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Comments
I want to play ToR but I have no money and an HSC to sit.
Forzare gave me a trial.
Oh good.
Sorry, I'm late for this, so I'll jump in here.
Media criticism holds a huge double-standard. That is, if a creator's vision is poor, we will criticise it to hell and back and make observations on how it might have been better. If it's good, we take is as a sacred expression of individuality. While it's seldom come to anything, we still suggest that a creator's vision ought to have been different, or that it ought to have found some other technique of expression, or it ought to have been expressed in some different medium.
We can't criticise something without wishing for it to be different in some respect. And while criticism has yet to make significant changes to individual pieces of art, it's still a way of democratising different art forms. It influences pieces that come along later. Furthermore, the market provides a further aspect of this. A game studio may not make the whimsical, political puzzle game they wanted to make and instead make a Call of Duty clone; sometimes they have to due to publisher pressure.
So why can a game be controlled by corporate bigwigs but not influenced by fan democracy? Given, fans are not always very clever people and should not be adhered to with too much vigour, but if there's such a huge reaction against the ending of ME3, then something is clearly wrong. And as someone who played all three ME games and enjoyed them -- albeit without the sort of commitment that I would expect from someone who calls themselves a "fan" -- I found the ending of the game a complete trivialisation of the input I had throughout all three games.
I prevented one implicit genocide and was forced to cause another. Some of my most trusted allies died in the line of fire, but they sold their lives dearly. Sometimes I was unhappy with the results of my choices, but I pushed on regardless, trying to make the best of horrible situations. I learned how to fight against eldritch machines from beyond antiquity, and I learned that even in the galaxy's hour of need, the various political forces at play will try to stab one-another in the back -- even while being slaughtered by godlike machines of space and time, grotesque pastiches of Lovecraft's dark gods, Giger's Alien and the synthetics from The Matrix.
But the ending wasn't about choice, the things I learned, the friends that died or the politics in place. It amounted to nothing I can adequately describe for all the sense in makes -- almost none -- unless you buy into the Indoctrination hypothesis, which is fan input. Even that boils down to "much of it was a hallucination", which in turn is scarcely better than the "it was all just a dream" ending. It is, in all respects, an absolutely horrible ending.
What Mass Effect does so brilliantly is audience investment. Some of the characters are mediocre, but many of the core characters are vibrant, lifelike and a joy to interact with in battle and more domestic confines alike. To have an ending that denies that audience investment lies in violation of those tones, theming and patterns that defined all three games. Such an ending arguably already compromises the vision of the games -- certainly, an ending is rarely a vision in and of itself.
That the players of Mass Effect are demanding a different ending can only be a good thing to my mind. They aren't demanding a specific ending, some validation of fan canon or anything comparable. All they want is an ending that provides a satisfying conclusion to the series, which should be a given when a company as well-regarded as BioWare is backed by the financial powerhouse that is EA.
I look at it this way: there are essentially three interest groups when it comes to any game.
Obviously, the developers should ideally have the bulk of the power when it comes to making a game. But in a clash of interest between consumers and publishers, shouldn't the consumers have more say? After all, they drive the profit of the game, being the force that validates the fiscal (and often artistic) success of a game. I'd much rather see games democratised by fans than the current situation, where they are constrained by uncaring publishers.
I'd even argue that the value of games is in their inherent democratisation. A game is incomplete without a player -- individual human input is what makes games games. Between this, the inherent democratisation of art in a society run by capital and the proven success of mod communities, it's easy to see that games exist inherently in democratic form. Furthermore, it's interesting that a gaming industry only developed in a democratic society -- in previous societies, board games and the like were cultural standards, not subject to consistent development. They were natural results of collective culture, agreed upon implicitly due to their success, unenforced by anything else. Like many comparable cultural entities, they were democratic from the beginning.
One of the resounding successes of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 as contemporary traditional games is the manner in which become to be owned by the players. The lore for the games takes pains to ensure that there are strong undefined elements; the designers and writers are very obviously including a form of democratisation in a game otherwise owned by a capitalistic, corporate entity. This is the real way those games trump other fantastical wargames -- they establish narrative rules very powerfully and then give players a huge opening to make their own personal contributions.
At the end of the day, I'm interested in games being the best they can be. If that means that consumers have to call out publishers and the developers that cow to them, so be it. It's the lesser evil compared to letting such a specifically awful conclusion slide, and certainly the lesser evil compared to allowing publishers to be the driving force of the industry. That latter scenario is how things currently stand, and it's death to artistic integrity more than some form of democratisation could ever be.
why do i always read through the entirety of your posts
Ah
This screen is so huge compared to my laptop screen
How am I supposed to even focus on one part of it
^^ you are silly
So the ending DLC is confirmed, and it doesn't seem to be changing the ending so much as adding to it.
Also, it's free.
http://www.itjustbugsme.com/forums/discussion/10271/power-fantasies-and-anti-heroes#Item_3
I am the boy who cried wolf, apparently.
I hate online dating ads.
^^^ That's a wrap, I suppose. Good on them for making it free.
>Free DLC
>EA
I honestly didn't see that coming.
Given that missing answers and lack of a conclusion weren't the problem with the initial ending as presented, but were a problem with the indoctrination version, I consider this vindication.
>I'd even argue that the value of games is in their inherent democratisation. A game is incomplete without a player -- individual human input is what makes games games
No.
To say human reaction isn't a part of movies and books and TTRPGs betrays a horrific understanding of the medium.
You are not an author. You are not contributing to the storytelling. You did not code, you did not write. You pushed buttons on a pre-selected path. The choice in Mass Effect is an illusion. It's a choose-your-own adventure book. I knew this going into game one and it's amazing how this fails to register with people.
Forz: Hmm, that seems to be alright. I'm more okay with adding to the ending than changing to it.
Myrm: You really are.
I never said that, but a film or book is a linear form of art. Even without an audience, it is complete. Not so for a game, because the input of individual players is what makes them powerful. Unlike a book or film, you choose. And yes, you certainly do contribute to the storytelling, because that's the entire point of a game in some way or another. Whether that's deciding on the characterisation of Shepard in Mass Effect or swinging the tide of a battle in the "living" world of Mount and Blade, it's up to the player to complete the story by filling in the blanks.
The capacity for the player do be a mover and shaker during the narrative process is the defining factor of games. The narrative needn't be a large, overarching plot -- it can be as simple as a single mechanical choice or doing something because it seems like you should rather than adhering to game logic. Every mechanical element of a game should ideally be a contribution to the narrative with interactive input from the player.
Hell, even the upcoming FPS Dust [Whatever Number] is going to make brilliant strides in player narrative. It's connected to the world of EVE Online, so your FPS battles contribute to the outcomes of that universe. It's impossible to deny that as a result of player driven narrative, even if most examples are admittedly more subtle.
The thing about games is that what's "narrative" in a film or book is different to what's "narrative" in a game. For instance, numbers in an RPG are a narrative feature because they describe the balance of power. All games have stats, even if they're invisible, but RPGs show them to the player in order to allow them to understand the power relationships in the game and make rational choices based on that information. The player's choice of armour, weapons, special items, character build -- these are all contributions to the narrative. They don't necessarily influence the plot, but plot is just one factor to consider within narrative. Many games are perfectly fine when it comes to narrative with little or no plot, like Minecraft or Demon's Souls.
In most games considered "narrative" (as if all games weren't inherently this), it's true that X, Y and Z plot events will happen no matter what, and it's also true they're the most important ones. But how the story comes to that point, even if it's just a matter of mechanical choices, is an element of narrative left up to the player.
Often, its games without strong plots that have the most narrative impact on players. Given that human minds are more or less naturally narrative, we will enforce narrative structure over "regular" events, including things within a game. So when one plays Mount and Blade, they might still experience something of a plot arc despite there being no official story -- the natural mechanics of the game are all that's needed for the player to have a narrative experience.
Games, be they digital or on the tabletop, are the only medium that absolutely demands player input. Certainly, some other mediums have be interactive, but examples of that are few and far between. Most of the time, we are passive viewers experiencing events vicariously when observing literature or film. That's not even an option in games -- we have to be there in the driver's seat. The game only unfolds, only completes itself with a player, and every single player experience is going to be at least a little bit different.
Looking at games too heavily on a macro level, or using the standards of literature or film, can't bring a strong understanding of how players interact with the medium. Truly excellent games owe their ultimate success to the strength of their mechanics, and how those mechanics allow the player to contribute to the experience. This doesn't mean that the game has to have more than one ending, social interactions or moral choices -- it simply means that the gameplay mechanics have to be graceful and elegant enough to generate experiences on their own.
A game that can gain great positive attention without conventional attention towards literary narrative is a keeper, because it's capable of creating a fulfilling experience without conventional narrative devices. Minecraft epitomises this. Its game features narrate the passing of time, the dealing of damage, the alteration of the landscape and the use of resources. Even within those simple boundaries, the game has told millions of tiny, enthralling stories. That's what Mount and Blade does. It's even what Dark Souls does.
The rule of thumb is a game that makes good "water cooler conversation" is probably a narrative success in some respect. Minecraft, Skyrim, Demon's Souls, ect. None of these are narrative triumphs in the conventional literary sense, but every single one makes the player feel as though they own their experiences. Everyone shares the same macroexperience of Minecraft -- delving into deep tunnels potentially filled with monsters into order to access powerful resources -- but no-one shares the same microexperience, the individual stories. Not everyone gets chased through a series of natural tunnels by a group of spiders, seals themselves in a safe area and turns around just in time to see a groaner end their run, falling out of their chair in the process.
The ultimate truth of gaming is that games are defined by their players. A film showing progresses without an audience; a book's text sits unread in completeness; a game is not a game until it is played and the code is unfolding, reacting to the input of a player. And the nature of a player is going to determine the choices they make, from their choice of weapon to their tracked moral decisions to self-imposed mechanics, like special runs of Pokemon. The game's progress will be different in response, even if it's similar to other runs of the game undertaken by other people.
Unless a game is literally preset via button sequences, then the player is the final element that makes it complete.
nvm
I disagree. A film or book is meaningless until it is experienced by an audience. A work of art is about evoking some kind of emotional response in an audience, conveying something that the audience can relate to in one way or another, etc. This kind of response isn't something that's built into the work itself. While the artist can (and does and should) certainly try to set it up so that the audience actually does get the right experience out of it, the experience itself is something that occurs within each person in the audience. And very often, this actually does require interaction with the work itself, even if not on a physical or mechanical level as in video games, certainly on a mental level as all but the most obvious of works will require at least some level of thought and questioning in order to reveal the meaning of the work. In any case, the point is that this experience can only occur if there is a subject to experience it, and it is that experience, not the actual text of the work itself, that is what makes the work meaningful, and as such it seems like a work of art that nobody ever experiences could hardly be considered complete, regardless of medium.
^I'm agreed with that. A book sitting on a shelf isn't a work of art, it's the stored information of a work of art.
Considered like that, I think you're right. I still think that games are more "demanding" in this sense -- they lack a more literal sense of completeness, a solidification into a singular experience -- but apart from that caveat, I retreat that particular point.
Alex, I think you've succeeded Louie as the most verbose poster on IJBM.
A most satisfactory conclusion! Although it could also be interpreted to be a negative trait, in which case I should likely offer an apology, although in turn that would supposedly be subjective to the particular audience at hand during any moment wherein my posts are read.
Hey, have any of you found it hard to interact with other people?
I do, but for completely different reasons than you probably think about (I have a severe stutter which can only be alleviated by meditation or liberal amounts of weed).
^That must suck.
Not really
I can interact with people just fine. However, I often don't want to
It does, especially since I'm a natural extrovert.