You are assuming artistic omniscience (not to mention basic good taste) on the part of all video game visual design. The history of visual design in video games is littered with poor choices. You are also assuming more artistic intentionality in the choice of which user options to foreground than is really the case in practice. Most users, admittedly, tend to make the game uglier when they monkey around with post-processing software, but it is still eminently worthwhile for all of those cases where it tangibly improves the look of the game.
No, I'm not. There will still be good games and there will still be bad games. Good visual design, and poor visual design. But it is an act of basic respect to the creatives behind these works of art to appreciate them in the way they were intended. For a similar reason, I am against the colorization of black and white films. It has a profound effect on the way this art is consumed and interpreted.
Hmm, I see the distinction you're making and I understand where you're coming from, but I personally disagree. To me it's an all or nothing deal - either taking the product as intact as humanly possible or allowing for it to be absorbed in whatever way the audience prefers. Plus there are many mods that are less remixes and more overrides of the creator's intention, like mods that skip thematically fitting but perhaps annoying gameplay features, skip intros, and so on. There are many mods that do less for the game than a graphic filter does. And the way I see it, if I were to acknowledge that at the very least some mods are bad, then I feel like the next step would be discern which mods are good and which are bad...which starts getting iffy for me.
I don't understand the reason for this level of absolutism in saying that I must either choose between saying that works of art should be presented in the manner in which the creators intended them, or saying that derivative works can be created based on that work. Yes, there might be mods which remove intros and override the creators intention. That's why they aren't viewed as representative of the game in question, but rather a derivative piece based on the original that can be viewed alongside it, much as a collage would be or even a fanedit of a film. I think these are all separate issues than a visual filter which seems to exist solely to destroy the visual design or color palate of a game.
People will always change up the way a work is to fit their tastes better. Some will skip a few pages in a book, some will use TV screens weird saturation filters, and so on.
Perhaps, but if someone has skipped a few pages in a book, they haven't actually read the book. They've only read a part of the book.
I guess where I disagree with you is that I genuinely think that art should not be enjoyed in a singular way. I'd be opposed to this if, say, the creator's original vision was simply inaccessible and was lost to the public. But I feel that art being enjoyed in a personal way depending on the person is what gives it meaning. If someone wants to look at a painting wearing sunglasses, they have a right to do so. In my opinion, this would only be problematic if they started claiming that their sunglasses-colored view was the only real one and tried to actively convince everyone that it was impossible to experience the painting without sunglasses. As it is though? I feel like it's a person's right to interact with art however they see fit, and that interaction between the audience and art is something I find very nice, as opposed to it being something to avoid.
People can disrespect art if they want to, but I can't imagine anyone looking at a painting through shades (for whatever bizarre reason someone would choose to do that) and believing that actually improves the work in question. No one's arguing whether someone has the right to do this. Only whether or not it is a good idea.
Ah, so you actually have no idea what Reshade and Freestyle do. They can have a seepia etc. filter, bust most of the people will use them to put better AA (not in Freestyle), get rid of fog (put there for performance reasons more often than not and can be useless for people who have a beefy machine), and heeps of other things that game makers haven't thought of or had to exclude because reasons (money, time etc.).
Tweaking programs like Reshade or This is more like remastering old movies, adding little sharpness or colour where the technology has been outdated (unless you are arguing that every movie in the past was washed out and noisy on purpose?).
A lot of the "artistic" things in games are done because they need to meet a performance quota, devs can be pretty creative when it comes to hiding the tricks they use.
You must have misread my posts or misunderstood it. Part of my argument is that this type of filter is not the same thing as Reshade, because Reshade actually issues commands to the game's rendering pipeline. These sort of ugly color filters don't have that level of consistency with the game's internal visual framework that a rendering-level solution like Reshade provides, it seems they are just an overlay on top of the screen, although I could be wrong about that, there is some level of confusion as to how this solution operates. I can see the line drawn between applying more anti-aliasing in Reshade, for instance, with a higher resolution or better quality master being presented of a film. But that's not what the filters in question do. Instead of providing a higher quality master, imagine if the master had a dark-blue or rainbow color filter applied universally over every scene. No one restoring a film would ever think this is a good idea, because it compromises the film's entire visual design and color timing. The difference is this: there are some uses of Reshade that are a good idea, and others that are probably a bad idea. These filters, with the exception I earlier stated about legitimate uses for colorblindness, are near-universally worthless.
And what becomes to the art angle, art is what you make it to be. Every person looks art from a different perspective, shaped by your life. There cannot be an objective way of enjoying art, it is a deeply personal experience. There is so, so many books written about aesthetics in the last few thousand years that it's not even funny.
Humans have seeked perfection for a long time. Golden ratio and all that. Some say that we are just trying to imitate the perfection that is God. Some say that everything we make is just a reflection/shadow of an ideal thing, other claim that everything God makes is perfect (because God made it and thus it is perfect because God wouldn't do anything imperfect, right?).
All in all, we can deduce that art is an asshole. And we all have an opinion about it. Or something.
It's not about there being an objective way of enjoying art. The interpretation of a piece of art should, of course, be up to every individual. But when you transform the color palate, the visual design, of a work of art, you are actually looking at something else, not the work of art in question. It's actually possible for color to evoke emotion, to fascinate and move the player. But not if the colors are not there. Imagine viewing the overture (the opening scene) from
Dancer in the Dark (if you're not familiar, it can be located on YouTube), but watched only through a television on the other side of a stained glass window. What you see may be beautiful, but it is not the film. It is a spontaneous creation. It is something else. Art should always be a matter for individual interpretation, but in order to interpret a work of art, you have to actually consume it first.
Honestly, I'm getting slightly tired of responding to all these posts at length to clarify my position. I don't quite understand why this argument has developed into, by far, my most controversial set of posts on this site. I really didn't think it would be that provocative to say that we should endeavor, to the best of our abilities, to present pieces of art in the manner in which they were intended by their creators to be presented. I sort of thought that was a pretty fundamentally recognized principle, and part of the reason why things like the
Silent Hill HD Collection were so widely derided.
