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Tuxedo Catfish posted:This is why literacy in the medium is important, so that you can make distinctions. Would you call Triumph of the Will parody? I'm about 99% sure a bunch of people today would call it satire if they didn't know how it was produced.
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Jun 5, 2016 02:01
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Panzeh posted:Would you call Triumph of the Will parody? I don't think so, Tim.
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Jun 5, 2016 02:14
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Panzeh posted:Would you call Triumph of the Will parody? Well, there are sort of two issues here, complicated by there not being a perfectly clear line between them. On the one hand, some works blatantly or subtly signal how you ought to read them. As a good critic, you should be able to pick up on this -- even while it's not the end of the conversation, and even while people will disagree about what's blatant or subtle or even what's being said. Saints Row 3 constantly lampshades the fact that the protagonist is a psychopath with a near-magical ability to avoid the consequences of their actions, but it's also absolutely about how funny it is to make light of violence. Sucker Punch near-explicitly tells the audience "convincing yourself that these sexytime fantasies are empowering is the same as being lobotomized" but it's also Zack Snyder's mea culpa for being someone who has and enjoys those fantasies. On the other hand, context is incredibly important, and can even be transformative. I wouldn't call Triumph of the Will a parody (and it's been years since I saw it) but I don't think it would take very much to push it over the line. Is it unimaginable that someone might show it to, say, a history class in order to provoke disgust at fascism and start a conversation along those lines? Is that somehow less legitimate than using it as Nazi propaganda?
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Jun 5, 2016 02:16
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Panzeh posted:Would you call Triumph of the Will parody? Triumph of the Will, at no point, gives any sort of subtle nod or wink or indication that the whole construction is a farce.
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Jun 5, 2016 05:08
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Panzeh posted:Would you call Triumph of the Will parody? You are projecting hardcore there and it really make me question your intentions in this discussion, on video games.
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Jun 5, 2016 07:43
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computer parts posted:Again though (and I'm addressing FC3 since you mentioned it), that goes back to the Starship Troopers problem - do you really need someone facing the audience and saying "the thing you just saw? That's bad"? I actually watched ST for the first time, and it's delightfully heavy handed - the cheesy propaganda, the scenery chewing talk show host, Dr Horrible dressed as a literal Nazi officer. It's got this constant absurdity to everything. FC3 and SP don't have that. The present their dumb stupid violence with a perfectly straight face, and then turn around and call you dumb and stupid for going along with it. That's not really satire.
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Jun 5, 2016 11:15
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I actually watched ST for the first time, and it's delightfully heavy handed - the cheesy propaganda, the scenery chewing talk show host, Dr Horrible dressed as a literal Nazi officer. It's got this constant absurdity to everything. Lots of reviewers thought it was a dumb action movie and they even directly quoted reviews from ST saying "oh yeah this seems to say fascism is bad but that must've been unintentional".
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Jun 5, 2016 11:21
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Wales Grey posted:Triumph of the Will, at no point, gives any sort of subtle nod or wink or indication that the whole construction is a farce. You know how over the top it all is? That's what people call parody now- if you make it over the top, it's satire. Warhammer 40,000 has no subtle nod or wink or indication that it's a farce. It presents everything it says straight up. Yes, it's over the top, but the Nazis and fascism in general is over the top- that's their style. If you're going to make fun of them, you make them seem small, petty, and trifling, not over the top(which is exactly what the Nazis went for in all their propaganda). You know the people who are really into that universe? Most everyone I know in real life who actually loves it are on the side of the political spectrum that appreciates the message that the universe is a permanent Racial Holy War where humans need to unite and serve their God-Emperor to fight the unclean Xenos and stave off Chaos by Doing What Has To Be Done(which can involve annihilating everyone). No dissent can be tolerated, but instead of presenting that as a problem, the setting makes it literally true that if you have dissent Chaos becomes a problem. I'm sure the people who write that setting think they're writing some cutting parody, but if you read it, it feels more like "What if Mein Kampf was really true?" and that's hardly a parody at all, despite the authorial intent. I think Starship Troopers the movie as parody only really works if you understand that the book was absolutely not parody- Heinlein believed everything he said in it. It really doesn't have any subtle winks or anything other than being Over the Top, but you can't really out-Over the Top the real fascists. I guess my thing is that I don't discount the reaction of most people as a wrong interpretation- when a bunch of people watch the opening of Full Metal Jacket and then turn off the second half because their perspective on the movie is seeing R. Lee Ermey be a badass drill instructor and whip those recruits into shape, I kinda think the movie is flawed in some way, even if it's not intended to be seen as that. To me, telling people they're wrong for seeing a movie like that is like telling your really obscure joke and then calling someone an idiot for not getting it. Strom Cuzewon posted:FC3 and SP don't have that. The present their dumb stupid violence with a perfectly straight face, and then turn around and call you dumb and stupid for going along with it. That's not really satire. I think the thing is in a first-person shooter video game, you're showing dumb stupid violence as a test of skill and wits rather than a conscious act- the perspective of someone playing what's considered a good video game is someone moving pieces around on a board. The people you kill become game pieces for you to remove from play, no matter how much blood or gore or however many cutscenes you have to try to tell you it's bad. I don't really think video games that would be considered fun to play can really sell a message that what they have you do is bad, and when they try it just comes off as cheap. Even Spec Ops: The Line is a cover shooter most of the time and it telling you that's bad when the game treats it like simply a test of skill to get to the next point where it just berates you again for having beaten that challenge. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 11:59
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Panzeh posted:
I think it can be done, but it needs to reinforced throughout the game, instead of a last minute twist like FC3. No More Heroes has the gameplay mechanics of "be a badass murdering hordes of dudes" but then deliberately mocks that with crude 80s sound effects, dumb combat shouts, and by making you literally jerk off the controller over how cool you're being. Spec Ops I think does more than you give it credit for - there's the hanging scene, the constant escalation of your squad commands from calm and professional to screaming obscenities, and the scene where you level the TV tower with such extreme prejudice that it almost becomes awkward. Every time you try and disconnect your actions (moving pieces around the board) from their consequences it forces those consequences into your face and reminds you what a psycho you are. This point: quote:I don't really think video games that would be considered fun to play can really sell a message that what they have you do is bad, and when they try it just comes off as cheap. is really interesting to me. Almost every action in a video game ends up being interpreted as a positive one because you're always rewarded for it- you gain points, get powerups, earn xp, open a door, solve a puzzle etc. In a way the textual description of the action becomes irrelevant - shooting someone in the head and pulling a lever both advance you through the game, and after a while become interchangable events. The best I've seen games do is, like Spec Ops, is to make that disconnect part of the story. There's some, like The Void, that create a strong atmosphere of nihilism to stop you feeling that sense of reward and achievement - sure you get some resources from sucking out that creature's life force, but all that does is delay your inevitable death, it doesn't prevent it. computer parts posted:Lots of reviewers thought it was a dumb action movie and they even directly quoted reviews from ST saying "oh yeah this seems to say fascism is bad but that must've been unintentional". This bothers me. Judge Dredd, 40K, Starship Troopers - in my eyes they're self-evidently absurd, and hilarious. But I find it very hard to articulate *why* they're absurd, and why Sucker Punch is not.
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Jun 5, 2016 13:01
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I think it can be done, but it needs to reinforced throughout the game, instead of a last minute twist like FC3. No More Heroes has the gameplay mechanics of "be a badass murdering hordes of dudes" but then deliberately mocks that with crude 80s sound effects, dumb combat shouts, and by making you literally jerk off the controller over how cool you're being. FC3 does more than a twist at the end- the characters you rescue all react in a fairly 'realistic' way to your violence, and you see that throughout the whole thing. The disconnect is the way everyone else, from the "friendly" tribe to all the villains and most of your allies throughout the game are absolutely over the top. They fit in the world they inhabit and the gameplay where your old friends do not. The ending is where they try to make you choose between the Video Game World or the Real World and the Video Game world leads to death. It still doesn't work, though, because everyone rightly says that the part of it where it's in the Video Game world where everything and everyone is over the top from Michael Mando to the German guy saying "wunderbar" to blowing up gas stations works fine, because it's just straight up action that way- and that's the part that people would call a good game. That's the part where you solve puzzles, find the best way to tackle that base, have a stimulating experience. The part where you talk with your friends you just rescued is just standing and talking- staring into someone's face, watching a screen tell words at you. 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. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2016 13:45
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That ending just preserves the idea that violence is cool, and Travis is just too emasculated, too much of a woman/gay, to really perform it. Making the commission of violence itself part of being pathetic and contemptible is far more in line with what No More Heroes is presenting.
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Jun 5, 2016 15:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:This is why literacy in the medium is important, To put it another way, baldly presenting some idea, in any medium, and expecting someone to take it as ironic criticism because to you it just seems so apparently wrong on its face presumes that they not only see the same face from their subjective vantage point, but also that they will necessarily conclude that the idea is bad. As SS Troopers / FC3 point out, this is easily not the case.
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Jun 5, 2016 15:55
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Paolomania posted:You are using "literacy" here as a stand-in for "agreement with a certain critical framework". To assert that such is necessary is to beg any critical question - i.e. It presumes that any analysis must necessarily agree with the assumptions and baggage of that framework. A person deprived of any artistic content is finally presented with a PS1 and Dino Crisis. They understand it as the pinnacle of art. We could treat this opinion as unassailable, or we could recognize it as a result of a limited perspective. Or, to put it another way, people are capable of distinguishing Blake's poem about chimneysweeps from Libertarian paeans to child labor, without needing indoctrination. But they do need to be familiar with the world and culture on at least a limited level first.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:01
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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. Brainiac Five posted:That ending just preserves the idea that violence is cool, and Travis is just too emasculated, too much of a woman/gay, to really perform it. Making the commission of violence itself part of being pathetic and contemptible is far more in line with what No More Heroes is presenting. Yeah, and funnily enough some IT nerd would actually be less contemptable than Travis, because the IT nerd can hold down regular work. No More Heroes 2 was a really weird addition to the series, because the whole arc of that game was all about Travis redeeming himself (via violence), but the first game was all about how even cool violence is pathetic. But Suda 51 had little to do with that game. I kinda feel that Suda 51 peaked on Killer 7 and his games (which is to say games his name is on) have gotten steadily worse as time goes on. I wanted to give Killer Is Dead a decent try, but I just completely lost interest in it after the first Gigolo Mode scene. If the intention was to introduce a mechanic that alienated the player, they certainly hit the mark there.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:07
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Paolomania posted:To put it another way, baldly presenting some idea, in any medium, and expecting someone to take it as ironic criticism because to you it just seems so apparently wrong on its face presumes that they not only see the same face from their subjective vantage point, but also that they will necessarily conclude that the idea is bad. As SS Troopers / FC3 point out, this is easily not the case. That's not what I'm expecting. It is not the magnitude or over-the-top-ness of the games and movies I'm talking about that make them "ironic" (nor is "ironic" really the right word here but that's another discussion entirely), it's their actual content.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:11
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A broad issue with video game criticism is the length of time required. Final Fantasy 8 is a game that only really makes sense on a second playthrough, but the 30-40 hours needed to do this are fairly daunting. Where it's quite possible to read faster, and movies take up 1.5-3 hours generally, without speedrunning there's not much to speed up playing a game though multiple times unless a means of doing so is explicitly incorporated in the game.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:19
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I mean, contrast the lengths to which the Metal Gear series go to present their criticism to say, the gunship fire support scenes from Modern Warfare. If you are inclined to be against war and killing then those gunship scenes on their face invoke the horror at how easy and impersonal killing in modern warfare can be; however if not the scene is just a power trip at killing the bad guys. The consequent necessary to make the argument "X is bad because ..." is left off because it presumes that you already know it. If the game really wanted to make and argument "X is bad because Y" and not just "here is X, we assume you know why it is bad" then it would show collateral damage, weeping families, diplomatic aftermath and so on (or at least make discussion as in the MG series).
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Jun 5, 2016 16:26
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Think for a second about how you signal something is bad, and see if you can spot the problem. If I think lobotomies are a good and necessary psychiatric treatment, the turn in Sucker Punch isn't going to clue me in to the reading I've suggested in this thread. If I think that impersonally gunning down people from the sky is for the greater good, I'm not going to be (as) turned off by that sequence in Call of Duty 4. But in either case, assuming I've got the cultural context to understand what a movie is and know the language being spoken and so on, I can still see the sequence of events; "my dance is going to be different, it's going to mean something" -> "brain gets pulled out with an icepick" or "black op raids against a sovereign nation, killing hundreds of people, and trying to kidnap dictator's son for leverage / information" -> "nuclear apocalypse is averted" and draw my own conclusions from it. At some point, yes, I do have to assume shared context, otherwise criticism is not only useless but impossible. But the more capable you are of seeing how the pieces fit together, the longer you can suspend judgment, the less you have to assume.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:46
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The medium is the message, but all video games are supersized.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:52
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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. 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.
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Jun 5, 2016 18:53
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Panzeh posted:I guess my thing is that I don't discount the reaction of most people as a wrong interpretation- when a bunch of people watch the opening of Full Metal Jacket and then turn off the second half because their perspective on the movie is seeing R. Lee Ermey be a badass drill instructor and whip those recruits into shape, I kinda think the movie is flawed in some way, even if it's not intended to be seen as that. To me, telling people they're wrong for seeing a movie like that is like telling your really obscure joke and then calling someone an idiot for not getting it. Since you mentioned this, the problem I think a lot of people have with FMJ is that Hartman and Pyle are clearly the two most compelling characters/acting performances, and after ~45 minutes they just vanish and are never seen again. Which is very intellectually clever on many levels, but emotionally highly unsatisfying. I did an experiment a few years ago where I re-edited FMJ to sprinkle the boot camp scenes through the movie, and present it in a more familiar "story with flashbacks" style, and it seemed like as a whole the film was much better for it (or at least more emotionally satisfying), but you absolutely brutally throttle and bury in a shallow grave the power and the intensity and the emotional impact of the boot camp scenes, and that's a pyrrhic victory at best.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:00
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