Post by Cheeseness in Voluntary categorisation by commercial vs artistic

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For better or worse, I feel like most creators (especially in games, where the medium never really had a significant period of existence before it became hyper commercialised) are likely to object to the notion of those being mutually exclusive. That's mostly because there's a sense that you can't do the former and be sustainable without embracing the latter.

In my mind, that further highlights why there's value in some kind of distinction that helps normalise/signal making stuff without the intent to squeeze every sale possible out of it, but my perspectives rarely align with everybody else's (as we can see from other replies, many people are fixating on the word "artistic" rather than the concept itself).

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DStecks6 years ago(+1)

The issue isn't people being defensive Because Games, it's that there is a massive gulf between games that can be classified as purely commercial and games that can be classified as purely artistic. Just because you can point to games like Call of Duty or Gone Home that fit very neatly into one category, that doesn't change the fact that many games, maybe even most games, especially on itch.io, are an awkward fit for either.

Where would you class Hyper Light Drifter? Or Pillars of Eternity? Or Dark Souls? Or Monument Valley? Where would you class something like a basic flash game, where there's no serious artistic intent, but no possibility of making money? Is there anything coherent in calling Mystery of Time and Space a commercial game?

I get that sometimes you're really just looking for games with serious artistic intent, or games that are mindless time-wasters, but what you're proposing is that somehow all games be categorized into a binary classification that immediately forecloses on any room for nuance.

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Fenreliania6 years ago

Hyper Light Drifter, Pillars of Eternity, and Dark Souls are all commercial, what? They're made to be enjoyable, playable games that give you a certain number of hours of entertainment that you want to pay money for. Monument Valley is still more towards commercial than artistic, but it could go in both because as I've said a dozen times in this thread, it's not mutually exclusive. Flash games? Well if they're not trying to be commercial games, if they're not intending to get your attention and get you to play them for the fun of it and entertain you, then they're artistic. It's not about whether something has "artistic merit" or whatever BS arbitrary measurement someone wants to try and put on it, when it comes down to it, it's about whether a game is trying to be commercially viable or not. But I thought that would be a more confusing way to phrase things because I figured people would get less hung up on commercial vs artistic than commercial vs non-commercial.

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DStecks6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Your initial post did not say that you can have both, and your opening paragraph explicitly states that you think these two are in direct conflict. When I made this post I did not see your post where you elucidated that in your proposal they would not be mutually exclusive.

If the system works in this way, then I've got no strong philosophical objection to it. My only suggestion would be to have "neither" as an option in addition to "both", since I think trashgames would pretty comfortably fit in that category.

At this point my real critique would be that I don't know how effective it would be at addressing the problem you're trying to address. The artgames tag already exists, so if the problem is that you're having a hard time finding art games, then how would adding a different way to tag your game as an artgame fix the problem that people aren't tagging their artgames as artgames?

And what about the backlog? The majority of content on any free-to-upload platform is going to be hit-and-run uploads, stuff that the original creators are no longer maintaining, so probably the vast majority of games released before the new feature is introduced will never be updated to use it.

I'm having a hard time understanding what the problem even is that you're trying to address.

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Fenreliania6 years ago

My bad, I've edited the post to better reflect that point.

As for the problem I'm trying to address and how this would help, as I and others have said in here, trying to find games that are trying to be commercially viable and entertaining vs games that are explicitly non-commercial and experimental is difficult. Yes I could use the artgames tag but 1) it's a vague enough term that many games that are non-commercial don't fit into it, or are on the blurry edges, and 2) it's not prominently displayed anywhere - you'd effectively need to know about it to use it, and 3) You can't negate tags in the itch search, so you can't filter out the games that do know about the tag and have decided they fit in that category if you're looking for commercial games.

By making the tags prominent and official, it makes it significantly easier for a newcomer to find a jumping off point and funnel down to the games they actually want, instead of meeting resistance when they just want a fun FPS and have to wade through a ton of 7DFPS jam games, and vice versa.

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Cheeseness6 years ago (2 edits)

I have no idea what "The issue isn't people being defensive Because Games" means, but I'm not so sure that you're grocking the angle that I am coming from (and what I interpret as the concept that Fenreliania is putting forward). As a creator, I have interests in being better able to signal which of my projects I've developed/released with the intention of them being "commercially viable", and which I'm just open to letting people pay me for. As a player, I'm interested in that too, though I'm more interested in individual developers' views of their own works than I am in any rules or systems.

Asking where lines should be drawn, and as I said, whether something objectively has artistic merit or intent isn't relevant - my hope was to highlight that we're not talking about a sliding scale from "commercialised" to "artistic" here...

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