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I would argue that video game novels may be worse
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Jul 22, 2019 23:07
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 16:24 |
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LitRPG (which I suppose technically counts as "video game novels")
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Jul 22, 2019 23:09
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Sham bam bamina! posted:LitRPG (which I suppose technically counts as "video game novels") The closer they resemble actual video games the worse they are, so sorta.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:31
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I cannot even conceive of what a LitRPG is supposed to be. It's it like a CYOA? with stats? I remember reading some of the Lone Wolf books as a kid but I doubt they're anything like that
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Jul 23, 2019 17:42
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Heath posted:I cannot even conceive of what a LitRPG is supposed to be. It's it like a CYOA? with stats? I remember reading some of the Lone Wolf books as a kid but I doubt they're anything like that
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Jul 23, 2019 17:43
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Sham bam bamina! posted:It's literally a blow-by-blow-by-item-drop description of someone playing a game. I'm writing a mental blow-by-blow account of someone recovering from psychosis. After the success of my previously shared story I'm hoping to share this all new, all improved, less indulgent story soon. Lots of stat boosts for negative symptoms while acute symptoms are debuffed. Big area of effects to lack of showering.
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Jul 23, 2019 17:47
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Heath posted:I cannot even conceive of what a LitRPG is supposed to be. It's it like a CYOA? with stats? I remember reading some of the Lone Wolf books as a kid but I doubt they're anything like that The work that started the current boom was iirc "The Gamer" a korean comic. The system actually works OK in visual novels, with the stat block providing information at a glance, without harming the flow of the story. It is also primarily a wuxia story, even though it has noticeable fantasy influences.
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Jul 23, 2019 17:56
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I looked up some examples of this and even as someone who has been brain poisoned by video games since basically day one I am utterly perplexed by this concept. I think I get what it is but I don't get why.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:06
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Heath posted:I looked up some examples of this and even as someone who has been brain poisoned by video games since basically day one I am utterly perplexed by this concept. The second wave of litRPGs is also very strongly influenced by the emergence of VRMMO (happening inside a virtual world) stories. Those are strongly influenced by the rise of e-sports, and the better ones are closer to the structure of a sports story then the structure of a SF adventure. The true villain is commodification.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:22
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I imagine it's for a very specific kind of brokebrain that can only process the world as a game. They've grown up on games, see their identity as a gamer, and relate everything they encounter through gamer memes, gamer bravado, and the mechanics of games. It's the type of person who calls others NPCs to insult them not realising it only betrays their own inability to deal with the world on a natural level. Everything is (not just a computer) game to them. People aren't real, they're quest givers, mobs to be destroyed, and success can be achieved through abuse of the "meta." When the world doesn't work like that, except in their own, increasingly (sadly) growing communities, they want to retreat to a fiction where everything can be processed by beating a level, or boss, or exploiting a bug.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:25
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VictualSquid posted:. what the gently caress are you talking about
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Jul 23, 2019 18:25
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chernobyl kinsman posted:what the gently caress are you talking about A lot of the current trends in pulp novels can't really be understood by only looking at novels.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:31
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I guess what I don't get is why the actual nuts and bolts numbers of things are included. Even a decade ago my friends and I would make fun of people posting in writing forums about how they kept active inventory sheets of characters and couldn't figure out how to resolve a scene because their character literally didn't have enough potions to survive a fight scene, which is something so baldly absurd to me that I can't even comprehend how it's a problem since you can either just rewrite the scene or have the character have found 3 potions instead of 2 earlier in the story, and even that is taking it on its own terms. This stuff looks like a level beyond even that kind of ... I don't even know what it is. I mean, from one perspective it's always interesting to see how literature evolves alongside and responds to other artforms and cultural artifacts, but it seems to me like having things like numerical stat outputs is really distracting and doesn't add any kind of substance to the writing since it's all arbitrarily decided by the writer in the first place, unless they're writing the story as they're rolling dice to determine outcomes, in which case they may as well just publish a freemium DND campaign or something.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:38
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VictualSquid posted:I am saying that stat-blocks work well in games, work OK in visual novels and are absolutely terrible in actual novels/literature. bring back botl with the stipulation that they can only harass and shame people with these kind of opinions tia
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Jul 23, 2019 19:35
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not entirely sure what was so terrible about that specific post tbh
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Jul 23, 2019 19:46
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The bleak frame of reference.
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Jul 23, 2019 20:14
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A lot of the drive behind the LitRPG stuff is because people want to make video games and can't, because developing a video game is a huge team effort and investment of time, energy, and skill, but anybody can type words on a keyboard if they have a single functioning finger.
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Jul 23, 2019 20:18
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In the context of the original purpose of this thread and its predecessor, all of it
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Jul 23, 2019 22:25
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“Let’s use critical literary analysis to examine sci-fi and other genre fiction and discuss if genre can have true value as literature” “well the japanese number story games are cool when they have numbers and sometimes the numbers are cool in comic books too bleep bloop boop”
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Jul 23, 2019 22:43
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I thought he just shed some light on the origins of LitRPG when some other dude asked about it, said some of its aspects work decently well in other forms of media, but not in literature, and that he believed that the proliferation of those other forms might explain current trends when it comes to lovely writing? the only opinion relating to print media is that statblocks are "absolutely terrible in actual novels/literature". I mean, yeah, "how do you even know about that other poo poo dude?", but other than that 
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Jul 23, 2019 23:11
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LitRPGs are bolstered by the Amazon marketplace. Some of the people who churn them out make six figures a year, if not more. A new one that came out recently from a new writer made 14k in direct royalties in the first two weeks. Not bad for something that was riddled with grammar and spelling errors.
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Jul 24, 2019 01:26
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idiotsavant posted:“Let’s use critical literary analysis to examine sci-fi and other genre fiction and discuss if genre can have true value as literature” We have strayed far from the light of the bravest of the lamps
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Jul 24, 2019 01:39
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litrpgs are weird. i do not know what to make of them
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Jul 24, 2019 02:51
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Toilet paper, from the sounds of it?
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Jul 24, 2019 03:06
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it's the first category of fiction i've ever looked at and been completely unable to understand how anybody finds any joy in it whatsoever i can have fun reading a chick tract but i can not and will not enjoy a litrpg, ever
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Jul 24, 2019 04:08
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nankeen posted:it's the first category of fiction i've ever looked at and been completely unable to understand how anybody finds any joy in it whatsoever Basically this, I have been thinking about this all day and it is utterly incomprehensible to me. Like I get that some people find something in it, but it's literally pretending to play a video game and pretending to read literature at the same time but it utterly robs the joy out of both of those things. What room is there for beautiful prose when it's perforated by damage outputs or social link rank increases or whatever the gently caress? What fun is there in simulating a video game being played when the whole idea is that you get to be the character on the screen running around doing stuff? It's mindboggling, which is probably why I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Like I get why people enjoy trashy romance even if I don't read or enjoy it myself, I understand why people enjoy dating Sims and things even if I don't, but this is the kind of thing where I want to meet someone who reads these and enjoys them and just crack open their consciousness because their mental narration has to be unlike anything I've ever considered. It's like that ulilililia book, I get that it tickles his brain but he's also actually autistic.
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Jul 24, 2019 04:36
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https://www.amazon.com/Land-Founding-LitRPG-Chaos-Seeds-ebook/dp/B0172GEB68/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8&pldnSite=1 What the actual gently caress is this quote:The series with over 100 THOUSAND ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reviews!
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Jul 24, 2019 05:39
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I don't mean to be a giant dick, but can we go back to writing reviews instead of discussing LitRPGs? They have no redeeming value. We know this. They cannot, nor will they ever, have redeeming value when you need to intersperse meaning with "and then I did over 9000 holy damage lolololol" with any kind of prose. Seriously, the fun of the old thread was applying literary techniques and writing reviews about nerds' favorite fiction. Otherwise I could see if the Dominic Flandry series still holds up as well as I thought it did.
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Jul 24, 2019 06:04
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I've been waiting all summer to write one once I'm back from studying in Russia.
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Jul 24, 2019 06:33
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I write a web serial so this is adjacent to me. LitRPGs come from a bunch of different factors. Generally, it's a bunch of people who don't really enjoy reading but understand that reading is a thing smart people do and, as nerds, they are smart so they must read. The problem is that they've never read anything other than MMO combat logs, as Mrenda pointed out a few posts ago. There's a significant crossover with Japanese light novels, translated Chinese martial arts novels, anime and manga, and the fact that a significant chunk of LitRPG readers come from countries where English is a secondary language. Hence, the ramshackle construction where little attention is paid to grammar and spelling, and less is paid to characterization, plot, themes, metaphor or even why they want to tell the story (beyond making money by churning out words.) What the audience cares about is 'things happening.' By things happening, they don't mean character development or so on, they mean 'the character got a new skill or a new sword' or 'the character beat the boss.' It is, essentially, the MMO loot cycle slammed into a novel, replete with the various terms and tropes such as 'starter village' and so on. It's the self-insert portal fantasy for a generation of people who have been so thoroughly ruined by late-stage capitalism that they can't even imagine themselves as some Mary Sue who lives in the fictional world and gets all the cool things, but they can only imagine themselves as playing a game and getting all the cool things by playing the game really, really well. There's no consideration for quality, either. Case in point, from the link Heath provided by 'the Father of American LitRPG.' quote:The Prince sneered at the back of the throne room. The sycophants and greedy court leeches pleaded their cases to the Dark Queen. Every day, every year, every millennia was exactly the same. Hearing their complaints of needing more power, or their false pride in capturing a few more souls, the Prince tried to summon anger, disdain, or hatred, but all he felt was boredom. What exacerbates their inexplicable popularity is that there's ridiculously good money in it, if you are either a. capable of writing this dreck without succumbing to shame or b. so lacking in self-awareness that you think this is something that has value beyond the money it makes. Like I said, a new one from a writer with no pedigree has made him over fourteen thousand dollars and he's released two books in that time, so, it's probably double that. I believe Aleron Kong makes over a million dollars a year and wrote his first six books in fourteen months - they've been turning a tidy profit ever since. There's so much money in this that it's more cutthroat than the usual Amazon self-pub drama: a few months back, there was an issue with LitRPGs authors apparently paying Russian botfarms to leave fake positive reviews and reads on their competitors so Amazon would kick them off for abusing the system (it worked.) It's all completely crazy. For stuff like this: quote:That pain was worse than anything he had ever felt! What the hell was going on? The pain dampeners were not supposed to allow ANYTHING to hurt that much, let alone just the sting of a wasp on steroids! He picked up a rock with his right hand, and activated his skill True Aim, and threw. The stone flew from his hand towards the wasp. It easily dodged to the side though, the rock missing and accomplishing nothing. That was not supposed to happen, he thought. At his high skill level, there should have been less than a 1% chance of a projectile missing when he activated True Aim. quote:“Well what have we learned?” the imp asked putting emphasis on the last word. quote:Picking up all four, he was awarded with new message notifications. They're not worth discussing. They're interesting only as a symptom of late-stage capitalism and seeing people churn these things out and make heaps of money in the process. I've tried to write one and I got about ten-thousand words in before my brain rebelled. They're really no different to any algorithm-driven content fed into a quality-ambivalent marketplace, just more bizarre because of the total lack of anything people expect from written texts. Unfortunately, Amazon will probably never corral LitRPGs to their own genre, so, virtually every Top 20 on Kindle or whatever is dominated by LitRPGs or GameLit. You have to use the word GameLit because Kong attempted, and maybe did, trademark the term LitRPG. But if you were aiming to break into the ridiculous market for the purpose of shamelessly making money, you wouldn't go for romance or whatever - you'd go straight for LitRPGs.
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Jul 24, 2019 06:34
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Not having read word one of these things (beyond the stuff you quoted; great post by the way), I'm going to postulate that dudes are reading this stuff in part because, uh, they can relate to it. Like videogames loom so large in their lives that the thing they have in common with the rest of humanity are these electronic skinner boxes. That and, as you said, they've never read anything else. These are the final nights.
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Jul 25, 2019 03:45
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porfiria posted:These are the final nights.
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Jul 25, 2019 06:02
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:But if you were aiming to break into the ridiculous market for the purpose of shamelessly making money, you wouldn't go for romance or whatever - you'd go straight for LitRPGs. After I saw those Kong novels and that that's apparently the bar for this kind of thing, I will admit that for a hot minute I really was thinking that I could do this. I am at least a capable writer and I could churn out what is effectively a decent video game fantasy story, but after reading this post I realized that I really couldn't do this since I have no connection whatsoever to this kind of writing. In other words, I'm not capable of meaningfully providing what these people would want because I have no loving idea what they want. I could probably emulate it but not well, and I feel like trying to make the writing or the plot actually interesting in some way would actually be an impediment. Given what the quoted post says I'm not all that convinced that there's even much legitimacy to the popularity of this genre in the first place.
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Jul 25, 2019 06:12
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Like with Kindle porn, the key is to get in on the ground floor three years before it blew up.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jul 26, 2019 |
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Jul 25, 2019 06:15
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I'm normally fascinated by outsider art, but something about this just makes me sad and uncomfortable.
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Jul 25, 2019 20:21
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this stuff isn't outsider art because that is made by genuine weirdos, not by cynical dumbasses doing it for a profit.
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Jul 26, 2019 00:21
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Heath posted:After I saw those Kong novels and that that's apparently the bar for this kind of thing, I will admit that for a hot minute I really was thinking that I could do this. I am at least a capable writer and I could churn out what is effectively a decent video game fantasy story, but after reading this post I realized that I really couldn't do this since I have no connection whatsoever to this kind of writing. In other words, I'm not capable of meaningfully providing what these people would want because I have no loving idea what they want. I could probably emulate it but not well, and I feel like trying to make the writing or the plot actually interesting in some way would actually be an impediment. Given what the quoted post says I'm not all that convinced that there's even much legitimacy to the popularity of this genre in the first place. I think you need to first poison your brain with TVTropes to the point where you can't communicate about media with anything other than nerd buzzwords.
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Jul 26, 2019 04:50
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Videogames can't make young men more violent, but they can annihilate their ability to appreciate literature. Interesting.
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Jul 26, 2019 13:47
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lol video games
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Jul 26, 2019 15:31
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I remember reading a Scholastic book fair book when I was like thirteen that was about a girl stuck inside of a VR video game where she kept dying and having to restart, so she eventually did a whole Groundhog Day/speedrun thing, and then at the end it turned out the hot prince was actually the game designer's insert character and he was seventeen and a boy genius CEO in real life. The ending was eye-rolling but I was pretty much on board for the rest of it.
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Jul 27, 2019 20:00
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