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Incoherence posted: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. I'd use Gone Home and, weirdly similarly, Mass Effect 3 as games that couldn't be replicated as movies or most other media because they rely upon the player unknowingly making decisions on how the narrative presents itself during the focused engagement with the game, and at conclusion present narratives that are somewhat unique to the player and without requiring post-engagement reflection. They're like CYOA books but the choice elements are obfuscated or expanded enough (not referring to Mass Effects obvious choices but some of the longer term decisions that are not obvious until hours later) that the comparison in media breaks down. Gone Home intentionally doesn't require me to engage with all the content to reach the end, allowing for a sort of Fatality of the Author. ME3 is a tougher one but I think similar results arise from the level of obfuscation in outcome. The closest I've seen in other media is Building Stories by Chris Ware, which is a comic story told over 10 or so other comics of varying shapes and sizes, which all come in a single box (which also contains comic panels) and no instructions on reading order, so how you literally build your story shapes your interpretation of characters and events.
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May 18, 2016 19:37
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Absurd Alhazred posted:And emulation is really, really hard to do well, the more stringent your accuracy requirements are. This interview with someone who is dead set on perfectly emulating the SNES is very illuminating in that regard. Eh, hyper puritanism on emulation misses the point because no one is going to claim that watching a DVD movie in the home or 80s show on a modern screen renders the experience false because it's not a theater or doesn't have scanlines and knobs. If you really want to get rigid then every serialized tv show with "next episode" trailers is lost forever, because the waiting teasing, and anticipation were all part of the media experience. Even the removal of commercials changes the beats of a TV show. Anecdotally, Lost is a good example of a show where the rate of episode viewing seems to have dramatic impacts on episode ratings because the huge cliffhanger gaps are eliminated and ABC isn't spending the whole week telling you that you're finally going to learn the secret of the tattoos. Legally game history is a mess but I think a far higher percentage of commercially released games have been appropriately preserved than film. I think everything up through ps1 is completely covered (not sure about DC) and the ps2 gen is definitely covered, although availability is an issue.
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May 24, 2016 17:43
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blackguy32 posted:This would be the case if emulation past the PS1 was worth a drat. Hell, I still don't think they have nailed down N64 emulation yet and I'm not talking about perfect emulation, I am merely talking about having the game running without crashing or having huge graphical glitches. AFAIK the Wii and PS2 have fine emulation, the N64 is emulated but requires per game tweaking (with some working fine from scratch), and everything besides the PS3, Vita, and WiiU have been emulated by the companies that control the hardware. The point is that availability has little to do with hardware ceasing to exist.
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May 24, 2016 21:52
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Incoherence posted: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. 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. For a film comparison, waaaaaay back in the 90s when I lived in LA I got the bulk of my movie reviews from the LA Times (also because there wasn't an internet to speak of). I got lucky that I generally agreed with their lead reviewer's views on film (Turran) and a couple of their secondary reviewers were reliable to my tastes for certain genres (but useless in others). Those people were around for at least a decade (I think Turran is still at it). Who in games criticism from the 90s is still writing? Who in games criticism from 2010 is still writing without coming from a major pre-existing outlet? Hell, who in film from 2010 is still writing that wasn't long-established by a major outlet, as identified on RT as the "top critics"? If the method you describe was working we should be seeing a lot of reasoned, well-written, differing perspectives rapidly broadening the dialogue but... it's just not. Even interesting points get undermined by clearly pre-selected conclusions, sub-D&D levels of intent projecting, and just naked incompetence. The 90s LA Times only having 4-5 voices isn't ideal, and if I didn't like them there were other options but not many, but all of those people were (presumably) supporting themselves simply by watching, analyzing, and writing about movies while continuing to grow as critics. The closest to internet-mode of that was probably the AV Club, but they all left to The Dissolve, which died, and their AVC replacements just aren't that good (and frankly seem to improve too slowly). Dr.Stab posted:When you're talking about what a game does well/doesn't do well, that's a very subjective matter. Doing well doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's only if people experience the game and enjoy it that you can say whether the game is successful in its goals. If one reviewer didn't enjoy the experience of playing a game because they are grossed out by the depiction of women, is that a less objective opinion than if they didn't enjoy a game because the platforming feels too floaty to them? Zachack fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 05:53
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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. You can lose, or at least have rendered irrelevant, your argument by having weak or faulty foundations. If I argue that game X should cost me Y dollars on Z date and refuse to adjust either X, Y, or Z then I am specifying what those parameters are and may be wrong. For an obviously extreme example, if I declare that Overwatch should only cost $5 at launch with no dlc and weekly free maps and characters of equal "quality" as those shipped at launch, then I'm making direct statements on how much Overwatch cost to produce and maintain, and probably how much it will sell, and thus could be specifically wrong - Overwatch may need to cost $10 and DLC be released monthy simply to avoid violating California labor laws. When people compare "quality" and price of, say, Fallout 4 to Witcher 3 then again you run into this problem: the cost of developing in the US is not the same as developing in Poland. And this is just a super-rudimentary way of looking at development costs - what if your head programmer gets cancer? Should they be forced to work anyway because you've declared Z immutable? What can't happen is actually winning the argument, because once you actually engage in cost-benefit analysis where you land on the curve is personal. Maybe you think Y should be $10 and Z should be right now, but you're completely flexible on what X is. I may disagree that Overwatch should be 1 map, 2 characters, and 3 memory leaks working in tandem to crash my PC in 10 minutes, but I can't say you're wrong (well, maybe on the memory leak I could figure out a winning argument) for being ok with that.
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Jun 3, 2016 17:17
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twodot posted:Should statements can't be wrong. If I think Overwatch should cost $5 and have free high quality DLC, it is just a fact that I think that. The cost of producing such a product might be such that were a developer to attempt this, they would end up losing money, but as a game purchaser it isn't my responsibility to ensure that capitalists can rent seek effectively. Having that sort of requirement may mean I never buy a game again, but that doesn't make it wrong to have those requirements.
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Jun 3, 2016 21:10
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twodot posted:What does irrelevant mean here? Do you mean uncommon? "You shouldn't create DLC" is a very relevant argument to game design. Your use of need is also squirrelly, need to cost more than $5 to accomplish what? Things don't have intrinsic prices dictated by physics. "I'm a sovereign citizen of spaceship earth " is an irrelevant argument when complaining about taxes because it shows an unwillingness to engage with even a modicum of contrary arguments and is rooted in fantasy. Game development in 2016 does have intrinsic prices generated by food, shelter, and sleep requirements of humans, to say nothing of labor laws, utility costs, development equipment, etc, so either you need to engage with those largely currently immutable costs in your arguments or accept that your demand of charity/patronage development is likely irrelevant when discussing a game with high production values.
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Jun 3, 2016 22:02
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