A specific beauty that platformers can have that can’t be had anywhere else.

I keep coming back to this, thank you for it 🙂 They are incomparable. Thinking about the seasons might make a game about the seasons more interesting, more beautiful, but perhaps that can still only enhance the unique beauty of that platformer as a platformer. A wine pairing. It’s slippery, but I feel somewhat closer to the idea of “What can a game convey that nothing else can?” It’s not a cheap pithy statement like ‘games are interactive and other art isn’t!’ but a bottomless truth, made out of infinite patterns.

I have a bit of a problem. I don’t think that platformers are as beautiful as the seasons, or even latte art.

On one hand, I feel like I’ve found so much other beauty in the world that I can’t help but see jumping around in videogames as worthless by comparison.

Oil paintings are not as beautiful as the seasons. That’s why we end up with pointillism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. A realist oil painting of a landscape is usually not going to convey the “awe” or “beauty” that the painter experienced at the landscape. If an oil painting ends up being “as or more beautiful” than the thing it is a painting of, it is probably going to be the beauty of oil painting. A specific beauty that oil paintings can have that can’t be had anywhere else.

object -> subject -> expression

There is a thing, some phenomena, a collection of photons travelling at a certain wavelength, in air that is vibrating just so, at just such a temperature. Then there are the human sense organs, which interpret these signals, and here we may find experiences called “beauty” or “awe”. Then the human leaves, and carries that information in their brain. When they want to “express” this, they find words fail to transmit the experience. A photograph also fails to transmit this experience. Even bringing a person to the exact place at the exact right moment may fail to transmit the experience.

So, I reject comparing videogames to a summer’s day! I reject it as meaningless. I do not understand the statement “I don’t think that platformers are as beautiful as the seasons”. What could this possibly mean?

I will attempt to though! Maybe it means, “living and walking around outside and breathing the cool air, or appreciating the colours of nature is more inspiring, more awesome, than playing platformers. Platformers don’t warm my skin, they don’t impress upon me the awesome machinery of nature, they don’t make my cheeks go all rosy. When I drive a car around the city or go for a walk in the park, it makes me want to make art! But when I play platformers it doesn’t make me want to make art. It seems bland in comparison.” OK but look:

“living and walking around outside and breathing the cool air, or appreciating the colours of nature is more inspiring, more awesome, than appreciating paintings. Paintings don’t warm my skin, they don’t impress upon me the awesome machinery of nature, they don’t make my cheeks go all rosy. When I drive a car around the city or go for a walk in the park, it makes me want to make art! But when I appreciate paintings it doesn’t make me want to make art. It seems bland in comparison.”

Admittedly, appreciating paintings or platformers does sometimes make me want to paint paintings or make platformers, but I think it’s not the same mode as when experiencing nature makes me want to paint paintings or make platformers. You experience nature, or love, or hate, but you often only appreciate films, or books, or videogames.

I like your conclusion though, I like the idea of droqen as the Jermaine of platformers. You’ve played enough of them that they’ve lost their meaning, they’ve come apart, playing them no longer makes you want to make them. That’s fine! But you cannot conclude from this that platformers as less beautiful than seasons because you can’t put them on a metric together at all.

I think!