Computer games: Page 50 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Computer games

Timbob

Stop slacking and get back to work. People like you the reason the global economy is on its knees. Fact!

Coombs

Burnwinter wrote:
Pepe LeFrits wrote:
Feeling my age reading through the lists of some of you guys.

Let me see if I can make you feel any better.

Kings Quest I and III
Space Quest II
Spacewar!
Alleycat
Harpoon

God I loved KQ5.

Right now I'm playing Dark Souls. It's like an old game with new tech. It's intelligent, gorgeous, and hard. Really enjoying it.

Captain

For the uninitiated, this is how a normal game of dark souls goes:

"ah cool. This game is kind of slo...what the fuck is that!" :dead:

presses start button - "man, I wonder how I can get over there, let me take these stai...what the fuck is that!" :dead:

presses start button - "okay, I guess I need to go anoth...what the fuck is that!" :dead:

presses start button again - "phew, just about got through this time, man this game is har...oh do fuck off!" :stabbedinthebackanddead:

Gazza M

Captain wrote:
For the uninitiated, this is how a normal game of dark souls goes:

"ah cool. This game is kind of slo...what the fuck is that!" :dead:

presses start button - "man, I wonder how I can get over there, let me take these stai...what the fuck is that!" :dead:

presses start button - "okay, I guess I need to go anoth...what the fuck is that!" :dead:

presses start button again - "phew, just about got through this time, man this game is har...oh do fuck off!" :stabbedinthebackanddead:

this was the first game in a long time to break me. i just couldn't play it anymore. in a way it felt good, because console games have been gradually watered down in difficulty since gaming became more mainstream.

Qwiss

Been playing Vanquish, really like it.

Coombs

I find Dark Souls difficult, but not in the bad way. It's not really skill that drives the game, it's more about understanding the mechanics. The richness of the game is in it's difficulty, and the more you understand the more things you begin to pick up. Little jokes, hints, secrets, and wryness/sarcasm thrown into the mix. It's stuff like this that convinces me video games can be meaningful tools for human communication, even if on the surface it's about leveling up and slaying dragons.

It's really impressive if approached as a piece of art to be navigated and experienced rather than as a sequence of player-triggered cut scenes or story elements for which game play is basically a glorified DVD menu. It's not relaxing, it's actually quite stressful, but the sense of accomplishment is worth it for me. The story itself is something you have to discover, they won't feed it to you. If you don't engage with the elements of the game, you won't know what the hell is going on. It really asks a lot of the player.

Captain

qs! wrote:
Been playing Vanquish, really like it.

Game is absolutely boss. One of the best this generation.

Mirth

EA voted worst company in America for second year running.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/04/10/ea-voted-worst-company-in-america-two-years-running/

Klaus

Poor sods just can't catch a break from angry Internet people. Remember back in 2010 when BP dropped 4.9 million barrels of oil in the mexican gulf, killing all marine life within a 50 mile radius and causing a few hundred species of mollusks to go ectinct? They still finished behind the company that made Dante's Inferno and Army of Two.

Burnwinter

They are a truly shit company.

Will never forget this open letter from a few years ago: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Mirth

Klaus wrote:
Poor sods just can't catch a break from angry Internet people. Remember back in 2010 when BP dropped 4.9 million barrels of oil in the mexican gulf, killing all marine life within a 50 mile radius and causing a few hundred species of mollusks to go ectinct? They still finished behind the company that made Dante's Inferno and Army of Two.

With all due respect, you're looking at it on a very superficial level. I think you'll find that there are children in sweatshops who are intimidated into working 18 hours a day just so that they don't have to play Dragon Age 2.

Klaus

Can't say I blame them.

I picked up Bioshock Infinite the other day, by the way. My initial reaction went something like this:

First 90 minutes: "Wow. What a stunning, bold vision. This is everything I've ever wanted a virtual world to be."
The 91st minute: "I see. Now he got hold of a gun and killed everybody."

It neatly sums up everything that is wrong with the modern game industry. It makes me sad to think about what it could have been if Ken Levine had focused more on creating interactive mechanisms to support the themes and the narrative rather than cramming a combat system into it. The shooting and the mindless violence is just so disconnected from everything else. Even mainstream sites seem to pick up on it this time, and those are the people who are responsible for the state of the AAA industry to begin with. You know that your game has got serious problems when publications like Kotaku and IGN ask themselves whether all the violence and conflict-based mechanics really are neccessary.

Burnwinter

The shooting and the mindless violence is just so disconnected from everything else.

As you may recall, this was my theory (which you despised) about the principle backing the aesthetic premise of the screenplay of Drive as an homage to, or satire of GTA. 😉

I agree with the sentiment, but it's a bit like complaining about a porno that "all these sex scenes are just so unmotivated by character development!"

Clearly game developers are convinced that their market gets off on violence.

Klaus

It does too, to be fair. There's a reason Bioshock Infinite averages 110% or something similar on Metacritic, just like every other new action release with a decent budget.

Personally I can't see any redeeming qualities in the industry. I'm far more interested in the indie culture and the DIY scene. I'll get back to the mainstream games when, and if, they ever outgrow their obsession with game mechanics. Interactivity opens up such a huge range of possible emotions and narratives to explore and yet we've got an entire industry focused on the ones who can be expressed through jumping and shooting or puzzle-solving. It's pretty sad when you think about it. You play things like Kentucky Route Zero or Dear Esther and realise that they're already miles ahead of anything that 2K, Bethesda or Ubisoft will ever create.

Burnwinter

Totally. Porn sells.

I don't know enough about the width and breadth of the current games market to comment, but it just sounds like Sturgeon's Law to me.

Is there any real reason why a big budget game can't be good? Financial risk, maybe. There will probably be an aesthetic renewal at some point - perhaps when interfaces, devices or distribution makes a truly significant leap from the keyboard/controller/Kinect-plus-console/PC-plus-download/disk model.

Three quarters of my time spent playing anything resembling a "game" (as opposed to a sport) in the past 10 years has probably been spent playing go.

It's minimal and beautiful in design, has a huge amount to teach about life both practically and metaphorically, and has more or less limitless depth and complexity.

Klaus

It's not that games can't be beautiful or serene, it's just that they lend themselves much better to challenge and performance-based rewards than they do to storytelling and emotional exploration. If you're going to do the latter within the framework of the former you're either bound to tell stories about waging war, pillaging and conquering, or you tell stories through other means such as cutscenes which ineviteably will conflict the gameplay (every game Rockstar have ever made would be a good example of this). It doesn't mean that they don't carry any merit but they're deeply flawed creations. Think about Red Dead Redemption for instance. The story is about one man's struggle to change his nature in a world full of violence and dishonest men. The gameplay is about the player killing a few thousand people and destroying innocent lives on the praire because they're bored or want to test the boundaries of the system. The most memorable scene in the game, when Marston enters Mexico and the tunes of Jose Gonzales emerge with the landscape, doesn't even have any game mechanics. It doesn't make it less powerful. Quite the opposite.

The fact that someone would liken the medium to Go or Chess in 2013 shows how backwards the industry is. It's our own fault for insisting on game design for so long while trying to create things that aren't games, though. In a way we're still stuck where films were when they called themselves photoplays, when they were nothing more than cameras capturing 24 pictures each second. Griffith changed that by discovering editing techniques like crosscutting and introducing open landscapes. Video games need someone to come in and point out that game mechanics is a form of interactivity rather than the definition of it. There are a few creators out there, like Tale of Tales, thechineseroom and Cardboard Computers, who do it already. They refuse to design their work in the form of addictive feedback loops and challenging systems. Unsurprisingly they're also much better at exploring art and emotions through interactivity than a game like Bioshock Infinite will ever be.

Burnwinter

The fact that someone would liken the medium to Go or Chess in 2013 shows how backwards the industry is. It's our own fault for insisting on game design for so long while trying to create things that aren't games, though. In a way we're still where films were when they called themselves photoplays.

Nifty point, although I find go very rich in aesthetic and metaphoric value. It may be closer than you imagine to the type of interactive experience eliciting an emotional response that you're talking about.

Klaus

Oh, I'm not saying games don't evoke emotions. They only evoke certain emotions though. In the end they're connected to empowerment and appeasement. An adventure game which deals with loss and grief on a thematical level still makes you feel good when you solve a puzzle which allows you to advance the narrative, for instance.

There are lots of studies showing that cognitive and emotional responses draw from the same limited mental resources. We're actually capable of blocking out (negative) feelings by doing something repetitive like dishes or sorting cards. Overlearned activities which can be performed automatically, like walking or passively viewing things, leave more room for dealing with emotions. In a video game context this means, in a slightly simplified way: the more complex the system is, the less capable you'll be to process the experience emotionally. Isn't it funny how the game industry has spent the last fifteen years on trying to create more and more engaging systems (or clusters of mini-systems) while trying to tell stories with an emotional payoff?

This sort of corresponds to recent experiments such as Dear Esther, where all you can do is walk around. No jumping, no picking up objects. No enemies to beat or platforms to overcome. It's a very simple interactive mechanism but it evokes a powerful emotional response. You explore this deserted island, and as you traverse its terrain a narrator will start to read parts of a letter when you approach certain key places. By exploring the island you're exploring the narrative, and the narrative causes you to make connotations between the words and the environments. It cleverly uses the island itself as a metaphor for a broken and isolated man. A bit like how people in art circles talked about an "inscape", where the painter's mental and spiritual landscape was portrayed, in late 19th century. You simply can't add to the experience by cramming combat or performance-based goals into it. It is the way it is for a reason.

Burnwinter

But I think there's always been multi-modal ways to enjoy games, though, even going back to tabletop games.

I remember an effort on Usenet in the 90s to document the various things tabletop RPG people looked for in a game. In that discussion they broke it down to:

"Dramatist" - people looking for a good story, emotional payoffs, comedy, catharsis, consistent character behaviour

"Simulationist" - people wanting a box-of-dice system that accurately modelled (or seemed to accurately model) things like physics, wounds, travel, market economics, wildlife distribution etc

"Gamist" - people wanting a series of "fair" challenges where the outcomes of the players could be rationally optimised using a set of strategies based on the published rules (so very akin to mainstream video gamer mentality)

"Immersive" - people who wanted to disappear into an experience that made them forget reality

One of the points of the exercise was to develop a vocabulary that could explain (in a non-judgemental way) why certain people didn't enjoy certain systems, or playing with certain players. At the time a lot of people objected to the cheerfully psychopathic and mercenary typical RPG character - very similar to the murderous and acquisitive player-controlled behaviour in GTA or RDR - and wanted language to express those objections.

And of course those games mostly evolved from literary works with a relatively romantic, idealised (or at least story-focused) concept of human behaviour - which made all the games where people dressed as Peers of Charlemagne ran around looting goblin lairs a bit perverse.

Thing is that none of the above hedonic modes of playing a game which combines mechanical and story aspects (like most video games) is particularly to be more valued than any other - except dependent on the people playing.

I really liked Uncharted 2, for example, which is one of those games where a great deal of effort has been made to conceal the Frankenstein scars between the "dramatist" (or cinematic) and "gamist" modes of enjoyment.

The need is for language to elucidate the differences so that developers can produce what particular gamers want, I guess.

Timbob

Me like to shoot and kill. Raaaaar!

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