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Fun fact:
Little <10-year-old me got my hands a Super 105-in-1 cartridge of Game Boy games once.
At that time, I'd played Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3, Duke Nukem 1, and Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. All of these are basically sidescrollers/platformers, where you can jump around, and generally speaking, you can attack things in some way (even if it's just goomba stomping).
So I pick up that cartridge. I found things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan, and Super Mario Land, and Kid Niki Radical Ninja. All of these are platformers with jumping and attacking. These I regarded as games. (In this category is are also two shmup games, Volley Fire and Battle City. Both of those also feature movement and combat.)
I also found things like "Mickey Mouse" (actually one of the Crazy Castle games), Castelian, Pitman (a.k.a. Catrap), Tasmania Story, and Hyper Loderunner. I regarded these as somewhat lesser games. Only because they were platformers where I had no way of jumping and (usually) defeating enemies. (I've since grown to understand that many of these are puzzle platformers, and that I've had a love-hate relationship with puzzle games.)
Then there were things like Match Mania, Amida, Pipe Dream, Boxing, and Ishido - the Way of Stones. While I guessed that they were being called games, I personally regarded these things as not really games.
And I asked, to myself, why there were so few real games on this cart, that had promised so much entertainment.
Well, apart from duplicate entries, the cartridge probably only contained between twenty and forty games. But if all of those twenty games were TMNT:FotFC, SML, Adventure Island, Kid Niki, Ninja Gaiden Shadow, Kirby, Tail 'Gator, etc., then I wouldn't have asked that question.
Heavy Rain was interesting. At least you didn't turn into Dragonball Jesus and fight the Internet again.
is that farenheit or indigo whatever
Yes to both.
Part of me wonders if the backlash to art games, specifically ones that call out unsavory bits of player mentality is just a backlash against expectations. I mean like I figure the typical emotional reactions to a videogame are either satisfaction that you beat the the part or frustration at the game/other players. Being asked to feel anger and disgust is a pretty different drive.
man, somebody needs to make a gif of Matt Fraction saying "How dare you make me think?"
There is a huge difference between not wanting to think and not wanting to be insulted. Most "message games" go for the latter because they're not subtle enough to pull the former off.
I agree with that sentiment. Be they "games" or "not games", they ought to be made. But we're also looking at very different experiences designed for very different audiences, of course.
For me, it's more or less just that I consider art games to be more pretentious than is worth putting up with in most cases. I think expanding the expressive potential of video games is absolutely fantastic and I wish more designers and developers would have a go at it, but if the overall engagement of the game is subservient to other factors, then perhaps using this particular medium was the wrong choice.
Mechanics themselves can be fundamentally expressive, or can generate expression. The most obvious example is probably Minecraft, which can be used in itself as a tool for visual art. But since there's no inherent objective in Minecraft, personal expression naturally flows into and from it. Sometimes, watching other people play that game is kind of amazing because of what it can tell you about them.
Another example of expressive mechanics is in Mount & Blade. One of the most difficult elements of that game is feudal economics, since you have to provide money for a professional army every week. You get income on the same basis from any lands or businesses you hold, but you have to ensure that those funds cover the cost of your soldiers' pay or you begin losing money pretty quickly. I remember once that I had been called to lend my strength in what turned out to be a series of border fights, and I was running desperately low on supplies and money. What I ended up doing was running the calculations in my head and, without any other options (apart from destitution), raiding a village. I didn't like doing that, but it was easier to raid another village later on so I could keep my troops supplied. It was a great little insight into the head of a feudal commander and how the economics of the time fueled violence against civilians, whether any particular commander liked it or not. Even though the game never came out and said "feudal economics is awful, look at all the violence!", I had the point very clearly illustrated entirely through the mechanics of the game.
The thing is, Mount & Blade isn't even considered an art game. It's reasonably educational and reasonably historically accurate entertainment based around kicking arse and taking names. But its gameplay systems are sophisticated enough and reflective enough of the realities of that situation that meaningful information can be inferred all the same, and this is what I mean when I say that mechanics ought to be the foundation of game experiences.
(and then alex was the alex)
Well, part of what's drawn me to various games, especially JRPGs, is the emotional content of their narratives.
Note that narrative need not be an explicit story. There is a narrative inherent in the environment progression of Super Mario Bros. 3, going from grassland to grassland with unfamiliar giant things to ice land with challenging levels and finally to lava and darkness land.
Also, the way that the backgrounds and aesthetic features of Metroid Fusion gradually decay or break down as the game's event flags are successively triggered really adds TONS to the atmosphere and emotional content of the game.
See here's the thing, stories that ask people to think about something pretty much always also insult them, even a little bit. I mean the standard format of a story trying to raise awareness of an issue is pretty much
Like just for the hell of it, try to name me 5 stories that try to make the audience think and call attention to an issue without some element of "hey, wake up dumbass"
See that last bullet is the hangup. I can think of a ton of films and books that subtly unravel why something is bad, virtually every video game I've seen that attempts to do the same is a beat-you-over-the-head affair, and I refuse to believe it's a problem of the medium.
The only counterexample I can think of is Shadow of The Colossus, which brilliantly picks apart the standard "go here, kill X, complete quest" formula. Even then, that's only sort of what we're talking about here.
Hey you complained about not wanting to be insulted. Which is really inherent to the whole narrative convention of calling attention to thinks. Really vidya have the nice trick of forcing the player to be complicit in some sort of crime to drive the point home. With books or movies the audience can think of all sorts of justifications why they weren't the folks being called out. Vidya takes away that option to lend the point more weight.
I mean sure it could give you the easy out of a moral choice to do what the game considers the right thing. But that's bunk. Moral choices are always crap and hell player agency is in general. No matter how many choices you are given you are still walking down the same story path. Hell even sandbox games that let you do whatever really just boil down the choice to what weapon do you want to use to inflict mayhem, how much shit do you want to stir up, what toys do you want to build and what path you pick exploring the place.
Yeah, but Shadow of the Colossus mostly calls the Wanderer a dupe for doing what he does and buying into it. The narrative pretty much always tells you from the get-go or at least implies that what you're doing is wrong. It's just that you have no choice in doing it.
And even then, as you are the Wanderer, the plot punishes you for pursuing the course of action you decided to follow because that was the only reasonable course you could follow in the world you were placed on.
He did say stories.
give us examples of those, then.
This pisses me off.
I do not understand this line of thinking in the slightest. Because it seems to imply an attitude where you're pissed off you can't become a farmer in Skyrim. Even the most open of open-world games have parameters--not limits, because "limits" implies an unfairness or a withholding, parameters--you buy a game because you like something about it. You buy Skyrim because you want to be a hero in a fantasy setting, you buy Minecraft because you want to build shit, and so on. We don't criticize movies for not simultaneously being every genre and playing every moral angle, and I don't understand why we think it's okay to criticize video games for doing the same.
A game can't be everything to everyone. Not from a genre standpoint, and not from a moral standpoint.
And again, if you are making a video game solely to make a point, you shouldn't be making a video game. The "trick" of forcing the player to comply with the protagonist's actions is just that, a trick. You can't complain about moral choices in games being bullshit and then decide that it's okay when the developer wants to make a point. A good game that tried to make a point would let the player actually make a choice, and if the choice was poor, display the consequences realistically within the game's confines. Something like, to use the old example, Spec Ops, dosen't do that, you are at no point given the option to put down the gun (metaphorically speaking, though I guess given the plot, it's literal too) in-game.
If we say that's okay, then we also say it's okay for that game's "straight" counterpart (Call of Duty, because let's be honest, there are no other realistic military shooters that anyone ever bothers to target) to do the same. You cannot have that both ways. Giving the player no choice is either okay or it isn't. It's not circumstantial.
I should point out that this is the part that's insulting. The part that assumes the player will make a choice, so they don't bother giving you a choice to make, even when that choice is obviously morally reprehensible in the eyes of the developer.
Can we also be realistic here? I really doubt most of the people who played Spec Ops subsequently vowed to never play another FPS ever again.
And for the love of christ say "video games", not "vidya", the extra word isn't going to kill you.
anyway I'm going to bed. I will perhaps continue this conversation in the morning.
This isn't necessarily true. The aforementioned Mount & Blade doesn't really have any kind of intended story beyond the narrative potential of the game content. One of my games ended up having romantic hijinks wherein three nobles (including my character) were vying for the attention of one woman. The same game had an unusually massive battle between almost a thousand individual soldiers per a side because two warring kindgoms just happened to have all their marshalled forces crossing the same path. If I had made different choices, the game might have been my story of ascension to the throne, or about my character as a mercenary brigand or any other number of things.
The Witcher games give fantastic moral choices from a reflection point of view, too. Most moral choice systems in games operate on a binary between good and evil, but The Witcher only gives you "differently good" choices. In this case, it's less about choice (although such choices can have different narrative fallout) and more about what you as a player consider to be the better option between two flawed ones. Any game that provides that potential for reflection is doing moral choices right in my eyes, because so many others rely on having mechanical rewards for "good" and "evil". In relatively recent memory, inFamous saw substantial success with its much-touted morality system that boiled down to a choice between extremes where each choice was excessively juvenile. The main character, Cole, is even going to take two slots in the upcoming Sony rip-off of Super Smash Brothers.
It's less a case of concept and more a case of execution. Morality and narrative freedom can certainly be used very well in games, but they have to be used in the right context with the right execution. The Witcher's use of non-mechanical moral choices fit its semi-linear position as a high-narrative branching RPG, whereas Mount & Blade's moral implications are within the player's grasp of the system. Mount & Blade works so well this way because of its lack of a conventional narrative, so having morality partially attached to mechanical elements helps players see where they stand morally in a game that doesn't have scripted events or set-piece moments, be those moments narrative or action-based (or both).
No but it might kill somebody else. See getting me to say those two words together was the post hypnotic trigger word to turn me into a manchurian sleeper agent. Not exactly sure what my handlers were thinking there. They should have picked something nobody would ever say in casual conversation like onomatophobia.
That's not what I'm arguing. My point is that player agency in vidya is a crock of shit more often than not. If a game is going to try to present itself as giving us agency and choices and failing to live up to that, we have every damn right to criticize it. And yeah it can't be everything at once. It shouldn't try to be. It should pick one thing and try to do it well. I mean honestly giving the audience choice in the narrative is a horrible idea. Letting people influence the outcome of the story just means they will do stupid shit with it.
Question about the Witcher games Alex - at any point do the choices you make actually influence the plot of the game beyond who you have to fight and who ends up ahead at the end? The game will still have you following the loose path of being a monster hunter caught up in political nonsense right? I can at least appreciate the choices being about "which of these options is less bad" though.
... kind of? I mean, certain key events will and must stay the same, but some of them have some severe implications, too. It depends how seriously you take reflection on your choices, though, because while there aren't always mechanical implications, there are in-game social implications that are liable to make you feel like a bit of a shithead. Then there's a choice in the second game which changes the content of the second act (who you're working for, how you have to complete certain tasks).
So, both, I guess. It's difficult to say because sometimes the content can be really different depending on your choices, but other times it's window dressing.
My two cents: choice in games, since it can't be all-encompassing, works best when it's more about the character development of the player character in relation to events than about the events. See The Walking Dead for an example of what I'm talking about. Many story elements remain the same, but who the characters are at the end can be drastically different.
So, even though Sony announced ages ago that they'd cut the Vita price, and then did so in Japan, they apparently have no plans to do so in the US.
Guess this is a good day for Nintendo, since my odds of getting a Wii U first just shot right the hell up.
...but...one's a handheld and the other's a console.
IGN just layed off a lot of people, and are shutting down 1up, Gamespy, and UGO.com. In favor of focusing on e-sports.
I want to say "and nothing of value was lost", but I genuinely feel sorry for all the people who lost their jobs, despite whatever I think of IGN.
The hell?
You'd think that if the new direction you want to take your company in is niche enough that you have to lay off most of your company, that would indicate that it probably isn't a good thing to focus exclusively on.
Far Cry 3 is making me play Poker.
I have no idea what I'm doing.
Are you playing Texas Hold 'Em?
i have no idea
Anyway, I kind of fumbled my way through a hand. Won, hilariously, but I don't think I had to. I was just making contact with a guy.
I did hear that they're putting a focus on sports, but I didn't know they were shutting down their game sites for it.
Why would they want to do sports anyway?
Not sports. E-sports. As in competetive gaming.
Oh yeah, these are all sports games.
But nevertheless, my point still stands. Sports games are boring.