Thirith on 15/6/2011 at 10:35
Sometimes you come across as the Angriest Little Autist, you know?
Matthew on 15/6/2011 at 13:37
Oh god, not the New Games Journalism debate again.
Yakoob on 15/6/2011 at 18:08
I think what Koki is getting at, and why I am agreeing with him, is that the real-life humanists and philosophers aren't what the humanists and philosophers should be by definition.
Instead of people who do look deeply into issues of human existence from a perspective of logic and reason, we get a bunch of pompous pseudo-intellectuals who, as Koki said, elevate simple and basic narrative twists into "holy shit epitome of human experience and oh god this reveals so much about humanity!" either due to their lack of experience with the gaming medium or due to their general tendency to over dramatize and embellish shit in line with their artsy viewpoints. Go watch some "artsy" student indie films if you wanna get an idea of this "god-i-am-so-deep" pretentious attitude. The same thing is now happening to games.
Let's take "The Path" as an example, where people creamed themselves about how "deep" it was. It wasn't. It was a game with 7 different half-told stories depending on which character you chose, with extremely shit controls and an even more abhorrent camera. Yes, there was a glimmer of novelty in there, but it was buried dead before it could shine because of the utterly shittastick game mechanics. It's like what Koki said - a game made by humanists who may understand narrative, but do not understand games at all. You can't take poetry/movies/novels and shoehorn them into a game, it's fundamentally different medium. But that's what these guys did, and why it didn't work.
And don't get me started on "yet another artsy platformer that uses a cartoony artstyle / neat post processing effect and refers to childhood innocent/banality of evil/some-other-pseudo-deep-human-nature-element..."
Sulphur on 15/6/2011 at 19:01
Too late.
Dude, The Path was made by Frenchmen. You know, the same guys that heralded the movement where a urinal uprooted and exhibited on a pedestal was a profound statement on redefining what 'art' is.
If I wanted to defend the Path as a game, I couldn't: it is a perfectly splendid example of an anti-game, where none of it was made to conform to your standards, some of it was made with the intention to provoke, and all of it is the antithesis of what a game is meant to be, which is fun.
The point being, of course, that a game can be ugly and terrible to mince through and unfun and instead of leading you off into flights of fancy and lurid escapism and shallow entertainments, that a game can ground you and bring you back down to earth and rub your face in the mud to remind you how life works. It's a subversion of the idea of what a game is usually meant to facilitate, which is a diversion from the pain and horror of reality.
Whether it does this well at all is, of course, a better question to ask. My opinion is that it does it too well: it's a bit too art-housey and dependent on repetition to grind through to its ambiguous climaxes, sort of like watching Tartakovsky's Solaris but with five times the number of scenes that are just the camera focusing on some fucking leaves floating in pools. And, like Solaris, the resolution that you arrive at may not be one you want to accept or like or understand.
Koki on 15/6/2011 at 19:23
Quote Posted by Sulphur
like watching Tartakovsky's Solaris but with five times the number of scenes that are just the camera focusing on some fucking leaves floating in pools.
Fact: The Path is one shitty game.
Sulphur on 15/6/2011 at 19:25
I just said that :confused:
Koki on 15/6/2011 at 19:32
Just wanted to make sure.
Yakoob on 15/6/2011 at 19:42
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Too late.
Dude, The Path was made by Frenchmen. You know, the same guys that heralded the movement where a urinal uprooted and exhibited on a pedestal was a profound statement on redefining what 'art' is.
Which reminds me why I hate pretty much all french movies :p
Quote:
The point being, of course, that a game can be ugly and terrible to mince through and unfun and instead of leading you off into flights of fancy and lurid escapism and shallow entertainments, that a game can ground you and bring you back down to earth and rub your face in the mud to remind you how life works. It's a subversion of the idea of what a game is usually meant to facilitate, which is a diversion from the pain and horror of reality.
No. It's not a deep metaphysical allegory of how reality works. It's a shitty game with shitty control scheme.
Yes you can use a medium to basically do
the opposite of its whole convention in order to make a statement, but isn't that just a really cheap and easy way of going about it? I mean I can make a movie made of epilepsy-inducing flashes and screetching sounds and that would stand out from the millions of indie films as an "anti-movie" but that doesn't mean it's deep or required any intellectual effort.
It's much harder, and much more meaningful to use the conventions of the medium in
the right way to invoke
the wrong feelings. Could The Path, as you say, remind us of "how life works" and "horrors of reality" with proper gameplay, controls and camera, without purposefully annoying the player? I'd wager that yes, it could, but of course, achieving that would be much, much more difficult to do. A good example is the flash game (
http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydaythesamedream.html) Every Day the same dream which manages to carry the monotony and pointlessness of daily life
without resorting to fucking up the gameplay in order to convey that. And honestly, my big issues with The Path (the crappy controls and camera) really do feel more like poor design choices rather than purposeful decision to provoke the player.
EDIT: I am not saying games should stick to the game formula 100%. There's certainly room to deviate and breaking rules CAN be used very effectively (look at Eternal Darkness's mindfuck moments like pretending to freeze or erase all your saves in order to mess with the player, or even MSG's 4th wall breakers). But there is a different between breaking some rules for effect and breaking
all of them at the same time; the latter just reeks of pretentiousness and "look how different and deep we are!" I'd also argue that breaking rules only works if the user expects them NOT to be broken. If a person knows everything in a game/movie/novel is effectively the opposite of what it should be, he learns to expect that and, thus, the effect is much less pronounced.
Briareos H on 15/6/2011 at 19:53
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Frenchmen
A Flemish and American couple.
By the way, this is one of the only times where I'm disagreeing with Koki's shortcuts about what a game is, and of course for once Yakoob agrees with him. Man Y. you're my gaming antithesis.
Yakoob on 15/6/2011 at 20:04
Briareos H, I guess it's the fact I am a programmer and a science person at heart who happens to love and pursue game design and filmmaking. By all means I dont want art to be a mechanical clockwork, and the whole reason it is art is exactly because there there is an element of illogical and irrational emotion in it. But at the same time, I have a much less tolerance for abstractness and perceive an excess of "artsiness" as pretentious bullshit rather than true innovation and deep retrospection :p
