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Comments
Then it's still the best at what it does, and the fact is that it's a shooter. So I don't understand why is it wrong to call it a good shooter.
It's like saying that Apocalypse Now is not a good war movie because it doesn't portray war the same way that River of the Bridge Kwai does.
>This increasingly sounds like a game that only people who aren't fans of its genre would play.
Sounds likely. I mean, as I've pointed out, I loathe almost everything about military shooters and the main thing about this game is how much of a takedown it is of the traditional America Saves The Day-style game.
Also, it shouldn't be expected of a game to provide the same experience just for being in the same genre. It's like getting angry at The Dark Knight for not being like Iron Man.
Games should offer variable experiences, even and especially in their own genre. Everyone trying to capture the same adrenaline rush type of gaming is why we have a fucking military shooter campaign in RE6. (still not over that)
I prefer Spess Mareen or otherwise Sci-Fi FPSes anyway, only because most modern War Shooters tend to be Call of Duty clones that are somehow less fun than the original franchise.
I'm just saying that it's easy for a game to fall into the trap of wanting to deliver a message, but setting itself up in such a way that you either feel like you wasted your money on it (no one really wants to buy a game that implicitly insults you), or you're just not going to buy it in the first place.
I'm definitely arguing in favour of gameplay being an expressive technique. What I'm arguing against is the idea that a good story makes a game a better example of a genre experience -- Spec Ops might be a game that needed to happen and a brilliant piece of art, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good shooter. It might make it a good game that happens to be a shooter, but would you recommend it to someone who wants a simple run 'n' gun experience with no strings attached? I mean, yeah, you probably would, because they're the perfect demographic to spring it on, but you know what I mean. It's not a game you would play if you wanted a great example of intuitive, deep gameplay. People play it because it's a technically competent game with great attention towards the social issues that come with the glorification of warfare via media, and video games in particular.
This is true, but there's "variable" and there's "mediocre". You can make the argument that it's important that Kingdoms of Amalur and Dark Souls play differently for the sake of diversity within fantasy RPGs, and I would agree with that. But that doesn't change the fact that Amalur's gameplay is bog-standard and could use a great deal of alteration. It's not that the approach or idea was necessarily wrong, but that the execution was lacking.
Oh the game outright insults you. Some of the loading screens say things like 'Do you feel like a hero yet?' or 'Don't worry, you're still a good person.'
That said, yeah there's always that danger, but I think there's also a chance people will miss the point. There are plenty of pro-war nuts that fucking love Apocalypse Now.
I think it's kind of silly that the developers said one option always on the table is to 'stop playing' though. It's a cute meta joke and I've made it about God of War, but it implicitly blames the player for a situation the dev team put you in and yadda yadda meta commentary.
> What I'm arguing against is the idea that a good story makes a game a better example of a genre experience
That's a ridiculous statement. All other things being equal the game with the better story will be a better experience.
And this is my point about genre and expectations. My point is that it uses the tools of the shooter better and to portray a better experience than any shooter before has. Just because people expect or want a mindless action game doesn't make what they want superior.
But then again, that falls under the issue mentioned above about genres. They don't need to be so clean and cut. A shooter can and should be more than just "run n' gun experiences" and it's really silly to say that a shooter is less of a shooter for having higher aims than its brethren.
Certainly. But it doesn't make it a better shooter. When you use a term like that, you draw a line in the sand between the gameplay and the conventional storytelling means. Because you're not saying it's a better game -- you're saying it's a better shooting experience. The best shooter is the one with the best core engagement when it comes to gameplay, which is probably not Spec Ops. It's a metagame almost in a league of its own when it comes to the use of gameplay mechanics to express itself, but taken solely as a shooter (rather than more broadly a game, or a story), it doesn't offer much.
So between similar games A and B, the one with the better story is obviously the superior narrative experience. But is it necessarily the better game, or the better example of [genre] gameplay taken to its finest level of engagement and depth? I'm not convinced of that, because I think we have to distinguish between what the overall media product is and what the actual game is, where the game is a logical system of play with rules and conditions for both success and failure. Remember, the story, the characters, the setting -- none of these are the game itself. Those are context and expression on top of the game, which is itself nothing but a set of rules and conditions.
The point here is that Spec Ops' gameplay is just as dullard-friendly as any other shooter's, but that's a part of its point and expression. There's no lack of shooters out there that exceed Spec Ops' level of depth and its requirements of technical consideration, so it's not like the game is providing new or exciting gameplay that breaks from the norm. That would run against the entire point of the game. Spec Ops is absolutely mediocre as a gameplay system, but it also has a lot to say as a narrative experience, and it uses its medium very well. There's a good argument that it's an excellent game, but not that it's an excellent shooter, if you get my meaning.
Yes, but if gaming is intended to grow as an artistic form, it needs to be more than just a set of rules and conditions, not to mention that you're forgetting that at the core, a game is better because it does what it intends to do rather than just because of what it intends to do.
I forget who said this, but I think it's applicable here.
A game, itself, can never be more than a set of rules and conditions. That's literally impossible, because that's one (of a few contested) definitions of a game. I mean, no-one considers plots and characters and story beats to be cinema, or to be literature. Those things are defined by the means by which they express those things, and games ideally express those things through rules and conditions. After all, a book is not a story, or characters -- it's merely a container of pages and text. It may be technical or it may be narrative. Its format makes little comment on its actual content, just the means by which it's expressed.
Game product are already far more than rules and conditions, to such an extent that developers are forgetting how important rules and conditions actually are and how they define the medium. A more appropriate name for "video games" might be "digital games", I think, because we too often forget how close video games are to playground games, tabletop games and sports. Many of those are completely abstracted and have nothing on top of their rules and conditions -- it's a subset of tabletop games, and then video games, which have been the exception.
Yes, and a movie can't be more than just a sequence of images (Hell, sound is not even necessary) and so on and so forth. But that's not the point. The point is that the content has to surpass the medium's limitations as a form of narrative if it intends to grow into a narrative medium as well as its own thing (After all, these two aims are not really exclusive)
Not like it matters because we're both deviating from the point, which is the validity of Spec Ops as a "great shooter". Now I haven't played the game, which is why I can't judge its full quality properly, but what I'm taking issue with here is the notion that a game is a bad example of its genre just because it's an atypical one with a different aim than the games in that same genre possess. Even if that aim is related to gameplay, the core quality of videogames as a whole, the fact is that it's still a really good game that happens to be a shooter. So I see this debate as a severe case of pedantry, even.
But that's irrelevant because even in the direction you decided to take it on, it's based on what I believe to be the fundamentally wrong notion that a game's aims should be just gameplay and if that a game is weak on that respect while its other aspects work, then it's still a weak game. I mean, again, taking the Silent Hill games as examples, these are games where you're definetly not playing because the gameplay is engaging but because the narrative and ambientation are. But that's not really the core issue, which is the issue about genre and expectations, which falls squarely under what was said previously. Expecting games on the same genre to be the same and saying that one is weaker because it doesn't follow the standard that most of the games in genre set for themselves is ridiculous and it's the exact sort of mentality that leads to stagnancy. Variety in aims, of all things, is what makes or breaks a medium as a whole. Different artists trying to say different things with the same tools, while coming up with different permutations of the same are what the body of variety in art.
>The point here is that Spec Ops' gameplay is just as dullard-friendly as any other shooter's, but that's a part of its point and expression. There's no lack of shooters out there that exceed Spec Ops' level of depth and its requirements of technical consideration, so it's not like the game is providing new or exciting gameplay that breaks from the norm. That would run against the entire point of the game. Spec Ops is absolutely mediocre as a gameplay system, but it also has a lot to say as a narrative experience, and it uses its medium very well.
I'm not talking about complexity or difficulty (which the game can be at times) I'm talking about the genre of game it is (shooter) and how it uses those things to convey a message. Sure, there are more complex shooters with 'better' (i.e. more fun) gameplay, but that's not the point. The point is how well it uses what it has to convey its message, and it conveys the bleakness the war, the stupidity of hero machoness in wartime better than any shooter has given an adrenaline rush, and its gameplay is a core part of that.
Yeah, because all of the mechanics play some part. For example, when you execute enemies, Walker rifle-butts them a couple times and then puts a bullet in them. A little brutal, don't you think?
Regarding genre stuff: I actually have a future blogpost I'm working on in which I propose that the reason why game genres don't really work when you think about them too much is because games have more core make-or-break elements than other media, and so while other media can be easily by types of engagement alone, games pretty much can't, because you also have to account for the interface and mechanics and stuff, and if you roll it all up into one label like "shooter," you get...this conversation.
I'm not sure I explained it that well there, but I wanted to be brief.
He doesn't do that for the whole game. The executions start off relatively professional and get more and more angry over the course of the game, as does combat chatter.
Yeah, I was gonna mention that, but I don't want to spoil things.
Well that's kind of the point of indictment man. You need to point out that things are horrible and the normal way people react to them is just wrong.
^^I wouldn't really count that as a spoiler, at least, not to a greater extent than "the game isn't actually a shity COD clone" is a spoiler.
Anyway, playing more Don't Starve.
I need more efficient farming techniques, so in order to learn them, I'm robbing graves and doing science to whatever I can loot.
Note to self: be very careful when exploring new biomes.
I have no idea what that thing was, but it took off most of my HP before I even managed to start running away.
Thing is that's not really going to work unless the person already agrees with whatever message you're pushing, in which case, they're probably not going to buy the game at all, and even if they do, nothing's actually changed there.
It's like that movie (blanking on the title), it was a sort of satire/criticism of slasher flicks, but the problem was that it spent a good chunk of its runtime basically just telling the audience they were horrible people. That just doesn't work. The people who agree with you aren't going to go see it, and the people who disagree with you are just going to be insulted.
Except that it can. It's the point of a lot of works, actually; pointing out things in other, similar works, and going "What the hell?" because it gets the people playing the game to think about what's happening.
It won't work with everyone, but some people will be affected by it.
Reading some interviews with the creator it seems like the developers would feel I was cheated by expected a subversion of war games. On the one hand, I see their point. On the other I never would have played the game otherwise. Also, I feel like I'm losing out by the fact that I don't really interact with the things it's attacking, mostly because I've already talked at length about the evil and dehumanization a lot of war games have. So I don't know, maybe the game wasn't quite the sucker punch it was supposed to be, since it even if I played it without knowledge I would be agreeing with it from the beginning?
Also, what Nova said. If we really accept that gaming is a true artform then we have to accept that it can change us.
It probably wouldn't, no.
Welp. Human discourse is dead. Humanity pack the fuck up right now. No point in communicating to people who don't already subscribe to your message. Let us just break off into our own little boxes and clans and never talk to people or try to convince them or let them convince us of anything. Nobody ever changes when exposed to things they might have found contrary since they just isolate themselves in their own little shitty bubbles.
Do you feel like a hero yet, Alk?
Haha, sure you can just yell too, that's fine.
I'm sorry I've offended the artistic sensibilities of all involved here.
Malk - I'm no hero. My origin story has me falling into a vat of weasels and corpses. It was through communion and vision quests with the mighty Shit Weasel Princep that I learned the secrets of the internet and vidya.
This would look more interesting if it wasn't essentially a fix-fic of Skyward Sword.
Yeah, not too big on the "help me get my fanfic published
" thing.
I think these kinds of projects are why people are wary of Kickstarter.