toyot posted:

and they only have a chance at humor in long dialogue trees, when they straight up adopt text or spoken humor, existing forms.

my favorite three stooges gag was definitely when poor coding would cause them to ragdoll and vibrate through map geometry

sissyfuss posted:

ive been playing a lot of dark souls 2 (best of the 3 imo)

i too am now playing dark souls 2, the best of the 3 dark souls

cars posted:

I guess I'm interested in finding and understanding that more subtle destabilizing influence in Skyrim, because I'm not sure where it came from, and it can't be attached to a known factor like Kirkbride beyond that someone paid attention to the influence he had over the story's inspiration. I don't know who that was or how it came to pass, and I know that there's not a lot of recognition it happened, let alone efforts to understand it.

iirc most of the weirder stuff about the dragons is literally just pulled from kirkbride's description of nord myth from in-game texts in morrowind

toyot posted:

maybe that's getting to the heart of it, plot as collection-of-lore, vs plot-as-story in lit/film. what separates the medium from others, is that, the game designer does not control the flow of time, the time between game events. an author can let something sizzle, or draw something out, by controlling # of words, so time-between-events is linear to the reader's pace. film directors+editors have microsecond control over time-between-events. but there's no telling when or if a morrowind player will search the right bookcase and catch tamriel history in order, except by controlling access to area. the open-world designer can lean on the only thing roughly paced to time-in-game, the rpg player's level, by keeping later plot events behind stronger enemies. or more typically like BotW it sits you thru 8 minutes of plot at the beginning then you're free to just roam and make the 4 lasers go pew.

there's a reason that outside experimental lit like Hopscotch you don't see this attempted, it's an extra challenge, for both writer and reader. film has some interesting counter-examples, but i don't think anyone would accuse them of being interesting plots. the plot of Edge of Tomorrow if it were told in one go, is C-tier, the only reason to watch is the time gimmick. the other counter-example is marvel. each marvel movie is a bit of interconnected lore. but does anybody accuse marvel movies of having good plots? they're somehow less than the sum of their parts. 16 hours in morrowind in a weekend could be fun, 16 hrs of marvel in a weekend...

the way to do it is to just copy what planescape:torment did, where the plot IS the character of the nameless one. abandon plot for character. the stories we tell about others and ourselves are less ordered by time than they are impact. like if you had to describe a friend (or yourself) with one story, it usually isn't the most recent one, it'll be the character-defining one. videogame plot as a semi-ordered series of self-discoveries. a game like Gone Home strips the medium down to basically just that: you unravel a small mystery about yourself and family in the course of unstructured exploration.

fun to think about!

I don't think that time is as under the control of the author of a book as you've suggested, because the reader can quite freely reread passages, or jump around the page, or even flip randomly to different parts of the book. you've mentioned hopscotch as an example of 'experimental' literature that does this to some degree but i don't think that a book needs to have that book's specific structural conceit in order to be outside of linear time. there's a william gass interview i read the other day where he talks about fiction as being more like navigating a space than moving forward in time. the interview is part of a conversation with the writer john gardner who is basically arguing for a more traditional chronological/plot centred approach to fiction.

https://medium.com/the-william-h-gass-interviews/william-h-gass-interviewed-by-thomas-leclair-with-john-gardner-1979-e6de4d424107 posted:

In reading fiction, however, the motion that moves the text comes from the reader. Now the writer can indicate or try to indicate how that motion should go and at what rate. But I don’t think that anyone writes a book now supposing that the reader will sit down and read 200 pages through in a dream. He’s going to, in fact, stop, brush a fly off his nose, go back to the first page, read it over, skip, look around for the juicy parts. The book is more like a building which you’re trying to get someone to go through the way you want them to.
...
The kind of response to novels that John is talking about certainly was appropriate 200 years ago, when there were lots of novels written in that form. There are just not many of them being written that way anymore. When Fielding comes to the end of Tom Jones, for example, I suspect that he expects us to remember about as much of the first chapter as we would of that early part of our life, if we were thinking back. Not every detail, not every adjective attached to a noun in a certain way. In someone like Joyce, quite the contrary is true. He wants an experience that can happen only when the reader moves constantly about the book. The notion of the space in which this kind of book is constructed is quite different from the notion of the time through which the Fielding work moves. While I don’t mind Fielding’s having written the way he wrote, John begrudges some people writing in this newer or different way, in which the kind of attention the reader is expected to pay to the page transforms the way the work exists.

kinch posted:

videogames are also the least funny medium, of any popular medium, and they only have a chance at humor in long dialogue trees, when they straight up adopt text or spoken humor, existing forms. maybe has to do with the same thing, less control over time, who knows, i mean is that a false observation to start w/, i can't think of a funny game except macabre stuff in fallout... a well-structured sitcom ep where everything goes haywire in act 3 is paced to the second, everything is forewarned, and you catch the calamity moments before it happens, because jerry panicked and lied to the woman that george was a marine biologist, and kramer found a bucket of golf balls, and got kicked off the range so went to the beach to drive em, so now, george on the beach date with this woman, his pride has him wading out to remove kramer's titlist from the beached whale's blowhole, a magnificent fish, and the sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. is a funny plot actually impossible in a medium that can't tightly line events up? i'm asking..

blinkandwheeze posted:

that's the kind of tragic thing about video game storytelling i think because in some ways it's an ideal medium for pursuing those sort of high modernist projects a lot of 20th century novelists were working toward. but it's rare to find writers of that scale of ambition in contemporary literature itself now, let alone in a field so small minded as game development. and as others have discussed in this thread, those in the field who do have some ambition toward a 'mature' form of storytelling seem to just do an insecure disavowal of the form that makes games unique by just forcefully imposing an overwrought narrative on the skeleton of a conventional game. rather than being someone who clearly loves and wants to explore the sheer mechanics of interaction. Anyway my ps4 died a while ago and i'm P*ssed off because i wanted to get death stranding.

i think it's quite telling that the aforementioned only-games-writer-with-half-a-brain, tim rogers, who in his game criticism regularly references great postwar literature and film from across the globe, and who professes to have written a number of unpublished novels, himself designs games entirely unconcerned with storytelling, instead focusing on the medium-specific aspects of game design, particularly physics. this is not to say he is actually a great writer, or that a great writer couldn't do something special with the medium, just that it's interesting that the most obvious example of someone who might be concerned with the sort of project you mention seems to utterly reject it.

toyot posted:

videogames are also the least funny medium, of any popular medium,

smash cuts are some of the funniest things and if there's one thing you can't rely on if you're making a big-time video game nowadays, it's a smash cut

cars posted:

it's usually better imo when people who don't normally do video game reviews do a video game review. like i looked up Tim Rogers and it's



vs. the video I posted by a guy who's best-known for analysis of editing in cinema, where his video on Fortnite talks about playing the game and the experience of that beyond just comparative ranking, about the aesthetics and psychology of the hostile design and exactly how it works to extract money from the player, about the material purpose and history of the game as a social phenomenon, and so on, all in about 20 minutes, it doesn't occur to him to restrict the discussion to these silos of Gameplay, Story, etc. because he's not a video game critic.

comparing the two I begin to see the point y'all are making about the low bar for "good" video game critics as well.

i think if you actually watch your own damn video (!) you will find that, actually, this isn't games criticism. its content delivery platform experience criticism