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I'm about to start watching this, but the first thing the logo makes me think of is the logo from the actual good game XIII. This makes me already hate it.
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Apr 26, 2019 11:57
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Is Grandia worth revisiting in this era? I remember liking the art enough to buy an artbook of it, but I never played it. You'll hopefully have your chance soon to find out on switch or pc. Grandia also has a better handle on sadness because people leave your party after you could develop fondness for them, unlike Yik, because a lot of them have arcs however small.
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Apr 26, 2019 12:05
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Crabtree posted:You'll hopefully have your chance soon to find out on switch or pc. Grandia also has a better handle on sadness because people leave your party after you could develop fondness for them, unlike Yik, because a lot of them have arcs however small. I mean it's kind of a spoiler but it's a spoiler for next episode but people leave your party in YIIK. 
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Apr 26, 2019 13:58
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GrandmaParty posted:I mean it's kind of a spoiler but it's a spoiler for next episode but people leave your party in YIIK. Oh boy, a compelling chance for Alex to develop some character, realizing that his actions not just detrimentally affected the lives of others but got them all killed too. He'll just shrug it off and apologize. With a monologue too.
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Apr 26, 2019 14:36
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I want to like the segment where the phone rings off the hook with bizarre phone calls coming from people and/or perspectives that shouldn't be possible. That's a succinct and striking way of demonstrating how reality is falling apart at the seams. If the story had some momentum or intrigue building beforehand, this might work. But remember what led up to this event? There were several ho-hum weeks of Alex sleeping in, finishing errands, and having a few weird conversations with his teenage friend that turned into a shirtless, levitating guru overnight. And then when phone barrage happens, it lingers too long and quickly outstays its welcome. You almost had it bud, but YIIK can't disguise the fact that it's still YIIK for more than a minute. 
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Apr 26, 2019 14:45
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So like as a thought exercise, what are some legit postmodern games? The ones that always jump out to me are the no more heroes games but I'm sure there's more
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Apr 26, 2019 15:36
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I suppose we're obliged to open this discussion with MGS2 and to a lesser but valid extent EarthBound.
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Apr 26, 2019 15:45
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The Prisoner?
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Apr 26, 2019 15:49
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Mizuti posted:I want to like the segment where the phone rings off the hook with bizarre phone calls coming from people and/or perspectives that shouldn't be possible. That's a succinct and striking way of demonstrating how reality is falling apart at the seams. If the story had some momentum or intrigue building beforehand, this might work. Yick will remain Yick as long as it mistakes length for depth. Before anything else Ack needs to realize more words != better, then they can start work on dismantling their lovely, solipsistic worldview.
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Apr 26, 2019 15:51
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Calaveron posted:So like as a thought exercise, what are some legit postmodern games? The ones that always jump out to me are the no more heroes games but I'm sure there's more What do you think postmodernism means?
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Apr 26, 2019 15:54
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Calaveron posted:So like as a thought exercise, what are some legit postmodern games? The ones that always jump out to me are the no more heroes games but I'm sure there's more my understanding of postmodernism is pretty limited but The Hex seems like it'd fit the bill
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Apr 26, 2019 16:00
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Since this is a cat posting lp, I thought I'd share mine too: The one on the left is Gonzo, he's about 16 or so and not afraid to use his claws to emphasize his requests for pets. Will bypass everyone else in the house to come meow at me while I play video games when he wants to go outside. The one on the right is Little Miss, my sister rescued her (and kittens at the time) because the jerks who owned her had basically tossed her outside to fend for herself without even getting her spayed. Her kittens have found new homes and she has become a super fluffy cuddlebug. Does not like loud noises or the use of fingernails in her cheek scritches.
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Apr 26, 2019 16:46
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That there is a pile of good catte.
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Apr 26, 2019 17:18
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GrandmaParty posted:What do you think postmodernism means? The definition I was taught in film appreciation class was that postmodernism encompasses a story composed of a pastiche of concepts, classical literary tropes like the hero's journey or movies like the wizard of oz (the example movie he showed us was Wild at Heart) and ideas applied in a way that parodies or satirizes current culture For nmh you have the trope of someone who wants to be the best, but it's at violently killing people, and then try to rescue a girl, who is basically his murderpimp
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Apr 26, 2019 17:18
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I don't know about post modern game but Baba Is You has a good example of a post modern mechanic. The player's agency sits with word You in that game. However, You, on its own, cannot do anything and instead you have to assign an object the You descriptor. Thus, Baba Is You means that you're now in control of Baba but you technically are not playing as Baba. You're still You. This gets messed around with in various levels where You has to get connected to other stuff and even multiple things can end up being You. It reexamines to some extent what the player's role is in connection to the game world.
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Apr 26, 2019 18:23
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This is gonna come off real academic, but I'm pulling this out of my rear end based on college courses I took a decade ago and some associated reading since. Sorry for any pretentious wording or what sounds like art student BS cuz, lol, I'm super good at art student BS from being an art student. Anyway. Post-Modernism, broadly, is a reaction to (and subversion of) Modernism. Modernism being the movement that followed/coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment and gave rise to utopian ideals of how much control Man had over Nature. That sort of mentality got fractured around the time of the World Wars, when Man (god, I'm sorry, but I just got into Art History Essay mode so I'm gonna capitalize poo poo accordingly) figured out that our world is fuckin busted, and Man has no more control over it than he did as a dirt farmer on the fringes of the Fertile Crescent. Like, sure, try terraforming the farmland in the North American heartland; that big river gon' do whatever it gon' do regardless, so lol puny human, enjoy your flood damage. See also, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism...Art Deco was a movement that was more a positive spin on Modernism, where a lot of other Post-Modern movements were about tearing down Modernism and exposing its flaws. Ramos posted:I don't know about post modern game but Baba Is You has a good example of a post modern mechanic. The player's agency sits with word You in that game. However, You, on its own, cannot do anything and instead you have to assign an object the You descriptor. Thus, Baba Is You means that you're now in control of Baba but you technically are not playing as Baba. You're still You. This gets messed around with in various levels where You has to get connected to other stuff and even multiple things can end up being You. That also sounds like how pointers work in programming. META AS gently caress.
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Apr 26, 2019 18:26
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Baten kaitos did something like that as well, "you" were a particular character in the context of the game, a disembodied spirit who could interact with the protagonist verbally. By that token you were also explicitly not the protagonist (who was also a jerk who had a character arc), and that divide actually informs a later plotline. Baten kaitos even played with it some more beyond that, because there actually were other characters like "you" and even having an aside where someone else interacts with their spirit companion, with the game even using the same style of dialogue boxes you did to talk to your main dude.
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Apr 26, 2019 18:32
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:That also sounds like how pointers work in programming. META AS gently caress. Meta as gently caress is a good descriptor for a lot of the later bits of Baba. Anyway, so from what I can get a handle on post modernism in a purely game mechanics front then, it's just subverting typical norms in an attempt to explore what else you can do in games. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a post modern game but its mechanics aren't post modern, same thing with the Stanley Parable, they have post modern narratives. At least in so far as analyzing typical video game narratives. I guess you could also take a stab and say Into the Breach is post modern? By giving you exact information on what enemies will do each turn, you change the focus of a tactical strategy game into more a puzzle game. Or would that just be an innovation? Or like Minit, which is at its surface, just a typical 2D Zelda game but by making it so that you have only sixty second intervals to explore around the world, which inherently goes against how exploration typically is handled in games, is that enough of a subversion to make it post modern? Ramos fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 18:50
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The game OFF makes a distinction between you, the player, and your avatar in the game. It was Undertale before Undertale.
Solar Tornado fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 18:54
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Pathologic is entirely about not only realizing that you are not the characters, but the developers are talking to you and asking you to do something that only tangentially involves dealing with the characters' motivations the entire game.
RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 19:11
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What's the point of this spoiler? You can't know if it's something you already know/care about knowing without scrolling over it.
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Apr 26, 2019 19:14
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Zanzibar Ham posted:What's the point of this spoiler? You can't know if it's something you already know/care about knowing without scrolling over it. Good point lol I edited it to be better
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Apr 26, 2019 19:16
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Crabtree posted:You'll hopefully have your chance soon to find out on switch or pc. Grandia also has a better handle on sadness because people leave your party after you could develop fondness for them, unlike Yik, because a lot of them have arcs however small. I normally try not to buy games multiple times but Grandia is worth it - I'm surprised that the fact that it has/had a really neat combat system that put a good bit of importance on timing attacks (but not Timed Attacks, because it, unlike YicK, understands fun in mechanics) and interrupting enemies didn't come up. Also, since no one else mentioned it, Grandia Extreme was a sort of interesting side game that I think was mechanically the best of the series - lots of fiddly stuff you could do with skill and spell loadouts - but even Mark Hamill couldn't save its story. I guess it didn't do so well because they didn't make any more games in the series after that! Ramos posted:Anyway, so from what I can get a handle on post modernism in a purely game mechanics front then, it's just subverting typical norms in an attempt to explore what else you can do in games. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a post modern game but its mechanics aren't post modern, same thing with the Stanley Parable, they have post modern narratives. This got me thinking - are games with retro graphics postmodern because they go against modern graphical trends? What about if you make the statement that oldschool graphics have become so popular again that it's once again mainstream; does that make intentionally using modern-style graphics, especially where retro would fit, post-postmodern? IS YIIK'S ISSUE THAT IT DOESN'T GIVE ITSELF ENOUGH CREDIT FOR HOW CUTTING EDGE IT IS?! haha no  it's just poo pooTo answer seriously, personally I'd say that mechanics-wise games (and not just video games) have been about exploring interesting ways to build upon, reuse, and combine existing mechanics, because that's just kind of what we do in the pursuit of new ways to have fun: screw around with rules. I don't know if I would want to label a game postmodern just on mechanics alone; I think that there'd have to be buyin from story and/or the overall presentation of the game itself.
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Apr 26, 2019 19:16
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RBA Starblade posted:Pathologic is entirely about not only realizing that you are not the characters, but the developers are talking to you and asking you to do something that only tangentially involves dealing with the characters' motivations the entire game. pathologic gets weird with this. your character discovers at the end that they're just a doll being played with by a pair of grieving children to cope with the recent death of a loved one, who died from the same plague afflicting their make-believe world. after your player character speaks with the children directly, they return to the game world to finish off the game's actual plot, at which point you can alternately speak to characters as the player character, as yourself, or as the player character recognizing that they're just an extension of yourself. one particularly cruel exchange lets you taunt a PC's love interest by saying that she only fell in love with him because of words that you put in his mouth. nevertheless, the game continues to treat its stakes as real and consequential even after the metafictional element is revealed, and some of the NPC's in fact praise you if you tell them that you'll continue to maintain verisimilitude and conviction even after learning that nothing happening is "real" that's not even taking into account how the game begins with you (in the typical first-person perspective) walking on the upper level of a theater while the three player characters argue over their goals and motivations on the stage below like actors in the middle of dress rehearsal. you are at once actor, audience, and director of the game, which is itself a performance (the children's imagination game) in a performance (the game, Pathologic) in a performance (the drama taking place in the game world's theater) Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 19:35
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LISA is probably a postmodern game because it makes players think about reward systems and safety nets that are normally taken for granted. Sleeping somewhere might serve as a safe way to heal or it might result in you getting attacked, exploration can be punished rather than rewarded, and choices aren't a matter of picking the "best" option so much as they are a matter of picking the "least awful" one. I think games about MMORPG's like .Hack and especially CrossCode can often qualify as postmodern too. They raise questions about who makes these games, who plays these games, and why these games are made/played. They also raise questions of where the boundaries lie between players and their characters and between player characters and NPC's. There is something extremely meta about being a player taking on the role of an unseen player playing a player character in a single player game about an MMO filled with NPC's and player characters who are also ultimately just NPC's. CrossCode in particular because (major late-game spoilers) the main character you are playing as turns out to be an advanced AI, which further blurs the line between players, characters we play as, and NPC's.
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Apr 26, 2019 19:39
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Oxxidation posted:pathologic gets weird with this. your character discovers at the end that they're just a doll being played with by a pair of grieving children to cope with the recent death of a loved one, who died from the same plague afflicting their make-believe world. after your player character speaks with the children directly, they return to the game world to finish off the game's actual plot, at which point you can alternately speak to characters as the player character, as yourself, or as the player character recognizing that they're just an extension of yourself. one particularly cruel exchange lets you taunt a PC's love interest by saying that she only fell in love with him because of words that you put in his mouth. nevertheless, the game continues to treat its stakes as real and consequential even after the metafictional element is revealed, and some of the NPC's in fact praise you if you tell them that you'll continue to maintain verisimilitude and conviction even after learning that nothing happening is "real" On top of that at a certain point you, the player, can choose to tell the developer's avatar that you're done playing the game instead of choosing an ending and leaving, at which point you leave through the framing device of the theater then leave through the intro video itself - it plays a variant where everyone dies of plague, since you didn't stop it, then the developers announce the victory of the player because the actual goal of the game is to determine whether or not it's possible to make a free choice in a game with scripted paths and responses - and you did. As you note it's operating on a lot of levels. RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 19:43
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GrandmaParty posted:What do you think postmodernism means? A buddy of mine that majored in theatre describes postmodern plays as "not having a point" and thus any piece of work with explicit change or character development could arguably not be postmodern, as then they have a point beyond "not having a point". In his view, the first game that springs to mind as "postmodern" in that sense is the Wario ware series, since nothing really matters and everything is small and fleeting.
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Apr 26, 2019 19:53
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Undertale would also be postmodern since it takes the concept of grinding in video games and defeating monsters and such and turns it on its head as a critique
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Apr 26, 2019 20:20
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I was going to bring up Undertale also. The idea of asking the player to interrogate their own cultural assumptions about the medium seems like it fits right into that space.
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Apr 26, 2019 20:28
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Calaveron posted:Undertale would also be postmodern since it takes the concept of grinding in video games and defeating monsters and such and turns it on its head as a critique Moreover, if you follow a non-violent path then the player character becomes their own self-actualized person with a name completely independent of the one you assumedly gave them when the story began. And if you play the game like it’s any other video game and just kill everything then at the end of it you fully subsume the character (there’s a reason Toby says to name the Fallen Child after yourself) so when you finally reach the end of your path you encounter the embodiment of your actions, a monster crowned with your name that just wants to destroy everything and “beat” the game.
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Apr 26, 2019 20:28
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:That also sounds like how pointers work in programming. META AS gently caress. Technically speaking, Baba Is You is a programming language. It's been proven to be Turing-complete.
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Apr 26, 2019 20:53
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I have been following this thread while only occasionally watching the videos because even second-hand this game disgusts me, but as a 100% unironic Coheed and Cambria fan the fact that there are characters named Claudio and Chondra makes me ill. And if we want to talk about subverting the "chosen one" archetype, Co&Ca's initial albums have an interesting spin: the main character finds out halfway through that he's the chosen one, actively rejects it (because in this case "the chosen one" means "the guy that untethers the eternally tortured souls of Space Hell and destroys known existence"), and then is forced into it anyway because the God of his universe is a paranoid schizophrenic from upstate New York who goes off his meds after a conversation with a bicycle.
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Apr 26, 2019 21:45
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Ugh, AACK would be the kind of people who would listen to C&C and misunderstand everything.CodfishCartographer posted:A buddy of mine that majored in theatre describes postmodern plays as "not having a point" and thus any piece of work with explicit change or character development could arguably not be postmodern, as then they have a point beyond "not having a point". That's not incorrect. "Not having a point" is a subversion of the idea that all art had to achieve some sort of goal, so anything that's linear, 5 acts, hero's journey, or otherwise a "conventional" structure, and therefore is Post-Modern. It's not the entire definition, but it's definitely on the right track. Mors Rattus posted:Technically speaking, Baba Is You is a programming language. Oh cool!
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Apr 26, 2019 22:06
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I always thought postmodernism was about the rejection of grand narratives. Post modern art appears weird and unapproachable at first glance as a result of the work actively avoiding or questioning commonly accepted narratives, like ones about experience (linear time vs anachronism, realism vs absurd), technical ones surrounding a medium (three act structure vs lack of progression a la Godot), or traditional grand narratives (Communism vs skepticism towards it) I would say Spec Ops the line would be an example of a postmodern game. Not only does it reject the narrative of AAA military shooters, it exposes how it's tied the larger narrative of US intervention. Both are defined by the same idea: you (player/soldier) are a violent, but necessary force for good and so is the army the PC/you belong to. Spec Ops rejects the two narratives in many ways: the PC turns out to be a delusional war criminal, whose perspective (the only one the player ever sees until the end) cannot be trusted; enemies are rogue US soldiers given moments of humanization, unlike the Otherized middle east/Russian soldiers of CoD and war propaganda; and the situation gets worse as you progress, never better, by your PC's hand. So much so that the civilians you're trying to save lynches one of your squad mates in anger and you are given the opportunity to gun them down in retaliation. I'd say what separates Spec Ops from YIIK is that each subversion has a point to prove. Each subversion of expectations in Spec Ops is meant to make you wonder if what you're doing is even right. YIIK's subversion only prompt confusion and nothing else. theGrooseofLegend fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 27, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 22:19
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Dirt Road Junglist posted:Ugh, AACK would be the kind of people who would listen to C&C and not understand anything Command & Conquer is pretty easy to understand. I don't know what you are saying.
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Apr 26, 2019 22:20
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Honestly after all this discussion I don't really see the point of trying so hard to strip Yiik of its status of being postmodern. Whether it is or not, the concrete points are A) it's pretty dumb and pretentious to state that up front, and B) it is a Bad Game regardless of genre. Genre and quality aren't mutually exclusive. A bad song is still music, a bad rock song is still rock, etc.Dirt Road Junglist posted:Ugh, AACK would be the kind of people who would listen to C&C and misunderstand everything. What's hard to understand? They want everybody to dance - now!
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Apr 26, 2019 23:03
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Under some of the definitions given for postmodernism, Yiik is definitely postmodern. Especially Katherine and subponticateposter. G-Mawwwwwww fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 26, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 23:12
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CodfishCartographer posted:A buddy of mine that majored in theatre describes postmodern plays as "not having a point" and thus any piece of work with explicit change or character development could arguably not be postmodern, as then they have a point beyond "not having a point". I really hope this doesn't come off as too "Alex-y" and pseudo-intellectual on my part, but having also studied theatre in college, I find this take fun, and I think it shines light on YIIK's failure to properly label and/or market itself in a kind of funny way. So I don't know if I would say this myself, but I think that one could argue Absurdist narratives are intrinsically postmodern because they reject traditional structural elements that we expect to see in western narratives, like character arcs or proper climaxes. Like, to use a big name example, no one in Waiting for Godot grows as a person, they're just caught in this Sisyphean cycle of nonsense and suffering. There's a lot of interpretations for why this is (e.g. "it's a reflection of post WWII existentialism and ennui among the general public" is one example), but--and especially in conjunction with Beckett's wild as gently caress later works--it's clear that this nonsensical poo poo is purposeful. Why this makes YIIK funny to me, is that Alex could totally work as an absurdist protagonist. Like, his biggest impression on us as viewers is that he fails to learn anything. He occasionally veers away from his vapid narcissism and dabbles in self-reflection, but it never goes very far, and he constantly repeats the exact same loving mistakes. But like, the game doesn't make very much note of this, constantly rewards him, and then the creator goes on podcasts to talk about how this game is actually a classic narrative about Alex becoming a better person, which actually frames the game as an explicit failure of writing, ironically enough. Like, I'm not saying going that route with the game would make it good or enjoyable, but portraying Alex in this manner could at least more strongly justify calling itself postmodern from the get-go.
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Apr 27, 2019 00:01
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Modernism states that art has rules, requires work, and must achieve a goal. Post modernism rejects this and states that anything can be art, effort is not required, and no point needs to be made. Post modernism can be used as a criticism of things, or simply as something that rejects outside influences and exists as its own thing. There is no one true way to do post modernism as far as I’m aware. This is part of the appeal to this way of thinking, it has a certain freedom to it, for better or worse. Warioware practically embodies this school of thought, but it is not the only way a game can be post modern, since there is no truly concrete way to be post modern. As for YIIK, whether or not it’s post modern I don’t really know, but whether or not it’s post modern is not at all what it’s problem is anyway. It’s problem is that it’s an unfun game with lovely writing and garbage characters. The Skeleton King fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Apr 27, 2019 |
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Apr 27, 2019 00:54
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I enjoy this talk about post modernism though, it’s a cool subject that’s fun to discuss and learn about, unlike YIIK.
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Apr 27, 2019 01:03
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