waiting for the new total war three kingdoms dlc to be cracked
sovnarkoman posted:warzone good
it is too cod4me
still stuck in pubg
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:video games may be for children but they are fully deserving of a thread on this, a forum full of weirdos, on the internet. so is star trek, but there is already a thread for that in endless shrimp, so respectfully cars, i would ask you not to continue to derail this pure and good thread about real art, with any more posts about the "good" tv show, star trek.
since I didn’t bring it up and everyone else posted about it more than me, I will continue to post blamelessly in the exact way i have so far. I appreciate those who tried to derail the conversation in this thread backing off, a wise decision on their part. Now let’s move forward together to a new posting future.
blinkandwheeze posted:cars posted:I'm not so sure it is. Hideo Kojima is widely recognized. The Silent Hill games were famously Toyama's in Japan, with "Team Silent" acting as a cipher for his direction in the West, and after that, Yamaoka filled the same spot as producer/composer. David Cage games may be bad but there's a long history of them at this point, and a lot of shock-high-selling indie games are auteur work by any definition.
I mean i think you're largely just listing a the small number of people who are novel because they are exceptional in that respect. someone like david cage seems to be able to continue at higher levels of development, despite a lack of talent, entirely because there are no other competitors. and of course it's commonplace in indie development but that's what i mean -- there's nothing like a lubitsch or howard hawks or whatever of video games, it's generally something that exists exclusively outside of development at a major scale.
What I did was list four globally known examples of auteurism in big-budget “Hollywood”-style video games, dating back about twenty years in total. That doesn’t seem like it’s novel or exceptional given the longevity of their careers and the height of their profiles.
tears posted:i will not
good, and thank you.
even in the communist cop game, which does have unusually good writing, all that writing would amount to well-executed but unexceptional pulp detective story if took place in Warsaw circa 1995 or whatever. but instead it takes place in a strange and unique world/history which player slowly explores, and which reflects back on reality in interesting ways, and that's what makes it good
it is a mystery.gif
cars posted:i did learn at least that rhizzone reacts with the exact same bizarre defensiveness when i ask that question as any other Gamer hive, willfully misunderstanding the question, restating the obvious, denying the even more obvious and terminating in weirdly personal hostility. Unexpected but educational in terms of schizoanalysis so I guess the state of the forums is strong.
idk, it seems to me like everyone is giving you the correct answer over and over and you refuse to accept it. there simply is something inherent to the medium of Game's that precludes good storytelling, and that thing is its unique element: interactivity.
think about it this way: it is possible to create a truly great game with no storytelling. any nonessential element of a medium will always be subordinate to its essential elements - words in a film, for example, are nonessential, and subordinate to sound and vision.
in fact, a great film script can never rise to the level of a great book, no matter how great the film, because words alone do not comprise a film. in this way, i hope you can see that judgment of what is a great element of a medium is ALWAYS relative, ALWAYS depends on the medium, and in this sense, the medium of Game's is NOT receiving special treatment, even though it is for children.
Audience participation through an avatar doesn't deal in choice, uncertainty or plasticity. It affirms the performance as presented, unless it breaks down, meaning, unless something goes wrong. It doesn't equip anyone with the knowledge in the flesh, the knowledge by doing, that anything can be changed about the story or the arena where the story's told, let alone out in the wider world. It just aims to make us feel how that feels sometimes.
So involving the audience in that way, superimposing each audience member's conscious and unconscious perspective onto avatars in the story, is the exact opposite of giving them something they can change or make their own. The agitation of the audience-participant is paralysis agitans, and Aristotle's catharsis is a technique to vulcanize the plasticity of the world. Dramatic theatre enacts repetitive tragedies and implicates us by enticing us to relive them, implicate ourselves in them and, finally, affirm them through collective emotional release at story's end. Whether or not the end is tweaked for the audience is immaterial, because it's still required to serve the same purpose. Through that "involved" repetition, those of us in the audience affirm by extension and in practice, in our muscle memory, the unchanging and unchangeable nature of the world, which in our era means the affirmation of bourgeois ideology and its false universalism.
Brecht considered "epic" theatre to be the kind that forces the audience to seize control of their own reactions and responses. It denies them the power to live through the characters as avatars, and it denies them the ending that bottlenecks their thoughts and passions into catharsis. The audience can get no closer than a good spot to watch what the characters do and hear what they say. Members of the audience can be no more than observers of the story, but the role of the observer is the role of true power in response to that story. No one should leave the hall confident in what happens after the curtain falls or in the path of the conversation they might have about the ending they just watched alongside the person leaving next to them, should they choose to talk about it. That process is a dialectical one that unfolds over time. The observer observes, and then, if they choose to do or think anything (and good theatre should induce that), they will be engaged in struggle, in building something for themselves.
Brecht was pretty smart about his terms, switching out "epic" for "dialectical" because he'd observed how easily the former gets stretched and hammered out of shape. By now, Ebert's observations about cross-pollination between video games and popular cinema, about the usual worst-of-both-worlds results, everything that "epic" describes in popular conversation today... that Chicago industry shop talk seems almost rustic, because of course both media are trying to be each other as much as they can be while still preserving complementary channels to accrue capital.
Since cinema still acts to catch the consumers who would never play video games as well as those who do, it's the channels that complement each other, not the media. Maybe there's some real way the two could enhance each other as forms, but that's about as far down on the list of Hollywood's desired hybrids as you can get. The distracting clash between the two whenever a direct attempt's made becomes part of the desired effect, consumer pseudo-identity as personal investment in an early-adopter experiment. Projects to weave a story through "seasons" of a video game and a TV show, for instance, serve to lock down a rivulet of a revenue channel while serving as a sideshow freak tent for wider consideration among those relative few who even notice when it happens. It's just one story made extra hard to read, and likely impossible to read at some point in the near future, even though tens to hundreds of millions have been spent on ways to get that project, and that project alone, in front of its meager audience. It's not wastepaper pulp and four-color ink as overhead. It's Ozymandias.
Where did "epic" end up? If we find it, we might not like how it looks or smells... but For The Win you could poll the people in the wider revenue stream, the yearly summer flooding of the septic cultural riverbed and the hog lagoon where it pools. I wouldn't, but if you're looking for the rancid Badassery Awesomesauce where "epic" marinates now, poll the massive social network connecting popular cinema and video games that's willing to throw thousands of dollars at a dozen yearly releases of 10-40 hour media they'll never find time to consume, where the most commanding heights of story by haute-critical, niche-academic and popular acclaim usually compare to the most middling of middlebrow in other forms.
Poll square in the middle of that turd swamp, ask them to describe their favorite video game or what they think was the movie of the year, and you'll find a whole lot of "epic". And "epic" today isn't just different from Brecht's "epic". It's that "epic's" mortal foe, the all-audiences scream-at-the-sky propaganda melodrama, wearing discarded chunks of its enemy's decades-old facelift as a combination stage mask and war trophy.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:idk, it seems to me like everyone is giving you the correct answer over and over and you refuse to accept it. there simply is something inherent to the medium of Game's that precludes good storytelling, and that thing is its unique element: interactivity.
think about it this way: it is possible to create a truly great game with no storytelling. any nonessential element of a medium will always be subordinate to its essential elements - words in a film, for example, are nonessential, and subordinate to sound and vision.
in fact, a great film script can never rise to the level of a great book, no matter how great the film, because words alone do not comprise a film. in this way, i hope you can see that judgment of what is a great element of a medium is ALWAYS relative, ALWAYS depends on the medium, and in this sense, the medium of Game's is NOT receiving special treatment, even though it is for children.
has anyone here ever played a saga game. saga frontier is sooooo good. but its like a jrpg detached from the strong story element and its incredible. this is what idiots criticized octopath traveler for without being aware its a spiritual successor to teh saga games
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:its unique element: interactivity.
See above I guess.
toyot posted:it's not a full explanation cars but the genre built to hold great stories, rpgs, tempts developers to write choose-your-own-adventures, which is murder to stories. so they'll write beginnings generic or muddled enough to fit 3 middles, and 3 middles to plausibly handle 6 endings. if a sidekick can either heel-turn, or save the day, how well can he be realistically characterized. or what kind of foreshadowing can be built in hours 0-5 under these circumstances, do you foreshadow all paths, dilute each hint? cuz the goal isn't story-telling per se, it's automating the task of dungeon master. one compromise made is, instead of branching, they'll hide lore and backstory down sidequests, to satisfy whoever still expects every playthru could still be unique. whole teams are devoted to procedurally-generated, randomized landscapes, flora, fauna, encounters, the philosophy isn't to tell a story, it's to make a story-machine, and it's not to make visual art in a manner like a painting or film, it's to make code that sways trees and can blow snow around boulders no matter where the camera's pointed, an art-machine. and with that a sub-profession of streamers, who can make the art-machine or story-machine run best.
Yeah the "side quest" is a big part of that pseudo-plasticity. One thing I noticed and it's just anecdotal is that you will almost never find a critic nowadays saying side quests are bullshit filler. It's always a complaint about how they're not as overwrought and melodramatic as the A story, or burbling praise if they are, and since a "good" A story usually kind of sucks... While on the other hand your average video game buyer is likely as not to call that "content" bullshit, though they'll still play engage with it as directed by the product. One of the things online clearinghouses for digital games give you is a rough idea of how many more people went out of their way to find a cross-promotional brand-synergy hat for the character's dog to wear than made it halfway through the video game they paid like a hundred dollars for, I guess so they could get the one with the dog ad hat and remind themselves to buy the "enhanced" version of another video game they already own and will never play.
Edited by nearlyoctober ()
Sunday posted:as a man in an 1980s television play once said stories should be all clues and no solutions
i think probably the most interesting stories in video games are things like morrowind or the souls games which take advantage of the nonlinear dispersed and encyclopedic forms of information in the medium to make the player piece together a narrative, often collaboratively. those are pretty embryonic forms but developers should start reading borges & pavic or whatever
making a video game seems to encompass lots of difficult work and pulling together lots of different creative and technical skills - more so than working in other mediums - it doesn't surprise me that the bar for "writing in video games" is low because the difficulty of the process is such that a lot of the time, as im hunting bugs for hours, i don't actually care about the story any more i just want the damn thing to work - it was said earlier that most video game writing is bad but that most writing is bad in general - im going to go out on a limb here and say that video game writing is a whole order of magnitude worse than any other type of writing - which might explain the low bar for quality
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:has anyone here ever played a saga game. saga frontier is sooooo good. but its like a jrpg detached from the strong story element and its incredible. this is what idiots criticized octopath traveler for without being aware its a spiritual successor to teh saga games
i played the octopath demo and although the gameplay was generic (to be expected for the genre and not really a problem), the writing stood out as particularly woeful. i don't mean the 'story', because it's a video game and who cares, i mean the actual choice of words. the dialogue. unbearably painfully bad. couldn't delete it fast enough.
cars posted:Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:its unique element: interactivity.
See above I guess.
all art involves some degree of 'interactivity' in that sense, so while it's always interesting to discuss brecht, i don't think it has much to do with what i'm talking about.
(Game's are certainly in a lot of trouble if they have to aspire to brechtian ideals in order for their stories to be considered 'good'!)
its completely open-ended with very minimal dialogue or story and most of its inferred from what you do in the game. sometimes its really hard to figure out what to do. but the atmospheric effect of that is really cool. romancing saga 3 is fun too but absolutely do not buy the recent release of romancing saga 2, they redid the sprites and it looks and feels like a really shitty rpgmaker game
tears posted:making a video game is really difficult - in the video game i make, not only do i have to do the writing and the plot stuff (which is bad), i also need to write code, design gameplay, balance mechanics, and join everything up into something that is a "game" - there's not even any art or sound.
making a video game seems to encompass lots of difficult work and pulling together lots of different creative and technical skills - more so than working in other mediums - it doesn't surprise me that the bar for "writing in video games" is low because the difficulty of the process is such that a lot of the time, as im hunting bugs for hours, i don't actually care about the story any more i just want the damn thing to work - it was said earlier that most video game writing is bad but that most writing is bad in general - im going to go out on a limb here and say that video game writing is a whole order of magnitude worse than any other type of writing - which might explain the low bar for quality
what kind of game are you making
keep it up tears. game dev is a freaking juggling act and it's super overwhelming but i hope rewarding at every successful step
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:taht lastfm guy shru i mentioned is also making a game it looks fun, to me https://store.steampowered.com/app/1040490/Prologue_for_a_Vacant_Kingdom/ havent played yet tho
in your ifap thread you spent a lot of time wondering what problems ppl had with your posts, and i think a good place to start is that you should stop referencing random online people you know as if it means anything to anyone. Cheers
blinkandwheeze posted:in your ifap thread you spent a lot of time wondering what problems ppl had with your posts, and i think a good place to start is that you should stop referencing random online people you know as if it means anything to anyone. Cheers
i get obsessed with the relationships between people across websites in a probbaly really schizo way though i dont know what im trying to signal by saying it. i do not think im trying to show off exactly though.. if it comes off that way. i posted that in particular cause when tears said she was making a game i remembered that i had mentioned him before and then i thought of his game so i was picking up on a thread of thought that had come before. it bothers me when i do that but i dont understand why i do it really
cars posted:you could have a good story instead though, on top of the rest of that stuff, and you could call an unexceptional story an unexceptional story instead of calling it a good one
it is a mystery.gif
this is like saying "this novel could have good illustrations on top of all the rest of the prose"
and for most of the games I play (which granted may not be representative but that's just because i have better taste than most video game players) it's more like "this cathedral could have a better narrative"