nothing about setting up stories.

Stories to them are just a means to an end and that is why they will always be subpar as long as they play second fiddle to the game-play. It’s as if games designers don’t want a real audience just a studio audience that laughs and cries on cue. Not really impressed. It’s just a waste of a character and a waste of time. Why do I want to get his girlfriend back when I’ve never met her!? I mean literally never met her, just saw her for like 10 seconds in a video which didn’t even establish she was your girlfriend, now I should care about what happens to her? It’s literally like someone just wheeled someone into the room and said; “This is your girlfriend now, commence loving her in five, four...” This set up is just lazy. I mean the ‘save the princess’ plot is the oldest in the world but at least when Mario does it you know who the princess is, you’ve met her on a previous occasion, in this game you have a girlfriend she’s somewhere in the jungle go get’em tiger.

  As first impressions go this is the worst by far.

 It’s almost like Ubisoft see story as something to be gotten out of the way to make way for the ‘awesome action’, (commence grumpy old man gamer mode) I blame this COD generation, they have ruined the world of gaming, turned games into just another series of crappy movies made for mass consumption, neither good nor bad, just alright which is worse in my opinion. It’s created a generation of gamers who just don't care about anything but shooting at faceless foreigners.

  Rant Over

Far Cry is an open world FPS/RPG hybrid set on a tropical island crawling with pirates and animals that want to eat you. You play Jason Brody an all american boy kidnapped with his friends by pirates and forced to become a tribal warrior to kill the pirate leader Vaas and reclaim his friends before they're killed or sold into slavery.

  Ok I like how you play the sissy younger brother who says “eww” when he skins animals, rather than the hard-boiled soldier older brother, makes the action seem more believable and shows progression. So you start off as this privileged prissy college grad twenty something tossed into hell and end up as this hardened guerrilla fighter. I hate it when you start a game and go into a gun shop and there’s only one gun you can buy, seriously what’s the point, why don't you just give me the gun? I know it’s trying to introduce to the shopping mechanics but once you’ve seen one shop you’ve seen them all.

 Although now I mention that, the shop in this game is quite nice because there are like gun vending machines in each safe house so you don’t need to keep going back to one gun shop but it also eliminates the possibility of introducing eccentric gun dealer characters saying things like “Stranger, stranger, now that’s a weapon!” but to each his own. I do like the weapon customization, paint jobs for guns have always seemed pointless but in this game it adds a little something if only painting your gun camo actually made you harder to see but it doesn't it just looks cool.

 On the other hand you can get silencers for almost every gun except the shotguns and the flame-thrower  which is something they could improve on for next time, because I want to burn people alive quietly.

  Skin to Win

It may shock you to hear I absolutely loved this game, I wouldn’t say I was a massive fan of the series I played the first game and thought it was a little daft, the second game was a pretty decent way to kill an afternoon but it was nothing to write home about really, it was fun but you want a little more from a game than just fun and I really think this game has that little extra something.

 The last games alluded to a stealth system and neither of them really delivered, this game really delivers. The stealth system is amazing, which is quite a feat for an FPS. You can hide in bushes and hunt with a bow, stealth kill dropping from a ledge or emerging from water. The stealth system works really well, you can mark targets from a vantage point and look for the perfect way to strike, which in an open world game like this is immeasurably fun.

 I also like the way you start off only able to carry one gun at a time and then you hunt animals to craft more intricate holsters to carry more weapons and ammo. Hunting and skinning and crafting aren’t new, Assassins Creed 3 to name a recent game did that to death, but the RPG elements and the gun customization really sell it to me. It allows you to customize your own experience, you can run in flamethrower blazing or you can hide in the bushes with a bow, or a do a little of both. I forgot to mention I love the fact you can take guns off dead guys and keep them, it drives me crazy how in some FPS/RPGs you have to make a pact with Zeus to get a new gun or you can only buy them.

Whereas it’s more realistic just to kill a guy and take his then you save money which can be used customizing the hell out of it, also it gives you time to experience each gun individually rather than just saving up for the best one. The levelling system is fairly straight forward there are three skill trees and you kill pirates to unlock skill points, the only thing novel about the concept is that the skills are symbolised by 'magical' tattoos on your arm, the only downside of this levelling system is there is no replay value as this game is an FPS hybrid there are no classes, so you can gain all the skills in the game in one play through.

  Round up

Although the game stumbles at the first hurdle and completely fails to immerse you into the world. The game play pulls it right back from the brink, it’s intensely fun and the story and characters do redeem themselves somewhat and I feel a little heart of darkness peeking out of the shadows not to mention the soundtrack is pretty cool and adds that little extra something. Overall I thought the length of the game was good, I find games like this can overstay their welcome and others can just have ridiculously short campaigns and just pack them full of really tedious padding and fetch quests. I’m not saying this game ticked all the boxes for me but I certainly don’t regret buying it, I just hope the next instalment puts more emphasis on story and character development, rather than gun paint jobs.

  Pros; The game is by no other words absolutely beautiful, the visuals are stunning and are juxtaposed masterfully with the brutality of the animals and people that inhabit the island, which literally brings the island to life. Cons; The storyline is a bit hit and miss and the introduction is a joke, the characters fall a little flat and after all the hype around Vaas, I think he ends up sounding like a nutter at a bus stop talking to his shoes. I just think the game set out to make a point that it couldn't decide on.

Grand Theft Argument

There are some entities that cannot be actors. These include taxonic collectives such as ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘white people’, ‘black people’, etc; social classes; ‘society’ and ‘the state’;  and objects such as money, or written materials, natural disasters, diseases and so on.

-          Tim Owen (Social Theory and Human Biotechnology 2009)

A game is not a person; it doesn’t think, it doesn’t make choices, it doesn’t necessarily pose arguments.  Any arguments it might pose or are injected in by the designers are subjective and open to interpretation. It’s not an actor, it doesn’t vote, it doesn’t get drunk and convince you that public urination is a good idea, it doesn’t knock on your door and ask you very politely to believe a load of nonsense in an inoffensive tone which makes it more annoying because it makes it hard to get mad at them because they seem so nice and then you think ‘maybe I could be that happy and nice if I believed a load of rubbish’.

A lot of controversy was raised around Grand Theft Auto 4 because you could hire prostitutes and then kill them after the virtual sex and get your money back. Obviously if this happened in real life this would be a heinous crime but in a game it’s purely logical; you paid money for a ‘virtual’ service that didn’t really benefit you, the point of the game and being a criminal is money so why shouldn’t you kill to get your money back? It seems nonsensical to play a criminal and then find yourself repulsed when they commit a crime. Does the life of one virtual prostitute have more meaning than the virtual money in a video game? I don’t know about you but when I play GTA I don’t feel the need to follow the speed limit, because it’s a waste of time, so why should I obey any other laws in a virtual world centred around crime?

 The police in the game don't chase you if you drive on the pavement as long as you don’t run too many grannies over and even then you can just keep driving and even if you get caught you just get fined and get your guns taken away and if you die you go to hospital and have to pay a bill. This is something I’m doing in private, it doesn’t hurt anyone, if I want to run over virtual grannies in the comfort of my own home, that’s my business and if John Stuart Mill were alive he would agree with me.

    “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”  ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

GTA isn’t bad, it’s the devil that doesn't make you do anything, you chose to buy the game, you chose to play it, you could have put down the controller at any time but you didn't  GTA didn't make you do anything it just gives the freedom to do everything, the game isn't necessarily immoral, it’s just amoral or misanthropic, simply put; it just doesn't give a shit. It doesn't make you kill prostitutes after ‘employing their services’ that idea was one born of the capitalist ideal of having something for nothing, which you brought into the game with you. Her virtual life meant less to you than the price of her service, which no one can fault you for because she wasn't real.

“Games don’t pose arguments, they present systems with which to interact”
 Chris Dahlen (video game critic)

 GTA isn't the bible, it isn’t telling you how to live, in fact its doing the opposite and that’s why it’s controversial, because it lets you do whatever you want. It only failed in my opinion because it tried to imitate real life by splicing other mediums into it. I don’t play games to watch tv, I watch tv to watch tv. It lost sight of the point of games to pastiche life rather than mimic life, because if we liked life that much we would just live it rather than play a game, so I think it got lost a little up its own arse and forgot that games are about fun and realism is just the canvas which we paint red.