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Gaming News
Topic Started: Aug 28 2011, 09:03 AM (32,868 Views)
Romanticide
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archiv...ingle_page=true

For once, Jonathan Blow isn't pretentious as fuck. He's mostly right, but the author...

Quote:
 
Although video games long ago blossomed into full commercial maturity (the adrenaline-soaked military shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, for example, racked up $400 million in sales during its first 24 hours in stores last fall), the form remains an artistic backwater, plagued by cartoonish murderfests and endless revenue-friendly sequels.


The author himself almost makes a good point here. Almost. He's right to say that a lot of video games are "cartoonish murderfests", and even more are sequels regardless of what they are (I'm pretty sure 90%+ of the games people want this year are sequels), but he fails to point out WHY THIS IS.

Here's a pro-fucking-tip: It's because AAA titles are expensive to make. When you spend a lot of money to make something, you have to aim it at the lowest common denominator. Right now, what they want is simply something that looks good and is fun to play. The casual player who wants to play a round of CoD online does not care if the game is "art". S/he cares about having fun. I know the two are not mutually exclusive, but how many people do you know think that "fun" is experiencing something deep?

Also, any old person can afford a word processor to write a novel, a video camera and some cheap actors to make a movie, or some recording program for their laptop. Gaming engines and talent on the writing/technology fronts? Not so much. Democratize game making technology and I suspect the "artsy" games would increase in number and quality.


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Blow envisions future games that deliver experiences as poignant and sublime as those found through literature and film, but expressed in ways distinctive to games. “If the video game is going to be used for art purposes, then it has to take advantage of its form in some way particular to that medium, right?” he told me. “A film and a novel can both do linear storytelling, but novels are very strong at internal mental machinations—which movies suck at—and movies are great at doing certain visual things. So the question is: Where are games on that same map?”


This to a T.

This medium is forty years old and really hasn't found its own storytelling voice. Even the best story games tend to tell their stories, well, in ways that are more reminiscent of films than in ways that only video games could. RPGs, one of the more story-heavy genres, tend to further their stories through cutscenes. The problem there is that cutscenes and gameplay are mutually exclusive. The presence of one means the absence of the other (I do not count QTEs as "gameplay"), and in this case, gameplay is what makes this medium unique. It can easily be argued that subtracting from gameplay is a bad thing.

The real problem here is that nobody has found a way to use gameplay to tell a story. The people who do and use it to tell a good one... Well, I suppose they'd revolutionize the medium. In spite of the corporatization of the industry, plenty of smart people have worked in it. If they can't find a way, I wonder if one even exists.


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Friendship with Blow requires patience for his rigid, often puzzling personal codes. He enjoys talking, but abhors idle conversation and is intensely private. He goes out dancing several nights a week, yet the suggestion of visiting the same club for a beer will elicit a lengthy anti-bar diatribe. “You’re poisoning yourself with alcohol,” Blow vented, as Hecker smiled knowingly beside him. “You’re kind of socializing, but the loud music prevents you from actually communicating. It’s all set up to help people socialize who don’t feel comfortable being honest about why they’re there. It freaks me out. Just understand what you’re doing, and do it.”

“Hold on,” I objected. “Are you saying people at bars should just walk up to each other and say, ‘I would like to have sexual intercourse with you’?”

“I think we could live a lot closer to a truthful existence and we’d all be better off,” he replied.


I'd just like to digress and point out this sounds like straight Aspie.

It also sounds like something I'd say. The key difference is that I know alcohol is a slow poison; I just give no fucks. Life is 100% fatal, after all.


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THERE’S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series. In games, brick-shaped men yell catchphrases like “Suck pavement!” and wield giant rifles that double as chain saws, while back-breakingly buxom women rush into combat wearing outfits that would make a Victoria’s Secret photographer blush. In games, nuance and character development simply do not exist. In games, any predicament or line of dialogue that would make the average ADHD-afflicted high-school sophomore scratch his head gets expunged and then, ideally, replaced with a cinematic clip of something large exploding.


If you wish to compare video games with other mediums by the standards other mediums use, then yes, video games have lost by a ridiculous margin. I can sit here and claim that something like Catherine is mature by video game standards (I still think it is, if only because it dares to tackle something games have rarely touched), but it wouldn't stand up to a great, thematically similar work in another medium, like an Anna Karenina.

It helps that other forms of entertainment have had a headstart of seventy years - at the least. Literature and music have had a two millennium head start, if not more. Of course it makes sense that these mediums have found their own voice and are more "mature", as it were. They'd be dead if they did not.

The Church had a lot of control with music in its early history and art in the Renaissance, but the key difference there is that the work was not monetized. They never had to worry about turning a profit; they only had to worry about glorifying God, and the best way to do so was with great art. Gaming has grown up in an age where money is the new god, and the best way to glorify that god is not with great art. It's with products designed for mass consumption and little else.

I suppose the whole tl;dr of my points is that "the issue is the culture of consumption corporations have created". When the way to make the most profit is to make something that can be used up and thrown away only to be purchased again, it's no surprise that's what we'll get.

Of course, all this implies that the only legitimate purpose of, well, any form of entertainment is to reveal a profound truth about the human condition, to tell a great story, or in general just "be deep". That's not necessarily the case. I don't want to hear a song about the evils of religion at a party, I don't want to watch something like Jersey Shore when I'm in the mood to be intellectually stimulated, and so on. Sometimes I just want a good time waster.

I know, the issue is that there are too many "good time wasters" and not enough "stimulating works". Which is true, but the author never considers why this is and if there is any way to change it, only that it is. The distinction *does* matter.


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It’s tough to demand respect for a creative medium when you have to struggle to name anything it has produced in the past 30 years that could be called artistic or intellectually sophisticated.


I struggle to name things that I can put on the same pedestal as the masterpieces of other mediums, true, but that does not imply I struggle to name things that show flashes of potential. I am loathe to engage in list wars, though; they are never useful.

Nearly all of the so-called "masterpieces" had years and years of accepted technique and/or stories to build off of. With gaming, I'm not sure it's established its own ground level yet. How could it? It's young and has been mostly dominated by monolithic publishers, who don't care much for "true art".
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Bigcalv2002
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And the debate over used game sales goes up another notch!
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LifeAgainstDeath
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Bigcalv2002
Apr 13 2012, 01:18 AM

Heh, these fail arguments remind me of a Jimquisition video I watched the other day.
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Romanticide
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Honestly he's right in a lot of ways.

He's right in saying this has pushed focus to online multiplayer. What he neglects to mention is that focus is on online multiplayer precisely because that means you need three more copies of a game and console, everyone needs a broadband connection (some places in America still don't have this in 2012), and if you're on 360, you need to pay $60 for the privilege of using your own internet connection, *not* their servers (lol), to play the games you purchased online. It's simply more profitable than local multiplayer.

Of course we want to play against our friends, but unless they're far away, we want to play against them in the same room. The social element is one of the major advantages consoles have over PCs, and in their never-ending quest to make profit, hardware and software developers have eschewed it. It also happens to be great advertising, which is something nobody should ever pass up. I know I would give strong consideration to buying a game I enjoyed with my friends offline, especially if I thought I would not have liked it in the first place. Actually letting people try a product, strangely enough, has that effect.

By extension, this reduces variety, at least in the AAA realm. The logic should be pretty obvious, so I won't expand upon it. He's right in saying this, too.

I'm not so sure he's right about the death of single player games. I can name a metric shitton of single player games that I am still interested in - Atelier Ayesha, Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, Persona 5 (it's inevitably being made), amongst others. I buy single player games almost exclusively, but I suppose I'm not a typical consumer.

The problem is that every title I mentioned would not count as an "AAA" production. Persona 5 might get the press of an AAA from gaming media due to its popularity, but that's as close as it would get. I understand single player is supposedly not profitable for the big guys, but there are still plenty of great single player experiences. They're cheaper and every bit as good gameplay and story-wise, if not better; they just don't have the polish of an AAA game. They still turn a profit. Gee I wonder why. Couldn't have anything to do with knowing how much they can spend on production or anything.

Even so, there are still great single player games that *would* count as AAA titles. I'd be shocked if Skyrim was not a T5 selling game last year. Why? It was fucking great (buggy though, I cannot deny) and seemingly everyone wanted it. People wanted Red Dead Redemption, LA Noire, GTA4, and other such games too. People want a good game. If you deliver on that, who cares if it has single player, few hours of gameplay, etc?

There are plenty of reasons people sell games, and really, they should tell smart people in the industry something is WRONG with their product. Nobody keeps a product that does not justify itself in some way. I can think of a few good reasons people sell off their games: One, sixty dollars is a healthy chunk of change, and if you experience much of what a game has to offer early on in the game's lifetime, you can make a fair amount back. Two, your game just flat-out sucked. Three, it didn't offer enough reason for someone to keep it, which I guess is kind of related to one and two.

The focus should be on making me keep your game, not preventing me from getting some money back for it and keeping it in the gaming community by relinquishing my copy that I no longer want. This creates more potential customers. I purchased FFXIII used, loved it, and got XIII-2 on day one at full price. How is this a sale they would have had otherwise? Anyway. Things that make me want to keep a game include good story/characterization, good gameplay mechanics, local multiplayer if it works with your game, decent post-release support (patches and DLC that adds substantial content, not just fluff like fucking costumes) and for online multiplayer, assuming I actually want to experience it, the guarantee that your goddamn servers won't go down for at least two, and preferably three-plus, years. As it stands, I don't know if the servers for most games will be up tomorrow. Sure, I can make an educated guess, but for more niche titles, I would be loathe to take a chance, especially late in the game's lifecycle.

The things that are truly killing this industry are production bloat, the focus on day one/month one sales, and anti-consumer practices. Not used games, which are pro-consumer and pro-gamer in every way.
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LifeAgainstDeath
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Two-Thirds of Parents Admit They Don’t Bother Checking Video Game Age Ratings

I find this study both hilarious and sad. It's hilarious because it reveals what we already knew: most parents are either too ignorant or too apathetic to care about the ratings of video games. I remember when I was young and I wanted my parents to buy me a video game, the first thing they'd see is the ESRB rating. If it was a T or M, I wasn't getting the game. My parents did let me have a few of those games before I was old enough, but that was only because I was close enough to the required age. It's not like I was given M games at age 9 or something.

This study is sad because I know it's not going to make a difference. Parents don't care that they've been proven wrong time and time again because they just don't want to admit they suck at their job (at least, when it comes to exposing their kids to material not suitable for them). We're still going to hear stories about killings that get blamed on video games, biased studies trying to link video games to real life aggression, and parent groups rallying for the ban of these video games because they're "being advertised to children".

I'm just glad the newer generations seem to get it. They, at the very least, know the ratings exist. It's the older generations who are out-of-touch and need to go away. Modern video games are just after their time, so they should just not bother trying to understand something they clearly do not want to understand.
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failureatlife
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http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/...e-Game-Industry

inb4minorshitstorm

But tbh I can agree with Mr. Inafune's statement. While the western gaming industry stagnates because of modern trends, I feel that Japanese gaming stagnates because it refuses to grow out of dated trends. Not to say Square Enix should start making Call of Duty or that Nintendo should make Mario a gritty TPS, but it feels like that there's even more innovation lost when developers stick to trends of yesteryear rather than innovating.

Of course, that would imply that A) the game industry innovates at all besides in indie games and in minute pockets of the AAA industry and that B) everyone here won't instantly decry this statement because call of duty sucks and Catherine/some jrpg I've never heard of rules.
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Romanticide
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failureatlife
Apr 13 2012, 06:51 PM
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/...e-Game-Industry

inb4minorshitstorm

But tbh I can agree with Mr. Inafune's statement. While the western gaming industry stagnates because of modern trends, I feel that Japanese gaming stagnates because it refuses to grow out of dated trends. Not to say Square Enix should start making Call of Duty or that Nintendo should make Mario a gritty TPS, but it feels like that there's even more innovation lost when developers stick to trends of yesteryear rather than innovating.

Of course, that would imply that A) the game industry innovates at all besides in indie games and in minute pockets of the AAA industry and that B) everyone here won't instantly decry this statement because call of duty sucks and Catherine/some jrpg I've never heard of rules.

I know you'd expect me to disagree, but he has a point.

The article mentions that many Japanese developers don't have the money to compete with Western developers. This is why we still see many Japanese games on technologically inferior systems like the DS and PSP. Rare is the Japanese game that comes out on PS3 or 360, and rarer still is it a "true" AAA title.

I don't see this as a bad thing. Not everyone can compete with the powerhouses that make up the AAA industry, and they probably shouldn't try. Unfortunately in this day and age, competing with them means participating in the graphics arms race - After all, we demand "production values" and we constantly upgrade our consoles/computers in pursuit of superior graphics/technology. Not competing means being relegated to the niche market, at least in the West.

But gameplay-wise, yes, Japanese developers could stand to try new things. Final Fantasy, for all the hate its new titles get, actually changes up its battle system somewhat with each iteration. In the end, it's still "turn-based", no matter how much they twist language in an effort to imply that it isn't. What I'd really like to see them try is a system that is truly not turn-based. I don't want to see a Tales-esque system; those are "mash X to win", which isn't any more fun than turn-based. Perhaps something out of a WRPG or some such. I don't see how a JRPG story could not work with some WRPG game mechanics.

Squeenix is one of the few Japanese companies big enough to take that kind of risk, and influential enough to show others that it could work for JRPGs.

And yes, Nintendo could definitely stand to try something new. They have tried something new with the technology in their latest consoles, but the games leave something to be desired. I suppose this is in part due to not having high quality HD graphics, which pushed third parties away. Anyway. Don't get me wrong, I *enjoyed* Galaxy and Pokemon Black, but even considering the new things these games tried, at their core they were still essentially the same games we've played since our childhoods.

I suppose it's folly to expect Nintendo to radically change their money printers and console sellers, but I'd think they have way more than enough money to risk some on an innovative IP.
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Antunee
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Apr 13 2012, 11:32 AM
Parents don't care that they've been proven wrong time and time again because they just don't want to admit they suck at their job (at least, when it comes to exposing their kids to material not suitable for them).

Who is to say what's appropriate at which particular age? They'll learn sometime, so why not now?
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Antunee
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Also, first gameplay video of B&W 2 is up. I cannot wait!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjrXoEkG6JA
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failureatlife
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@Pokemon: What happened? Did you guys run out of colors? *badumchh*

So I've been doing some research on review bombing and it still fucking baffles me that people can justify it. I mean, they did it to Portal 2. Motherfucking PORTAL 2. One of the most perfect games in existence, and I really mean that. And why? Because it had a 4 hour campaign(which is a complete lie, not even accounting for the co-op), it had day 1 DLC(hats, for the multiplayer. Obviously something that people should be up in arms about), and that the PC version is just a console port(if that's true, then why does the PC version look and run better, along with the console UI looking a lot more suitable for PC?).

Ugh, I hate the internet. Shit like this has turned me into a jaded, misanthropic husk of my formal self. I hope you're happy.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Review bombing is fucking stupid. Metacritic might as well only have 10 or 0.
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LifeAgainstDeath
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Andami
Apr 13 2012, 11:05 PM
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Apr 13 2012, 11:32 AM
Parents don't care that they've been proven wrong time and time again because they just don't want to admit they suck at their job (at least, when it comes to exposing their kids to material not suitable for them).

Who is to say what's appropriate at which particular age? They'll learn sometime, so why not now?

Yes, but if parents do give their children a video game that may or may not be appropriate for them (at least, according to the ESRB rating, it's not), then are they going to blame themselves if something goes wrong? No, because they can't possibly be wrong. Instead, they're going to blame the companies who make these games because "they're advertising these games to children". They're going to blame the stores like GameStop because "they don't warn parents of these ratings and don't prevent kids from buying them themselves". And they're going to blame the video games because "they should be all sunshine and rainbows".

That's all I want: for parents to finally realize it's their fault their kids are getting these violent video games they hate so much. If they don't want their kids playing a game rated T or M, then they shouldn't buy that game. It's as simple as that. If they do buy these games for their kids though, then they shouldn't blame the video game companies who never advertised them to children. They shouldn't blame the stores who actually do warn about the ratings and do restrict kids from buying them. And they shouldn't blame the video games, because we don't live in this fantasy world they think we do where only kids play video games.
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CALJR_8760
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I'm sorry it's not the parent's fault. It's not like the games have some bigass symbol on the front with the rating on it that says how old you should be to play the game. And it's not like on the back they give description as to what's wrong with the game. And it's not like at Gamestop they have a flyer with all the ratings on it and their meanings. There is no way a parent could possibly be at fault for buying their kids these games.
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Antunee
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I agree, parents who don't use the ESRB and complain about it are stupid, but my response was towards the parentheses. No need to write such a lengthy response that really had nothing to do with my statement, which was more of a comment and not a debate :P
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LifeAgainstDeath
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Andami
Apr 14 2012, 02:56 PM
I agree, parents who don't use the ESRB and complain about it are stupid, but my response was towards the parentheses. No need to write such a lengthy response that really had nothing to do with my statement, which was more of a comment and not a debate :P

Yeah, I kinda went off on my own tangent there. :P

I know you were talking about what was in the parentheses. What I meant was that according to the ESRB rating, the content is not suitable for kids.
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