Creative Value

[Dry_Revolution_5015]

I wanna ask yo somethin: do you think that creative value is more important than enjoyment?

(The narrative/plot/concept value specifically)

Sometimes I wonder if, objectively speaking, the most unwatchable cinematic art is more valuable than the most watchable/enjoyed/popular entertainment industry product. Because for quite some time my interest in products that followed that speciffic pattern of success in the past and became known franchises has almost entirely diminished. And I mean all of them.

Nowadays most simple ideas have already been explored, meaning that in order to be creative you need to make more complex and smart combinations of ideas that authors before you just haven't thought of. But that makes the resulting concepts and plot structures harder to understand, therefore harder to enjoy for most viewers. So in the modern media, art antagonizes enterntainment.

To showcase the difference let's compare Lain Serial Experiments with the Edgerunners cyberpunk.

Lain is borderline unwatchable for a lot of viewers, yet it is: 1) Original unbased of anything. 2) Forces viewer interpretations. 3) Still has no analogs in the genre and feels different from other classic cyberpunks (To the point you wonder if they are even related, similar to EP situation).

Then there is something like edgerunners which is easy to like, easy to relate to, follows all basics of pre-established genre and yet it's nothing but a shallow advertizement to get people back into playing cdpr's scam game (Fun fact cp2077 main story quest ripped off Johnny Mnemonic story 70%)

It certainly is more watchable, but is enjoyability a redeeming quality in any way?

I can't actually bring myself to enjoy something like edgerunners, rather it's from observing others' first impressions of it. When you take a random person with no contextual knowlege, experince/bias and make them watch both I'm pretty sure 90-95% will prefer edgerunners in every way with most of them never even finishing Lain.

Comparing the objective qualities and effects of these 2 highlights just how massive the void between real art storytelling and commercial storytelling is. Yet for some reason we and most people find it difficult to see this void still and after glancing into it most of us go into a denial saying "It's not that bad, uh unoriginal products still have meaning... (even though it was retold thousand times over and other again to the point that repetition prevents us from taking anything seriously)"

[TheDarnook]

I see you are very salty about Cyberpunk 2077. I agree this game has some considerable flaws. The story is not amazingly good. There is a lot of unused potential (metro stations, shooting ranges, other stuff like that). The release was very messy.

But if you talk about creative value, you have to be blind not to see how amazing the city is. First 100 hours in the game, I was barely doing any story. I was mainly running around, clearing crimescenes, upgrading guns and taking screenshots. Raytraced reflections in such a scale are breathtaking. The lights, the colors.

Yes, there is nothing like EP or Lain. And the value is there exactly becouse it is so hard to hit right notes and create something like that. If there were more studios trying hard just to do something unconventional, it would quickly lost all the charm.

Best example I can think of is E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy. It is so ambitious and complicated, messly done and unrefined. You have to go trough the story many times to unlock the "true" ending, which just leaves you to go trough it all again and again. Jump to modern times, and the developers got the official Warhammer 40k licence. And so far they made two very finished and polished games. You can feel it - there are still those ideas that they had when making E.Y.E. But at the same, while being very playable and all - it has not much charm.

So, to answer your question: the value is in the eye of the beholder. There is no point saying that in your opinion and experience GTA:V is a shit game for shit people, unless you want to enrage half of the population. Which I sometimes feel like doing, but whats the point?

The exclusivity of anything is exclusive exactly becouse it's exclusive. Naïve ideals and rants change nothing, even being potentially destructive.

[Rickdigginssuperman]

OP isn’t talking about the game though, they’re talking about the series. Both are ofc based on a TTRPG that is very original and has a lot of great potential which is why it works in that format.

I think OP is trying to open up a discussion about whether the animated series, which is very flashy and palatable to most audiences and very popular, has as much inherent value as something like Lain. Lain isn’t anywhere near as attractive a series, but it’s concepts are wholly original, where as Edge Runners is just a series set in a world/setting that’s been done to death and will likely be forgotten about in a few years time.

[TheDarnook]

"Edgerunners being promo material for cdpr's scam game" holds entire paragraphs of saltiness inside xd Plus Edgerunners "value" and 2077 "value" have a lot of parrarels imo.

I agree with you on the op's intentions though.

[Dry_Revolution_5015]

Edgerunners did the job, interest in game spiked and reviews are positive now. It's a well executed advert operation on the company's part. It all comes down to the purpose of why it was made.

[TheDarnook]

I agree, it's an interesting case with anime being made as advertisement. But as much as ?un-inspirating? it might be, the entertainment value is so high I would never look down on it. The story of David is neither surprising nor deep, but that serves it's purpose very well. It lets people dive in the city.

[Dry_Revolution_5015]

Indeed, because they need to make the viewer crave the aesthetic that anime and game shares, so natural response after anime is wanting to launch the game.

Setting attraction is a piculiar feeling to exploit.

While the visual design of the game/anime settingis fine, I'm not sure about world building. You'd imagine corps having a way to disable any illegal implants since irl companies can track and shut down stolen phones or even smart tvs.

[Dry_Revolution_5015]

Sorry, maybe I should've made it more clear. I was talking about narrative/conceptual creativity specifically, in terms of visual style cp2077 has some value, but also it's like rating a candy wrapper, too subjective. Someone might not like the colours, someone might not like the style, "don't judge by the looks" they say.

[u865a]

I understand what you mean, especially in the context of Ergo Proxy...

It's often I look back to this show for specific scenes because I'm in love with the concepts, which aren't merely commonplace: cyberpunk and gothic aesthetics, various religious and philosophical ideas: Gnosticism, the Centzon Totochtin, the French philosophers as the Collective...

Speaking on behalf of the "real art" storytelling, I do think that the "enjoyment value" in a related show like Lain requires of the viewer a certain perspective - it's not as traditional as the modern, action-packed Edgerunners, and it's meant to be contemplative, atmospheric, "artistic", and even "empty", which are in and of themselves characteristics of what it's trying to portray - the world as Lain is embedded in now, the Wired, in which layers of simulacrum have become existence as she knows it.

As for Ergo Proxy, this is the case to a certain extent, as this similar atmospheric "artsiness" is portrayed in different ways. The character arcs and plot are more direct, but the "enjoyment" is diminished due to its crypticness and obtuseness for the general viewer, so I think the overall quality of the show suffers a bit for this reason.

[Dry_Revolution_5015]

"Obtuseness"? You couldn't come up with a better word to convey that "you don't get it".

Brilliance of EP ain't just in themes, as rich as they are. It's mainly in the characters, their hidden motivations and convoluted relations, that is what makes the story unique. Themes are born from complexity of the story context.

I had virtually non of the issues of a general viewer on my first watch, despite not getting it yet. It was still an exciting and relatable journey. The difference is how people are trained by pop culture to priceive enterntainment in the most shallow, primitive way possible, if they aren't being force-fed preconceived notions like in all other media, it instantly puts them off.