Re: ART vs. DRAMA

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>]

Nelson Zagalo wrote:

> > Why 'emotional'?  
> >    
>
> Because that is the big essence of Art, in my view.
>
>  
I'm more inclined to define ART as a cultural practice.

> > I do analyze and contemplate it.  
> >    
>
> You 'cognitivize' it and feel it.
>
>  
Are all feelings emotions?  Is confusion an emotion?  What about pain, 
or being hot, or cold, or weightless?  All emotions are feelings, but 
I'm not convinced that all feelings are emotions.  In the martial arts, 
for instance, often a feeling is a contact reflex.  If I feel your hand 
upon mine (and I don't want it there :-) I flip my hand over and strike 
you in the head without time to think or feel much of anything.  Yet 
adrenaline is pumping in a real fight, and that's a strong feeling.  
So's fear, or anger.  Fear and anger are definitely what I'd call emotions.

> > such as "beautiful," "ugly," 
> >    
>
> This labelling happens in your reasoning, which mixes your intellectual
> analyses plus your emotional feelings in order to arrive at a conclusion
> of the object you're facing.
>  
Yes, there's a mixing.  But what % is emotional, and what % is 
analytical?  Related question: to what extent do we impose value 
judgements, and to what extent are we content to avoid making value 
judgements?

> > Here, 'decoration' sounds like a label for 'bad', without having any 
> > more substance to it than that.  
> >    
>
> I'm not labelling it as bad, but as "decoration". To me this is
> different. Rocky V has good technical work done by good artisans. The
> problem is that they limited their work to that, artisanship. 
>
> You have a story that doesn't add anything new to the original story.
> Neither in terms of content and lesser in terms of form. The story is
> built on top of a too fragile conflict between the main characters,
> however in terms of maintaining viewer attention it's well done because
> technicians were good enough for that. The story keeps progressing in a
> very simple way, putting you waiting for things in order to maintain
> your focus, that never happens and so the cognitive change never occurs
> and the emotional comes to be very weak. This is what makes the big
> difference between the two movies.
>  
So IIUYC, the audience is not made to care about the characters.

Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.