- cross-posted to:
- music
- cross-posted to:
- music
Write me 1500 words on how 1999's Homeworld and 2001's Halo:CE, having similar overall settings and plot structures, used their groundbreaking scores to tell very different stories.
Then I'll accord you the right to have an opinion about... idk... Secrets of the Magic Crystal.
Track in link is the choral version of Samuel Barber's Angus Dei - Adagio for Stings as prepared for Homeworld. Arguably one of the most iconic tracks in the history of gaming. Gamers of a certain age will still feel their spine tingle and their throat close up...
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It's art because it's a thing crafted by a human to convey emotion
"is it art" is the most substanceless question you can ask about anything made by human hands, "is it good art" is far more interesting
This isn't even a complete paragraph. Also, punctuation. Get outta here!
I am sorry I did not conform to MLA standards, here is my bibliography:
spoiler
deez nuts :PIGPOOPBALLS:
the Homeworld remastered collection is 3 bucks on steam rn folks :dean-smile:
They're getting us ready for 3
Also the remastered ones are beautiful, but I think lose some of the mechanics in the originals (they had to basically totally remake 1 because the source code was lost).
They also can't remaster Emergence/Cataclysm for the same reason, but because it was so vastly different from 2 it can't even be attempted without a total ground up rebuild.
Well you see, Homeworld was about the victims of an omnicidal religious cult trying to rebuild after a disaster, while Halo was propaganda produced by an omnicidal religious cult (America) that glorified the war they were fighting at that moment.
By all accounts, the ancient Higarans did have it coming. Apparently whatever they did when they ruled the galaxy was so heinous that the galactic community considered perpetual exile to a backwater shithole to be the merciful option.
This is one of my favorite elements of the story in Homeworld that isn't on the surface. Really made me think about perspectives in history as a wee lad trying to understand the middle east during the bush era. Whatever their past was, I was on the contemporary Higaran's side, because I'd gone through loss and displacement with them. Made the universe of Homeworld seem that much more real to me back then.
Yeah I remember cracking open the box and reading the manual (really dating myself here) and seeing all the deep lore about the Kiithid and history of Kharak only to see the whole planet go down in flames by mission 3.
Relic really put their heart and soul into world building for HW1 and it shows. Such as shame that they basically gave up doing that for HW2 and we got "uhhhh the Vagyr are... baddies from... somewhere... and they want... ummm.... the magic hyperspace core for... reasons."
I started with Homeworld 2, loved it, and had no idea at first how much sloppier the story was compared to the first one.
HW2 is still a great game in many ways, single player balance issues aside.
Personally I felt like the HW2 story was a lot more hand-wavey and mystical whereas HW's story felt a little mystical only in the sense that your whole people are completely out of your depth regarding galactic history.
This is the closest to an actual answer, though. Come on, what about the music? Two games, similar settings, similar themes, scores unlike anything else in gaming. But there's more to it than that. Come on.
Game is art. Too bad the artform is largely reactionary and creatively bankrupt, making it reactionary art. At best, you have select games that are progressive. And to counter this, I can point to entire genres (H-games, gacha bulllshit, war crime simulators) that are completely irredeemable. I think having an entire game genre that preys upon and financially ruins people with addictive personalities is completely fucked. When's the last time you've heard a song or a movie materially ruin someone's life like a gacha game?
Beyond the irredeemably reactionary genres, they are plenty of fascist and reactionary games as well. But the reverse is completely untrue: there's no such thing as a revolutionary game. The closest is probably Thatcher's Techbase or Fursan al-Aqsa. I do not know any other artform that simultaneously has irredeemably reactionary genres without revolutionary genres to at least balance things out. Where's the game equivalent of constructivism or socialist realism? When even an otherwise good game like Stardew Valley peddles in warcrime apologia despite having no reason to do so whatsoever, I knew I need to begin divesting in this crappy artform.
Let's take painting as an example. Reactionary paintings include loli shit and fascist propaganda from fascist regimes like Nazi Germany and cringey online communities like /pol/. Revolutionary paintings include social realist paintings and art made during the Cultural Revolution. You could argue that the reactionary paintings outnumber the revolutionary paintings, but there's at least something. There's reactionary and revolutionary (and everything else in between) paintings being painted everyday. Games have nothing. It's not the fact that reactionary games exist (we live in a reactionary society, which means most art that comes from that society, games included, will be reactionary), but it's the complete absence of revolutionary games that cause me to give up on the genre.
Besides painting, let's consider another artform: poetry. I could think of plenty of revolutionary poems, poems written by Mao and Ho, poems written by Black Panthers like Huey Newton or Assata Shakur, poems written by Palestinians who yearn for the destruction of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine. If anything, it's to poetry's credit that I can't think of reactionary poems, certainly not reactionary poem genres. I guess there's that unfortunate poem by Lovecraft called "On the Creation of N-words." When I think of a reactionary poem, I think of some medieval romance that shits on the peasantry and sucks off the king.
Revolutionary paintings include social realist paintings and art made during the Cultural Revolution
If that's your definition of revolutionary art then the lack of revolutionary video games is purely an accident of history. Games have barely existed for a couple decades, and they've only had pretentions of artistry for about half of their history. There has never been a cultural revolution to make games during, or a proletarian government finding the creation of games - unless there are examples in North Korea or Vietnam that I'm unaware of - but eventually there will be, and your thesis will be shattered like all capitalist realist thought.
your thesis will be shattered like all capitalist realist thought.
You can wait for the one (1) revolutionary game to finally appear in your lifetime, or you can find something better to do with your time.
I'm sure revolutionary orgs require prospective members to play Tetris before they can become full-time cadre.
Vietnam developer Emobi Games produced a military shooter about the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Notably, aside from the subject, it looks like a well-made CoD rip off circa 2005. Whether or not clicking interchangeable human shapes to make their heads explode is Radical Art is highly dependent on set dressing.
Games have barely existed for a couple decades, and they’ve only had pretentions of artistry for about half of their history.
What's the art definition here. If I go by 1972s pong as the starting date for video games and go halfway up to now I land at 1997 which seems way later than when games introduced more than absolutely barebones stories (Secret of Monkey Island came out 7 years earlier) but way to soon before we enter the video games are art (they are movies with interactivity) thing that plagues us to this day
I don’t believe that revolutionary games don’t exist - or, to be more accurate, I don’t believe that revolutionary games can’t exist.
I feel like, especially in the poetry section, that everything cited has been filtered by time. I’m 100% positive reactionary poetry does exist, it’s just not something my disabled, feminist, literature professor would have taught me.
Not to say that your mass market, “triple aye” game isn’t lib, reactionary, or outright fascist, I just feel that those politics are picked up and communicated because of the means by which those games were produced, and not because the entire medium is reactionary.
No artform is inherently reactionary because art as a superstructure reflects the economic base in which it is created. The problem with videogames that other artforms like poetry don't face is that videogames don't predate capitalism and not only do they not predate capitalism, they were developed during a particular stage of capitalism: neoliberalism. It also doesn't help that the two capitals of gaming development, the US and Japan, are two neoliberal post-industrial societies where their capitalist subjects have fully internalize capitalist realism or that people with the skillset needed to develop videogames come from labor aristocrat or petty bourgeois backgrounds or that developing a videogame requires significant amount of time and capital that most proles do not have access to. All of this casts a dark shadow over the artform.
My divestment from gaming is more of the realization that in the time it takes to finally play the one (1) revolutionary game, I could've read every single one of Mao's and Ho's and Newton's and Shakur's poetry and then some. This doesn't mean that I've stopped playing videogames (gaming while listening to a podcast or an audiobook is a killer combo). And if a socialist game dev wants to develop the first revolutionary game, they should by all means do so.
preparing my 1500 words defending H games but getting distracted by the research. here's what i have so far to tide you over
In 1992, Phillips InfoVision released The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe for the CDi.
This is only 402 words, less than a third of the required length. Get outta here!
H-games
there are a bunch of indie queer visual novels. Even straight up porn for lonely cishet dudes probably prevents rape.
w 1999’s Homeworld and 2001’s Halo:CE, having similar overall settings
:what-the-hell:
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I was just being concise.
Write me 1500 words on how 1999’s Homeworld and 2001’s Halo:CE, having similar overall settings and plot structures, used their groundbreaking scores to tell very different stories.
I'm kind of curious as to why the score is so important. I'd argue Homeworld has themes of being scrappy and rebuilding after your homeplanet apocalypsed (twice, basically) which it even ties into corresponding game dynamics while Halo has themes (garbage as they may be) of being the just cool super soldier for a quasi-fascistic regime and pulls that one off quite nicely.
Cheers but the question is weird. Trying to bisect or analyze a multimedial format via it's music specifically is such an odd approach to the question here. I don't think anybody objects to the idea that music or art design or anything is art, do they? But a book doesn't get better because it has cool cover art and a nice font.
Homeworld is great.
And of course who can forget Maria and Draco from FFVI
Owner of homeworld in 2000 when I could get a copy here.
Something expertly tugging at your heartstrings doesn’t make it art in the slightest.
No more than the latest marvel movie is art.
No more than the latest marvel movie is art.
They are. Art doesn't mean it's good. Something can be both art and garbage.
The point wasn’t that marvel movies aren’t art but that what we tend to call the trappings of art in video games is actually stagecraft, a process that has been almost universally treated as not art by every culture on earth.
Homeworld isn’t art because watching a spaceship come out of dry dock to adagio for strings makes you cry.
They played this song at FDR's funeral... That's how you know FDR was a true gamer.
