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Incoherence posted: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. the sims was pitched as a virtual dollhouse, so i'd make the pedantic distinction of calling it a video toy rather than a video game - there's no narrative or even metaphor to critique, it's nothing more than a sandbox for people to derive amusement from on their own terms and i'm not trying to ignite the is/isn't a game debate, but rather i dunno how much you can critique gi joe action figures in a vacuum versus the gi joe cartoon which told a story and thus is more open to critique. like we can look at the sims as an attempt to model everyday human behavior and social interaction in an entertaining, lighthearted way which includes casual supernatural murder from a detached godlike figure boner confessor fucked around with this message at 20:16 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 20:14
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Fuschia tude posted:Further pedantry, I don't think that's enough to distinguish toy from game. Tetris doesn't have a narrative or metaphor either--what does anything that happens in Tetris mean? But it's obviously a game: the player takes actions that affect the game state and there are developer-defined win and loss conditions. tetris has an explicit goal, to last as long as possible while following the rules of tetris. the sims doesn't have any explicit goal, you get some simulated people to lord over and generally dick around with. i dont think there's a significant distinction between toy and game when it comes to entertainment value, i'm just trying to differentiate between a board game like monopoly and something like a pile of legos, or crayons + paper where it's really just a tool for pretending
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May 27, 2016 21:10
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rkajdi posted:Why? Not every movie is fun, but lots are enjoyable in a different way (think Shindler's List vs. Guardians of the Galaxy) Is it any dumber to try to consider game this way? on a base level all entertainment should be fun, if it's not fun then it's boring and you stop consuming it. fun can take on different forms, such as interesting, frustrating, etc. the witness wasn't fun in a joyful sense, it was fun because it was intensely frustrating until you had an epiphany. schindler's list isn't pleasant to sit through or lightweight in its themes but it's fun because it produces in some way a powerful emotion like sympathy for the jews or hatred of the nazis which people find pleasurable in some bitter way. gone home was fun if you liked the atmosphere and environment, and it wasn't fun if you were expecting anything to happen or a more complex story
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May 31, 2016 18:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm pretty sure you're saying the thing, it's just he's using fun to mean something more narrow than "enjoyable" and you're using them as synonyms. yeah, they're nearly identical arguments. really i'm addressing more the original claim that "games don't have to be fun" when i think that's the only thing they have to do, and fun is an individual preference. like people who purposely seek out and play lovely, broken games to enjoy on a meta level how bad and incompetent the game is
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May 31, 2016 19:07
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walking simulators are the closest to other forms of art, in that they're all narrative/environment with minimal input from the player. the logical error is in thinking these games are the most artsy of games, when really they're just the most similar to other popular not-game art forms. and all of the hate directed at walking simulators is really just shutins who incorporate video games as a major component of their identity asserting exclusive political opinions
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May 31, 2016 20:37
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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. yeah these people are pathetically snobbish, but it doesn't make them wrong. there's no objective criticism of any artform
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Jun 1, 2016 00:52
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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. i'm guessing that in part your definition of "these people" is to some extent characterized by differing taste in games
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Jun 1, 2016 01:22
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Internaut! posted:A. everything is relative critics will approach their criticism from an individual perspective, or one based on some school of thought. consumers of criticism will shop around for critics they like. where many gamergaters get confused is when they substitute "this criticism is bad criticism" for "i disagree with this criticism" because it's difficult for people to remember they are not correct about all things when it comes to criticism of a thing that informs their very identity as an example, there's a ton of faith-based christian film criticism out there http://www.crosswalk.com/culture/movies/ nothing about this criticism is wrong, i just don't care at all about faith perspectives on entertainment boner confessor fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 02:11
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i wouldn't even call any game critic loud, except when they get amplified 1000x by a whining horde of neckbeards. it's the streisand effect all over. there are no syndicated game critics, it's all individuals who write for some hobbyist site or publication and a handful of revolving door junior writers for news organizations and other pop culture reporting sites
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Jun 1, 2016 02:20
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yeah that was the best criticism of the femfreq kickstarter, "people gave her way more money than she asked for and she's wasting it" like uh yeah they're heaping her with money because it is pissing you off nerd boy, and it's working such as to not be wasted. she could light it on fire and GG would make a million tearful posts and it would still be well spent
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Jun 1, 2016 02:31
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OneEightHundred posted:When people speak of "objective" criticism, they don't really mean objective. I'm not sure if there's a good word for what they're looking for, but I think the root of it is that the job of a product reviewer is to help people make a buying decision. It's not the same as writing an opinion piece. The question being asked of them isn't whether they liked it, and especially not what they think about its sociopolitical implications, but whether people thinking about buying it will like it. but rather than expecting reviewers to anticipate the tastes and desires of a wide audience, it's much more efficient for a reviewer to express a certain perspective and let their audience find them. this is probably confusing to a lot of people who expect objective reviews given that games aren't really a consumer good that can be objectively judged (with the exception of a game being broken or buggy) as well as the fact that historically games were reviewed 'objectively' by publications with game publisher ties that used a multi-part or wide ranging scale that felt scientific for example, pc gamer gave half-life a 97 back in the day, and gave alpha centauri a 98. how certain can we be that alpha centauri is really 1 better than half-life?
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Jun 1, 2016 03:38
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we all know there is only one objective way to review games
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Jun 1, 2016 05:36
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bloodysabbath posted:All this means that "traditional" game journalism is becoming less relevant, writing for an increasingly insular group of fellow critics and a dwindling audience of what a less charitable person might call sycophants. Meanwhile, companies are starting to withhold review copies in favor of giving access to Youtube channels, and consumers are writing them off in favor of watching streams to determine quality before a purchase. uh traditional games journalism is magazines like Nintendo Power shilling rosy reviews and merch directly to consumers. i love this idea that gamergaters seem to have that we're falling from this perfect era of unbiased games journalism. trust me i'm in my mid thirties it was always, always poo poo e: not saying you're a gamergater here but that's an argument i see from that camp often, which almost necessitates the existence of a good gaming journalism to be corrupted, when i personally dont think gaming journalism has ever been as good as something like the SA games forum where people chat about games bloodysabbath posted:(*The one exception I can think of is Game Informer, which usually gets a lot of first reveals, because they're in every shop of the biggest specialty games retailer in the US. But why deal with Polygon or Kotaku at all?) because those outlets have audiences and serve as gatekeepers to those audiences. look at stardew valley, which was stupidly successful, and marketed directly at the kind of people who read polygon (and a bunch of people who love weeb poo poo and know what harvest moon is, who would have played it regardless). a larger portion of the gaming market is going indie along with the wanks, and the mass market is just going to buy whatever is advertised most regardless because they don't necessarily care if a game is 'good' or 'bad' so long as it is entertaining boner confessor fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 04:15
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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 don't mean this at all as a personal attack - but i think you're more motivated by airing grudges than assessing the state of gaming journalism, because you're trying to cook up reasons why an industry giant like rockstar wouldn't give a preview copy to outlets which you deem as unnecessarily hostile based on things like 'potential hits to the metacritic score' like rockstar actually cares about the metacritic score vs. just getting as much discussion about a game around release as possible. and really this just gets back to "the review wasn't objective or correct enough"
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Jun 3, 2016 17:28
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yeah, but everyone agrees that's a dumb way to do things plus it doesn't impact the biggest studios who self-publish
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Jun 3, 2016 18:24
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I don't feel like uncompensated content creation is sustainable, actually. it depends on the timeframe - they've been farming forums content to put on the frontpage for a decade at least
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Jun 3, 2016 23:45
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