the games thread is a sanctuary for gamers
Populares posted:Video games are for children.
i nebver said i wasnt psychologically arrested at the age of 12 in a way that causes all my problems
Populares posted:Video games are for children.
oh yea? then how come we have a thread for it on the communism forum?
By V.I Lenin
https://www.crummy.com/2009/10/15/0
cool interesting comment on tath thread:
Andrew Plotkin has an interesting set of slides musing on rule-based programming for IF: I thought of it because of his observation, on slide 25, that IF programming is all about exceptional cases; it seems to me that this is another symptom of the fallacy of logical positivism, where you can't make the world fit into a neat set of categories.
i need to listen to that podcast. apparently perec is mentioned? and the comment about positivism? where are these cool 2009 gamers now
Edited by tears ()
edit posted way too many times in arow further shit going in dumphtread
tears posted:7 posts in a row about byob *taking off glasses and cleaning them frantically, leaning back and falling off chair*
sorry.. see dumpthead
swampman posted:Judging by the price, content and addictive power of video games and the marketing strategies of their publishers they are for adults
cars posted:idk, most people who play Skyrim think the main story is an unambiguous single-reading narrative about a hero stopping a dragon from eating the world. and true Gamingkin make memes about how simple that is and how it's a decline from the purest Aryan golden age of Gamers Gaming. But if you read a couple roadside plinths and collect a couple books, you find another story about how the dragon doesn't want to end the world, he defines his goal in defiance of that role. He's the "World-Eater" like if your parents told everyone your nickname was Spanky.
i think my issue with skyrim is that this seems like "the hidden narrative" in a discrete sense and something closer rpg sourcebook lore. whereas by embracing the gnostic & hermetic i think morrowind is interested in exploring that sense of occlusion itself, producing something that is more painterly and evocative. there's a more perfunctory hidden narrative you can discover about vivec betraying the tribunal etc. but i don't think that's as interesting on its face as the further questions that raises and the writing explores.
similarly i think the souls games approach is interesting because of how uninterested in the conventions of worldbuilding it is, that kind of storytelling could have easily led to trivial wiki fodder but the world its trying to communicate is much more concerned with the fabulous & poetic, more like lord dunsany or something than post-tolkien genre fantasy
blinkandwheeze posted:the world its trying to communicate is much more concerned with the fabulous & poetic, more like lord dunsany or something than post-tolkien genre fantasy
the fortress unvanquishable, save for lightning zweihander +5
blinkandwheeze posted:i think my issue with skyrim is that this seems like "the hidden narrative" in a discrete sense and something closer rpg sourcebook lore. whereas by embracing the gnostic & hermetic i think morrowind is interested in exploring that sense of occlusion itself, producing something that is more painterly and evocative. there's a more perfunctory hidden narrative you can discover about vivec betraying the tribunal etc. but i don't think that's as interesting on its face as the further questions that raises and the writing explores.
I have zero interest in "lore" or anything related to it, I'm just saying it's part of the story through found written materials if people bother to look and that the thing Skyrim's accused of jettisoning is right there in the game.
I'm probably being more conservative than I need to be since I tend to be generous with other people's readings, what I'm really saying is that's the story and most people who played it don't know it, I mean, Christopher Plummer straight up tells you that you didn't stop the world from ending.
And tbh when it comes to the better game, I think the Sermons are interesting and everything but I'm not sure most of the real experience of playing Morrowind depends much on the esoteric androgyny of the alchemist and concepts like that except in corner cases, as much as Kirkbride wanted to win the daily argument in the leaky Bethesda boiler room. It seems like the haphazard result of what most people report it to have been, this constant struggle to try and trick the deadline cops on the team into accepting more provocative elements, like the guy designing most of the monsters would go into the office with two designs that would be impossible to get approved and one that he really wanted because otherwise everything would look like Daggerfall.
chickeon posted:Not sure if you mean something different by lore from what most people do, and in general i despise 'lore' discourse about games and think it homogenizes and trivializes what is already overhwelmingly homogenous and trivial already, but it seems from your posts that you have a non-zero amount of interest in it.
this , but forums lore
chickeon posted:Not sure if you mean something different by lore
What I mean is that as far as I can tell, and I don't have much of an interest in digging into it because it's honestly a little nauseating to me, "lore" is what a lot of "fan communities" substitute for thinking about stories in the way I'm at least trying to do.
"Lore" is the collation of information without regard to the context I'm trying to provide here. "Canon" is sort of the same way when it comes to continuity over different entries in a series.
It's treating a story as a reality on another plane of existence divorced from ours in both creation and reading, and of course doing that selectively and without rigor because you have to leave yourself room to point out when the Eternal Jew was responsible for A Girl Being In It and so on.
Both of these are a little grotesque to me, the treatment of these elements of a story as though every story existed in a physically consistent universe that provides answers, replacing discussion of stories, let alone analysis, with arguments over readers' just-so stories to preserve the "universe".
Maybe there's a nicer way to see "lore", I don't know, I haven't bothered to think about it much.
because that's not what I understand it to be from what I've seen of it, that sort of thing is what the "lore" people hate talking about because it connects the real world to something they'd rather treat as a complete escapist fantasy. "lore" wants to pretend that those bugs evolved on Morrowind or were created by wizards etc. and that's the allowed reason in the "lore" conversation for things to be a certain way
cars posted:I have zero interest in "lore" or anything related to it, I'm just saying it's part of the story through found written materials if people bother to look and that the thing Skyrim's accused of jettisoning is right there in the game.
it approaches it in a very different way to what morrowind does, a game which requires you to piece together narrative threads but not in service of "revealing" the narrative, one that doesn't show you any real answers but provokes an evocative experience in itself through the process. you're right that most people who condemn skyrim for that reason are probably doing so on a trivial level but i don't think it's the same as what i'm saying. i'm not very interested in the general form of piecing together clues in the information of the game world in itself, but the particular narrative experience it allows. like a borges thing where you're playing a detective finding the mysteries to solutions
& i agree that kirkbride's most interesting stuff has a pretty small impact on the direct game experience but that's sort of valuable in its own way. like people have said the novelty and value in the medium is generally its most mechnical aspects, which narrative should make space for. then there's this other textural layer you can discover which recontextualizes your understanding of the nature and weight of what you interact with as the "reader"
i think it's cool that the souls games have a completely perfunctory main narrative that barely pretends to be anything more substantial than the device to carry the gameplay along, with the story it is more interested in telling being one that is more evocative and ephemeral
blinkandwheeze posted:it approaches it in a very different way to what morrowind does, a game which requires you to piece together narrative threads but not in service of "revealing" the narrative, one that doesn't show you any real answers but provokes an evocative experience in itself through the process. you're right that most people who condemn skyrim for that reason are probably doing so on a trivial level but i don't think it's the same as what i'm saying. i'm not very interested in the general form of piecing together clues in the information of the game world in itself, but the particular narrative experience it allows. like a borges thing where you're playing a detective finding the mysteries to solutions.
I mean... I think you can assume in good faith that I'm talking about the same thing, not some sort of quest to fill out the Wikipedia page, and we may just have a different experience of how much we enjoy the different narratives.
And I don't know that it's necessarily less satisfying in an objective sense to have the experience of a narrative where those elements punch a hole in a more traditional story and let light through than one where the entire structure is deliquesced by it. I think maybe some people will find one or the other interesting, or both to different degrees.
My point of comparison might be Oblivion, where it's much more of what Skyrim seems to be in a lot of people's minds: the Dragonborn are a royal line that serves to prevent an evil being—one completely exterior from both the player avatar's story and the legendary line warding it off—from entering the world and conquering it. You're the hero of fate because it puts you in a cell where Captain Picard spawns and he's part of that bloodline. Find the dauphin, light the fires, watch the legend play out. In Skyrim, it turns out that being the last Dragonborn in no way requires you to come from that royal line, that it's an influence from time's own avatar instead of a legacy of blood, and the influence of the eidos of the concept of "dragons", also the representation of time, is the reason you end up kicking the shit out of every single dragon the game throws at you.
Again, I have to resist the idea that I'm just interested in that because one thing's the good thing, but you're secretly the bad thing, and so twist ending, wow what a shocker! It's among other things how that traditional narrative about a fated hero coming to save whitey in his hour of need interacts with the familiarity of the in-game myth of the Nords for most players, but you're not really there to make Skyrim great again, that stuff's all operating on a lower level that the story makes explicit is dirty and nasty with no higher mythic purpose to it than the interests of competing elites. I think that very much gives the player tools to confuse the story for themselves, and I'm still wondering how and why, since there was apparently no commercial need for it as the game's overwhelming success adheres to the surface narrative.