The Errant Signal Thread

[Excidium]

Spec Ops, stuck somewhere between popamole and 2deep4u

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Yeah, Spec Ops is a shit game because the gameplay and story are both shit in and out of themselves. Using that to point out that the whole genre is shit, does not make Spec Ops itself any less shit.

 

[Athelas]

But there's nothing wrong with playing games for mindless fun. So while I think the people who play Call of Duty have shit taste, and I hate how the popularity of such games has stifled creativity in the gaming industry, I don't see why the people who play such games should be morally comdemned.

And do such games really run the risk of making its players glorify war? From what I understand, the average age of the Call of Duty fanbase is 8-12 (i.e. much too young to follow a story) and people buy it almost solely for its multiplayer.

And at the end of the day, Spec Ops still is a cover-based shooter with regenerating health about killing dudes. A game that claims to be subservice needs more than a few token cutscenes. Its gameplay also needs to be subversive. A game like Torment subverts RPG tropes by shifting the focus of the game from combat to dialogue. Spec Ops doesn't do anything of the sort.

Moreover, the game actively mocks the "branching narrative" technique you seem to refer to by making all these "choices" extra meaningless, irrelevant and inconsequential.

What does that accomplish? Aren't shooters typically very linear?

 

[Machocruz]

Jeezus. A good portion of game developers haven't even proven to me that they've mastered the basics of their craft, let alone have the experience and authority to be making high falutin' statements in their games. Can they even make a 2D platformer, bro? Make some games - and I mean game games- as competent or intelligent as Sim City, Castlevania, Wing Commander, Ultima 5, then you've earned the credibility to meta commentate on games in your games. That's how I feel, anyway. You don't start writing yesterday and think you're mfing Kafka or PKD tomorrow. Master the form first. Can't believe what passes for professionalism these days...

 

[Grunker]

But there's nothing wrong with playing games for mindless fun.

Who the fuck said there was? O_o

 

[sexbad?]

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.

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

But that's just worthless posturing that adds nothing to the game itself. The game's message is probably something that even the development team couldn't agree on since it's such a ridiculous mess of a game, but I figure it's something like, "Modern shooters are bad for trivializing violence and for providing bombast with no meaningful implications, no characterization of the enemies and no real context to much of the action." I think this is a totally bullshit point to make because it doesn't address what's at the core of shooting games and instead tackles something that in many cases is of no issue. The premise of the game is already based on an inherently flawed perspective on gaming, and ironically I believe it could actually have been saved by giving players greater agency.

I can get by just fine on shooters that have exactly what specopstheline doesn't want them to have, like meaningless big explosions and enemies with no real context. But specopstheline could have at least used some good old fashioned merit to justify its existence and its pseudophilosophy that points in the wrong direction. It could have given its plot device characters time to develop instead of relying solely on their deaths to simulate psychological impact. It certainly wouldn't have lost anything by making its shooting mechanics actually high strung and desperate. It could have set some kind of example for other games that have you shooting at brown people in the desert, but instead it settles for defeatist bullshit that wins people over simply by existing. It knows you're hoping for choices with some kind of consequence if you've got more than two brain cells, but the fact that it expects that of you and doesn't fulfill that hope is nothing commendable.

 

[Grunker]

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.

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

But that's just worthless posturing that adds nothing to the game itself. The game's message is probably something that even the development team couldn't agree on since it's such a ridiculous mess of a game, but I figure it's something like, "Modern shooters are bad for trivializing violence and for providing bombast with no meaningful implications, no characterization of the enemies and no real context to much of the action." I think this is a totally bullshit point to make because it doesn't address what's at the core of shooting games and instead tackles something that in many cases is of no issue. The premise of the game is already based on an inherently flawed perspective on gaming, and ironically I believe it could actually have been saved by giving players greater agency.

I can get by just fine on shooters that have exactly what specopstheline doesn't want them to have, like meaningless big explosions and enemies with no real context. But specopstheline could have at least used some good old fashioned merit to justify its existence and its pseudophilosophy that points in the wrong direction. It could have given its plot device characters time to develop instead of relying solely on their deaths to simulate psychological impact. It certainly wouldn't have lost anything by making its shooting mechanics actually high strung and desperate. It could have set some kind of example for other games that have you shooting at brown people in the desert, but instead it settles for defeatist bullshit that wins people over simply by existing. It knows you're hoping for choices with some kind of consequence if you've got more than two brain cells, but the fact that it expects that of you and doesn't fulfill that hope is nothing commendable.

*sigh*

You didn't actually read the entirety of my argument, did you? Then you would have noticed this:

I feel similarly about Spec Ops: The Line, in that it’s basically got nothing, but it does have a plot and characters and we can have a ready set of tools for talking about them.

[...]

Spec Ops has plot and characters, but its pacing is ridiculously awful, the delivery of its message eye-rollingly blunt and lacking in nuance, and the supposedly mediocre shooting is mediocre to no interesting end.

I can't really reply to your finely argued post when it ignores a pretty vast part of my own argument. I don't expect you to read the entire article if you can't be assed, but you could at least skim the parts that deal directly with Spec Ops. Though the entire article really is about Spec Ops as well.

 

[Grunker]

(in short, I pretty much agree with you, but you'll remember I started stating this:

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.

and I still stand by that: Spec Ops' narrative, and the way it constructs it, is excellent at the deconstruction it attempts)

 

[sexbad?]

(in short, I pretty much agree with you, but you'll remember I started stating this:

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.

and I still stand by that: Spec Ops' narrative, and the way it constructs it, is excellent at the deconstruction it attempts)

That's exactly what I was addressing. It doesn't do anything beyond just recognizing criticisms of things it hates and putting in nods to them. The fact that your choice of whether some pointless asshole burns to death or gets shot is completely meaningless is just defeatist bullshit.

 

[Grunker]

(in short, I pretty much agree with you, but you'll remember I started stating this:

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.

and I still stand by that: Spec Ops' narrative, and the way it constructs it, is excellent at the deconstruction it attempts)

The fact that your choice of whether some pointless asshole burns to death or gets shot is completely meaningless is just defeatist bullshit.

There's no way I can reply to that. The fact is that the pointless choices have a point. You may think it's not the most graceful way of making that point, and I'd agree.

My argument is that the story makes no sense and becomes incoherent the moment you implement real choices in Spec Ops. Would Spec Ops have been better crafted? Had more ambition? Been able to tell a better story? Yes. Would it have been able to tell the story it tells? No. Because it uses the lack of choice to make its point.

Spec Ops functions brilliantly as a showcase of how the emperor has no clothes. The first part of the story is a tight clone of modern shooters, and the steps it takes toward the end (which is of course a story of what these shooters actually are when you strip away the dressing) is good at showing what it wants to show. Contrast it to FarCry 3 for example, which is basically an attempt at telling the same story, but a much more feeble one. It is incoherent, has no clear point it wants to get across, and jumps from one end to the other trying to figure out what it really wants to say or who it wants to sympathize with.

Say what you will about Spec Ops; its narrative is coherent, clear and precise. Its characters has arcs that are believable and serve to underline the thematic points.

Too bad that's pretty much all the game's has got going for it. Arguably, it's not enough. Unlike the other discussion, this last part is strictly a matter of taste.

 

[Grunker]

Also, sexbad, more reviewing, less random debating on the Codex

 

[Vibalist]

I'm kind of sad to read that SpecOps supposedly has such a good story, because I couldn't for the life of me get through that horrid, horrid gameplay. I must've quit somewhere around after six or seven hours, it just failed to keep me interested. Though I guess it goes to prove the very valid point that games must have a foundation of solid gameplay to rest on, and that no amount of excellent storytelling can replace that foundations. Hell, I could even deal with Bioware's hamfisted fucktardery that they call storytelling if their games were actually fun to play.

 

[sexbad?]

My argument is that the story makes no sense and becomes incoherent the moment you implement real choices in Spec Ops. Would Spec Ops have been better crafted? Had more ambition? Been able to tell a better story? Yes. Would it have been able to tell the story it tells? No. Because it uses the lack of choice to make its point.

Spec Ops functions brilliantly as a showcase of how the emperor has no clothes. The first part of the story is a tight clone of modern shooters, and the steps it takes toward the end (which is of course a story of what these shooters actually are when you strip away the dressing) is good at showing what it wants to show. Contrast it to FarCry 3 for example, which is basically an attempt at telling the same story, but a much more feeble one. It is incoherent, has no clear point it wants to get across, and jumps from one end to the other trying to figure out what it really wants to say or who it wants to sympathize with.

An important word in what you're saying is "showcase." I suppose you're right that it does deconstruct elements from other similar games and then lay them out and show them to you, but I still don't think that's commendable. The narrative is competent overall (and I agree about it being much better than FC3's infuriating attempt at ironic bad), but it's definitely there to show all the shitty tropez rather than examine them. People who aren't total proles (I'm including myself in this group) are already aware of the horse shit in modern crispy cinematic shooters, so just showing off the stuff that's disagreeable doesn't impress me at all. I don't need ludic aid to see that the emperor wears no clothes, because it's glaringly obvious already. specopstheline can display the tropez and what it thinks of them, but it doesn't tie them in well to the narrative.

For example, I think Nolan North's character arc is stable overall, but one major part where it just flops is near the end after your buddy is captured and hanged. Not so much later, he appears as a spooky apparition in the form of a heavy armor enemy who taunts you that everything is your fault. Nolan North yells shit like, "I tried to save you!" but it's completely meaningless. The point of the scene was to have your buddy blame you for wrongdoing, and it wanted to connect that with his death. Except there is no connection, because your buddy got lost in an accident, and his death was entirely out of your control. It does use the scene to tell you off, but it only manages to do that with a questionable amount of competence.

It probably couldn't have gone by its exact premise if it did manage to give people meaningful choice, but I've already described how fucking stupid I find that premise in the first place. Since the goal of its story elements isn't to tell a story for the sake of telling a story (but rather to deliver a message), the story is expendable and modular to a degree. It certainly would not have done any harm to its message by changing mechanics up into something more clever.

Also I should review, I know. I know I've had a review copy of Mars: War Logs and a frapsed playthrough of it sitting on my external HDD for months now, but the game's just so fucking dull that I can't be bothered. Maybe another game will finally come to me.

 

[Grunker]

An important word in what you're saying is "showcase." I suppose you're right that it does deconstruct elements from other similar games and then lay them out and show them to you, but I still don't think that's commendable.

Well, that's a question of perspective, I suppose. Personally, I think we're in such a rut both when it comes to craft and form that I'll give the nod to anything that delivers either in a competent manner. I agree that if video games were like other media where the competition at the top was fairly high, Spec Ops would probably just get the "ye, it's decent"-sticker, because it at least has some sort of point - and interesting commentary it endeavours to make. As it stands, that is high ambition indeed for a video games, and the fact that it's competently written sets it apart even further.

But yes. If you want to judge it in a vacuum (which I agree that you should), Spec Ops is not a praiseworthy piece of entertainment, and I doubt it will go down in history as such.

it's definitely there to show all the shitty tropez rather than examine them.

Good point. Granted.

Though only to a certain extend. I don't think you can judge stuff on its ambition, only on how well it does what it sets out to do. Spec Ops has big problems here as we've discussed, but I'm not sure I want to fault it for NOT doing something. I'd like to fault it for what it does do, and whether it does that badly or not.

For example, I think Nolan North's character arc is stable overall, but one major part where it just flops is near the end after your buddy is captured and hanged. Not so much later, he appears as a spooky apparition in the form of a heavy armor enemy who taunts you that everything is your fault. Nolan North yells shit like, "I tried to save you!" but it's completely meaningless. The point of the scene was to have your buddy blame you for wrongdoing, and it wanted to connect that with his death. Except there is no connection, because your buddy got lost in an accident, and his death was entirely out of your control.

But it was. They wouldn't be where they were, and the accident wouldn't have happened, if orders had been obeyed.

the story is expendable and modular to a degree

Again, disagree. I actually think a few characters are genuinely interesting and well-crafted. DJ, main character, general. The story twists and turns in unexpected ways at the beginning well enough. The way it spins from "oh jesus, another dudebro shooter" into "lolno" is also well done and it's great that they avoid a DUN DUN DUN WOOOSH reveal like some BioWare game.

It certainly would not have done any harm to its message by changing mechanics up into something more clever.

COMPLETELY AGREE. But then that's been my point from the beginning. See also the article that I agree with.

Also I should review, I know. I know I've had a review copy of Mars: War Logs and a frapsed playthrough of it sitting on my external HDD for months now, but the game's just so fucking dull that I can't be bothered. Maybe another game will finally come to me.

I'd love that review, if nothing else then to see you tear it a new one. Can't be worse than that polish post-apocalypse game.

Otherwise, I'd love to see you review your favourite shooters of the past as well

 

[tuluse]

Though only to a certain extend. I don't think you can judge stuff on its ambition, only on how well it does what it sets out to do.

By this measure Halo is the greatest story ever told. It does what it sets out to do basically flawlessly. If you're not trying to tell an interesting story, what's the point?

Edit: This does explain your views on Fallout

 

[Grunker]

Though only to a certain extend. I don't think you can judge stuff on its ambition, only on how well it does what it sets out to do.

By this measure Halo is the greatest story ever told. It does what it sets out to do basically flawlessly

Eh, no, no it doesn't. The story is pretty badly written and the characters are bland and cardboard-cutouts. The alien design is at odds with the gravity of their motivation and the scope of the story. And that's just what I know from having played like 1/4 of the first game and never touching the franchise since.

I think you misunderstood my "judge something on its own merits" to mean "as long as it's not inconsistent, it's super awesome!" What I am saying is that you can't judge a fantastic action movie based on its lack of philosophical depth.

 

[tuluse]

Eh, no, no it doesn't. The story is pretty badly written and the characters are bland and cardboard-cutouts. The alien design is at odds with the gravity of their motivation and the scope of the story. And that's just what I know from having played like 1/4 of the first game and never touching the franchise since.

I think you misunderstood my "judge something on its own merits" to mean "as long as it's not inconsistent, it's super awesome!" What I am saying is that you can't judge a fantastic action movie based on its lack of philosophical depth.

A story should be interesting, it should be something worth saying. As far as I can tell, the Spec Ops story was not. It's like if someone made an action movie pointing out all the stupid things in Michael Bay movies. Everyone with an IQ over 80 already knows their stupid. What's the point of making an entire game or movie about it?

 

[Grunker]

Eh, no, no it doesn't. The story is pretty badly written and the characters are bland and cardboard-cutouts. The alien design is at odds with the gravity of their motivation and the scope of the story. And that's just what I know from having played like 1/4 of the first game and never touching the franchise since.

I think you misunderstood my "judge something on its own merits" to mean "as long as it's not inconsistent, it's super awesome!" What I am saying is that you can't judge a fantastic action movie based on its lack of philosophical depth.

A story should be interesting, it should be something worth saying. As far as I can tell, the Spec Ops story was not.

By which standard do you think you can judge something to be 'interesting'? I can't (unless you're talking about interesting to me personally, in which case Spec Ops qualified, so yeah). I can just say that the story was well-told and well-written. I believe I have argued sufficiently as to why and how.

I also don't think art/entertainment has any obligation to justify why it does something. Only to do it well.

 

[tuluse]

Well I disagree for the reasons I posted, I think the entire idea behind the story they were telling was banal.

 

[Grunker]

Banal stories can be told very well. Some of my favourite movies, like Smoke, have very banal stories indeed. But we're treading water here.

 

[DeepOcean]

I heard alot of people saying that Spec Ops was good as a storyfag game but it was just banal, shit, boring on that aspect. They made a terrible game to point the obvious, if you are going to make a 1 hour documentary about how military shooters are retarded, okay, but don't force the player on six hours of terrible gameplay to just prove a point that everybody with a fucking brain already knew. I was: I already got, military shooters are retarded, I got it already, please stop torturing me with this bullshit. The plot was just a Apocalypse Now in the sands, nothing to write home about.

 

[AngryEddy]

Here we go.

4:49, There's a gem. Of course political games are evil, only if minorities are attacked, but if you do it to "power structures" like heterosexual, white, men, it's wonderful!

5:00 Wow! This pathetic worm should be embarrassed. He's mad that you don't win in Civ5 because of eliminating hunger and poverty. He's just a scummy LIB, out to sabotage fun at every chance.

What a cunt.

This Youtube poster got it right:

This video is just a huge strawman.

People don't complain about politics in videogames, people complain about people who want to censor videogames for being supposedly "sexist" or "misogynistic". I want developers to keep making the games they want to make without the fear of receiving lowered critical scores (which obviously lead to lowered sales) because they hurt someone's feelings, see Killer Is Dead and Dragon's Crown.

 

[tuluse]

Haven't watched the video yet, but in Civ basically every civilization has solved hunger. If you have hunger your cities shrink.

 

[AngryEddy]

TB chimes in:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut
TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit 10 Seconds Ago

Ok so you take scores seriously too, you're claiming that the effect of scores is "obviously existing". There's actually very little proof of that what so ever, you won't even find evidence of correlation, simply because most people, as much they don't want to admit it, buy games based on how they are marketed to them not what score they receive.

Birds of a feather flock together. Publishers and developers wouldn't be greasing the palms of metacritic reviewers if the score had no effect. Remember that huge scandal when it was found out that Bioware employees were vote spamming their game on metacritic?

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/847...ly-caught-boosting-metacritic-scores-updated/


Surely there was a calculated risk and reward behind the reasoning of this decision.

 

[Dexter]

I never gave a shit if games are considered "art" and never wanted to appear "cultured" by playing video games, I frankly never gave a fuck what other people thought about me playing games and still don’t. All I wanted was for them to be engaging and fun and I couldn’t give a shit how many other people play “games” since I’ve long since learned that mass market means bad games.
This goes the same for movies, music and anything else too although they were considered that long before I was born, it was always the meta-hipsters and would-be academics that are pushing for that.

Whatever the fuck „art“ is, is also highly subjective and often in the eye of the beholder, some people can convince others that portions of fecal matter smeared over a canvas is “art” and make them pay a lot of money for it.
I’d rather not want to be connected with these people and what some can argue is banal/shit/boring or only there for comedic effect, others can laud as “high art” as well: http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/20/grand-theft-auto-todays-great-expectations/ In the end it's rather meaningless and most often employed for reasons of self-validation.

I don’t really tend to define my life around my entertainment, I believe some of the late problems might have something to do with a “what am I doing with my life”-syndrome some of these “game journalists/commentators” go through, while a lot of players just play games to have some good fun blowing stuff up, immerse themselves in a well-built RPG worlds or challenge their skills and motor functions in the latest Jump&Runs, a lot of “gaming journalists” try to always find some sort of deeper hidden meaning or message behind what is them basically peddling wares to the masses. They want it to have meaning and they want it to be “art” so they can find validation and self-justification in what they are doing and thus gain in importance.

But the reality of the matter more often than not is that they write rather simple 300 word articles after playing 2 hours of a game and watch it get uploaded onto a website plastered with advertisements for said products they are supposed to be critical of (but are often meant to whet appetite), so that teenagers or 20-somethings can skim over what they’ve written or look at the score and decide whether or not to pay their advertisers: http://gtavtrailercomments.tumblr.com
That is basically the job. Journalism is generally already a largely thankless profession, “video game journalism” is much worse.

Also oh no… objective reviews that look at gameplay features, what is actually there and how it plays would be so horrible instead of stupid meta-reviews where everyone can just state their “subjective opinion” without making any actual points regarding the game itself and everyone tells each other how every single opinion is valid… because reasons. I liked reviews a lot better back in the day when they gave different scores for things like Graphics/Sound/Gameplay/Controls and so on and put it together to a whole, at least it made some more sense how they got to said scores in the first place and didn't seem like a total asspull most of the time.

Spoiler

The farther away they get from that, the less they also seem to be able to look at and discuss what actually makes a game "fun", "engaging", what having a "good story" and the likes means as to what went into actually making the game from the sense of game/systems/level/sound/graphics design as professions with some insight on what succeeded and what failed in the final game and the more they descend into social commentary instead of analysis and are injecting their, in the large scale of things, utterly meaningless "personal opinion" unto other people.

From watching this I’d get the idea that this guy is retarded. One of those people that takes a look at Super Mario or Super Meat Boy and instead of recognizing that these sorts of games are all about the gameplay and the very few story-related elements there are, are only in it to enable said gameplay, instead push their myriad of interpretative views on what it could “possibly tell us” that you otherwise mostly find in parody, however dumb it might be.

What these types of people also still (alarmingly and continually) fail to realize is that games like products in a lot of other entertainment mediums are fictional works: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThisIsAWorkOfFiction

These works don't have to represent the political views of their creators in any way, if their creators are good in fact they likely won't. I think I brought this up before in one of these topics: http://spring.me/JESawyer/q/346168929430822639

That is what they want them to do as a way of social propaganda by making games like Gone Home and lobbying for self-censorship or certain depictions of culture and worlds that they seem to agree with only, without realizing that a Post-Apocalyptic world full of flowery tolerance, love and respect for fellow man makes for a rather shit setting overall with not much potential for conflict.

I hardly think that Counter Strike is meant to endorse planting bombs or GTA is meant to endorse killing sprees and the general criminal behaviour displayed therein.

By the way I’m gaining an appreciation for this guy’s channel more and more over time, he could almost be a Codexer:

Spoiler