Koki on 16/6/2011 at 18:51
Quote Posted by Thirith
So you're the judge of what is a waste of time for others, Koki... Well, you've definitely helped me understand what else is a waste of time. Thanks.
Welp, no shit? In case you haven't noticed, the only reason I even wrote that post was because Sulphur got on his +5 Agility Moral High ground again. If he didn't wrote that post, I wouldn't care. Stupid things are one thing, people liking them another.
And yeah, I don't adhere to your ridiculous ideas of everyone being right at the same time. I put my own opinion ahead of everyone else's, because at leat I know I can back it up. Wanna fight about it?
Of course you don't. Because your worldview enforces you to respect my position, no matter what it is. r00fles!
Aja on 16/6/2011 at 18:56
Koki, do you truly believe we should discuss games entirely apart from any emotional or cultural context? I mean, just because the majority of your so-called humanists can't get past the need for academic recognition shouldn't mean that these subjects cannot be discussed in a thoughtful and relevant way. Wouldn't a better solution be to work toward such discussion without having to resort to meaningless jargon that hides underdeveloped ideas? A ten page paper on a game's technical aspects might be interesting in some ways, but as a replacement to the flowery, pseudo-intellectual ramblings that tend to pass as good games journalism, it strikes me as the same problem from the opposite side.
edited because he's right here in the room now
june gloom on 16/6/2011 at 19:17
Koki, get laid or something. Woman, man, sheep, I don't care. Just... go disappoint someone somewhere else.
Koki on 16/6/2011 at 19:27
Oh, I post on other forums too, don't worry
@Aja(and some others on the first page I couldn't be bothered to answer to because who cares): That was a rant. Making sweeping generalizations is one's priveliege when ranting. Duty, even.
Aerothorn on 17/6/2011 at 05:13
I think others have covered all necessary ground in responding to your points, so I simply have one question:
Do you also hate anti-jokes?
Koki on 17/6/2011 at 05:47
I anti-hate them.
Thirith on 17/6/2011 at 05:54
Quote Posted by Koki
Of course you don't. Because your worldview enforces you to respect my position, no matter what it is.
Heh. Trust me, I've got little to no respect for your position, at least in this thread.
Aerothorn on 17/6/2011 at 05:59
I think what he means is that your worldview forces you to not be a total dick to him about his position.
Or maybe that's just because you're a pleasant individual. WE'LL NEVER KNOW.
Sulphur on 17/6/2011 at 17:03
Quote Posted by Koki
Welp, no shit? In case you haven't noticed, the only reason I even wrote that post was because Sulphur got on his +5 Agility Moral High ground again. If he didn't wrote that post, I wouldn't care. Stupid things are one thing, people liking them another.
Still burning from the last time, I see. Keep that flame hot on the kielbasa.
Yak, I'm quoting this out of order, and I'm not addressing everything in your post but the main points, cuz otherwise we'll be here 'til Christmas:
Quote Posted by Yakoob
And here, I guess lies the crux of our disagreement as you outlined in your next sentence. For me, that *point* is stupid. What you are basically saying is: "I made a shitty game
on purpose therefore it's OK for it to be shitty." That doesn't seem like a good justification at all. Heck, it's not a justification at all when you think about it. Yes you really show high aptitude and excellence in the art of making shitty games, but that's not really an accomplishment, is it?
It's a perfectly fine justification if the ends justify the means: the fact that the camera angles upwards when you run to simulate the feeling of being lost, the girls' otherwise slow gait, all reinforce the feeling that it's not explicitly trying to create a system that you 'game'. Like I said, this isn't a game, at the end of it all: beyond the rule-breaking anti-gaming device, it's a slow exploratory adventure first and foremost, with no time limit and no explicit objective beyond the most obvious one.
Trying to 'game' or 'win' it is counter-productive because like Koki mentioned, there's no specific win/lose state, there's only an end trigger that you reach. Playing The Path and expecting to work a system through skill is self-defeating, because it uses the interactivity the medium affords to immerse you in the narrative, first and foremost. That is its primary goal: to leverage the advantages of perspective and immersion to place you directly in the story of each girl.
And this is where the engineering and art/narrative sides collide. A game by a purely technical rubric is expected to have a rule set and a goal to work towards. How well you follow/work the rules determines how well/fast you achieve the goal. Most narrative fundamentally does not work this way, hence the disconnect that's so often felt between trying to tell a story in a game and playing it.
The Path sets out to do away with the rule set apart from keeping the bare minimum to call it a game and breaking what's left: why it does this could be pretentiousness ('making a statement'), but it's also used in order to further
narrative immersion. Making it uncomfortable to control plunges you deeper into the mindset of who you're playing as: a lonely, wandering, lost girl who strayed off the path.
Making it easier and more gamey, adding actual win-lose systems (ignore the flowers, certain things happen if you collect a certain number of them, but with 144 of them, I'm thinking they were either the devs trolling gamers with fetishes for collectibles, or their idea of a joke) would work against the intended atmosphere, and distract you from the goal of piecing the narrative fragments together and having it all culminate once you reach the end trigger.
Threshold levels for this sort of thing are, of course, highly variable from individual to individual. It's obvious that your threshold had been crossed.
Quote Posted by Yakoob
A bunch of flashes are not
unwatchable, just about painfully watchable. See what I am getting at?
There is a difference between "painfully playable" in the sense that "I have an uneasy feeling that makes me question my life/morality/memories/whatever" and painfully playable in "I want to throw my controller at the face of the game developers because the shit controls are hampering me from actually
experiencing the game" sense. I know the RPS review totally hailed The Path as being in the former category but, personally, it didn't for me. It did little to make feel tediousness of reality; it felt more like tediousness of crappy game design. But I think we are just getting into utterly subjective field here there probably isn't much point in arguing any further :/
Threshold levels, as stated above. A bunch of flashes, by the by, are meaningless, but The Path isn't. There's a message to be discerned, and it's not some random cobbling together.
Quote:
I know you say the shitty control scheme is the whole point of the game and I see where you are coming from... but I just don't think that it, in and of itself, makes for a valuable experience that warrants the tedious slog.
But it's not the shitty control scheme in and of itself. As you said, you didn't get to any end state, so what I've been pointing out about 'impact' is lost on you. For this sort of game, you can't quite say if it's 'worth it' or not (entirely subjective again, but you know :D) if you haven't reached the culmination point that ties the experience together at the end.
It's like walking out in the middle of a boring movie: you can say that what you saw of it definitely put you to sleep and by god it sucked, but you can't pronounce a summary judgement on the entire movie because you haven't seen all of it; and you don't know if what came afterwards would have made it worthwhile or not.
Have you played Dear Esther yet? It's fundamentally the same thing as The Path, but without the anti-game efforts. Just a first person camera, a bunch of levels, and some narration and music. You could say it's not a game, the first ten minutes are boring, it's an exercise in tedium.
But it is easier to play through than The Path. So, well... if you've got about half an hour, could you 'play' it to the end first? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it.
Quote:
Ugh, this is where our subjective opinions disagree. You find the meatloaf scenes deep and meaningful. But I find it lazy, and taking the easy way out. "How do we make the viewer feel tediousness of her life? Make the movie tedious! A-HA!" How much more fulfillng would it be if you were, instead, actively engaged in the movie, not bored to tears; and yet, at the end, when you leave the screening room, you leave it with a heavy sense of pointlessness. Yes it's hard, but there are movies that accomplish just that (Shindler's List is a good example of a movie that had me glued to the screen but left with an uneasy feeling, or even David Lynch if you wanna go more artsy and abstract route). It's kind of like "show don't tell" - making the viewer stare at the meatloaf for 40 minutes feels like
telling them "this is tedius, feel tedius!" rather than properly showing it in more symbolical and evocative manner. Its so... in-your-face obvious and easy.
Entirely dependent on the subject matter at hand. There are always different ways, some may be better and some may be worse. Schindler's List made you uneasy because it was, ironically, quite easy to do so: everyone knows about World War II. Everyone knows what Nazis were like. The movie took that image and rammed it home, with the girl in the red dress, with the random shooting of workers on the street, by making Ralph Fiennes a sadistic, psychotic madman.
Affecting, but one-note and unsubtle. Far harder to do would be to portray a Nazi as an actual person, but driven, circumstances beyond their control, and making their choices as an actual human being would -- and making the wrong ones. That would be more actual showing, and less telling you of what you already knew.
The meatloaf scene -- confession time: I dislike it just as much as you would if you saw it. But the fact of the matter is, it grounds you in the scene effectively enough that what comes next is like a blow to your jaw. That leaves an impact, and it's arguably more effective than symbolism and its constantly implied foreshadowing of what's about to happen. It's a technique, easy or not, and used in the right places it creates resonance due to a) its sheer temerity in reminding you that sometimes life isn't all quick cuts to the next piece of meaningful/forced exposition, and b) the power of contrast is a valuable tool as it makes the events that follow the lull more immediate and forceful. Calm before the storm, and all that.
Yakoob on 18/6/2011 at 00:21
Sulph, I feel like we both reached a point when we understand each others points and it's time to agree to disagree; your threshold comment pretty much hits the nail on the head and is the crux of our disagreement. But to elaborate (because, why not!)
Quote:
...not a game... it's a slow exploratory adventure first and foremost, with no time limit and no explicit objective beyond the most obvious one.
Oh I agree and I am not in the school of Kokism where if a "game" doesnt have a score bar and a win screen then it is a Waste Of Time™ (C) Koki&Koki Ltd. And I took that in consideration; I heard it's more of an "experience" that needs to be "sunk in" rather than a game, and that's how I approached it.
And that's where it also failed, exactly because of the game mechanics. For a game that, as you say, is more of a narrative "exploratory adventure," the most broken elements WERE the exploratory and adventure ones, i.e. the controls and camera. You state the game aimed ...
Quote:
to further
narrative immersion.... but it's exactly because of the broken gameplay that the immersion was broken. I wanted to be an innocent little girl learning about the world and exploring it, but the stiffness and bad camera constantly reminded me I am playing a game.
It's like the game suffers from a
cognitive dissonance - on one hand it wants to draw you into the world with perfect immersion that makes you forget you are holding a controller. On the other, it constantly hampers your controls, breaking the immersion and reminding you that you are not the girl, but just her controller.
Lets look at an example. Somewhere in the forest there is a big rock with a few items of interest. When you approach it, the camera switches to one of 3 pre-defined positions, usually pointing in different directions. Here's where your immersion is instantly shattered: the camera doesn't zoom it, it switches abruptly, every 10 seconds as you walk around. And each time it points in a different direction.
I know what you are thinking - this is on purpose, to confuse you, disorient you. But even something as simple as a gliding camera would have made it much easier. The constant popping of camera left right doesnt only disorient you (a desired effect), it also reminds you that you are playing a poorly designed game (an undesired effect). Again, this may be a threshold thing.
Another example is the giant lake, where your girl automatically goes into walk mode and will not let you run. At first its alright, it serves to slow the pace time and makes the player pay attention to...... what exactly? There is the lake and... that's it. And it's not even a nicely refracted lake, but shitty HL-era water type lake. And it's huge. So if you want to explore it you will spend a good 10-15 minutes just walking with absolutely nothing to see or do. It didn't want me to immerse myself in the world and sink in the atmosphere; it made me go in the opposite direction and avoid the fucking lake like fire. I dont know maybe there is something there to see; but after 10 minutes of holding the forward button staring at the same screen I just couldn't be bothered anymore. It's like the difference between showing the woman in the movie make the meatloaf, and placing a static camera AT the oven for 40 minutes. And the oven is dark so you cant even see the meatloaf brown up.
That's where it lies I suppose. Maybe for you, you can spend 30 minutes at a slowpace walk around the exact same terrain and get something out of it; but I just cannot. I understand the allegories - life is a slog, its repetitive, and there isn't always a reward at the end of it. But the point is made in the first 5 minutes of dealing with the crappy controls and after that... they are just annoying, and prevent you from experiencing the rest of the narrative. And if there is no more narrative, if that really is the sole point of the game... why doesn't it end after those five minutes, then? And if there is more to the game, than, as I said, the game suffers a cognitive dissonance , where it tries to do two mutually exclusive things - immerse you in the narrative, and break you out of it at the same time. For me, the latter side was stronger; for you, the first. Thresholds, I guess.
P.S. I am downloading Dear Esther right now, for variety of reasons I missed it the first time around, thanks for the reminder :D
