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Walking simulators aka "Notgame" Thread

sser

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Good points, but I don't feel like without playing Her Story I can contribute anything further.

A good movie would have been better than Her Story (even if it is a one room setting, eg. The Interview with Hugo Weaving), but if you have decent, at best, acting and the silly narrative offered it needs the game element to make it worth any while. I would not have watched this as an 80 minute movie.

Some time ago I thought that this was precisely the reason why these projects are being sold as games. If they were released as movies/animations/books then they would be grinded to dust by critics of specific field. By chopping them up and introducing some minimal interactivity they can be sold as games and receive critical acclaim for pushing gaming "forward".

Aye, but if anything it does give a bit of a release valve to something that's been pressuring and thus fucking up games for awhile.

Gaming has always had a struggle between gameplay and "serious" narratives. Considering how many games are action-focused, it's very difficult to develop the latter. Look at the new Lara Croft games. In the gameplay, you mow down hundreds of henchmen. In the narrative, you're a big baby accruing a steady stream of PTSD. Lara Croft is a run-and-gun game with a Walking Simulator's plot. It's fucking stupid. It just doesn't work. Prototype was another one that bothered me. A lot of the cutscenes have the protagonist sulking about and being worried about this moral cause or that one. Meanwhile, you're a biological weapon of mass destruction that can consume people alive.

A Walking Simulator effectively removes the biggest roadblock -- the player's input in character development. If your only action is to press W, then the developer is free to pepper in whatever they want. It's a comic. W is you flipping the pages. It's just a joy ride now. These are the dime novels of today. Unoriginal and pandering, just like their literary forebears. Except instead of punching away at a Depression-sunken American's desire to be rich, it's just a glut of tapping into the drivel that passes for commentary today, a fucking feeding trough simultaneously poured into and eaten from by every moron that can afford internet access. Make no mistake, these games are developed by individuals, but they're really written by a sea of dipshits, because it's just communal garbage being bounced around the most widely accessible platform about fifty thousand times/likes/retweets/posts before it winds up in a "game."
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014


I'd like to see more of this kind of art direction in games, not just in notgames.
 
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It has come to this - https://archive.is/y4Meh

Developer of indie darling notgame That Dragon, Cancer is crying because people would rather watch his game on youtube than buy it and "play" it.

This doesn't surprise me at all. These are essentially self-paced movies, so not much is lost from the experience by watching LPs instead of going through the "game" yourself provided the LPer is competent. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these walking simulators fail because the first couple of LPers to give one a shot are too incompetent to find their way around and kill the pace. Basically I see these more as interactive movies where you get to be the director, but lots of people would rather just let someone else do the directing. The problem is that lots of these LPers get popular for being funny, not because they are good at navigating 3D worlds or following basic instructions meaning they screw up the director part of the interactive movie.

No matter how good your story is if it's poorly paced it's going to fail to get real recognition. Imagine if people did readings of a Murikami book or something and some of them were somehow so incompetent at turning pages that you'd have to wait 3 minutes after a page ended for them to get to the next page sometimes. To add to it they'd fill that dead time in with dumb jokes while they tried to figure out how to turn the page. You'd probably say the book sucked after that if that happened to be your first exposure to it. This is why I think LPs can really hurt story driven walking simulators. In a sandbox game like Minecraft if the LPer fucks around and cracks jokes for 15 minutes between doing things it doesn't really do that much damage to how the game is perceived as there is no story being disrupted.
 

Blaine

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It has come to this - https://archive.is/y4Meh

Developer of indie darling notgame That Dragon, Cancer is crying because people would rather watch his game on youtube than buy it and "play" it.

However, for a short, relatively linear experience like ours, for millions of viewers, Let’s Play recordings of our content satisfy their interest and they never go on to give us money in the lucrative way that we intended for it to be given.

:lol:

I don't have anything against walking simulators, but I can't be bothered with them. I did try Mind: Path to Thalamus, and I imagine that's the only walking simulator I'll ever need.

Hidden object games, on the other hand, make my blood boil. I've never played one, but I know how they work... absolute degeneracy.
 

Infinitron

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In this interview announcing their next game, The Chinese Room's Dan Pinchbeck talks a bit about how notgames have evolved: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/01/total-dark-announcement/

“Dear Esther came from first-person shooters. Looking to the left of the spaces normally explored and wondering what else could be done. A lot of that came through narrative and music, but we were experimenting with a genre rather than trying to create a new genre. The other mods we were making were very game-y.

“It’s fascinating to see how that type of game [walking simulators] is evolving really rapidly at the moment. Even though there’s a conception that any game that falls in that category is very much the same as the next one, mechanically, people do expect the games to have moved on from what we did with Dear Esther. Rapture went open world. Firewatch and ADR1FT are all introducing new stuff, whether its dialogue, choices or survival elements.

“What looked like a new avenue is getting assimilated back into a more traditional form of first-person adventuring.”
 

Crooked Bee

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This tweet isn't about notgames per se, but imo it does represent the same kind of mentality that led to / is embodied by notgames - in an ideal case at least:



Note the anti-"dominant design values" attitude, the 100% notgamey disdain for "obstacles," and the absolutely zero consideration given to mechanics. I'm assuming "interactions" are meant to be non-mechanical here too, i.e. moving an item or taking it in your hand and looking at it from different angles, etc., aka the notgame version of "interactive storytelling" (esp. as coupled with "observation").

Also, as evident in this guy's case given his pedigree (Harmonix, 2K Marin), it's funny how the Looking Glass design philosophy can easily mutate into that behind notgames.
 
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felipepepe

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I still think the most deluded part of all that is thinking VR will take off and be popular... is the kind of thing were the hype comes 100% from devs, journos and critics who are entirely disconnected from the average gamer.
 

Metro

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I still think the most deluded part of all that is thinking VR will take off and be popular... is the kind of thing were the hype comes 100% from devs, journos and critics who are entirely disconnected from the average gamer.
So much this -- VR is still a huge gimmick.
 

mutonizer

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So much this -- VR is still a huge gimmick.

Yea, I don't even see the point for games personally. Not even interested in trying it to be honest.
For other activities however, ranging from medical to porn but also gyms (treadmill VR, that'd be big), etc...

But all in all, I don't think people want to put shit on their face or on their body in general, especially at home. I mean sure, if you go to some park attraction for VR, you put on the shit or something, but at home?
 

Burning Bridges

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Games of the future could be consolish, VR, MMO notgames running on Unity.
You walk through a photorealistic (albeit only 2x2km) world with other people, watching a series of prerecorded events.
 

AN4RCHID

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Been playing this on the Rift - it really does make this kind of game more engaging

 

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http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/140706329877/the-first-of-my-new-series-on-interactive



Transcript:

OK so here’s the beat:

(Spoilers ahead.)

This is where Esther died.

I’m going to walk you through what it’s like to play Dear Esther if you’re someone like me. The game begins on a pier jutting out into the water off this small island. A voiceover begins narrating a letter addressed to someone named Esther, the logical conclusion for anyone who plays games is that the voice is you. As you start to explore the island, more letters are read, and though they’re kind of vague you start to piece together the basics: Esther is a lover who died in a car accident, and you’ve come to this island off the coast of Scotland as a sort of pilgrimage, you and Esther having read about the island in a book. Fragments of memories come through in the letters: of meeting with the man who drove his car into yours, of the hermit who used to live in the bothy, of Esther being next to you as you woke up from kidney stone surgery. All the while you make your way forward across the island.

Despite hearing all these letters read aloud, you never actually stop to write any, but you take that in stride. You think of how, for instance, at the beginning of Half-Life 2, it’s morning, and it’s evening by the time you get to Black Mesa East, and then it’s nighttime in Ravenholm, and then daytime on Highway 17, and then nighttime again when you get to Nova Prospekt, and if you cut out all the times you’ve quickloaded no more than 6 or 7 hours of real time have passed, and at no point have you stopped to eat or go to the bathroom, and that’s OK. With games time gets compressed in service of the story. You roll with it.

But as you progress and make your way into the system of caves that takes you through the mountain, things start to get a little… hyperreal. The caves are, frankly, beautiful, but do caves off the coast of Scotland really look like this? And how exactly is all this being illuminated? It’s a bit much for bioluminescent mushrooms. But whatever, it’s maybe a strong aesthetic choice by the designers. You roll with it.

But then you fall down this waterfall and splash into this pool of water and then… you’re here. The scene of the accident. It’s just… here, in a pool, in a cave.

I’m going to try and articulate what it is about this scene that feels so… haunted. Because it doesn’t quite feel like anything else I’ve experienced in a work of fiction.

When you come across a scene like this in a movie or a novel, there’s usually the moment where you ask, “Wait, is this real?” And then your suspicion is confirmed. [Wake up clip.] And that’s what dreams do, they end when you wake up. Unless you’re in a coma, all dreams - even lucid dreams - will end of their own accord. And that’s how books and movies work as well: the only way to experience a movie is to have each frame be followed by the next; the way to experience a book is to keep turning pages. You consume the narrative by being pulled forward through it. This sequence will also end of its own accord after about a minute, but by this time the caves have incrementally become so surreal that they no longer feel markedly less dreamlike than what you’ve just experienced.

You are theoretically underwater, but you’re body has no buoyancy. You don’t float. You sink. This space has rules, just as concrete as the rules of walking around the island. This leaves you with the sense that, while this space is clearly impossible, it doesn’t feel like a dream; it feels like a place. It’s the difference between being shown a haunting image and being in a haunted house.

Dear Esther is a dense text - dense with visual and narrative information. If a book is dense, your primary option for unpacking it is to, upon finishing it, reread it, and see if you notice more this time. You can’t spend more time in the book; the only way to be in its world is to progress towards the end of the book. Dear Esther takes only about an hour and a half to play beginning to end, but you have the freedom to spend three, five, ten hours poring over the details, of which there are a lot. This dreamlike world will end after about a minute, but this one won’t, not until you choose to proceed. What the game can do that books, movies, and dreams can’t, is allow you to linger.

So what is and isn’t a dream? Where if this scene were in a movie you’d be doubting the protagonist’s perceptions, here you’re starting to doubt your own. Where in a movie you’d be asking whether this is real, here you’re asking, “Has anything up to this point been real?”

Because, thinking back on it, you’re starting to wonder about what’s preceded this scene. What seemed like narrative elisions now seem like discrepancies - the narration says you’ve come to the island with one copy of the book you read with Esther, and yet there were many copies strewn around the bothy; the narration says you broke a leg in the cave, and yet that doesn’t seem to have happened. Come to think of it, you noticed the remnants of a wrecked car on the beach, which you took in stride at the time, but now you realize there are no roads on this uninhabited island. You remember all those times you saw something out of the corner of your eye, what usually turned out to be brush blowing in the wind, but wonder now if you weren’t actually seeing figures in the distance (and, on further playthroughs you will discover that, yes, there are ghosts on this island). And, notably, the narrator didn’t mention anything about finding a stretch of highway in a pool of water.

So is this island real?

This scene becomes a turning point in that question. As the game progresses from here, the narration becomes more and more abstract, and so does the island. The narrator describes his broken leg becoming infected, his narration descends into delirium, and you start to gather that he’s probably dead. So is this island some purgatory, built of his regrets? Is he actually you, or are you someone else, living out a dead man’s memories? (I mean, that is literally what you, the player, are.) Various images and memories start to mix together as the narrator tries to make sense of his loss. At the game’s end, you are left not entirely understanding what happened in this man’s past, or what his ultimate fate was, or, really, what the game was about. You’re left only with the feeling of lack that comes when a loved one exists now only in memory and memory is fallible and incomplete, with a jumble of images and sensations trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy, trying to add up into a person.

And, if you feel you can make sense of the game, you can treat it like a book and go back through it again - you can, like the narrator, visit and revisit this memory of the accident, hoping to understand more this time. But with every playthrough, elements are randomized - you get different letters, encounter different ghosts. Even, some small percentage of the time, this scene is partially replaced with the recovery room after the narrator’s surgery. And if you find some new detail you didn’t notice before, you can’t be sure if it was even there the last time. Memory is fallible. No two players will get precisely the same set of variables and notice all the same things, which is something games can do that books and movies can’t. So everyone is given their own incomplete set of puzzle pieces, and the option of going back through to look for a few more. And, like going through your actual memories, you can always learn something new, but it may never be enough; it may never be resolved. A tragedy may never make sense.

This is how we tend to think of ghosts: people who, even in death, can’t let go. People who are still trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.

Lots of game mess with sanity effects to simulate a character going delirious. But these effects make you question the character’s rationality, not your own. They may be disorienting, but you never actually doubt your perceptions; you know the screen is actually going all squidgy.

But this is something unique, and exclusive to interactive media. Not to watch a character realize they’re dead but to realize it yourself. Not to watch a space be haunted by ghosts but to be the ghost. To walk through a believable world and slowly discover that this world is maybe something else, something traumatized, something you may never fully understand; a place where you might just find a car crash at the bottom of a waterfall.
 

tuluse

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There was the 1994 Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time. My dad had a copy and it was kind of gamish. There were a number of mini-game-like experiences, but it certainly wasn't a game as a whole. More of an interactive experience. (it was also really buggy and crashed all the damn time).



I think there is a lot of edutainment software from the same era that is vaguely similar (I think I had one by Broderbund that was Reader Rabbit, maybe. [my parents were really into edutainment when I was a kid]) . Don't know if this is the kind of thing you're looking for.
 

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Upcoming Doom walking simulator mod by JP LeBreton: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...om-2-mod-memoir-autobiographical-architecture



Doom meets Gone Home in Doom 2 mod / memoir Autobiographical Architecture

Someone once parodied Gone Home by merging it with Doom in the humourous video Gun Home. But now ex-BioShock and The Cave developer JP LeBreton is taking that seemingly ludicrous juxtaposition of first-person games seriously in his upcoming Doom 2 mod / memoirAutobiographical Architecture.

jpg

Finally, a game that captures the horrific reality of a school dance.

LeBreton's history with first-person shooters is well documented as he was the lead level designer on BioShock 2 - where he worked with the devs that went on to make Gone Home - and he was also a designer on the first BioShock. LeBreton later worked at Double Fine for a number of years where he was the lead designer on The Cave and the project lead on Spacebase DF-9.

LeBreton has a strong love of Doom, a game he meticulously analyzed in a blog post to accompany a Doom 2 demake of the Arcadia level he designed for BioShock. The now independent designer also interviewed Doom co-creator John Romero back in when LeBreton was at Double Fine.

In an interview with Killscreen LeBreton said that "Doom is this thread running through most of my life" and Autobiographical Architecture will cover various chapters of his journey. The first episode will focus on his Texas upbringing while later episodes will be based around "times of crisis and identity (re)formation."

Autobiographical Architecture is going to be released in installments with the first chapter due later this year on LeBreton's itch.io page.

You will need Doom 2 to play it.
 
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Although this mod seems retarded, LeBreton's analysis of Doom is pretty spot on. I read it a few years ago and wondered when he'd give his own shot at replicating Doom not just superficially, but using some of the core things that make Doom what it is (abstract level design, mobility as defense, and incredible variance to enemies). I just want him to get his head out of his own ass and work on that, not gimmicky mods like this.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Dear Esther EE: http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog/dear-esther-release-date



Hi all!

You've been asking for it, and we finally have an answer for you:

Dear Esther: Landmark Edition, for it is its title, will launch on PlayStation 4 & Xbox One on 20th September 2016 (which is still technically in Summer), and will cost £7.99 / $9.99 / €9.99.

It is a faithful port of the Source engine original onto Unity 5, and features:
  • remastered audio
  • a brand new commentary with developers Jessica Curry, Rob Briscoe and Dan Pinchbeck
  • some additional accessibility options: larger subtitles and a crosshair in addition to the original's FOV & brightness sliders and controller sensitivity
  • menus and subtitles in English, French, German, Spanish and Russian
  • trophies/achievements!
For all you non-console fans out there, the PC & Mac version of the Landmark Edition will launch with all that content in a few months, and will be free to all existing users!
 

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