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Aerothorn on 18/6/2011 at 02:16

Yakoob: just so you know, Dear Esther is also coming out as a graphically amazing remake within a matter of months. Though it's meant to be replayed, so that's no reason not to give the mod version a god.

I actually wrote a chapter on Dear Esther in my book - it's pretty short (because I couldn't fully launch into an exploration of what makes it ticks without going to a level of narrative/academic distinctions that was outside the realm of what I was doing) but I'm relatively satisfied with it. I can send you it if you're interested when you're done playing.

Sulphur: YOU'RE SO GOOD AT EXPLAINING THIS. I'm mostly just envious because I spent a year writing about this shit and I suspect you're better at it.

Koki on 18/6/2011 at 09:19

Quote Posted by Sulphur

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.

There's one problem with that line of thought, and it's this: you still need to play it. If you don't do jack shit, the girl will just stand there till the entropy wins. So yeah, it tries to be an anti-game or whatever and ho ho ho that's so clever but in the end you still need to push that fucking block of girl wood around the forest yourself. And all the oh-so-brilliant tactics to simulate the experience of narrative immersion or whatever buzz-word you explain it with serve just to frustrate and/or bore the player. The player that is you.

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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 yet everyone stubbornly calls it a game. It was nominated for some game awards and it even fucking won some. In the GAME category. I know it's a piece of shit game, Yakoob knows it's a piece of shit game, you apparently too since you're coming up with shit like in the next quote... kielbasa.

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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.

How ironic then that almost entirety of The Path is about as un-immersive as it gets. Nothing is fucking happening 99% of the time, the graphics are mediocre and the music constantly tries to rape your ear with a pencil. And maybe for you shitty controls are immersive because they're shitty, but for most normal people they're just shitty and annoying.

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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.

And that's the kind of thinking that gets us garbage like The Path. Instead of trying to come up how to combine game and "narrative immersion" together you just give up on the former. It's the easy way out. It's like developers behind Planescape: Torment thought "Hmmm, we have a lot of text here, you know what, let's just make it a visual novel".

Or hell, think about Shadow of the Colossus. They're kind of similar mechanics-wise: you wander around a huge, completely empty area and find objects. In both games the objects are used as narrative devices. In The Path, when you find one all you get is a short text and a bad picture in your inventory screen. In SotC, you fight a colossus. Which is more fun? Which feels more rewarding?

You say that The Path feels rewarding when you actually finish it after wandering around for god knows how many hours, but that's like saying Desert Bus feels rewarding after you rech the end of the road.

henke on 18/6/2011 at 12:52

Sulph, what you've written here is pretty much the best defence of The Path I've ever read. I still didn't like it though and I even played through the whole damn thing.

Quote Posted by Sulphur

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.

What point that ties it all together? The fact that you play as the black girl in the last level? I kinda saw that final level comming btw, but I was expecting that you'd play as the black girl and your mission would be to lead all the other girls out of the woods. Instead it ended the same way as it did for all the other girls, and I was dissapointed. Would you mind explaining, in spoiler tags, what's so great about the ending? Because it just felt like a huge anticlimax to me.

Also, about the slow pace meaning that the end is much more shocking: that really only works the first time. When playing the rest of the girls I expected it to end just as badly for them, so when they enter the house and some abstract badstuff happens it's not very shocking.

Aerothorn on 18/6/2011 at 16:50

Quote Posted by Koki

And all the oh-so-brilliant tactics to simulate the experience of narrative immersion or whatever buzz-word you explain it with serve just to frustrate and/or bore the player. The player that is you.

Not to get too moderate here, but the fundamental problem with your argument is that you're treating the player as a constant. It clearly didn't serve to bore Sulphur, so why are you claiming it did? Why speak for all players when you're really just speaking for a subset of them?

june gloom on 18/6/2011 at 17:07

Because the ones who share his opinion are the only ones worth considering.

doctorfrog on 18/6/2011 at 20:42

So is the magazine any damn good, or is it only to be read with thick black plastic-rimmed glasses while waiting in line to play Nidhogg, the game that's so fucking great but is only available at cute little pixel celebrations in Manhattan?

Hoo, that thread rage is catching.

Boxsmith on 18/6/2011 at 23:21

No clue! I'm purchasing an issue, though, so I might report back after it arrives.

Koki on 19/6/2011 at 07:09

Epilepsy aside, Nidhogg was pretty interesting - the combat was tactical as shit.

Sulphur on 19/6/2011 at 08:04

Thanks for the kind words, Aerothorn and henke. Aero: I doubt I'm as good as all that, I'm just typing my thoughts out as they come, and I think I need an editor. :D I'd love to read that book once it's good to go, if possible (I don't know if that's something you're allowed to do if it's to be a text for your Uni.).

henke: I didn't mean the point that ties the entire game together - though there is one - I meant that Yak hadn't played it far enough to get to any one girl's wolf. That's the end trigger, and without experiencing what happens at that point, the experience doesn't come together.

The point of the entire game, though? I don't think there was supposed to be any denouement from playing the girl in white. The entire game is, basically, a tale of growing up and the loss of innocence. It's mentioned in ToT's (http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/the-path-post-mortem/) post-mortem of the game (warning: long-ass article) as the idea behind the entire project.

So, well, you could see this as the ultimate art-fag cop-out, but the end is open to interpretation. Mine: she's the only one who actually visits the Grandmother; she can't dally in the forest and choose not to interact with most things in it, and when she does get to Grandmother, she appears to be dying.

The girl in white is covered in blood after she meets Grandmother, and then she leaves and all of the other girls enter; the symbolism is obvious, I think. Even though she was the only common element of purity between all the girls, even she couldn't remain pure in the end. And when she leaves, all the girls come back - it's a cycle, innocence, betrayal, death, rebirth.

@Yak: Yes, agree to disagree, I'm afraid. Cognitive dissonance is a fair point because of the way the game twists the interface, but the approach worked in favour of what the game tried to project for me: you're not playing you, you're playing the girl you picked. The instances where you lose control of the girls are quite intentional again: they have minds of their own and will not follow your lead all the time. This may cause cognitive dissonance because you've been thinking of them as your avatar all along - but they're not, not quite. The girls are mostly puppets to be controlled, but depending on which one you're playing as, they will not be controlled all the time. (As most girls/women are wont to behave. :D)

You never really have much of a choice in anything in the game. And in certain places, it takes away all choice from you even in terms of 'go forward' or 'run away' - you can only go forward, even though you know you shouldn't. Control has been wrested away at this point, because, again, you're not playing you. You're playing someone who doesn't have a choice.

Sulphur on 19/6/2011 at 09:00

Quote Posted by Koki

Y'know, this is eventually just going to turn into a pointless rerun of the debate you had with Thirth.

But before that: narrative immersion isn't a buzzword I made up, it's something that games as a medium have an advantage over movies and books. Most games, you're literally in the story. Narrative immersion. This one does it very differently because it's not about literal PoV immersion, so yeah, that's obviously going to make people with zero patience or curiosity like you want to repeatedly hit your head on the desk until your brains spill out your ears.

Me, I'm not you. The player that was me wanted to see what this was all about, so I went on with it.

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Maybe they were anti-game awards

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Back to your argument with Thirith: there's nothing wrong with games experimenting and testing the waters. Whether the experiment worked for everyone or not is a subjective thing. Don't you love how that word keeps coming up?

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Oh, I agree that the combination of game and narrative immersion didn't blend here at all because the devs gave up on most of the 'game' portion. That doesn't mean I automatically write off the entire thing just because it didn't jive with my expectations of what it was supposed to be, and then snipe at 'em with a 'what retarded fucks' every now and then.

The comparison with SotC doesn't hold. SotC does what every other game does, it just changes up the formula a bit. Instead of a constant series of smaller rewards, it spaces them out until the final payoff is an epic confrontation, which ends in a massive climax. It's just using the power of contrast, again, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is coming up.

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You say that The Path feels rewarding when you actually finish it after wandering around for god knows how many hours, but that's like saying Desert Bus feels rewarding after you rech the end of the road.

So here's the question: why must all games need use a tension-release climax as a reward? What is the purpose of this 'reward'?

I never said The Path was 'rewarding'. It resonates, but it doesn't reward you for playing in terms of 'here, have your neatly tied up with a bow/happy ending'. I read through 1984, and while it's an amazing book the first time you read it, and it stays with you for a long time, it's never, ever 'rewarding', not in the conventional sense. But it is considered a very important book, a classic of literature.

The point, and this is the one thing which you repeatedly refuse to get because of your pre-conceived notions of gaming, is that every game doesn't have to be about working towards a climax or a series of them to reward the player. They can and should be allowed to be pretty fucking different and have their own agendas apart from giving you 'rewards' in the form of simple gratification, instant or otherwise.