The Errant Signal Thread

[Jarpie]

I don't think most people who does videos are interested in actually debating, otherwise they'd be on forums writing instead of doing videos. Also some other "youtube personalities" tend to be those so-called "precious flowers" who can't take criticism and will react with drama and/or butthurt because someone called them on their opinions or mistakes, but dunno if this is a case with Campster.

Given what Campster has said and what kind of games he's talked about, I don't think he's been playing for longer than since maybe early 2000s, and certainly haven't played pre-Kotor RPGs. That's my impression at least from what he talks about the storylines and writing.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

He's on the ignore list because he posts image spam (like most everyone else on the list) or an alt of someone who does. I still read the posts if they're actual posts and at the end of a thread.

Yes, one of the reasons developers do this, is that it allows them to introduce the setting and mechanics to the player without it feeling out of place. There are other reasons, which I've mentioned, and which you've ignored, raving about tutorials like the butthurt fanboy you are.

The only other reason you mention is that it allows the character to be an established part of the game world... which has nothing to do with amnesia since any character can do that by having a backstory.

Fuck it. I went and read your posting history, you've really contributed nothing of value, ever. Welcome to ignore list.

Just helping refresh your memory, my brother, since you appear to have confused me with someone else.

 

[Turjan]

Fish is a drama queen, there is no comparison... but people like Chris that earn money/fame out of talking, criticizing and debating other people's work... why they react so badly when people do the same with them?

That's actually very common. People who constantly criticize others most of the time don't take criticism well. I have seen the same with jokesters, who have no qualms making fun of everything and everyone and become deadly insulted if you make a tiny joke about them.

 

[felipepepe]

I don't think most people who does videos are interested in actually debating, otherwise they'd be on forums writing instead of doing videos. Also some other "youtube personalities" tend to be those so-called "precious flowers" who can't take criticism and will react with drama and/or butthurt because someone called them on their opinions or mistakes, but dunno if this is a case with Campster.

I think people make blogs/videos because they want to be heard, they believe they have something important to say, but don't have a forum where they feel comfortable/relevant enough to post it.

Glorious Codexia is great in that aspect, constantly people like Alex create threads on theories of game design, with massive chinese great walls of text (that clearly take a lot of time and research), and we proceed to have a nice (if politically incorrect) debate. Not on every forum you could get a big thread going for long and remaining interesting, especially if you're a newfag...

I suppose that youtube guys do get some e-mails from people doing smart questions and debating, but it's a sad thing that it's hidden from all the other viewers, that we can't debate all together, just one at a time with the author, since youtube comments are almost as bad and limited as twitter. Sadly, it does happen that after some time people seem to move from "let's discuss this" to "hear my lecture"...

 

[Infinitron]

I suppose that youtube guys do get some e-mails from people doing smart questions and debating, but it's a sad thing that it's hidden from all the other viewers, that we can't debate all together, just one at a time with the author, since youtube comments are almost as bad and limited as twitter. Sadly, it does happen that after some time people seem to move from "let's discuss this" to "hear my lecture"...

Errant Signal does have some limited debates in his blog comments, but he seems to avoid getting bogged down there by making it as obscure as possible.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's stupid to try and debate with people when you're making videos like this. You think GD is a useless shitstorm, imagine twenty times as many people. Half of them are just there to stir shit up. You can't have a meaningful discussion like that anyways, everything important is drowned out in the noise.

If you really wanted to talk about stuff with him, you could send him an email or something. I'm sure he'd reply. But expecting him to address every fucking viewer that makes a comment is retarded. I mean, he has over 800 comments on a single video on youtube alone, let alone other places he uploads the video. Who the fuck would even read that, let alone try engaging it in discussion?

 

[tuluse]

You must be a farmer with all the straw you used to construct that man.

 

[sexbad?]

Youtube comment boxes are a shit place for discussion, given the character limit and the often broken threading, but it's entirely possible that someone can leave something worth reading or debating there. From what I've seen, though, he just doesn't reply to YouTube comments much at all. He might more recently now, but I don't watch many of his things anymore so I'm not up to date on that. I don't get eight hundred on any of my videos, I think, but even eight hundred on a five hundred character limit aren't at all tough to read or prioritize. There are some comments I've seen on his videos that I think really deserved to be answered, critical or otherwise, and it's kind of silly that he just ignores them, outwardly at least, as far as I'm aware.

 

[PlanHex]

infinitron y u so slow



Game looks like the FPS equivalent of a pixelhunt, but it has a neat story so apparently it's the best thing ever.

 

[sexbad?]

He sounds like he's trying very hard not to call it a point-and-click adventure, even though doing so would probably make a lot of elements easier to explain and relate to.

Game looks like the FPS equivalent of a pixelhunt, but it has a neat story so apparently it's the best thing ever.

I'm supposing that, provided it's actually good, it gets its challenge in a manner similar to Myst, in that puzzles and other symbols of progression present themselves in nonverbal but observable ways as you gain information from the environment. If it's just a series of rooms full of things to look at with no more real interaction than Dear Esther, that would be a letdown, but it might be worth checking out.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's not so much a matter of it being good, as being a step in an interesting direction. Hopefully it has some success and encourages some more people to create a really good game with a down to earth story. As it stands all that ever gets made is basically hollywood over the top bullshit, where everyone has to be some sort of ninja or super spy or whatever the fuck.

 

[felipepepe]

I'm actually very interested, but $20 is just too much for an experiment...

 

[Infinitron]

So apparently some people are getting fed up with Campster's favorite term: http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=543

So I’m aware of plenty of valid criticisms of ludonarrative dissonance as a term, and it’s certainly an idea we should continue to healthily question the need for. However, there seems to be a recent trend in certain game criticism circles to not just critique the idea, but to dismiss it out of hand. In the past few months Bob Chipman, Anthony Carboni*, and Jim Sterling have all written pieces that try to dismantle the idea. And I’m trying to process my thoughts on this without being a giant hypocritical asshole. This is more difficult than you may imagine as I think that all three misunderstand the idea to one degree or another, but if I start drawing lines in the sand about how they “just don’t get it” then I become the sort of slave to vocabulary I warned about above. Still, if we’re to have any discussion about the idea at all, I think it’s worth having a concrete starting place – and I like going back to the start.

Clint Hocking – who originally coined the term – first used it in a critical piece on the original Bioshock. In it he wrote about how the story – which he claimed has a preoccupation with criticizing the Objectivist notion of individual interest above all else – felt at odds with the gameplay that celebrates a player’s exaltation to virtual god by leveling up and gaining power. Note that this is a thematic dissonance, not a literal disconnect. The story explores how a society built on self-interest and men becoming gods was inexorably doomed to fail, but the gameplay champions and rewards the players who act just that way. The game seems to have two directly opposing thematic goals, and it’s not an uncharitable position to say that it’s a deeply conflicted work. The question is whether we want to give a name to that tonal and thematic conflict – is it sufficiently different from a story that conflicts itself? Can gameplay itself present self-contradictory perspectives, and if so what does that say about this word’s value? Do we gain anything as critics, players, or developers by being able to identify when play is thematically opposed to story? Is it setting up a dangerous false dichotomy?

Unfortunately the concerns raised by these three critics seem to be attacking something else entirely – mostly a disconnect between literal gameplay and literal story, where things “don’t make sense.” In Carboni’s case, he refers to it as occurring when “the game isn’t talking to you, it’s acting like a video game,” asking if West Side Story breaking into song results in “Musonarrative dissonance.” Sterling’s example cites Booker DeWitt going through trash cans and finding money and eating food off of the ground. Chipman claims that “a player that keeps bumping into walls and jumping into bottomless pits” when they’re supposed to “be a badass” is a quintessential example of the idea.

But while each of these may be amusing, the idea that they encapsulate ludonarrative dissonance is disingenuous. No one is claiming that throwing rocks at Eli Vance’s face is ludonarrative dissonance because Gordon Freeman wouldn’t do that; that’s just subversive play. “This wacky gameplay contrivance doesn’t make sense in the context of the game’s narrative!” was never the point of the term. Health-as-an-integer, infinite stamina and pain resistance, and a ridiculous carrying capacity have long been jokes about video games when framed in the context of an actual narrative, but they’re so far removed from the ideas of a thematic and tonal conflict that they’d represent some other issue entirely. So I’m worried they’re tearing down a strawman no one ever purported and in so doing moving the debate away from useful criticism of the term and towards a push for mindless snark against a vaguely related idea.

 

[Grunker]

I still hold that 99% of cases with "ludonarrative dissonance" is just a question of bad writing. See my example with Tomb Raider versus Indiana Jones. The problem with Tomb Raider is dissonance within the writing - she is a psychotic bitch we're supposed to root for - unlike Indiana Jones who occupies a world where the bad guys are so obviously bad - and death to minions just a minor nuisance - that we don't question the killing of a handful of sword-wielding arabs or nazis or whatever.

 

[felipepepe]

Honestly, I despise the entire range of Ludo/Ludic terms. It always read like someone is throwing in fancy words to make his speech seems more relevant and himself a specialist... "Oh, my text is not 'People should play Games', is 'The Relevance of Ludic Experiences'". The choice of words makes sense when referring to the entire spectrum of "playful" activities, but when you're talking just about games, it looks like trying too hard.

Same way, Campster's text are not "How games fail to merge storytelling and gameplay", but "The issue of Ludonarrative Dissonance"...

 

[Athelas]

The problem comes from these games trying to tell Really Mature Serious stories (and gaming journalists lavishing praise on them like the mindless hive mind they are). You can't tell a coherent story that consists for 95% of combat, a world that consists mostly of conveniently placed walls and boxes so as to facilitate the umpteenth bit of cover-based shooting. The older games didn't have this problem, because they never had any pretensions other than to be fun, while games like Fallout and Torment tackled the issue of ludonarrative dissonance much better than any of the modern games can hope to do.

 

[iqzulk]

I still hold that 99% of cases with "ludonarrative dissonance" is just a question of bad writing. See my example with Tomb Raider versus Indiana Jones. The problem with Tomb Raider is dissonance within the writing - she is a psychotic bitch we're supposed to root for - unlike Indiana Jones who occupies a world where the bad guys are so obviously bad - and death to minions just a minor nuisance - that we don't question the killing of a handful of sword-wielding arabs or nazis or whatever.

Well, actually, in the very first game Lara only killed something like 4 mercs over the course of the entire game - and ONLY in self-defence (returning fire) - all the other enemies were animals/abominations from the tombs themselves, so they don't count. Which was really damn consistent with the plot, character, atmosphere, younameit. Don't know about any of the subsequent games in the series though.

The problem comes from these games trying to tell Really Mature Serious stories (and gaming journalists lavishing praise on them like the mindless hive mind they are). You can't tell a coherent story that consists for 95% of combat, a world that consists mostly of conveniently placed walls and boxes so as to facilitate the umpteenth bit of cover-based shooting.

Yes you can. SpecOps: The Line did just that, actually

 

[Grunker]

I was commenting on the most recent TR, sorry if that wasn't clear

 

[Athelas]

Yes you can. SpecOps: The Line did just that, actually

The story of Spec Ops is laughably stupid - and a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. It criticizes the players for making the wrong moral choices, while never giving them any real freedom to make those choices to begin with.

 

[tuluse]

The story of Spec Ops is laughably stupid - and a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. It criticizes the players for making the wrong moral choices, while never giving them any real freedom to make those choices to begin with.

That's not ludonarrative dissonance. It's not really any kind of dissonance, it's just stupid.

 

[Athelas]

Yeah, you're right.

 

[Grunker]

Yes you can. SpecOps: The Line did just that, actually

The story of Spec Ops is laughably stupid - and a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. It criticizes the players for making the wrong moral choices, while never giving them any real freedom to make those choices to begin with.

That's not what Spec Ops does. Spec Ops criticizes the player for uncritically consuming crap (modern military shooters and their bullshit set of story and mechanics). It uses its lack of player agency as a story device to show how much of an idiot the player is if he thinks he has any agency. For example, it gives you the illusion of choice in choosing which prisoner to shoot, but it laughs in your face if you're stupid enough to think a choice without any consequence at all is a real choice.

If Spec Ops presented real choices to the player it would make no sense. The entire premise of the game would be inconsistent.

There are a lot of things Spec Ops can be criticized for. It strikes me as sort of ironic that it often gets criticized for some of the things it actually does very well.

(the best, shortest and to the point criticism I've seen of Spec Ops is part of Mammon Machine's article on Craft and Form: http://mammonmachine.com/post/55695607522/craft-and-form)

 

[iqzulk]

Yes you can. SpecOps: The Line did just that, actually

The story of Spec Ops is laughably stupid - and a prime example of ludonarrative dissonance. It criticizes the players for making the wrong moral choices, while never giving them any real freedom to make those choices to begin with.

Well, yeah, that's because the main focuses of its critique are the sub-genre itself and the mere fact that you are playing this kind of game at all. Like "Oh, so you like popping heads with cool weapons and to feel like a modern military hero in the meantime? OK, here's what I think about you, yes, you, behind the screen, personally". The only meaningful choice you have is perfectly adequate to the thematic of this game: you can turn off the game and go away (and Walker can just turn around and go away). Or you can keep playing. Sorry, what? You like to pop some heads too damn much or you are really curious as to what happens next? Well, your choice, suck it down then.
Moreover, the game actively mocks the "branching narrative" technique you seem to refer to by making all these "choices" extra meaningless, irrelevant and inconsequential.

 

[tuluse]

Spec Ops: haha what a retard you are for playing our game

This is a stupid point to make. Instead they should have made a good game.

In MGS3 you were given the choice of how to handle enemies. You could tranq them or kill them (or just sneak around most of them). There is a point in the game where you are literally confronted by the ghosts of all the people you have killed. They also show how you killed them. Used the flame thrower? They'll be burned. Slit their throat? Their head will be flopping around. This is far smarter and more powerful than anything Spec Ops did.

 

[Grunker]

Spec Ops: haha what a retard you are for playing our game

This is a stupid point to make.

I don't agree. Spec Ops beautifully displays that the emperor has no clothes.

they should have made a good game.

I agree. Read the Craft and Form article.