How do we/should we talk about video games?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > How do we/should we talk about video games?

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

icantfindaname posted:

It's really not, though. The SNES came out 26 years ago, and the PS2 16 years ago. Comparably, film was more or less a developed medium by the 40s/50s, which was maybe 15 or 20 years after it was viable technologically

Video games got trapped in the same sort of protracted adolescence that comics spent an even longer time in: the "games as product" aspect was by far the biggest force, and because of the way the distribution channels worked, it was difficult (albeit not impossible) for the less commercially successful "art games" to squeeze in. This only really changed a decade or so ago, when the tools to make a decent-looking game became more accessible, and when distribution platforms like Steam became popular as a way to distribute such games. My favorite game of last year was almost entirely built and self-published by a single guy, whose previous experience was "a lovely romhack" and "some music for loving Homestuck of all things", and whose self-insert in the game is a "lovely dog" :shittydog:

. And even then, games are still feeling out what is possible in the medium, and what games can do well that other media cannot. We can only say that "games CAN BE art", not so much that "games ARE art".

There are going to be people who strongly identify with the AAA games more than the indie games, just like there are people who go to tons of movies but dislike the kinds of "serious" movies that tend to win the awards. Those two groups can and do coexist in the same medium, and the optimistic reading of the recent troubles is that they're part of the process of building that coexistence.

# ¿ May 18, 2016 06:22

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 21:58

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Coolwhoami posted:

An interesting conundrum: Many games put forth as good examples of artistic games (Gone Home, Dear Ester) seem to better fit the category of interactive story. It would seem as though moving further from being a game and closer to other media forms inclines us to think of a game as being more artistic. However, something that has no challenge component has a very tenuous grip on being a video game, and it seems to me that we are willing to confer this status upon these examples more because they fall into the same medium (both in platform and programming) rather than whether it makes sense to describe them that way. They also demonstrate the weak grip that video games have to the art class, as some of our best examples lean more towards other art forms while having a much weaker kinship to other games.

The challenge component isn't really as fundamental to games to me as the interactive component: the thing that is most unique about games is that you are making decisions while playing them. The story the game is telling intertwines with the story of you playing it. The key question is whether there's something about those games that uniquely works because of the interactive element. You could probably make a Gone Home movie with a similar impact, although you'd probably structure that movie differently. Undertale's narrative wouldn't really work as a movie.

It shouldn't be surprising that games are starting out mostly by imitating other media (mostly movies), especially because making maximal use of the interactive element in a AAA game is fairly expensive, but there's a potential there for something unique.

# ¿ May 18, 2016 17:17

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

blackguy32 posted:

Yeah, there are good options if you are thinking of computer games. But when it comes to console games, unless your game is emulated, you are out of luck.

I think emulation, with appropriate hardware peripherals like controllers, is entirely appropriate as a means of preserving old games. Online games create a much larger problem, since those games rely on a central server or on the metagame that develops between players, and patches mean that you have to choose which of the dozens of possible variations of the game you want to preserve. And even then, a game like World of Warcraft has gone on long enough that player knowledge of its history starts to make it difficult to choose a point in the past to preserve: a WoW 1.12 private server is not at all the same experience as WoW was circa 2006.

Everblight posted:

I think this is probably germane to the discussion:

https://twitter.com/npcdel/status/698008029585801216

This always felt like a false dichotomy to me: just because something is not aspiring to be art does not mean it is somehow immune to cultural criticism. People write thinkpieces about the deep implied meaning of a bubbly pop song all the loving time, and no one really bats an eye at it. "The author is not overtly making a political statement in this work" does not imply "this work is apolitical".

Incoherence fucked around with this message at 20:52 on May 24, 2016

# ¿ May 24, 2016 20:48

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Well, there is an interesting property of games as interactive art.

Normally a critique of a work of art is read as a critique of the creator. This work of art is implicitly racist, poorly structured, etc.

With interactive, participatory art, though, where the participant "creates" part of the experience, some of that criticism can redound onto the participant.

It's one thing to say that, for example, Marvel objectifies female superheroes. It's another to say Diablo objectifies women because the player is stabbing sexy succubi all day long, especially if the player bought the game in part because of the hot succubi.

Counterpoint of course is that the comic buyer bought the comic to stare at superheroine rear end too, bit that's still not better.

I think you're onto something, but the given example doesn't really show it. There are plenty of people who buy comic books or watch movies so they can look at the pretty girls therein; that part's not unique to games.

So let's take a different example: The Sims. You can kill your Sims by luring them into a room and removing the door: is this your fault as the player for doing it, or the creator's fault for leaving it in? I think it's somewhere in between: in some sense the creator is responsible for building the set of actions the player may perform, and in some sense it's a reflection on the player if they insist on doing those things to the exclusion of everything else.

# ¿ May 26, 2016 19:07

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Powercrazy posted:

It's a completely blameless action since you as the player are doing nothing but exploring a consequence-free virtual world. You can take a flight simulator game, like the Microsoft flight sim games, and smash a fully loaded A320 into the ground. Who's "fault" is that? The designers? The players? Gravity? None of the above, it's a morally neutral event because, and this is what trips some people up, it's simulation. It's not real, you didn't really kill anyone. You did it for your own amusement, at the cost of nothing.

So if you want to "blame" designers for allowing players to play their games "wrong," then I don't think games are for you.

I know people are all spooked by decades of politicians blaming violent video games for things, but it's not necessary to go to the other extreme and say that video games have no moral consequence whatsoever, which is basically what you're saying here.

Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:

The traction is more by company in video games. Hironobu Sakaguchi has been a major part of every numbered Final Fantasy game until his resignation but the franchise was and is more closely tied to Squaresoft/Square-Enix than any members of its staff. Hell, in the credits, the only common person betwen FF1 and FF13 is Yoshitaka Amano, who is credited only for the logo for 13. Mario and Zelda are Nintendo, Castlevania is Konami, Elder Scrolls is Bethesda. Only a few exceptions exist like Hideo Kojima and the Metal Gear series, and part of that may be his eccentricity. And even then there's still a strong link to Konami.

It's sort of the same way that American animated films are strongly identified as "Disney films" or "DreamWorks films" or "Pixar films": the group contribution of the whole company is stronger than the contribution of the director.

There are a handful of exceptions, of course; Kojima is the most prominent, but a lot of smaller-scale or indie games are strongly identified with their creators (Jonathan Blow, Suda 51, Edmund McMillen, Tim Schafer), and certainly there's been a whole raft of Kickstarters of the form "here's a new game from the people who brought you [old game you liked]".

# ¿ May 30, 2016 04:36

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Dr. Stab posted:

I think it might be responsible for the type of thing we're seeing with no man's sky. To the many, a video game isn't the result of a creative endeavour, but a thing that exists by itself. When a developer comes along and says "sorry, game won't be out next month," the developer is now coming between the consumer and the video game. The developer only exists to realize the game (which exists as a notion separate from being made). The developer serves the game, rather than being the creator of it.

This is a really odd interpretation of Death of the Author which seems to be popular both among a subset of gamers and among regulars of TvTropes, and I don't quite understand how they make the leap from "the setting is created by the author" to "the setting exists independently of the author and the author simply channels it". This is, I think, how people manage to argue that a developer voluntarily making a change to their game is "censorship" (the most recent example of this being the tremendously stupid Overwatch "buttgate" controversy).

# ¿ May 30, 2016 05:05

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

computer parts posted:

It's pretty common to see those <do trivial thing> achievements at like 75% though. So a quarter of people who bought the game never even played it.

Some of that is the Steam backlog effect: I have a bunch of games that I bought off Steam sales (including GTA5) that I've never actually played.

# ¿ May 30, 2016 08:12

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Dapper_Swindler posted:

if these people had actualy cared about gaming other then using it as a platform for their various views, they would have known doom was always like that. I think their is room enough in the industry for all types of art. i dont think these people thing that.

On one hand, "it's always been this way" is not a sufficient justification for "it should continue to be this way": we as a society occasionally decide that something that used to be acceptable is no longer acceptable. On the other hand, the burden is to prove that these things are actually harmful (that is, a world where they exist is worse than a world where they do not exist).

On the third hand, you're falling into the "a game that is not overtly trying to be political cannot have a political viewpoint" trap, which is the only point those tweets seem to be making: if you disagree with the political viewpoint being portrayed by Doom, then you might be upset to see people cheering uncritically for that viewpoint. I imagine it's still overthinking things, since the obvious "solution" is for someone to say "I recognize that this viewpoint is problematic and I still want to play the game anyway despite that", but it's maybe worth forcing that to be an explicit thought process.

Brainiac Five posted:

This only works if we define "narrative" in an extremely narrow way, one which is fairly antithetical to how it's used in general. Because in Street Fighter, you have a narrative from the process of the individual matches and of the context of the different opponents in singleplayer, which remains even without any art assets beyond the bare minimum to distinguish T. Hawk from Sagat. This is an inevitable consequence of the game providing a sequence of events and a framework in which to contextualize them, and it is itself distinct from plot and story.

I think this is a terminology question: it's probably useful to have separate terms for "the ingame plot as put there by the creator" and "the emergent narrative of you playing the game", even if we haven't agreed on exactly what those terms are.

Incoherence fucked around with this message at 22:47 on May 31, 2016

# ¿ May 31, 2016 22:44

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Dapper_Swindler posted:

while i personally dont find GOW deep or emotional(i personally just dont care for the series) its kind dickish to look down on those who get emotional reaction from it. just because this dude and others. even when i agree with this dude and others, they always have this condescending attitude about anything that isnt their "high art games" I always tear up a little at the end mgs3. also the velveteen rabbit. different stuff hits different people.

I think people dramatically overestimate Jonathan McIntosh's influence (and for that matter Anita Sarkeesian's). Besides, Hot Takes can come from any ideology or political leaning, and that right there is definitely a Hot Take.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

I guess i dont completely buy the whole "critize because we love it" thing. because i have never seen any of these people talk about stuff they liked in something like GTA or DOOM or whatever. its almost always a puzzle game or a walking sim.

Sarkeesian, at least, has tried to post a couple of positive reviews to go with her usual negative fare. The "famous" Carolyn Petit GTA review is also sort of an example of what you're talking about : she gave it a 9/10 but called out its lovely politics, and guess what part people focused on?

Incoherence fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jun 1, 2016

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 01:16

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Dapper_Swindler posted:

Pretty much this and its kinda what i want. Opinion pieces are fine. but when i look for game review. i want to know what the basic premise is, how it plays. what it does well and what it doesn't.

Even that's subject to variance between reviewers. I love Killer 7 but it plays like a railshooter and the story is written by a Japanese weirdo with a tenuous grasp of American geography and doesn't make a ton of sense. I could imagine a well-meaning reviewer giving it a very wide range of scores.

So we're down to reviewer opinion: does the game overcome those flaws enough to merit buying, or not? And I think the only reasonable way to resolve this is to let critics actually give an opinion and have the audience read a variety of such opinions, rather than having critics hide their opinion behind a thin facade of "objectivity".

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 04:07

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Zachack posted:

While what you're describing is ideal it's not really possible currently due to immense churn in critics, and I don't see that stopping any time soon. The minuscule barrier to entry means lots of new voices and perspectives but it also means almost none of them can actually pay the bills to push those perspectives unless they aim straight at paid programming, which is honestly fine but even then most seem to crash in short time.

There are three basic requirements that need to be met here. First, game critics need to play enough of a game to form a well-supported opinion about it; often this takes tens of hours, and you want the review to be out reasonably close to release, so you don't have a ton of time to do this once you get your hands on the game. Second, they need to play and review enough games to build a voice and an audience. And, third, they need to do this without compromising editorial independence: they need to be free to give bad reviews to heavily-hyped games without getting blackballed by the publishers (or by the rabid fans). The minor outlets tend to compromise on one of the first two, since they don't have the money to do them well. The major outlets have had issues with the third pillar: unlike movies, there doesn't yet seem to be a strong culture of skepticism toward games where publishers won't give out review copies to legitimate outlets (or, really, an agreement on what a legitimate outlet is).

Powercrazy posted:

So really the OPs question is loaded since the "right" answer only depends on what the individual is looking for. For me the "right way" to talk about most games is via the mechanics, and the consequences those mechanics have on the game world. But others obviously feel that games should personally speak to them via the character you play, their back-story, their struggle, the game-world etc. So for those people the way we "should" talk about those games differs greatly.

This still leaves you with the same subjectivity problem: a well-meaning reviewer who focuses solely on mechanics can still come up with a variety of valid evaluations of those mechanics. There's no way for a given reviewer to satisfy all of their potential readers in this way.

I'll use Saints Row 4 as another example. Saints Row 4 gives you superpowers very early in the game, allowing you to basically Hulk-bounce across the map. This breaks a lot of the systems in SR3 (which sort of makes sense given that SR4 was originally intended as an expansion pack): you no longer need a car at all, wanted level is very easy to get rid of, and you have a lot more options for open-world combat. The game then invents a series of excuses for why your superpowers temporarily don't work in campaign missions. Personally, I consider this a big reason why I liked SR4 less than SR3: it made the open world feel a lot smaller and less impactful, and removed the possibility of emergent storylines that could come from just driving around getting into trouble. Others consider this a big improvement: it removed a lot of the tedium of shuttling from place to place and let you concentrate on doing cool poo poo. Both of these are valid, defensible views. Neither is somehow "tainted" by association with the game's storyline.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 09:12

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Everblight posted:

One of the major problems in games journalism/criticism is that it has a couple big strikes working in concert to keep talented people from staying in it long:
The pay is beyond abysmal
it's an enthusiast, rather than antagonistic press relationship (think silicon valley reporting rather than political)
you make strong connections within the games industry if you're any good
This makes games journalism a stepping-stone to an actual marketing/pr job within the games industry, since you're doing the same thing (writing about games) but for an actual steady paycheck. This means that whatever little antagonism and honesty might have existed evaporates, since no one will speak ill of their only realistic options for future employers. The constant churn and brain-drain doesn't help. Games Criticism doesn't need its own Roger Ebert, it barely has a FILM CRIT HULK of its own.

The garbage pay applies on the developer side, too, for the same reason: both game development and game writing attract people who are lifelong enthusiasts and who are willing to accept the lovely pay initially to get their foot in the door. After a couple years, a lot of them get tired of the fact that they're still getting paid and treated like poo poo, and they go do something else that pays better.

And this isn't quite the same problem as Silicon Valley reporting: the problem with Silicon Valley reporting is that there's a sizeable contingent of people on both sides who actually believe the bullshit they spew about how they are going to Disrupt Everything and Change The World by selling a $700 juicer that only works with its own $5 juice packs.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2016 20:12

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Dapper_Swindler posted:

agreed. but https://killscreen.com/articles/homefront-revolution-everything-wrong-america/ call this a review(the site calls it a review and its under the review section) when its more of angry political critique. I played this game, it is an indeed poo poo. but after playing through the whole thing. i didnt see their idea of right wing masturbation shooter, just a poorly written resistance story that rips of half life 2 way to much. the ending of the review is him just quoting howard zinn. they did the same kind of "review" with the devision. if you want to make artcle critquing the games morality/ethics/"problematic" do it. don't call it a review though.

If the storyline is sufficiently painfully stupid that it actually ruins the reviewer's enjoyment of the game, then I think that's a legitimate thing to put into a review. There's a sliding scale here: you're probably not expecting Call of Duty to have a good story, but if it's forgettably bad then that's better than it being bad enough that you notice. Similarly for, say, Adam Sandler movies: you may be there for the fart jokes, but the plot needs to be minimally coherent. Similarly for, say, lyrics to metal songs: you only notice them if they're really good or really lovely.

The same is actually true of mechanics: a lot of indie games use pixel art in part because pixel art is sufficient to convey the information they want to convey, and that doesn't necessarily make them worse than a realistic-looking AAA game, but there's a line at which the aesthetic starts to interfere with gameplay. (For me, Bit.Trip Runner had this problem.)

And, again, if you didn't like this review, then find a critic that shares your opinions. None of the critics are making any money anyway, so there should be plenty of equally-broke ones to choose from.

Countblanc posted:

Honestly people seem to get hostile when you review something negatively despite playing it a great deal; I constantly see people respond to those sort of criticisms with "well you clearly enjoyed it if you had 100+ hours in the game." To me that makes you more able to give a thorough, honest opinion of something, not less.

I think this is mostly weird when someone swings their opinion from "I like this game and that's why I put 100 hours into it" to "I never liked this game and it has no redeeming value and should burn in the pits of fiery hell", as if those are the only two options. It's not nearly as weird if your initial reaction was positive and then you realized later that there wasn't much depth to the game.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 01:53

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

bloodysabbath posted:

I can see some of these outlets surviving and even thriving by going indie-only. It's a good fit for a lot of these sites and the audiences they go after. Meanwhile, I think AAA games coverage is going to slip them by. And I think a lot of developers are probably having internal conversations about whether or not it's worth the hassle to access the Polygon, Kotaku audiences via reviews anymore. If I really want to reach those audiences, I can still do it the old fashioned way: I'll make them aware the game exists by buying ads. But why send review copies to an Arthur Gies, a man who shoots medkits in Doom and gave Bayonetta 2 a 7.5 because he finds sex to be icky? If I'm Rockstar, why should I bequeath a copy of GTA VI to Gamespot after they assigned V to the one staffer most likely to have an issue with it? (None of this excuses misgendering or sending hate speech over a game that sold a billion dollars in 3 days, I shouldn't have to say this but this is the Internet so I do.) If I've sunk 100m into a game, I can reach way more potential customers with a Pewdiepie or Total Biscuit type, and I can do it without worrying about the Metacritic score taking a hit because the game rubbed against a reviewer's identity politics.

I'm not loving touching the last paragraph for a whole host of reasons, but, as a reminder, Carolyn Petit gave GTA5 a 9/10. That whole thing was over a 9 out of loving 10; imagine if she'd given it a 6.

Also, the whole premise here relies on people who make day-one purchases. Preorders have already given you your money, so the review has no impact on their buying decision. And outlets that don't get a pre-release copy can just buy it after its release and post a review a week later: if people wait awhile to see reviews before they purchase a game, then that may be fast enough for them, and it still counts in the Metacritic score. Even worse: those outlets can make a legitimate claim that their review is less biased because they aren't beholden to the publisher at all, or they can do what people tend to do with movies and suggest that the publisher has something to hide by not giving them an advance review copy.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 05:45

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Aureliu5 posted:

Like the reviewer that complained that although Overwatch is not free, you can also grind-or-pay for cosmetics within the game.

This is a very old argument. It's one that anti-DLC people have mostly lost at this point, but it's a very old argument.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 11:06

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

twodot posted:

In line with what's been said earlier, I don't see how one could lose this argument. You either think paid for cosmetics in a game is good or not, both sides can buy, play, and review games as they see fit.

The argument is lost in the sense that you are never going to convince publishers that they shouldn't ever put paid DLC in a paid-for game. They may or may not do so in any given game, and there's a whole range of kinds of DLC where different people can draw the line in different places, and you can make fun of people who pay for horse armor, but the DLC genie is out of the bottle at this point.

The post I was responding to gave the impression that they think "complaining about cosmetic DLC" should be out of scope for a game review.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 18:10

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

fivegears4reverse posted:

Whether it is about the quality of the game's controls, graphics, the plot or the characters within, there's an increasingly annoying trend for people to not actually review or critique the game that is actually in front of them, but rather what they wish that game was, regardless of whether or not they actually like or hate the damned thing in the first place. A game is "transcendental", "good", "mediocre", or "garbage", with very little in between these three basic states a game can ultimately launch in, and for places like Polygon or Kotaku, the actual quality of the game doesn't really matter all that much. To them, reviews or critiques of a game are becoming less about the actual game itself, and more about the writer flexing their thesaurus/that one semester they took a course on ethics/psychology/history any time in the last fifteen years. They are crafting The Story Of How They Came To Like/Hate Things About This Videogame. They are trying to sell you about themselves as a personality "in the biz" to their readers, or selling you the "brand" they represent. Almost as much as they are trying to sell you their review/critique.

I actually don't know what this paragraph means, other than the shot at "Polygon or Kotaku" (why is it always those two? and why does Kotaku come up in the context of its game reviewing rather than its ongoing series of posts about creepy Japanese bullshit?). If I'm interested in the experience of playing the game, then I'm interested in reading someone talk about the experience of playing the game. There's a reason that the Game Review Rubric (graphics/controls/plot/replay value/etc.) fell out of favor.

I'm not even saying that people who review a game only on its mechanics are wrong; it's a different perspective, and one I don't share, but if that's all you care about in a game then that's the kind of review you want to seek out.

twodot posted:

The fact that may or may not do so in any given game seems to suggest the argument isn't lost. This looks to me like saying the argument for not putting objectified women in games is lost, because there will always be at least one person that will do it.

The difference, to me, is that publishers have recently been generally more receptive to arguments that they should not put objectified women in games, even somewhat apart from how much it'd impact sales. (You can make a long-run financial argument that you're excluding a potential future market, but that argument is fairly speculative.) That influence isn't really there for DLC; the only real influence players have had there is not buying the DLC in the hope that future games will not have it.

Incoherence fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Jun 3, 2016

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 19:23

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

fivegears4reverse posted:

I don't want games to ONLY be reviewed on their mechanics. I want the mechanics of the game to be treated with even remotely the same reverence that drives people to write bullshit like "Sequel Three is the Citizen Kane of Videogames/Is Very Problematic And Here's The Essay I Wrote About It". When I bring up places like Polygon or Kotaku, it's because they exemplify the opposite to the extreme you think I'm pushing for.

Part of that is that there's a lot less cultural baggage with game mechanics than there is with storytelling, so it's harder to write thinkpieces about mechanics alone, and they tend to be less visible because they're less controversial. No one's going to write an angry response to an article about Overwatch's audio design. A lot of people can and do write angry responses to articles about objectified women, or even about "X is the best/worst game of all time". So, on the one hand, if you're trying to drive traffic, controversy is your meal ticket (the Gawker sites are all basically tabloids so Kotaku fits in very well here). On the other hand, we can't very well just pretend that baggage doesn't exist.

As a data point for my personal leanings, the last time I actively followed a single gaming news outlet was the original incarnation of the Escapist (the PDF magazine format), where most of the articles were personal rather than news-driven. (And then they moved far away from that, while keeping their community's overinflated sense of "we're smarter than people who read GameSpot/IGN".)

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 20:53

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I've been reflecting on some of the posts here, and I have to wonder: now that we have the possibility of seeing people review a game on Youtube, with all the live gameplay footage that entails, is there really a need for written reviews, as opposed to critiques? I know that if a game comes to me through other than "this is good" word-of-mouth, what gets me to play a game is seeing people actually play through the start of it, and their reflections as they play.

I also know that I rarely read anything by games media, IGN or Kotaku, especially not when I'm making the decision of whether or not to play a game.

I can think of a couple reasons why written reviews are useful to me even in a world where YouTube exists. It's harder for me to watch a YouTube video on my phone while I'm taking a poo poo (I don't want to subject others to a video review of Shootman Simulator 2017 and I don't really want to carry headphones around everywhere). It's harder to skim a video review for the salient points. And the "first X minutes of [game]" videos especially don't tell you anything special about what lies beyond those first X minutes, so unless they edit in some later clips of the game you're not getting the whole picture.

I tend to be skeptical of Major Games Media mostly because I consider them bought and paid for by AAA publishers' PR departments; unfortunately no one really wants to talk about this anymore because some idiots decided to co-opt the term "ethics in gaming journalism" to refer to almost exactly the opposite problem.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I'd summarize it by saying that reviews are open to critique, and critiques are open to critique in turn. It's critiques all the way down.

An ouroboros of thinkpieces.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2016 23:49

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 21:58

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Panzeh posted:

I think No More Heroes works okay, in terms of showing how Travis is an absolute dweeb but because he's inhabiting a world portrayed in a Video Game way it doesn't come off as strongly. Travis is still actually a badass and kills a bunch of people like it's nothing and beats his foes, though I can't help but think the thing that would've made it an even stronger message is the ending being some fat IT desk guy opening his eyes after a daydream and looking at his mall katana.

I think it's possible to miss the portrayal of Travis as "still a dweeb but now he's good at lightsaber fighting", but it'd require that you miss a lot of clues in the game; if you can read subtext at all then I think it comes through. He kills a bunch of people but he gets led on by a pretty girl and still lives in the same apartment and rents increasingly bizarre porn from the video store across the street. I think I remember reading speculation that the satire is actually unintentional (that Suda 51 was intending it to be read as an otaku's power fantasy) but I'm not sure I believe that; I can sort of believe that Japanese gaming audiences are less likely to catch it.

And then the second game blows that all up and plays it relatively straight. In the second game, several characters remark on the fact that Travis actually managed to get out of the assassination game (which they've been unable to do) and is now storming back in, with a weak implication that he's actually a psychopath, but everything works out for him in the end (and he actually gets the girl this time) so it's harder to say that it's being played as satire.

NMH2 is roughly the point where I lost interest in Suda 51 games; after that he seems to have just gotten weird and lecherous rather than using the weird lechery to build some other effect.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2016 18:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > How do we/should we talk about video games?

icantfindaname posted:

Coolwhoami posted:

blackguy32 posted:

Everblight posted:

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Powercrazy posted:

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:

Dr. Stab posted:

computer parts posted:

Dapper_Swindler posted:

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