Yakoob on 11/8/2011 at 13:51
I noticed the first time I tried to save it didnt show in my load game list. But subsequent attempts to save worked fine. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature.
Quote Posted by Koki
Well the simplest way to not make a forced or stupid allegory is to not make it stupid or forced. Sounds banal, but that's how it works. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri for example - not really the first game to come to mind when discussing deeper meanings, but it is one of the most thought-provoking I've played. Let's take the Self-Aware Colony Secret Project - you check what it does and you're like "wooot half the energy cost and some police bonuses" so you research it and then you watch the (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqN3Ur-wP0) related movie and you just think "uuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..." to yourself.
To be honest... your introspection on alpha centauri sounds exactly like the next item in "So we end up with Pac Man as a message on consumerism, Total Annihilation that was about transhumanism, the plot twist in Bioshock that was actually a commentary about linearity in games and not just a fucking plot twist and 28 Weeks Later about war in Iraq." If anything, it's even more meaningless just because, aside from the "thought-provoking" cinematic, the whole colony thing is purely a game mechanic. So the rationale behind the vid just comes off as "hey wouldnt it be so cool if we..."
But I havent played Alpha Centauri and am comenting on just the impression you are giving me (which is, ironically, exactly the impression we are giving you talking about the Stanley Parable here, heh)
Quote:
The game is brilliant but in a too self-conscious way. It's too self-referential about its "brilliance" and there is little room for subtlety. It's like an actor turning to the camera and giving a wink after a moving performance. The wink just spoils the whole thing.
But... the game ISN'T a "moving" performance. Its a clear parody that does not take itself seriously. In fact, at its heart, the self-referencing IS what this mod is about.
Quote:
Essentially what this means, is that everything about a work (in this instance, a game) is developed, fostered and crafted all in concert with one another in the pursuit of creating the best incarnation (according to the creator's strengths) of what that medium has to offer. [...] I'll give another more potentially polarizing example given the context of this discussion: Team Fortress 2.
I am hard pressed to find anything "wrong" with TF2. The art style, the sound and music, the "lampoonish" gameplay, the humourous characterization of the classes, they all fit together to create this fantastically fun, campy, and frantic multiplayer game experience. There is nothing in the game that works against the purpose of "fun, campy, & frantic", and it achieves that goal by having all of those elements expertly crafted together. Hence I consider TF2 to be a "beautiful" and "artistic" entry in the gaming medium.
Interesting... so basically, the "Citizen Kane" of video games will not be a game with the most thought-provking and deepest meaning that truly touch and change the player. It will be the one that is the most immersive and fun experience that never fails to earse the smirk of joy on the player's face?
That's... so stupidly obvious and logical I'm surprised the argument isn't thrown around more when we talk about "games as art." I'll need to keep this in mind for future (e-)debates on the topic.
Thirith on 11/8/2011 at 14:03
Quote Posted by Yakoob
To be honest... your introspection on alpha centauri sounds exactly like the next item in "So we end up with Pac Man as a message on consumerism, Total Annihilation that was about transhumanism, the plot twist in Bioshock that was actually a commentary about linearity in games and not just a fucking plot twist and 28 Weeks Later about war in Iraq." If anything, it's even more meaningless just because, aside from the "thought-provoking" cinematic, the whole colony thing is purely a game mechanic. So the rationale behind the vid just comes off as "hey wouldnt it be so cool if we..."
But I havent played Alpha Centauri and am comenting on just the impression you are giving me (which is, ironically, exactly the impression we are giving you talking about the Stanley Parable here, heh)
I'm into pretentious, art-faggy games myself to some extent, so I'm probably the worst person to post in reply to this, but I would very much defend Koki's point here.
Alpha Centauri has a very clever way (by means of videos, narrative bits, and sometimes just letting the player make the connections completely independently) of showing, "So, there's this thing in the game that gets you obvious benefits, especially when you look at it from a birds-eye/political leader's perspective. And here's what is happening on the ground. Just think about it." In
Alpha Centauri, nothing is "purely a game mechanic". It stands for something in the (fictional) world, and they're making us aware of that. It's a way of contextualising your actions in the game. It requires some imagination from the player, but with most games (except for completely abstract ones) that's a given - do you perceive the opponents in
NOLF as bits and pixels or as people or as something in between? Most people become invested in the fictions they read/watch, arguably more so with a more directly interactive medium such as games, and suspension of disbelief is a big element of that.
polytourist97 on 11/8/2011 at 19:09
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Interesting... so basically, the "Citizen Kane" of video games will not be a game with the most thought-provking and deepest meaning that truly touch and change the player. It will be the one that is the most immersive and fun experience that never fails to earse the smirk of joy on the player's face?
Basically, yes, but a game having deep meaning that truly touches and changes a player is also not mutually exclusive. I wasn't necessarily saying TF2 was an example of a potential "Citizen Kane" of games, I was merely pointing out the flaws of
TRYing to design/deliberately craft a Citizen Kane, and how the expectation of its arrival creates an antagonistic environment where the thought is the game MUST be thought-provoking, deep and touching in order to be "significant" or an artistic "success". The brilliance and significance will occur, and people will notice without a need for this conscious effort to "find it" or "make it happen", so long as game developers just do their best at making a game that can fulfill its own purpose (like valve did with TF2).
I personally would argue the Citizen Kane of games (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock) has (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_%28video_game%29) already (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex) been (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2) made.
Koki on 12/8/2011 at 07:20
Quote Posted by Yakoob
To be honest... your introspection on alpha centauri sounds exactly like the next item in "So we end up with Pac Man as a message on consumerism, Total Annihilation that was about transhumanism, the plot twist in Bioshock that was actually a commentary about linearity in games and not just a fucking plot twist and 28 Weeks Later about war in Iraq."
The point and tone of that movie is pretty clear, unlike Pac Man or TA where there really is no point at all so you need to try really hard to find one. But at the same time, unlike say, The Path, the point is not an excuse for the whole game to exist. You could remove that movie from Alpha Centauri entirely and it would function just as well as a game.
AxTng1 on 13/8/2011 at 00:19
This is like someone telling you to read a book, only when they give you the book it turns out to be a hastily-crayoned pamphlet called "this is a book". When you get to the last page, it just says "olol you turned pages, what kind of prick does than, honestly?"
Limitations of a medium can inspire creativity in other directions. This is not creativity.
SubJeff on 13/8/2011 at 00:43
Yeah, where were the frikking guns?
1984, wtf is that all about then?
Aerothorn on 13/8/2011 at 01:22
Quote Posted by AxTng1
Limitations of a medium can inspire creativity in other directions. This is not creativity.
Um, what? I think we're going from very, very different definitions of creativity. A work being subjectively flawed does not equal a work that was not creative on the author's part. Creative energy was CLEARLY spent coming up with original characters, script, level design, etc. Obviously there's a spectrum of creativity and it's up to you to decide the cut-off point, but it seems to me that a work would have to be wholly derivative (i.e. someone looking at Game X and saying "I'm going to do that but with some name changes and one modified mechanic) to wholly lack creativity.
Of course, I'm being a pedant here. I suspect what you mean is "this is not particularly creative." At which point I'd again disagree, because there are very few mods like this and no direct equivalent that I've played. It may not seem that way as we tend to cover all of them here at TTLG, but honestly they are a fraction of a percentage of the mods released.
demagogue on 13/8/2011 at 01:36
Punchlines aside, I might go on record saying an important part of artfaggotry, or influential brands of it, is that it makes you reflect on some aspect of real life & being human, either universally or in some concrete setting (putting aside abstract art, which has its own rules). It doesn't have to be necessarily all serious, because real life isn't always serious, or you don't need "serious things" to reflect on it (surrealism's whole point was to make serious use of adolescent pranks to reinvent or piss on art, depending on your perspective. But art & anti-art were the same thing to them). Though by the same token serious things by themselves hardly disqualify it also... And even though a lot of life is drudgery, I think most of us would say the most important parts about it aren't; and good art should get us to reflect on the important parts. (Hamlet makes you reflect on thinking too much; Citizen Kane makes you reflect on hubris; blah blah blah...)
But I think games designed basically to offer "escape" from real life, the whole move to scifi or fantasy, is dropping the ball. They can be fun; but they aren't offering us anything to chew on. That's not to say some scifi or fantasy couldn't make you think about life from a new angle (speculative fiction), but I think most of it is about escape. And games like this one, sort of gimmicky; they may pretend to offer some insight into life, but not really. It's only worth anything in its own manufactured world, but we don't have any reason to care about that world after our 5 minutes of jumping around in it.
All of which leads me to think games have to take on real life in a way beyond The Sims treatment to get anywhere on "art" grounds. How many FPS are there that are set in the real world not in a war scenario?
And I get that there's problems of method. The whole idea of "gaming" the system inherent in gameplay usually makes a mockery of it trying to have a "theme" (hence the artfag tendency to toss real gameplay completely, which I think is the wrong direction)... But I think there's ways you can keep gameplay & work with the "gaming" issue. You could actually *let* the player piss on the game's theme by gaming it as part of your point, again like the surrealists pissing on art with anti-art (i.e., anti-games; I've seen a few, but not a good one just yet). Or linking the gaming itself to how people live their lives, since we're in a culture where people do actually game their lives... (Can't think of a good example just now that isn't going in the direction of rehauling the dating-sim or princess-maker genre into new territory; but I have a feeling something's there.) Or like some good IF, you just do very clever scripting to connect the gameplay to its meaning in the scene... Hard to explain, but like Anchorhead structures its gameplay. They're like but not exactly puzzles because they're not gimmicky, they're still tied into the story & advance the plot in a meaningful way, etc. It's actually the gold standard of "IF gameplay" that I know and should be studied for anyone trying to connect gameplay into a story or theme; and about the only thing holding it back from being more "artistic" is just that it's still (an exquisite) fantasy. But adapting its approach to FPS would make a big splash. Maybe there's other techniques too, but this post is already long.
TTK12G3 on 13/8/2011 at 21:25
I thought that this was going to be a massive satire against gaming trends. I kind of like what they were going for, but the story branches out in so many directions that the objectives become blurry.
