Really Great Art Because of How Great It Is - Ep. 14 of Intentionally Blank

[Music] so one problem with telling people facetiously to do things on our podcast is that sometimes they actually sometimes people do uh do you guys remember in our first or second episode when we said hey leave us episode suggestions episode like podcast title suggestions in the comments and then we realized we didn't have comments and suggested you write them on paper airplanes so a couple days ago a giant cardboard box full of paper airplanes was left on my porch and it looks like i got here and you've got a ton as well yes there's a bunch on my desk here i'm going to read you a portion of the letter that was in the box it says dear dan we love your new podcast and we actually like the current non-title which is ridiculous and yeah who would like that title calls their whole process into question but as you solicited names here are a few of the ones we came up with thanks for giving us a great few hours of work in brandon's warehouse parentheses yes we were still working and then it's signed by all of your warehouse workers and that's really funny to me because what you don't all know listening at home is that we record this in a branded warehouse and there are often people toiling in the background usually with the lights turned off uh because brandon basically runs a sweatshop it's it's horrible this isn't even the warehouse that they the one they're working on is not this one i assume it would have to be a different one in order to be a sweatshop because this one as mentioned before is a meat locker you actually the um aren't far off because we're getting air conditioning installed at the other one because we just bought the warehouse well at least it um and so it didn't have air conditioning it might now but uh it had not had air conditioning for uh quite a while so if the uh workers are listening over there uh i'm sorry about that blame carrick he's he's winking and crossing his fingers well he says that um so one uh the first of these paper airplanes is on a just a gargantuan like three or four foot piece of cardboard uh that i'm gonna unfold here i have not read any of these uh they've been at my house for a couple days but i left them unread so that we could do that for you so this is like a paper airplane the size of a small child yes maybe a mid-sized mid-sized child yes comfortable two-door child with okay whatever you call it a midsize child mid-size is a car other things can be mid-sized the only thing that is mid-sized as a car if you describe a child as mid-size that means it has four doors and good trunk space which is frankly a horrible thing to say about a child and you should be shamed whatever so uh we have uh the unfinished podcast okay uh half-baked musings uh they are pretty half-baked actually that might be giving us too much credit unsuccessful segue which props where it's due that's a killer title for this particular podcast except for the fact that i can't place spell segway which they spelled it correctly now they are smart and uh and that's why they gave this airplane to me and not to you because you would have read it unsuccessful seg i'd be like what is that um one of their suggestions is we maybe should be writing which is is that just mers podcast yeah i think yeah i should be writing i should be writing yeah and i shouldn't be because i am sitting here signing things for the people at the warehouse to send out uh and so i shouldn't be writing right now i should be doing this technically you are writing your name i am right over well it's not even really my name we should talk about signatures like my signature um did you do this when i first got a book deal i'm like i have to develop a signature and i like remember sitting it was at uh like a a church meeting like a you know a group meeting like a presidency meeting um and i was like hey what do you guys think of this uh this signature and i was like trying different versions of my name one of my friends saved the thing that i signed a whole bunch of times um and has it like hidden away somewhere i don't know for his children to sell or something like that here's brandon's name before it was brandon's name that's wonderful no i didn't actually do that uh for the first book uh i actually just signed my name just like i always said like for checks and things yeah yeah which is stupid uh and and for that reason that you don't necessarily want to give every stranger on the street an example of your legal signature and it was actually at it was dell howard at dark delicacies in burbank uh who had me when i was there for a signing he had me sign this big poster and i'd met him a few times and we know each other pretty well uh and so i signed to the poster and he said oh the whole big signature like i was your mom and that's when i realized oh you're right i should have a different signature mine is not as pictographic as yours it's still just dan wells but very stylized i like your signature thank you very much it fits the books you write right in some way it looks it looks like this signature on a ransom note people don't sign ransom notes i suppose but you know what i'm saying yeah um it's got these big wide letters and it's like it's very intentional but it's also very i know there's something unsettling about it it's not a pretty signature it's not an ugly signature it's an unsettling signature well thank you uh when you start off writing horror that is kind of the ballpark you try to play in uh the last name wells w-e-l-l-s there's a little tiny e and little tiny s and everything else is just very jagged risers and so i kind of leaned into that on it yeah for me let me ask you this actually before let's do it let's do it a what do they call that segway uh an unsuccessful segue segway um an unsuccessful sagui an unsuccessful sea um an unsuccessful siege do you think it's a big deal to hide your legal signature anymore half the documents i signed are signed electronically and i don't even you know they just say would you like to adopt this signature and sign and beyond that is it really that hard to find an example of someone's legal signature probably not does anyone checking any signature ever look and say okay is this signature right i mean i suppose when you're buying a house they do that weird thing where they're like let's hold up the signature make sure it matches and but i don't know if they do because uh i'm actually in the middle of buying a house right now we're buying a rental property and we just it was all digital we don't have to go in person no one's checking the things it's all just the docusign stuff i think that don't share your legal signature thing is like a holdover from ancient days and i didn't even know if it was a big deal then no but uh but it spooked me yeah like in korea they use tojongs the stamps um and that's your legal stamp and i'm like that's that makes as much sense as anything you keep that locked away in a safe deposit box but anybody could stamp that um so that would be very easy arguably much easier to fake i have seen some authors who have uh very stamp like signatures too uh because you know some people will do your name but stylized like i do some people do my name the little thing that you have yes which how would you describe yours uh so mine is a stylized version of my initials that just turned into a symbol um so you the artist formerly known as brandon sanderson yep uh so what happened is i used to have a signature where i did a big b and then the rest of my name kind of legible and then a big s and the rest of my name kind of legible um and over time that changed into big b scribble big s scribble um and then eventually i'm like the scribble is useless you can still see some leftovers of it in what i do but now i do a very stylized b it's three strokes um and then a nice flowing sort of that actually looks a little bit like a cursive s um over the top of one another and that became my symbol over probably about five years of signing um one piece of advice i was given that i really like is when you're developing a signature if you're worried you're gonna have to sign it a whole bunch of times develop one that moves your l or your arm not your wrist yeah that's smart so that's what this does it's something since each of them are essentially three strokes i can do it quickly it actually looks nicer than when i write out my signature because i do not have neat handwriting and so having this kind of symbol thing that replaces it uh is very appealing to me because i do not like how my handwriting looks um and i do not like how my name looks when i write it out well now you are saved from that with your little iconograph all right i'm gonna i'm gonna open one of these this person cheated because this is a boat that's a paper boat this is a paper boat uh so you know who you are that made a paper boat and perhaps a hat um and you're fired i don't know who they are they do uh a hundred years of brandon and dan is that better or worse than 100 years of solitude oh man i guess that depends on whether you're us or not uh i've got a killer one here okay you're gonna love this one two men one thought that also might be giving us too much credit that is far more thought than we actually have between us uh we write kids in space we do write kids in space both do right this is true has your kids in space ever actually been in space rather than in a spaceship um yes because he goes outside of the spaceship yeah and does like a kind of eva walk so there you go kids in space kids in space spencer climbs out of her ship she doesn't bring a space suit she's she's special she doesn't have to uh how about not enough dragons um yeah i have a lot of dragons in mine do you yeah zero g series okay yeah second books called dragon planet uh-huh i have dragons but they've never appeared on screen as dragons they've always been in another shape uh so i don't know uh i think maybe i'm definitely falling in the nominations where i expose uh my bad friendship uh which of your book series has dragons in it uh so dragon steel that you the that you read well yeah that one did yeah those characters are still published ones no those characters are still in the cosmere and they're showing up here and there uh it's just very like you don't even know who they are uh the reader doesn't right frost who's a main character in that one but you're not going to remember him because he's i guess he's not even no i i remember remember frost has been communicating with hoyd via letters in the stormlight archive in the epigraphs um koid calls him a reptile at one point is you saying this just now the first public confirmation that that character is a dragon no i have no idea i'm sorry maybe it's gonna be new to some people but yeah i haven't been able like all the fantasy tropes okay creature-wise and stuff i just haven't really done but dragons i couldn't let alone right yeah when i first started working on the cosmere i knew i was going to put them in uh spoiler of the nerd dumb jurassic park is a perfect film here's my thesis statement i would agree that jurassic park is a perfect film um indeed that is an excellent thesis statement i have watched jurassic park recently and watched jurassic world recently and wow the difference is stark and this is not to say that you know jurassic world like i don't have a problem with a lot of the things just in jurassic world other than they're just not brilliant right yeah spielberg like this whole crew of them spielberg and lucas and scorsese and all of them like that that started making films in the 60s and 70s their whole big thing was we're going to take pulp ideas and we're going to class them up we're going to dress them in a suit and tie and we're going to present them with artistic flourish to you um and like spielberg is really really really good at that and jurassic park is in my opinion his opus of that i mean jaws is too but he'd refined his stuff was his first big movie um jaws is excellent but if you look at jurassic park and you compare it to jurassic world and you say what is missing it's the spielberg it's the fact that he's able to work subtle nuance of character throughout the entire thing is the fact that he's able to work theme into it again very subtly um with this whole idea of reproduction and children and thriving and surviving and what does that all mean um the way that he lines up shots and i'm sure there's a cinematographer doing a lot of heavy lifting there as well yeah but just the way that spielberg puts all these pieces together makes a film that on paper is a monster movie and in actuality is just a magnificent opus of art and another person doing that makes a monster movie yeah so early on in uh jurassic park when they're in the helicopter flying towards the island my favorite one he has to put his seatbelt on and he picks him up and he has two female ends yep and just ties them together and makes it work yeah there is nothing that clever in any of the other jurassic park movies yeah and that sort of thing is all through yeah the uh the first jurassic everywhere in the first place uh it is so clever and so well filmed and the music is so perfect so yeah it is a perfect film and it's a perfect example of how to make something that is both kind of from these pulp roots um and mass broad appeal as well as being just really really great use of art um just i don't know if i can say it better than that it's a that's a shiny endorsement really really great brilliant great art because of how great it is yes it's excellent and it's excellent you know we never did the second half of our perfect movie episode but that's okay i've thought of like five more perfect movies since then so uh haven't we no we never did we just we did like two or three each okay and that's all we got oh man we're gonna have to do more perfect movies then here somebody just this isn't even an airplane or a boat it's just a crumpled up people comfortable piece of paper this would be hilarious but brandon's here [Laughter] the shots fired a podcast title or is that someone who was about to write something funny and then you walked into the warehouse oh man in your three-piece suit that's right and someone asked for pudding and you're like no what do you think i am made of money no more coal for you actually extra cold because it's too hot in here we need to get rid of this coal artificially all right the room uh we just work here uh this one literally does not have anything on it so intentionally blank that person is a genius oh man except for the fact that intentionally blank is a terrible podcast absolutely awful but uh that is okay gold star for you um dan and brandon's guide to the apocalypse uh good title i feel you've we've tried apocalypse uh several times in book titles and uh it is uh still an ongoing experiment whether apocalypse is a book title is a viable thing for us did you manage to get apocalypse edition on yours uh it's it's on the title page but it's not on the cover okay yeah so uh and it it's not that they were worried about it legally we we had a discussion about that the the book is extreme makeover apocalypse edition which is very clearly a joke on extreme makeover home edition right and legally they're like nope we're cool our concern is that uh the audience would pick it up and and think that it was that they had missed a previous edition that there was a extreme makeover normal edition and they're like well where can i get that one i don't want to buy the apocalypse edition yeah what do you think on that i don't know i've always thought that was ridiculous and then a few weeks ago i was telling some friends that story and one of them was like yeah i 100 would have been confused by that and had would have spent the last several years trying to find the normal edition of the book so why in america the exact same reasoning why the final empire is cut off of mistborn uh so in the uk for those who don't know i wrote a book called mistborn final empire and it's a trilogy of three mistborn novels and the first book title is all the people out there who don't know your books and yet are listening to this podcast there are one or two there always are there's like a spouse who's been forced to listen to this or there's someone who was clicked random somehow and ended up with a podcast true um or there's some jerk who's like on the subway just listening out loud and everyone in the yep dear everyone else in that subway car mistborn the final empire was a trilogy dear everyone else in that subway car we're sorry we apologize that you have to listen to us um and even though we are calling it intentionally blank for now we are not very good at not saying things um it was called mistborn the final empire the final empire was the title just like kind of a new hope is the title for episode four um i say that questioningly though it really is sort of uh retroactively is but uh tor was like we think people are thinking this is the last book of the series because it says the final empire and we think that it should just be mistborn and i was fine with that i'm like ah again no one calls star wars uh a new hope except when they want to differentiate it from other films um and so for that very same reason i have a book title alter as well well uh so here's another title that's going to confuse the rest of the people in the subway car hey guys thanks for still listening uh this week title is not a writing excuses spin-off brandon and i uh have another podcast this is actually our second one the first one is one that we share uh the two of us with howard taylor and mary robinette kowal and various co-hosts and various other co-hosts and uh special guest stars and things we've been doing that for 13 years and it won a hugo it did and a bunch of parsec awards i won a hugo i think i told this story on the podcast here want a hugo for my dumb brother right yeah i think that's how you phrased it too yeah [Music] that jordo i have the tea and there's a very nice illustration of the boba tea that we had in a previous episode uh much better done than the logo for said boba tea location um thank you very much i think it would be weird to call it i have the t when that happened on one podcast and you know when we're searching for something more iconic more covering all the different various topics that we might i think that the mothers everything we have uh here's a sp okay so wait speaking of tea you mentioned the boba tea yep which reminds me that we have another food heist to talk about food heist food heist we need to get a food heist jingle we need something we need a food heist jingle get on that jingle man um so this was uh this was in the news recently because i believe the guy was either arrested or actually convicted uh but it was pistachios they're worth a lot they're worth a lot actually um a ton of money uh nuts are big money and as the article i read so eloquently put it pistachios do not have serial numbers on them [Laughter] and so there was a guy who stole 42 000 pounds of pistachios by setting up a fake trucking company he set up a fake company he got hired to do this job and then he basically just drove the trucks to a different warehouse repackaged them and sold them to a distributor forty two thousand forty two thousand pounds that's twenty one tons of money not just a ton of money twenty one ton of the uh the pistachio industry in california is a 5.2 billion dollar industry man which is why food heists are so delightful to me because they seem ridiculous but there's so much money in them and so now i just want like every time i hear a food heist i'm like i want to do that movie of the guy who steals for 2 000 pounds of pistachios by pretending to be a trucker i finally watched um the fast and the furious like where they started to be good you're speaking of heist which one was so i had seen fast from furious one long time ago um and i had heard that two through four are kind of a chore depending on who you talk to some people like them but the uh audience and critique critic ratings are not uh terribly high on those and so i never got around to the rest of series and someone said this isn't the sort of series you have to do your homework on they drive cars quickly and they're a family and i'm like you know you're right let's watch the good ones so i watched fast five and it was ludicrously stupid in all the right ways i really enjoyed it it was really i i have this thing where i i really like vin diesel because he tries so hard yeah right like diesel doesn't get the respect he deserves i think he's not a brilliant actor but he gives it his all and it is charming to watch how seriously he takes this movie and it actually makes the whole thing work because if these movies were more campy than they are i don't think they'd work at all at least the one i once i have seen instead it's very serious also our cars are flying now and we're towing a giant safe with two cars don't think about it and so yeah we watched it at midnight uh it was started at like 11. 11 until 1 o'clock so i was watching a thing today uh there's a really cool series on youtube called stuntman react oh yes i've seen it seen that they talk about the the safe from fast five and literally there's that safe is just built around a truck and there's a guy inside driving the truck um and it's just a super bare bones thing that looks like a safe that's a really smart idea right like i i would have probably mistakenly thought they just put it on wheels but of course that's not going to go where you want it to go and it looks very real it's not cg yeah and it's all practical effects that whole sequence was just wonderful um i i love it when people are that creative with their stupidity if that makes sense um and people who take silly things seriously yes produce wonderful art yes and so uh i'm excited after the next uh two writing groups not this week but next week and the week after probably we're going to watch six and seven which i hear are both quite good as well and the same i just watched seven mm-hmm and uh while i did not love it there were definitely stunts in it that i thought yeah that's awesome it has the highest uh of the scores really um yeah seven does uh but yeah the thing for me is i love seeing things i've never seen before when you watch a lot of movies when you read a lot of books you kind of get in this place where you're like yeah i've i've seen this or i recognize all the ingredients of this i know where this came from right and there's a bit in fast and furious seven where i'm like you know what i've never seen this before and that's really amazing to me you know this is i think a problem with criticism in general that isn't acknowledged enough uh as someone who is on both sides of that right getting critique and offering criticism i'm like a real youtuber now because i release like video essays and stuff it's yeah um and that's kind of what this podcast has turned into is kind of a criticism uh podcast in a lot of ways one issue is uh it's uh what i'll call the aragon problem right okay when aragon came out for to people for whom those you're talking about the book the book aragon yes uh the movie aragon is unwatchable without rift tracks um because i know what you're going to say and it is a great defense of the book and the movie is indefensible for people to whom these tropes were well trodden and well-worn aragon did very little for them um they picked up the book they're like i have seen this a billion times before i am not interested to people for whom those tropes and that was most mostly our generation right who grew up on star wars yeah because aragon is a bit of a remix on star wars and anne mccaffrey kind of a mash-up of a lot of those things for people to whom those tropes were brand new aragon was everything that star wars and anne mccaffrey was to me yeah um and star wars and mccaffrey were remixing things from before and so your experience as a critic directly influences you in ways that are not often i think acknowledged um a lot of film critics they watch a lot of movies because they want to offer you know critiques of these movies for people but then by very nature of doing it as much as they're doing it they stop being as reliable a um a source this happens to us too as they used to be at least for the general movie going public if you're you watch three movies a year the move three movies you want to see are going to be very different from the person who's like this movie is brilliant because it does everything different yeah um well see i'm going to disagree with you though on this first of all you're right but the fact that that is an unacknowledged aspect of criticism i disagree with okay completely because that is the number one critique leveled at critics okay oh you dumb out of touch people who are so bored by movies that real people like see i think that that critique is made but the nuance of why is not what's discussed because it's not that people go and they're like oh the critics are elitists who don't like you know normal things that people like but that is not getting the whole picture um anyone who watches maybe not anyone but a large number of people who watch that many films will have this natural sort of progression that happens to them and it becomes much more difficult to figure out what the average moviegoer or reader is going to enjoy for that reason which is interesting because part of our job at least my job you veer off into the more experimental more often than i do um part of my job is understanding what is going to connect and work with my audience without having that happen to me without throwing things away just because um not how about this let me phrase it this way not doing things that are new just to be new right um and which i do do on purpose pretty often yeah um and they're they're that's a valid reason to do new things right let's try this new thing and see how it works but um it's it's this aspect of criticism that i don't think we as critics talk about enough uh talk about enough and even audiences are like oh those critics are out of touch i don't think you're talking about why and how this works and what's going on with it and it how really we've talked about this before in the podcast before how genuinely difficult it is to try and look at something with a critical eye and say how well is it doing the thing it is trying to do and how can i suggest that it do that thing better um rather than what is this thing trying to do and how can i change it into being the thing that i think it should be yeah i always try to stay really my two rules of criticism when i critique something um our number one i'm usually not going to publicly review something i didn't like because i don't see any point like this this show we're gonna tear into things but like if i do a youtube review of a role-playing game or something if i hate it i'm just not going to review it yeah and that's something that i learned back when we did time wasters guide in college um but the other rule that i always try to follow is to think about who the audience is because different things are successful for different reasons for different audiences uh which is exactly what you're talking about if somebody is you know a movie that does not work for me at all but does work for somebody else that doesn't mean it's bad the fact that i dislike it doesn't make it bad it just means it wasn't really for me necessarily and i do believe that there is you know a possibility of find finding objective quality or objective lack of quality in art but i don't know how useful that is you know what i mean yeah i mean we've talked about plot holes before uh plot holes are something i think you can point to and say objectively this is not explained you can you can point that out say this is not explained viewers and readers might ask this question and probably will um but the leap that that actually makes the art worse is a leap that i'm not sure i'm willing to take in a lot of cases because explaining things has a cost in films and you can only explain so much and walking that fine line you have to leave some plot holes um and you try very hard to cover up the ones that people that are going to kick people out of the story and you try to ignore the ones that won't and that's an art of storytelling and so yes you can find objective you can be like objectively this has a plot hole but what does that do for you yeah well and that's why i dislike so many of the the youtube series about like everything wrong with this yes or realistic honest trailers or even the the movie pitch one that you that you told recommended um most of them seem to focus on refrigerator logic right this all works while you're watching it but then later when you're getting a snack out of the refrigerator you think wait a minute that scene doesn't actually make any sense now that i think about it well it doesn't have to make sense now it made sense at the time and you enjoyed it and that's kind of what its job was yeah um but the thing is doing the criticism like there are really good critiques out there that really dig in depth you can find them on youtube we've talked about some people do that that's really hard and it's not as entertaining to sit down and say all right we're gonna realistically look at the themes of the star wars movie or this the transformers movies like lindsay ellis did and we're going to break down the artistic intent and we're going to look at them and see how they artistically what they're trying to do and maybe what some flaws in those assumptions are and they're brilliant videos but they are not as youtube algorithm friendly as well let's talk about the plot holes that they missed in this let's just make fun of this popular movie everyone's going to click on that let's say i love the pitch meeting i love ryan george um i think that's his name um i i watch his channel and his other channel but i really like his other things better than his pitch meeting he he does these uh these little skits they'll be like the first person who invented restaurants and it's you know a guy being like all right you're going to come to my house and eat now they're like i i don't want to he's like no you're coming to my house to eat and you're going to pay me and it's just it's really funny kind of poking fun at human nature and things um awesome i really do like i like that i've seen one of those uh the the first people to get divorced i think it was or the first people to get married or maybe it was a series that had both of those it's always him and various incarnations of himself doing one person skits but i do let's not make this a total call out of all those things but that's entertainment like when i watch pitch meeting it's not criticism of the film i'm watching it because it's funny yeah um when i watch the lindsey ellis video i'm looking for in-depth criticism on of the film enlighten me on how to be better at storytelling for from a critical perspective well and for you know now that we've bashed on critics for a while i do want to put in that plug because i do find criticism really valuable if it is thoughtful academic criticism i think there's a lot to be gained from that sort of thing and i know that's not what you were saying is you know critics are all out of touch clearly uh but just for our audience and for those people on the subway um there's a lot of value in talking about what something does and how it does it uh that i that me as you know an english major and an artist i love that kind of stuff yeah i do too um and i think criticism is really important like it is what helps genres evolve and until we look seriously at things including you know our own art and whatnot we can't explore it completely i don't think um until there's that kind of external pressure and force picking at these things the the there's almost no sentence in the world that enrages me more than just turn your brain off and you'll enjoy this like i i know what they mean and i know that their intentions are good right and there are certainly things that i enjoy because they're dumb or because they're easy i talked about fast five yeah and that's that's fine but if your response is like if your only defense of something is don't think about it yeah it just irks me it gets under my skin well it has a wrong perspective i mean i've talked about how dumb that movie was but it was the type of dumb movie that takes an enormous amount of effort to project its dumbness onto the screen and when i say dumb i'm really getting at this idea of um it is playing to familiar tropes set pieces um it is it is not trying to have nuance it doesn't want to have nuance it wants to let you have a fun time and that's really difficult to do well just look at how many failed versions of this sort of blockbuster there are and you'll know that this is uh this takes an incredible amount of skill it's it's so hard to do that kind of crowd-pleasing stuff well um if you want to please a big enough crowd and fast and furious is like the seventh highest grossing film franchise of all time uh it's it's wildly good at what it does uh my favorite sentence my favorite bit of it of of wisdom about criticism is from roger ebert who i think is a brilliant writer and he said it doesn't matter what something's about only how it's about it and that is such a great encapsulation of why i like the fast and furious movies because it doesn't matter what they're doing on a certain artistic level what matters is how they're doing it how they are trying to engage the audience what they are trying to show and how they are trying to show it um and so i love that can we talk a little bit about the kind of um bad rap that ebert gets for his games or not art uh stance which let's point out that i disagree with him but for those who don't know there was a a big sort of stink that persisted on the internet uh centered around roger ebert in the years before he died where he was making the argument that games are not art well and more so that games cannot be art you are yeah games cannot be art um you are you're right like it's and this is one of these sort of he's making a pedantic argument um a much more pedantic argument than you think he's making because you hear that and you're like i have played games that are works of art his argument which again very pedantic is that those games contain brilliant pieces of art they contain writing and music and visuals and all these things that are art but the game mechanics he's saying are not uh the game checkers is not art you can make cool pieces out of the out of the checkerboard and that's art and again i think it's a pretty pedantic argument yeah um and i disagree with it i do think gang mechanics can be art they absolutely can be i think yeah yeah that that kind of argument uh is basically a way of saying i am old and i have not accepted this new thing yet see i don't think he is i think that's the misunderstanding i think that's what people are putting the words in his mouth he is not saying that at all i don't think that he's saying i don't think he's even intending to say it what he's saying is that the actual act of flipping a coin is not art the act that you take pushing a button is not art that the physical game if you read his essay the mechanics aren't art everything else about them is and a video game can be a wonderful artistic experience but the actual idea of pushing a button itself is not art that's what he's saying um that if you read that change yes even even if we accept that premise i think that at the root the root of that belief is that he just has not thought of it that way before and is unwilling to consider it which is a sign of i am old and have not accepted this new thing yet except again i'm playing devil's advocate he's talking about checkers and chess which he's played his entire life yeah he's experienced games a ton but that doesn't mean he's thought about them in a critical or artistic way right but i think saying he's an old man is dismissive of the argument is what i'm saying um now he's not willing to entertain this media form that is that is burgeoning and growing beyond its bounds totally i get what you're saying but my argument to him is not you don't get it you're an old man my argument is here are specific instances where actual game design choices not the things around it have increased my love of the artistic piece for instance here's an example with with uh with books i like it when the form of the book enhances your enjoyment of the story and then a simple case of this is sometimes you can put a line break a page break so you have to turn the page and then you get the the reveal right that is a little more artistic you can't really do that anymore with ebooks and not um but the the turn of a page in the akira comic for instance sakura where you get the blast the full page spread is a mechanical choice to make you turn that page and is absolutely artistic in its choice and i think ebert would agree that choosing when to slice a film in order to edit it that the editing is an art form itself um and i think making that argument would say yes the physical like choosing which medium you put the uh the thing on choosing where you cut it these are all parts of the art and in the same way choosing how you make people push the buttons i don't like quicktime events but tweak time events are absolutely an artistic choice the button pushes in there it changed the way you interact with the medium so the rules the actual things he's getting at where he's saying the rules themselves are not in that case they are because it is changing your your experience and how you interface and i think that in that case you do have a point because you can't do that as easily with chess you can't explain that you are constrained to move this piece at this one time because of an artistic decision and so his infant unfamiliar with it unfamiliarity with it is part of this but i think his argument is stronger than we give it credit for um and it's not just old man yells at cloud it is the person trying to make a really interesting but flawed argument about an art form that i wish people would do more often and that the internet didn't pile on them quite interesting well and that's definitely true it's very hard to discuss anything intelligently on the internet um i'm doing that right now i know oh wait intelligently intelligently right uh i would i don't know i would almost go as far as to say that your interpretation of his argument makes his argument pointlessly narrow but yes that's why we call it yeah which is why it's very pedantic and at that point it doesn't matter if he's right or wrong because it's so narrow that the answer doesn't matter um but at the same time we were talking earlier about like part of the value and criticism is that when you do the autopsy of the thing that's when you really get to understand it and he's doing an autopsy of this and saying all right what parts of of gaming is art the music definitely the visuals definitely what about it when you choose how often to push this button is that art and i think it's useful to think about i really liked reading his essays about this i thought they were really interesting reads despite how vigorously i disagreed with him um i love that he raised the issue well and that's something that we do got to say because uh you know now that we've been bashing on a dead man for his old argument um he is genuinely one of my favorite writers i think he's incredibly talented and very smart uh but he's wrong a lot oh yeah go read his look it up online because all his reviews are still online read his review of predator and it's so obvious that he actually really liked the movie he just thought it was dumb and then was kind of making fun of it because he thought he was supposed to he's kind of the read you get on it um and uh you know one of the critiques he makes of predator that i i know this essay well because i use it as an example a lot uh one of the critiques he makes is uh he gives the basic premise of the movie that a bunch of commandos go in the jungle and then get attacked by an alien and he says and that's the kind of thing that you would come up after a 12-minute brainstorming meeting you know handily ignoring the fact that nobody else had ever made that movie or used that premise ever before so clearly it's a little more original than he's giving it credit for predator is brilliant there's a really good video essay on predator i'm trying to remember that that's one i would call a perfect movie um who made this the uh um cause predator is a slasher film look up predators of slasher film producer adam uh and find me who made this one i'm gonna recommend this video essay because cool um but one of the things i love and i we talk about this a ton on writing excuses um is when genres are hiding as other genres right when you go to a movie and there is something hidden in in this movie um it's my my you know my favorite example is this idea of the underdog sports story popping up all over the place in movies um just with different things and um he or she the person who made this essay talks about the predator as a slasher film um where it follows all the strat slasher film tropes where it starts with um and it even sets you up with the same premise of it shows the manly men going on their mission at the beginning and they're successful they're super manly and then they get hunted one at a time putting them in the position of the usually teenagers often teenage girls who are getting murdered in a slasher film in exactly the same way um and exactly kind of the same dynamic and it is just a brilliant talk about how to transpose the tropes of one genre to another and do it in such a way that you can't even see it until you step back and do this sort of criticism and arnold is the final girl yeah he is and uh is it and there you know ironically there is a that you know the one woman in the entire movie does escape and shows up at the end so they have a technical final girl the thing about the final girl she gets let go because she's not she's not she's not worth hunting she's not yeah she's not in this story the predator says no you're not part of this story you the the the person who would in a normal slasher be the person who gets killed you know first probably not in you you aren't in this film because you aren't my prey um i am hunting these overly buff dudes who uh you know it's it's so cool um adam did you find that anywhere i didn't find a specific video uh entitled that i did find a post on reddit on the horror subaru saying is predator a slasher movie right uh and they have the top comment is arnold is my i don't know i don't know if you could make the argument that predator's not a slasher movie right like is that even an argument in the cinema world it's it's clearly a horror movie well it's clearly a person is setting up different expectations at the beginning which is one of the things i love about it i do need to point out just as my own personal brag that i have been to the set where they filmed predator uh because it's right outside of puerto vallarta um and it's awesome and i've been in one of the original helicopter props that is still there in the gym is pretty cool well i we can't find this um we'll find it if you can find which essay he's talking about write the url on a paper airplane and throw it into the air or leave it in the comment in r sanderson or in the youtube comments we do have we do have a reddit like the subreddit now so read it there um we've i one of these podcast titles is the podcast for our fans who don't write which i do think is maybe a good one uh because that is uh you know we have writing excuses where we talk about writing this one we're still talking about storytelling but i think from a very fannish yeah the idea perspective for this podcast is if you're not a writer but you do like listening to brandon dan bran and dandin and dan talking um then this is the podcast for you but not anymore today because we are done and we have no outro [Music]

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 42,986

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Id: Bbnoi8ORw4M

Length: 49min 35sec (2975 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021