N'Al on 30/7/2013 at 14:06
Heh.
Yakoob on 30/7/2013 at 19:07
Thanks Deth, I havent followed these devs at all since their games arent my cup of tea but sounds like big deals in the indie scene, so thanks for educating me.
To be honest I am a bit on the fence - I can understand Blow being upset people didn't get his intended message behind Braid and disliking press. And as much as controversial as his and Fish's opinions are, you gotta at least respect they voice them knowing the criticism they will get, rather than play the safe PR game. That being said, Fish does come off as somewhat of an entitled douche and that is something he could probably work on.
Im glad you educated me deth, since it all partains to my work on Postmortem. Again why I can relate to Blow - I have a certain vision for the game and when I first playtested it... the testers totally approached it as "I must win" which is not what I was going for. Now I did not blame them but instead considered it a failure of *my* design (plus "genre tropes") that I needed to fix (and hopefully managed by now). Anyway, skip to Goals section of (
http://koobazaur.com/origins-development-and-goal-postmortem-game/) my last dev blog post if you want to get more of my thoughts on this.
Quote Posted by Thirith
If I remember correctly, Robert Yang's "
Radiator" mods for
HL2 do some interesting, subtle things with homosexual characters. Nothing terribly in-your-face, though (but then any mention of Teh Gay is in-your-face to bigots). They're very much 'art games' of the kind that elicit the P word, mind you. Anyway, I think he's also said some interesting things on the topic in blog posts and interviews, but I won't be able to access most of them from work.
I enjoyed the radiators, and while they felt a bit "too artsy" they never felt pretentious to me. His
(http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/) design blog is actually one of my favorites because he puts A LOT of
actual research and analysis in his talk of game design. Totally not "ITS MY VISION!" type of a guy.
Quote Posted by Thirith
I think that this is rarely the real issue - it's more that this white, suburban, male perspective is seen to be the norm to such an extent that people become blind to it being
a perspective and not the world as it really is.
Interestingly, this issue came up developing our game, as one of our artists really wanted more diversity since we realized our whole cast was white. He wanted to make one character of different race.
I opposed.
Why? We already cover so many themes and motifs, I did not want to bring race into the mix, it was not what the game is about. Secondly, I was fearing it would end up being taken the wrong way seemingly perpetuating some arbitrary stereotype (i.e. "why is the only black character in the game the one that does/believes x?") And lastly, it frankly made sense from a narrative-standpoint that they would all be the same race (or close). And I did not want to have the "token minority" just for the sake of having one so we can be PC.
june gloom on 30/7/2013 at 19:23
The smart thing to do would've been to make a number of the cast non-white, not just one "token" character.
Yakoob on 30/7/2013 at 19:28
Not without reworking half the design and narrative when most of it has already been well established and suited the game's setting and message perfectly, just to be "politically correct" in a game that doesn't even touch on the issue. I don't believe in having forced diversity just for diversity's sake if it doesn't make sense.
Renault on 30/7/2013 at 19:36
Quote Posted by Yakoob
To be honest I am a bit on the fence - I can understand Blow being upset people didn't get his intended message behind Braid and disliking press. And as much as controversial as his and Fish's opinions are, you gotta at least respect they voice them knowing the criticism they will get, rather than play the safe PR game. That being said, Fish does come off as somewhat of an entitled douche and that is something he could probably work on.nd I did not want to have the "token minority" just for the sake of having one so we can be PC.
Drives me a bit crazy when these guys complain about the general public not understanding their message, sort of implying that we're all just not sophisticated enough to understand. What they don't seem to get is that they should be shouldering the blame for not properly relaying their "message" to the player. It's called bad writing and/or design.
Other times it's just an excuse for producing an awful, paper thin story with shallow characters (hello, Far Cry 3).
I actually think BlowFish have some great points and are usually right on with their opinions and criticisms of modern gaming. The problem is that they're such divas and douchebags when trying to express those opinions that they end up looking like a bunch of doorknobs and lost any credibility they might have otherwise earned.
Yakoob on 30/7/2013 at 19:40
Quote Posted by Brethren
Drives me a bit crazy when these guys complain about the general public not understanding their message, sort of implying that we're all just not sophisticated enough to understand. What they don't seem to get is that they should be shouldering the blame for not properly relaying their "message" to the player. It's called bad writing and/or design.
Exactly. When I had my playtest my first thought was "the player doesn't GET IT. crap. I'm not communicating it right, I need to fix it!" :x
Quote:
I actually think BlowFish have some great points and are usually right on with their opinions and criticisms of modern gaming. The problem is that they're such divas and douchebags when trying to express those opinions that they end up looking like a bunch of doorknobs and lost any credibility they might have otherwise earned.
^ this. exactly this.
june gloom on 30/7/2013 at 19:41
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Not without reworking half the design and narrative when most of it has already been well established and suited the game's setting and message perfectly, just to be "politically correct" in a game that doesn't even touch on the issue. I don't believe in having forced diversity just for diversity's sake if it doesn't make sense.
I question why you think putting black people in a game is somehow "touching on an issue" or that by putting black people in you need to discuss race politics at all. And you've yet to explain why putting them in "doesn't make sense."
june gloom on 30/7/2013 at 19:46
[video=youtube;TeRkK34bwFg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeRkK34bwFg[/video]
Kuuso on 30/7/2013 at 20:21
For anyone interested in whiteness as a subject, I can wholeheartedly recommend Richard Dyer's work, if you haven't perused him yet. Good starting point is the essay "White". He of course covers various subjects from masculinity to gay cinema (his main area is media studies).
Yakoob on 30/7/2013 at 21:41
Deth I can already tell that whatever answer I give we will just go further down the hole and someone down the line might just cherry-pick my comments calling me racist, if I havent already wrongly given that impression, so let's drop it. Suffice to say, for design, feasability and time-constraint reasons, it just made more sense not to drastically rework half our narrative and character art design a month before release with an already heavy schedule.
EDIT: and I dont want to discuss the particular character because of major spoilers. lets just say we did not want to end up looking like we're further perpetuating a certain very common stereotype. but we do have another non-white character in which case it fit, but again, dont want to give out too much pre-release!
