John Walker criticized: "Not Just Solid Food, But Real Food"

toro, are you one of those guys who think that "videogames is a medium" or something like that, and so videogames must not necessarily be games and so on?

Isn't "think to themes that exist completely outside of the game world" kind of the opposite of being immersed in the game? I understand that "immersion" is thrown around a lot without meaning a great deal of anything, but really, linking it to thinking about out of game stuff? You'd think it would be a better fit for when you're no longer consciously aware of there being a world outside of the game. You'd think it would be a better fit for things like this.

Misquote, more like. I'm not sure which variation of it is the correct one. Maybe this one. It's reasonably well known, and the idea is very well known. Art is about form more than it is about content.

 

BRO YOU ACTUALLY GOT ME THINKING AND I HAVE PROBABLY GIVEN THIS MORE THOUGHT THAN IT IS WORTH

BRO I DO AGREE THAT WALKERS ARTICLE WAS NOT AS STRONG AS CALL TO STORY LAMENESS AS I THOUGHT BUT I DO BELIEVE FROM READING BETWEEN THE LINES THAT A SHOOTER WITH CUTSCENES ABOUT FAGS OR SUICIDE OR WHATEVER WOULD MAKE HIM HAPPY BUT I COULD BE WRONG

THE POINT TO ME SEEMS SUPERFLOUS IN THAT GAMES DONT NEED TO TELL A STORY TO BE MATURE AND REALLY MOST GAMES HAVE TROUBLE TACKLING BASIC ISSUES IN A DECENT WAY WITHOUT RESORTING TO TELLING A REATIVELY SEPARATE STORY VIA CUTSCENES WHEN THAT SEEMS TO MAKE THEM A HALF ASS MOVIE IMPERSONATION

BRO I TINK YOU MIGHT BE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING GAMING CANNOT PROVIDE

 

Where did the | piece come from. Who are its parents? Why does it feel the need to conform to |-shaped spaces? Maybe it's seeking acceptance and approval from its father, the ¬ piece?

 

Do you actually understand what a "game" is? I guess those chess grandmasters and pro football players are doing something not alright, they should be trying to add more context/story/meat to their games instead of just enjoying the challenge.

 

I think the problem stems from the fact we lump everything with different focuses into one umbrella called "videogames". I experience, and interpret things in a much different way exploring the foggy streets of silent hill, than I do manipulating block shapes in Tetris. Assuming games will "grow up" if they adopt some high-minded focus denies/belittles the importance of games that don't attempt to be anything beyond their mechanics, but also denies progress already made. I don't entirely agree that games should forgo the notion of meaning something beyond allowing the player to "win", but draping a first person shooter with philosophical notions is not the answer.

While I disagree with people stating Bioshock as a "great piece of art"(wasn't a very good game either), I don't think this renders interesting settings/dialogue/atmosphere superfluous. In fact, if they coincide with the game mechanics it can greatly enhance the experience, making it far more memorable and engaging to play. Nothing like hearing the guards grumble about their duties and lives as you silently glide past them in thief, and I'll always remember the insanely tense atmosphere and disturbing story of Silent Hill 2. Given how good graphics are getting, its only natural that we gravitate towards giving context(meaning) to our actions as we interact with things spatially.

 

BRO ONE EXCEPTION I HAVE HEATR

THE SETTING IN BIOSHOCK VS GUARD CONVERSATIONSW IN THIEF ARE TWO DIFFERENT THING

IN BIOSHOCK THE OBJECTIVIST NARRATIVE WAS TOTALLY SEPERATE FROM THE GAMEPLAY WHERE AS GUARD CONVERSATIONS IN THEIF WERE AN APPROPRIATE PART OF THE ENVIRONMENT

BRO I KNOW I AM VAGUE HERE BUT DOES THAT MAKE SENSE??!!! THE EXTRANEOUES SHIT IN THEIF ENHANCE THE EXPERIENCE OF PLAYING THE GAME WHILE THOSE OF BIOSHOCK WERE EXTRANEOUS TO THE GAME

LOLLOLOLLOL AND I AM NOT TRYING TO BE A PCTARD CUNT HERE I DIDNT MIND BIOSHOCK AND THE THEME AND SHIT BUT I DO AGREE WITH HIPSCUMBAG THAT GAMES ARE ABLE TO INTEGRATE THIS STORY INTO THE PLAY AND IT WOULD ENHANCE THE GAME I AM ALL ABOUT ATMOSPHERE AND SHIT

AND REALLY IN THE END BIOSHOCK DIDNT REALLY HAVE MUCH TO SAY ABOUT OBJECTIVISM AND AYN RAND SHIT LEADING TO THE NUTBAGS YOU KILLED THE ENTIRE GAME THE STORY TURNED BACK TO YOU AND I THINK THAT WAS A MISTAKE BECAUSE THE PLAYER AS A CHARACTER WAS SHIT THEY REALLY MADE THE ENVIRONMENT THE BEST DEVELOPED CHARACTER

BUT STILL IN THE END IT BOILS TO MECHANICS AND THAT IS WHY DEUS EX IS REMEMBERED IMO IS BECAUSE THE EFFORT PUT INTO THE ENVIROMENT ALLOWED PLAYERS WHO WERE DILIGENT OR GAVE A SHIT TO UNCOVER MORE INFORMATION

 

I agree entirely. It makes me angry when people cite Bioshock as one of the mature forms of the medium, when your only forms of interaction are blasting the shit out of anything that moves in an assortment of ways, or some contrived moral choice where you eat(?) or save some weird little goth girls. Its made even worse considering the 'moral choices' culminate in the most retarded moments of the game at the end(RAISE THE LITTLE GIRLS OR TAKE OVVERRR DAHHH WURRRLD!). Thief will always be remembered for its stealth gameplay, but I certainly enjoyed the setting and care they gave to the environment/characters.

So to me, if a developer feels like a feature is worth it to include in the game I expect it to be quality. Like in a RPG, its going to take away enjoyment from my game if I have to listen and wade through Bethesda dialogue, and quests.

 

BRO YOU KNOW THINKIN` AINT GOOD FOR BROS LIKE US! DONT DO IT BRO!

AND READ ALEEC MEER MORE OFTEN HES THE ONLY ONE THAT DOESNT LEAVE YOU WANTING TO SMASH YOUR OWN HEAD AGAINST THE WALL BRO!

ALSO, BASICALLY ....err... ahem....

:slaps himself:

I mean, ahhh...



The problem here might be with reading between the lines really... although i hate the fuck he didnt say anything out of the blue really. basically he is right.

If you look at the games as a medium that has as wide range as you can imagine then a portion of that range is missing, so far.

And he is not saying all games should go in this direction, just that some of them could cover this issue more deeply. Thats all.



STAY GOOD BRO!

 

Wow, lots of interesting comments over the weekend! I'll try to answer a few now & a few later.

That's very much what I meant - whether we're talking about setting, aesthetics, or story, none of these make a strong game by themselves or elevate a stupid game to a smart one.

I'd agree with you. I think it's important to understand what's defined as a "game" (or something close to it) a la Juul 2004 so that we understand the different purposes and strengths of these different products. Like Cracked.Com's David Wong says, "ask yourself why those Modern Warfare games have essentially two different products on the same disk -- one is a five-hour-long action movie, the other is a competitive electronic sport." Unfortunately, people like Walker tend to get a bit irate when you try to put boundaries on what a game is. For people who are impressed by flashy themes and "cinematic" gameplay, everything is games, and anything that moves games towards more "respectable" media (typically movies) is still commendable.

I'm upset to see that you think that I think it's "bad" that games aren't books. Killingsworth and I are actually very glad that games aren't books. You have misunderstood me. Please try reading again.

This is exactly my point - in the game GTA4, as a set of rules & verbs & interactions as Rockstar created it, it's literally impossible for Niko to behave like a reasonable person. He does not have non-sociopathic verbs. You don't need an "rpg mechanism" for that - you need a button that does something that doesn't inflict harm for once, or a rule that discourages you from murdering civilians, like The Saboteur did.

 

So you freely admit you don't know what a theme is in a literary context, and yet you felt compelled to write on the subject anyway? When writing is being discussed, whether it be in literature, movies, or, yes, video games, theme refers to something very different than "setting, aesthetics, or story". Theme is the central idea or problem that the author explores through his storytelling. As such, the theme of Star Wars is not "Space Opera"; it's Good vs. Evil. Likewise, the theme of Fallout: New Vegas, which you cite as an example of "a good theme making a good game better", is not "Country Western", but Violence and Human Nature. As far as I could tell, your article was an attempt to contribute to a conversation started by Slate's review of Dark Souls, but by failing to understand one of the key terms of the debate, you've completely missed the point.

There is nothing "shallow" about theme. When you begin to think thematically about stories, you discover that a well written story is idea rich and filled with layers of meaning, all of which combine to give you some insight, some take, on what it means to be human. Games rarely do that, probably because most developers, like you, evidently never passed high school freshman lit class.

 

You're the one who's putting "literary" in front of the word "theme" every time I've used it. You're restricting what I'm trying to say & then getting bent out of shape about the restricted version of my argument that you've made. Please, calm down.

In game development, it's pretty common to refer to "theme" as the unifying aesthetic you choose (robots, ninjas, ancient egypt, feudal europe, etc). If you're here to split hairs over semantics, I'm afraid I'm not interested in what you're selling.

 

So were you responding to the conversation started by the Slate author or not? Because when the Slate author discussed theme in video games, he wasn't talking about "unifying aesthetic".

 

I'm replying to Walker's article, linked at the very beginning of the article. I quote the exchange between Thomsen and Killingsworth becaues I thought it was interesting, and that Walker's argument seems to miss the point of games in many of the same ways that Thomsen's does.

I apologize if there are particular semantics which seem "off" to you - I hope that you will still be able to read the article and understand what I'm trying to say, and agree or disagree with my argument, not the particulars of word choice.

 

A little bit off topic, but Thomsen is a very curious guy - what happened to him to make him go from proclaiming "Metroid Prime is the Citizen Kane of videogames" to complaining that Dark Souls isn't War & Peace?

 

I agree that theme must be married to mechanics. Easy to say. Perhaps difficult to do. But I don't know. When Shut Up and Jam!: Gaidan, a weird little labor of love if there ever was one, has no problem making absolutely everything revolve around the power of basketball, why don't we see more of that from much larger companies? Sure, we're talking about a light, silly sort of unity with Shut Up. You collect the tears of dead basketball stars and throw basketballs as your main attack, etc, but it keeps the game cohesive and the mechanics make a certain kind of theme and story sense. You don't get the uncomfortable marriage between movie-or-book and straightforward shoot-em-up that you get with a lot of modern games. Maybe it's like designers either feel obligated (or are actively pressed) to put familiar mechanics in games that don't fit them. For example, what really is the point of shooting over 100 people during a normal playthrough of L.A. Noire? It's more an adventure game than a GTA. Or maybe designers just don't think through it enough. I don't know. But I wonder if a reason that games like Thief and Deus Ex seem to be concerned more with theme is that they're designed around their core mechanics, which have nothing to do with shooting anyone. There's no sense of playing two separate games awkwardly married together like you get with some BioWare or Rockstar games. And many many others.

(And hello, longtime lurker.)

 

This is exactly the shit I've been praising the Dark Souls and Demon's Souls ever since I got my copy on my Asian release of Demon's Souls. The dark and hostile nature of the game is evident in gameplay as much as it is in the theme of the game. They work off each other perfectly. Everything is shit and there are big scary demons who look like they can ruin your day. You have giant demons with equally impressive hammers that look like they would squish you in one hit. And they do.

Now to make a Souls game that wouldn't make sense in terms of gameplay or theme they'd have to try and sell a grim and dark world with these dangerous monsters only to have us kill them by the thousands while trying to rake up a high combo score by chaining flashy moves one after another. Of course if you make the game not take itself seriously, and you have a less-than-serious main character then suddenly these graded combos make sense. The main character is goofy and likes to have fun so you'd kind of expect him to turn killing demons into a little game.

 

This is the 3rd time I try to write you an response and I realized that I cannot write a concise answer. So, just some ideas:
1) "So, the article you're criticizing is a call to do something too, a call to design better gameplay, and to have this gameplay reinforce the narrative, instead of contradicting it" - I actually agree with this point. And in the previous posts, I actually discussed about reaching a equilibrium between mechanics and story.
2) "What Walker wants, essentially, is Mass Effect with a better story. Do you agree with that?" - Partially. What is wrong in this? My only point in this discussion was that a good story most likely will improve a game, independent of the fact that the game is revolutionary or not. And maybe that failed experiments as Bioshock should not be shunned, but taken as examples for a future iteration. And the third one, that mature themes are not limited to adding romances to a games
3) Let me repeat again ... I did not put neither Bioshock or Heavy Rain on any kind of pedestal. Maybe you can read the original post again.
4) You might be shocked to realize that gameplay mechanics represents a limited quantity of fun, where fun is described as something refreshing and new. Is true that emergent gameplay is fun, meaning that a developer can design several gameplay mechanics that are build on top of each other and/or all of them can be combined for unexpected effects. However the number of combining gameplay mechanics is a finite and usually after the initial surprise of finding a new "gimmick", the fun decreases exponentially. It doesn't matter how flashy is an explosion or how gory is an assassination, the fun is limited to a few hours. On other hand, a good story can keep a person entertained/immersed for the entire experience of the game. I TOTALLY AGREE that a good story will not make a game great or awesome by default, because it depends how that story/experience/theme is delivered, but I rather have a game with story than play a game without one.
5) I don't see the reason why do you complain, the mainstream is flooded with superficial games that don't even try to mimic a story solely for the reason that those games have no purpose of existence except to get more money from people. Can you accept that some people want more of Bioshock, despite the fact that the game sucked for more than 50%?

 

The beginning of Heavy Rain -- the parts where you're jumping through hoops to make your son happy and then when you're desperately searching for him in the mall -- are a pretty epic implementation of marrying gameplay and story/theme (despite being based on lame QTEs). The rest of the game, though, devolves into an interactive movie with some semi-interesting CYA elements.

 

I don't know. I definitely make the difference between movies and games and I never claimed that all games must be in the same way or something like that.

And I posted solely because I see so much patronizing attitudes about who wants mature themes in games. Like is some bad thing. Or like there is not enough space for all of us, beer drinkers and wine drinkers.

Immersion is a an overused word, but I don't see the harm to find something new in a game and then research it outside of the game. I did not say that is mandatory for gamer to press ALT+TAB and read on wikipedia on the spot. For example: After playing F3 NV I had to get more information about Hoover Dam. It's stupid and not quite useful, but reading has some fun in it

Half truth is a full lie.

 

It is my main hobby for the last 20+ years. And maybe that is the reason why I want more from games, cause I wouldn't want to find out that all this time was spent in vain
Is nice that you put chess and football side-by-side, even if they are different as hell and we were discussing about "video games".

 

I'm all for weightier themes in games. At the very least, it might get us more narratives that aren't [blank] saving the world from [blank], a prettily spun pulp story to hang shooting things on. I do think that a lot of these games trying to reach for the weightier things get bogged down in the actual play. But there's nothing wrong with seeing a real-world character name in Crusader Kings and wanting to know more about them, or wanting to google Hoover Dam after playing New Vegas. Games that are rooted in real world facts and intrigue, games that have done their homework, are something I'd love to see more of. As long as they're also fun. That's the tricky part, balancing the two ambitions, developing them together rather than separately. War and Peace could be a game, maybe, but not if you just copy/pasted the text into cut-scenes and figure the writing will speak for itself.

 

Just to be clear, it wasn't about the defending the article or whatever. It was just a FYI kind of thing. It sounded like you didn't know of the quote.

It is not a matter of space. It is a matter of some imbeciles arguing that corked wine is a particularly fine brew of beer.

 

Because of the scandal ignited by that quote, I knew something is wrong with it and I pointed it out in the first post. Cause for someone who publishes essays, it's unacceptable to misquote something.

Both beverages are fine, just not at the same time

 

I haven't. I understand that they're both interesting experiments, but Pathologic sounds a little crueler and more rough-shod than even I can abide. My schedule this year is pretty well packed between my Master's thesis, Legend of Grimrock, and the PC release of Dark Souls.

I've kind of written about this point before with regard to David Jaffe's notorious talk. Gameplay isn't just a series of "gimmicks" or the size of your explosions or whatever. You're right to say that fun decreases after the game is mastered, because once mastered, the game is pretty well used up (Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun 2004). That's exactly why we look for games which "have depth" or "are difficult to master." That's why sports, chess, go, etc are still played today, because their play isn't something you figured out a million years ago and are now just sitting through trying to get to the next dose of story reward. The play itself is lasting and fun. If you feel like your fun has been "used up" within a few hours, as certainly it was in Bioshock and many similar shallow games, that doesn't mean that games need stories - it means that games need to be better, more interesting games.

As much as I'm flattered that you think I could come up with so insightful a quote as Ebert's First Law, I suggest you click this link. or this one.

 

toro, just saying like, but nothing in your last post deals with any point made in the stuff you quote.