{"id":103,"date":"2009-01-22T23:53:04","date_gmt":"2009-01-23T04:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/games\/?p=103"},"modified":"2013-09-26T14:39:10","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:39:10","slug":"what-do-video-games-leave-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/2009\/01\/22\/what-do-video-games-leave-out\/","title":{"rendered":"What do video games leave out?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Randy Smith\u2019s talk last night, Games are Art (and what to do about it)<\/em>, at Postmortem triggered a few thoughts I wanted to throw out there briefly. Here\u2019s the first one:<\/p>\n

In exploring the nature of art and different art forms, Randy looked to McCloud\u2019s Understanding Comics<\/a>\"\" to identify \u201cclosure\u201d (the interstitial space between frames) as a unique feature of the comic medium. He then posed the question of what made video games unique. It struck me that what each medium can be defined by what each one leaves out; for example, comic books\u2019 closures leave out what is between the frames \u2013 that is for the reader to fill in. Performance media cannot convey inner lives the way literature can (Wonder Years style voiceovers notwithstanding); it\u2019s for the actors to interpret that inner life and for the audience to infer it from their performances. Literature, for its part, leaves to the imagination how its characters look or sound, which generates that little bit of shock when a book is translated to film. (Harry Potter provides a great example: the movies\u2019 cast probably overrides the books\u2019 illustrations probably overrides Rowling\u2019s text).<\/p>\n

So my question is: what do video games leave out for the player to fill in? Or better: what is best<\/strong> for video games to leave out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randy Smith\u2019s talk last night, Games are Art (and what to do about it), at Postmortem triggered a few thoughts I wanted to throw out there briefly. Here\u2019s the first one: In exploring the nature of art and different art … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113393,2958],"tags":[905],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archival","category-theory","tag-art"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/games\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}