Sulphur on 15/6/2011 at 20:26
Well, whoops. The Belgian bit always throws me. Their vision seems to be cut from the same cloth, at least.
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No. It's not a deep metaphysical allegory of how reality works. It's a shitty game with shitty control scheme.
But you see...
REALITY HAS SHITTY CONTROLS
No, wait. I told you it was a terrible game. That's the point!
Hang on. I know this argument is also getting as pretentious an ELP cover. That's why I said I couldn't defend this as a game, because it's the epitome of the blinking anti-game.
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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.
Yes, but the fundamental difference is that your example is unwatchable and meaningless, whereas the Path isn't
unplayable per se, it's just about painfully playable, and it has something it wants to say. If ToT really did want to make a statement and be insufferably pretentious about it, they'd make a video and bill it as a 'non-interactive game' and sell it on a website.
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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.
Also it would be missing the point. Remember the first Alone in the Dark? It had various off-kilter camera perspectives and terrible controls. A lot of the horror came from struggling with Carnby to make him do something you wanted him to -- the actual enemies you faced off had a laughable polygon count and looked like little more than shaded blobs. The game used other techniques to get the horror out of the situation.
The Path uses similar tricks because if the game were easy to control and could be finished in five minutes like EDtSD, I'd wager it'd be even more boring and would actually become sort of pointless, because better controls and a better camera would cut right through the tedium and the sense of being lost and home straight on in to the climax.
Conveniently, there's a bit of an article linked from RPS on Sunday which relates to this:
Quote Posted by I'm a Film Critic and I've Got Plenty of Time
So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman's 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It's a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film's 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can't literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film's punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think.
That's pretty much a parallel to the sequence of events for each girl in The Path. If you don't have the initial grounding in the situation, the power and meaning of the final sequence is lost.
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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!"
The Path is, to an extent, pretentious. It doesn't have to force you through the same dreariness seven times in a row. That's what I meant by saying it was a little 'too good' at what it does: what exactly does it do? It tries its damndest to be uncomfortable most of the time. You will get weary of that after some time. Perhaps that pretentious. It's the Lars von Trier school of game design; do you find Trier's approach to be pretentious? It's the same principles at work, from editing to story.
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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.
This is true, and this is again where ToT went a little too far in applying anti-game rules to The Path. They almost literally broke everything, and while that does make a statement, it doesn't do as much for the experience.
Aerothorn on 16/6/2011 at 03:20
I wish I had more to contribute, but I basically agree with everything Sulphur has said.
In short, I see where Yakoob is coming from, but he's essentializing the situation; not all anti-games are alike.
I'm also a little dismayed that you chose The Path as your example game. I realize it's good rhetorically to choose the most extreme example (in which case, why not just go with The Graveyard?) but most art games are anti-games like The Path or Randy Balmer: Municipal Abortionist. They endeavor to be good games while challenging a specific gamic assumption or trying to do something different. Also, you act as if The Path was universally well received by everyone interested in games from a non-technical standpoint. It wasn't. FWIW, my principal interest is in game narratives and The Path did nothing for me (which is not the same as saying I believe it is without value).
To put it another way: we can learn and understand many things about Metal Gear Solid 2 from a technical standpoint, but ignoring the narrative aspects would be folly if one were seeking a complete understanding. It's not an either/or situation.
Koki on 16/6/2011 at 05:37
There is just no end to the apologist bullshit, is there? "Anti-game", jesus breakdancing christ, who comes up with this shit? Oh right, people who can't do x but they think they can so they call it "anti-x" as if that justifies the fact that they have no fucking talent, no fucking skill and are fucking retarded.
Quote Posted by Briareos H
By the way, this is one of the only times where I'm disagreeing with Koki's shortcuts
the fuck?
Briareos H on 16/6/2011 at 06:36
This served to reinforce my jab at Yakoob don't worry Keaukie I'm still not sucking your pole.
Thirith on 16/6/2011 at 08:05
Quote Posted by Koki
There is just no end to the apologist bullshit, is there? "Anti-game", jesus breakdancing christ, who comes up with this shit? Oh right, people who can't do x but they think they can so they call it "anti-x" as if that justifies the fact that they have no fucking talent, no fucking skill and are fucking retarded.
And how is this not a prime example of you declaring something you're not interested in as worthless because you're not interested in it? This may strike you as odd, but as someone who routinely pirates games (if I remember correctly), you may not be in *anyone's* target audience to begin with?
I haven't played
The Path and cannot comment on how pretentious it is or is not - but any medium that isn't given free rein to try out things, no matter how silly, outlandish or indeed pretentious they may end up, is a medium that isn't exploring its full potential. I'm glad that I enjoy a medium that ranges from
Tetris to
Metal Gear Solid, from
Grim Fandango to
STALKER, from
The Path to
VVVVV. I won't like every single game within that range, and some I might outright hate, but if people decided not to try something on the basis that some might think they're pretentious, the medium would be poorer for it.
Koki on 16/6/2011 at 08:29
Making a car in which you have no control over front wheels is not "exploring the car potential", it's just retarded.
But that's not even what I was talking about - make shitty games all you want, just don't try and cop-out of it later by saying that it's an "anti-game" and the fact that it sucks balls is some sort of deliberate ploy on your part.
In other words, if you want to make a car that looks like a gigantic dick to signify the masculine focus of motorization or some other bullshit go ahead, but don't expect anyone to care unless you can drive it around like a normal car.
If a game can't stand on its own as a game I don't give a damn what sort of enlightment it may contain, and I pity the fool who does.
Thirith on 16/6/2011 at 08:38
Quote Posted by Koki
Making a car in which you have no control over front wheels is not "exploring the car potential", it's just retarded.
So what's the purpose of a game? To entertain you? To challenge you? To while away the time? No matter what definition you set up, someone will say, "Ah, but game X doesn't fit that definition - so is it a crap game or even no game at all?"
I can fully understand you not caring about games trying to be art. What I don't get is why you get so riled over something that has no impact whatsoever on you as a gamer, and that's part of a process of experimentation that in this specific case may have resulted in a crap game, but experimentation by definition can't guarantee that the outcome will be worthwhile in itself.
Quite apart from anything else, though, your notion that if you consider something worthless it is worthless and anyone who disagrees is foolish is boring. If you could at least add something beyond the vitriol, that'd be cool.
(Not quite sure why I'm even getting into a discussion on this, mind you. Probably something to do with my motivation levels at work...)
Koki on 16/6/2011 at 09:00
Quote Posted by Thirith
So what's the purpose of a game? To entertain you? To challenge you? To while away the time? No matter what definition you set up, someone will say, "Ah, but game X doesn't fit that definition - so is it a crap game or even no game at all?"
What, you want to get all technical suddenly? Fine. The Path has no opposition. There are no rules for losing. Which makes for a boring, bad game.
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I can fully understand you not caring about games trying to be art. What I don't get is why you get so riled over something that has no impact whatsoever on you as a gamer, and that's part of a process of experimentation that in this specific case may have resulted in a crap game, but experimentation by definition can't guarantee that the outcome will be worthwhile in itself.
And yet no one ever did an experiment
Can A Cat Survive Ten Minutes In The Total Blender. Hey, we won't know unless we try it. Oh right, we would know because of some common sense.
And why it riles me up? Because it's stupid.
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Quite apart from anything else, though, your notion that if you consider something worthless it is worthless and anyone who disagrees is foolish is boring.
Sorry to hear that. In my defense, I never tried to entertain you. (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P8eb2n5IRc) Try YouTube perhaps?
Thirith on 16/6/2011 at 09:39
Quote Posted by Koki
What, you want to get all technical suddenly? Fine. The Path has no opposition. There are no rules for losing. Which makes for a boring, bad game.
And even a boring, bad game can still do interesting things. Also, there are people who enjoy playing adventure games with walkthroughs, in a way that is different from watching an LP of that same adventure on YouTube. No opposition. No rules for losing. Yet they get something out of doing it.
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And yet no one ever did an experiment
Can A Cat Survive Ten Minutes In The Total Blender. Hey, we won't know unless we try it. Oh right, we would know because of some common sense.
Vastly different thing, because the experiment not only has no positive outcome, it has a negative outcome (at least for the cat, but also for anyone who has a shred of empathy for other living things). And common sense, more often than not, is an excuse for failing to re-examine your preconceived notions. So many things that were common sense turned out to be full of shit.
Vernon on 16/6/2011 at 10:34
Quote Posted by Koki
RPS doesn't offer a refreshing view. All they do is regurgitate news - and badly - and occassionally write out-of-the-ass article about how I liked this game because I liked it hurrrr.
Gotta agree. I expected more from RPS when I heard people harping on about it but it really is pretty mediocre, and seemingly worshipped by the mouth breathers that comment beneath their articles. Having said that, it is better than most other writing I know of (I have to admit I don't spend a lot of time looking for or reading 'online opinion pieces'). :o
Though I do think this the way of things - writing at places like RPS becomes stale and trite and everyone moves onto The Next Big Thing.
I don't know what the answer is - I like good writing but I doubt a print magazine is gonna cut it. How about a decent, uncompromising online magazine? Does one exist? Seems you're not allowed to make it big on the internet without inviting hordes of trolls to your big comments page or creating a "feedback subreddit" to fag everything up. "Content creators" need to see their visions through without pandering to the lowest common denominator, but I'm way off on a tangent here :erg:
