Decline The lack of sincerity in RPGs (and gaming in general)

[Alex]

It's extra hilarious when it's applied to history in some fashion. "Better remove the slavery, because slavery is BAD." "So now we just pretend slavery never existed? Shouldn't we acknowledge that it used to exist, even if we don't condone it today?" "BAD!"

And of course, just to double down on the retardation, we're incredibly hypocritical and inconsistent about the whole thing. Can't show a woman being slapped, even by a villain, because that's just unacceptable. But a 12 year old child killing someone in cold blood? That's a minor evil at best. Really, she's a hero with a tragic backstory. Nipples on screen? Gotta censor that shit, that's XXX rated stuff right there. Genociding an entire harmless culture out of pure greed? Yeah fuck it that'll be a funny game mechanic. Rated T for Teen, depictions of space ships firing lasers at eachother!

Porn is conductive to sin, violence isn't.

 

[Falksi]

It's fucking terrible and ruins everything it touches. I love reading old 1930s sword & sorcery, many of these stories are completely over the top and out there with imaginative alien creatures and wild sorceries, but they take it completely seriously. Humor, if it appears, comes from the characters themselves rather than the author inserting himself to poke fun at his own tropes. Characters actually care about their world and their quests. The stories take themselves seriously, and therefore manage to immerse you.

This is what makes the 80s Flash Gordon film work.

Had it once, even once, winked at the camera it would have fallen to pieces, but it maintains a charming sincerity all throughout that makes you not care about how silly it is and embrace it.

The Christopher Reeve Superman films fit into that bracket too. He's a clown as Clark Kent, but plays Superman straight as an arrow, and holy shit does it add gravitas to the role.

Even the lesser films are more investable because there wasn't this stupid trend in them. Frank Langella as Skeletor goes fullbore in this scene, there's no quip from Evil Lynn of "Looks like he's had his Weetabix" or suchlike, it's just 100% commitment...



The film itself is very flawed and was viewed as mediocre at the time, but compared to almost all similar modern media Masters of The Universe is a masterpiece because of performances like this.

 

[Inec0rn]

So much damage has been done, they published massive games making WW2 inclusive ffs. That shit is so disrespectful to everyone that died in the world wars. The last decade and half has been extremely Orwellian trying to re-write and censor history.

 

[luj1]

Then some stormtroopers launch into the air with jetpacks to attack the heroes from above. Escalation! Rising danger! Excitement!

Then, one of the characters asks, baffled: "They fly now?"
Another echoes him, even more baffled: "They fly now?!"
The third shrugs and says: "They fly now."

And boom, all the tension, danger, excitement is gone. It's all just a joke now.

The infantilization of society as I like to say

 

[luj1]

The lack of sincerity in RPGs (and gaming in general)​

The lack of maturity and serious tone, IMO

Everything needs to be goofy, zany, and Reddit-tier

 

[Necrensha]

Let's see:
-Social media like Reddit and Twitter punishes you harshly for having opinions that go against the grain, which enforces sheep mentality. Discord promotes sitting in a bubble where only people you like are allowed to enter, which creates childlike adults.

-The attention economy rewards snark. Think about how many people are youtubers/influencers/streamers or just farming likes on X and so on. It's much, much easier to get ahead by shitting on people than to be sincere.

-Corporate culture demands that everybody shuts the fuck up and just do whatever they're told, further enforcing the necessity of a coping mechanism for your average wagie. Many people find comfort in detaching themselves from what they're doing and saying, and if they do it for long enough they start to truly believe those things and forget why they were even doing it in the first place.

-Marvel. Yes, the extreme popularity of superhero bullshit and their endless quips is another huge contributing factor. Ever notice that not a single superhero movie takes it's characters seriously? Writers and directors are afraid of being made fun of, so coating everything in layers of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor is like a safety net against criticism.

-The proliferation of the internet makes it so that if you fuck up once... you will NEVER be allowed to forget about it, future generations will be laughing at that one time you got recorded slipping on a banana. Another reason why so many people are incapable of being sincere.

-American leftists/marxists/progressives and so on invading every facet of culture and every corner where anyone forgot to close the door. You all know them, they are the mentally weakest people alive and they love to drag everybody down to their level, and they also abuse the laziness of authority to get rid of anyone who dissents.

-Surveillance. If you know that *everything* you write is being monitored, analyzed and sent to some random database somewhere... you cannot be sincere. You'll have the german police knocking on your door next day.

-The latest golden age of civilization ended, most people see their future as completely black and since thanks to the internet they can see how much better things were just a few years ago, they're not taking it well. Impossible to write about hope when you're hopeless.

The current state of media is just a reflection of all the bullshit that has been going on the world. It won't get better until the current situation improves.

 

[0sacred]

stop brofist harvesting ITT you faggots

 

[Losus4]

The lack of sincerity in RPGs (and gaming in general)​

The lack of maturity and serious tone, IMO

Everything needs to be goofy, zany, and Reddit-tier

A consequence of letting women into what was once an industry composed of MGTOW fantasy nerds.

 

[luj1]

Much larger than that

 

[rojay]

But the first time I watched this cinematic it really impressed me for how straightforward it as and despite the clear technological constraints the ambient and direction of the scene doesn't lack grit and weight.

Not only this, but it is also a captivating prelude to the main story opening it with a rather mysterious premise that keeps you intrigued for the rest of the game: who’s that armored figure, why is he after you? And oh boy it delivers the answers.

Nipples on screen? Gotta censor that shit, that's XXX rated stuff right there.

It always stroke me as super hypocritical, as at the same time we have all these porn web sites with all sorts of fucked up content not only openly available but being popularized by the mainstream media as something normal and wink-wink aww cute.

but also someone who is currently exclusively playing a ToEE mod that is so much better than BG3 and which has an audience that is probably numbered in the dozens.

What’s that?

Paladin's Cove. https://co8.org/community/threads/paladins-cove-beta-release-and-feedback.13473/

 

[Morgoth]

You're confusing the 'sincerity' of BG's intro with lack of nuance, animation skills, and funding.

 

[Sibelius]

You're confusing the 'sincerity' of BG's intro with lack of nuance, animation skills, and funding.

You can make cheesy, self-referential, insincere intros on any budget, old Bioware chose not to.

 

[Morgoth]

'Sincerity' in Codex terms just means oversimplified, inoffensive, safe schlock.

 

[0sacred]

stop brofist harvesting ITT you faggots

all good mates, just when you think it's a monocled circle jerk Morongoth wades in with his retadred farming to balance things out.

 

[Infinitron]

This is a valid complaint. But keep in mind, this is something that people "on the other side" have also noticed and begun to complain about.

Woke gaming site TheGamer.com spoke out against Marvel-style quippy dialogue in 2022: https://www.thegamer.com/forspoken-trailer-marvel-square-enix-let-me-get-this-straight/

Forspoken's Trailer Shows How Marvel Has Ruined Modern Media​

 

[Sibelius]

Another sign of the decline is the constant PC monologuing, often to themselves, for your 'benefit'. They stuff these monologues full of the same terrible humour.

I don't mind monologue narration in say old Noir movies and the like, it works there, it just doesn't work in games, particularly with the some of voice actors and script writing in game dev these days. I played Alan Wake 1 for about 10 minutes before it drove me crazy and that was just the voice acting, the script itself wasn't too bad for the 10 minutes I lasted, and the monlogue kind of works in the context of that game. Depending on how annoying the VA is, I sometimes turn all voice audio off and just read the subtitles. Its easier to do that for something that is a bit more abstracted (metroidvanias, isometric CRPGs etc.) than something that has close-up camera work and lip syncing though.

BG3 may have it's faults, but the quality of the voice acting is superb and none of the actors annoyed me (even the narrator who has a very sexy voice). BG3 didn't really do the modern California humour either, a surprise from Larian, I never really got into the Divinity Original Sin series due to it's humorous sending up the tropes tone.

 

[thesecret1]

BG3 may have it's faults, but the quality of the voice acting is superb

I couldn't stand it. Everyone was overacting as fuck. Even the slightest emotion was amplified to 11

 

[GamerCat_]

This is a valid complaint. But keep in mind, this is something that people "on the other side" have also noticed and begun to complain about. For example, I feel like the "cozy games" trend represents a pushback against irony and insincerity.

(Notice some of the reactions from Codexers when I used that term in this thread: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...th-turn-based-combat-coming-next-year.151421/)

Glad you raise this, because it highlights the full extent of the era. We have this sense that our pop-art/culture is somehow wrong. And a vague sense we're sick of shit humour that feels like it's dodging its own feelings. And yes, "the other side" is too, and they have an answer. An answer which was hilariously commodified in a yoghurt commercial for some reason.



I think the fact this was seen as something that could sell yoghurt on tv brings us closer to an answer. If this was the answer why weren't they doing it all along? If it's so safe that you can just run it on tv why aren't they all doing this? I believe that it's because this is safe, but does not address the problem. You do not cure quipfaggot vapidity by lo-fi just living in the freaking moment with your fellow trans-girls and lo-fi-ing your penis off to your favourite "yet the world refused to die" hopepunk playlist.

These hipstery little details, what we see above, in the swooshy sounds and humming ambience of the game you linked in that other thread, the answer is not to pay attention to a few arbitrarily selected fine details (no corposloppa obsessed with MICROTRANSACTIONS would let you PET LE HECKIN CHONKERINO) and have a big NO SARCASM rule hanging over your writing. Does the yoghurt ad feel sincere to you? Nobody would dare break the serenity by quipping. But the problem, is that just about anything could break the "serenity". Contemplation of how any of that works, the social structure or practical running of their society, it's a veneer. I'm not saying we have a hard REALISM problem, but something far deeper. I believe that under any particular manifestation you can tell when a work is a product of a mind which is allergic to reality.

The reason millennial and gen-x faggots decided they liked their "snark" was because it allowed them to reclaim a veneer of edge that they lost as the people who started to concede that we shouldn't call people faggots, we should loudly and regularly disavow everything that happened before 1968, we should feel vaguely guilty for existing, but we have spirit because of these random meaningless spikes of verbal energy.

Even if you don't actively feel these things, you don't have to hold your arm down to prevent a spontaneous heil whenever you see a picture of Hitler, if you believe these things (or rather, make yourself believe them), then sincerity is beyond you. Anybody who is afraid of or dishonest about human nature can be said to have insincerity nested in the heart of their being.

We have had good works still made for decades in the west (the beginning of this spiritual decay could be noted in 1965, as noted in this thread, and even earlier), bleeding off over time, but these were often what we might call products of people being allowed to forget or sublimate their problems with the world, partially lie to themselves, or just being allowed to live and work as unprincipled exceptions because libtard takeover of reality was an uneven and never complete process.

To write compellingly, or even design a non-verbal/literary aesthetic work compellingly one has to tap into some kind of authentic pathos. Libtardism as it works on an individual I believe could be described as a process of inserting increasingly artificial pathos in the place of anything organic (and so capable of survival, reproduction, and production).

I'm presently reading a manga which has a reputation for being a bit unhinged. For shamelessly leaning into the passions, convictions, and interests of its creators. A work of deep pathos some say. Well, it's a work which has endured for something like 30 years and succeeded commercially. It resonated somehow. It's a mess of gore, sexuality, cartoonish humour, apocalyptic faith in one's own final ends.

Where I'm going, Japan is the first world country with the least raped nature/spirit, so they have the best popular culture and arts. This is no particular of approach we can clamp down on or copy in our own doings. Apocalypse Zero tries to be funny quite often. Retarded cartoonish sex pervert humour. And then next page the protagonist is in his Unit 731 uniform announcing his willingness to suffer anything and die for his people. And it's all compelling. The brilliant craft, the bizarre premise, everything they try works because it's all drawing on a source that's alive in the heart of the creative team.

This is what creative fire looks like. By comparison hopepunk agricultural idylls, fishing spots, natural ambience and swooshy menus feel like men among ruins desperately rubbing sticks together as they succumb to radiation poisoning. If even. More like they've been told fire is evil so they're rubbing plastic rods together, the jews told them that creates morally good heat if you believe hard enough. The analogy is strained and unnecessary, I hope you already follow me.

No attempt fixing this through identification of symptoms will get anywhere. And the attempts at spiritual alignment by the trans-girls is approaching correct (because they are autistic men, they can think), but because any true spiritual correction would shatter their existence, they can only substitute a void with a lie. The "snark" from a faggot who obviously believes in nothing is obnoxious. As is the attempt at a rich and fulfilling aesthetic experience made by a spiritual coward obviously trying to hunt down the few remaining scraps of culture and niceness that The Woke have not forbidden them yet.

This thread opened with the Baldur's Gate OP. If you think I'm getting carried away in my own fancies, why don't you open that up again and tell me whose name appears immediately. Even if the allusion is unearned, they knew what feels cool, serious, mysterious and heavy. It's a relatively straight little opening movie, but by this point it already feels like a faint aesthetic echo of the living, honest and true works which started the primary trends of genre fiction in the 20th century. Robert E. Howard was a chronically insecure bodybuilder obsessed with masculinity in decline who shot himself. If that's not living in awareness of the bronze age mindset I don't know what is. H.P. Lovecraft was a miserable incel who wanted to kill himself when he contemplated the idea of America being inherited by the racial debris of the world.

These men thought, felt, and believed things which have been running on a trajectory towards being treated as practically illegal soulcrimes from their own times onwards. If we want to heal our art, the path forward is the same path as healing our entire world. These men need to be unleashed again. Working from below and without, they established legacies that last a century after their deaths. Imagine what this class of man could do in a society built around him. Japan is not that, but it's about as close as anywhere can get after World War 2 went the way it did.

Now this doesn't mean you turn on the based switch and everything comes good. Catastrophic damage has been done to western cultural infrastructure. And due to over and under the table persecution people who are perhaps more spiritually ordered are often drastically undercultivated as potential artists you can slot into a more ordered industry. Trans-girls and leftists might seem more artsy, they're not, but when they're waited on hand and foot and met with opportunity and service at every turn, while their ideological counterparts are brutalised out of society, that creates a disparity in outcomes which does not necessarily reflect innate potential. I think a more ordered industry would get dramatically more eventually due to better utilisation of manpower, but there would be a painful gearing up process. People capable of making things which don't feel like someone trying to giggle down the tension of being held up at gunpoint exist even in the racially compromised America of 2025, but how long does it take to turn that into good things? Probably several years.

How do you rebuild a sincere society? That sounds like a revolutionary task to me. Well, best news for that, My President Donald Trump has something approaching a revolutionary program. The forces which serve spiritual wrongness are being at least partially dismantled.

And if you think I'm full of bullshit, another final case I'll make for this. I think the most revolutionary gameplay evolution in western gaming in the past 15 years was the shift back towards tactility and embrace of game conventions as conventions in shooters. A process that was started by the lone Brazilian SergeantMarkIV. In particular his work on Brutal Doom that he was doing during his most schoolshootermaxxed aesthetic and ideological phase.

He STILL brands like this. This is his twitter pfp.

And back ten years ago on random Doom forums he was telling depressed people that logically they should kill themselves because nature won't miss them. This man was metal to his soul. And that shone through into his work, which cut through years of painful stagnation that everyone felt but nobody could fix, and after it'd happened it felt inevitable. It could only have gone this way. Even if people rejected him, they were grateful for his work, they indirectly embraced his edgiest self through its products.



And to bring up advertising again, look at how these ungrateful fucking worms treat the products of his influence. Yeah man... we love blood and guns that explode people... it's like... coming home from school... getting a snack... going to my toystory bedroom and lo-fi-ing my penis off pretending to be a stranger things character. This is about going back to tha- NO. THIS GAME EXISTS BECAUSE OF BRUTAL DOOM. TO MAKE BRUTAL DOOM YOU HAVE TO BE A FUCKING NAZI. And Boltgun is a game that aesthetically DOES NOT WORK because it was made by LYING FAGGOTS. We could technically break down why the game is wrong, the cheap way that papery blood effects obscure a lack of dynamic gore, the lack of unique weapon impacts, but the point is that anybody authentically channeling the same forces as SergeantMarkIV would not have made these mistakes. There is an organic connection between the motivating aesthetic impulses and the results. This is the difference in final results between sincerity and insincerity.

I hope this has been enlightening and we can now proceed with clarity.

 

[JarlFrank]

The lack of sincerity in RPGs (and gaming in general)​

The lack of maturity and serious tone, IMO

Everything needs to be goofy, zany, and Reddit-tier

A consequence of letting women into what was once an industry composed of MGTOW fantasy nerds.

C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett would disagree with you.

 

[JarlFrank]

You're confusing the 'sincerity' of BG's intro with lack of nuance, animation skills, and funding.

You wouldn't know sincerity if it chopped your head off with a battleaxe.

 

[Necrensha]

Another sign of the decline is the constant PC monologuing, often to themselves, for your 'benefit'. They stuff these monologues full of the same terrible humour.

Actually, that one has to do with an obsession with accessibility. The constant fear that game devs have that players will walk into one obstacle and instantly ragequit:

 

[Infinitron]

GamerCat_ That's quite an effortpost. Thank you for your service.

 

[GamerCat_]

GamerCat_ That's quite an effortpost. Thank you for your service.

Happy to serve, fellow Patriot.

 

[Sibelius]

You have a chase scene with a shootout, the protagonists driving away while stormtroopers chase them. Laser bullets fly everywhere, it's a scene of high tension and danger. Then some stormtroopers launch into the air with jetpacks to attack the heroes from above. Escalation! Rising danger! Excitement!

Then, one of the characters asks, baffled: "They fly now?"
Another echoes him, even more baffled: "They fly now?!"
The third shrugs and says: "They fly now."

And boom, all the tension, danger, excitement is gone. It's all just a joke now. And it's completely retarded, because one of these characters is an ex-stormtrooper who should know that the army he served up until like five minutes ago uses aerial assault tactics with jetpacks. This little exchange single-handedly destroys all believability of this scene, and the setting as a whole. It stops being a believable universe with people who live and experience in it, and turns into a silly collection of tropes for the audience's entertainment.

I really appreciated Andor, it was the first piece of Star Wars TV where the script, dialogue and production was completely sincere and had a darker tone. Outside of some EU novels like Darth Plagueis and some of the games, Star Wars has never really taken itself seriously, so Andor was refreshing to say the least. The sequel trilogy and more recent TV really do bring their own level of cringe though.

 

[Brancaleone]

You have a chase scene with a shootout, the protagonists driving away while stormtroopers chase them. Laser bullets fly everywhere, it's a scene of high tension and danger. Then some stormtroopers launch into the air with jetpacks to attack the heroes from above. Escalation! Rising danger! Excitement!

Then, one of the characters asks, baffled: "They fly now?"
Another echoes him, even more baffled: "They fly now?!"
The third shrugs and says: "They fly now."

And boom, all the tension, danger, excitement is gone. It's all just a joke now. And it's completely retarded, because one of these characters is an ex-stormtrooper who should know that the army he served up until like five minutes ago uses aerial assault tactics with jetpacks. This little exchange single-handedly destroys all believability of this scene, and the setting as a whole. It stops being a believable universe with people who live and experience in it, and turns into a silly collection of tropes for the audience's entertainment.

I really appreciated Andor, it was the first piece of Star Wars TV where the script, dialogue and production was completely sincere and had a darker tone.

With the added note that being completely sincere doesn't require having a dark/darker tone. I guess one of the reasons for the success of manga's among a certain segment of the western public is that many of them take themselves absolutely seriously, regardless of the tone or the subject.