A "Cracked" Article That I Actually Really Liked

Uh... no? My earlier defense was that people need to make a living, and my follow up was that being homogenized was a good way to do that. They go hand in hand, they don't cancel each other out
People need to want different things...? why? What's wrong with people enjoying what they enjoy? is broad appeal a sin, for that matter?

 

Your first defense was that everyone wanted to be a gamer and that the little guys have to be homogenized to keep up.

That's simply not true. It's the little guys who branch out because they know they can't compete with the homogeneity of the big leagues. Knock offs of the one-trick ponies don't sell as well as niche titles.

Big companies could make better games for less money. It's not hard. The reason we are where we are is irresponsible consumers. People who just want better graphics on the same old content.[DOUBLEPOST=1402958814][/DOUBLEPOST]

To this: Yes. It is wrong to enjoy the same thing over and over. It is wrong to be content without improvement. It is wrong to be complacent.

These things encourage stagnation and that is the worst thing that could happen.

 

Not to keep up, but to mute risk. You're treating being homogenized as being a knock off, but there's plenty of ways to appeal to a broad audience by being vague. It just so happens that when you're vague more and more things seem similar to it

If you can fill a niche, you can count yourself among a very lucky few, otherwise making an indie puzzle platformer will at least make SOME people buy it because they know what to expect.

How is it irresponsible yo want a better version of something you know you enjoy? A safe bet means you're less likely to waste your money, for one thing, and I'd hardly say it's the consumers job to ensure everyone else gets a fair shot at being discovered.[DOUBLEPOST=1402959298][/DOUBLEPOST]

Constant new things will over stimulate you. Most people play video games to relax, not on some sort of quest to improve the state of the entire industry. If you enjoy something, do it, buy it, whatever. It's insanely egotisitcal to assume that there's a 'right' way to enjoy something
Complacency isn't ideal, to be sure, but buying something that's new and improved isn't complacency. Just because they see more value in the changes made to a new game and you don't doesn't make their enjoyment any less worthwhile. You're literally arguing that everybody needs to have the same standards as you

 

The belief that video games are for relaxing, or any one thing in particular, is the exact attitude I'm arguing against.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's irresponsible to not buy good games.

I think it's irresponsible to buy bad games because they're familiar. We have to punish developers for doing things we don't like.

If you ask anyone in particular they will agree that innovation even in their own preferred type of game would be great. But they still buy the same old stuff! I'd rather they become even more selective in what they buy instead of the opposite.

Literally force the devs to change their habits by hitting them where it hurts when they do bad things: their wallets.

Boycotting bad decisions is a huge part of what it means to be a responsible consumer.

 

but that's what they're primarily USED for. That's what MOST entertainment is used for. Most people don't want their entertainment to be work, they want it to be the escape from work.

And people don't buy bad games because they're familiar, they buy games they think are good that are familiar. A person doesn't go and say "Hm, this new Call of Duty looks awful, but I bought CoD last year so I guess I have no choice" they work more like my friend, in other words "Oh man! Did you see how they have like lasers in the new CoD? And mechs and other fancy stuff? It looks so cool I'm really excited!"

I don't disagree with the fundamentals of what you're saying. We need to vote with out wallets, and actually stick to things, as gamers, to enact change. And unfortunately gamers are some of the most impatient people as a group in the world. But you're being too hamfisted with it, encouraging this hyper diligence based on some arbitrary scale of good and bad, as well as saying the core way people enjoy games is wrong, and that everybody else needs to change

 

Did you actually read the article? Schindler's List was made for entertainment, but people won't make a game for it because they have this preconceived idea of what gaming means. Apply that to any highly emotional or deep work of art. Games are treated as childish and immature and a lot people think they should stay that way for some inconceivable reason.

That reason? Because they don't want anything more from games. And that's wrong. They are missing the huge potential for storytelling they have at their fingertips because it's not what they're used to. They are dismissing the entire medium just because.

Your friend has the first thing running through their mind subconsciously but since confirmation bias is a thing they only see the good parts. They see the bad things but they don't register them.

Confirmation bias is why we need to be so diligent. If we are not honest with ourselves about what we want we will end up only getting a tiny bit of the potential out of the industry.

 

I could just as easily start throwing around games like Brothers and Journey. They're not the majority, they're the exception to the rule.

On my friend bit... I'm sorry, but you're just trying to find any excuse for why his taste in games is somehow wrong. My friend is just a man of simple taste. He likes explosions and stuff, he likes honing his skills in multiplayer, and he's very competitive. That's just his jam, and you have yours. He's more concerned with enjoying a video game while you're concerned with finding hidden trends that prove that everybody but you has the wrong taste in games.

 

You have me wrong. These trends do exist, even in me. We are all led to accept things that strengthen our biases and ignore things that conflict with them. Why do you think so many of us have trouble finding fault in games we played as kids while people new to the series see flaws right off the bat?

I do not believe that liking explosions and such is wrong. Everyone is, and should be, free to want what they want.

I do believe that having simple tastes or being easily pleased is wrong. Our demands should be as strong and varied as possible. I believe that your friend would enjoy a lot of other types of games if he tried them but as you say he has simple tastes. As such he will continue to buy only one subset of the industry and not explore.

People who stagnate like that disgust me. I don't care what you like so long as you're serious about improvement, even if it's only in one area. Staying the way you are or being okay with flaws is something I cannot accept.

 

I always have a hard time arguing with you because I rarely actually represent the points I'm arguing for. I think that asking for improvement and striving for self improvement is one of the most important things you can do, but I also look at people with lower standards, simpler tastes, and I can't help bu notice how much bloody happier they are. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
On the biases thing, we're all about our biases yeah

 

I remember when David Wong wasn't written off in my mind as a hypocrite.[DOUBLEPOST=1402967443][/DOUBLEPOST]So what David Wong wants is more immersive games on one and only one console with none of their games giving the player the option to play with friends and for these games to not offer the player more things to do?

Okay .

 

If choices are your big turn on I' m afraid you picked the wrong media : as long as computers will remain utterly unable to think for themselves they' ll make piss poor role-masters. You might want to look into actual role playing games, not video games that excel at crushing numbers but can barely emulate the choice side of things. The devs would have to write every possibility in advance, it requires time that might have been better spent writing a single, longer, solid story (which is hard enough already), or improving something else. Choice for the sake of choice is a waste of time. Which I guess is exactly the line of thinking that led Ubisoft to throw Unity' s second character away.

I do agree that it is important for video games to explore other avenues, but that' s just it, they already do ! Take Silent Hill and its sequels for instance, they use a number of directing and narrative tools that cannot be used in movies. They have several endings that don' t necessarily or entirely depend on the decisions you made, what you did in-game also might affect the outcome but the games never warn you about it. And each of the endings casts a new light on the rest of the story. I wonder if David Cage would dismiss the series as silly gore monster slashers. For a guy so eager for novelty he' s surprisingly clueless and dismissive about what video games can and already have done. Someone might want to tell him his Heavy Rain is essentially a Dragon' s Lair clone. Most of its "choices" are inconsequential, its story is a collection of teenage targeted clichés if I ever saw one, and its gameplay rarely offers any sort of actual challenge. But don' t mind the horror aficionado and keep dissing the industry as a whole Mr Cage, you' re doing such a bang up job at elevating it.

 

I already do go for tabletop roleplaying for my narrativism.

That said, games have a long way to go in innovating on every front. We can't keep going like this with graphics being the only thing that improves with each game.

 

Guys, part two is actually hilarious because he's complaining about how diverse characters should be right (and in the usual way, omitting shining examples) and gets to Franklin from GTAV. He shows a cutscene where he thinks Franklin talks, but rather it's the character Lamar.

HE CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO VERY DIFFERENT BLACK PEOPLE

That was so delicious I shall return to this restaurant.

 

I...don't think you're getting what he's going at here. And no, I'm not a fanboy as this is like the first article I believe I've read from him.

He wants more games that are immersive that uses gameplay to actually improve the way that their stories are told, rather than making the gameplay feel almost like a distraction from the story. The problem isn't that these games don't exist; the problem is that they're so often the exception than the rule. I don't see a problem with that at all.

The console exclusivity thing is one thing I'm kinda on both sides about. While I am sick of having to shell out ~$300 for another system so I can play specific games for it, competition does still breed quality, and specific system sellers are helping make certain games happen at all (like Nintendo did for Bayonetta 2.)

He's not at all saying that giving players the option to play with friends is bad. It is annoying to me that more developers are forcing multiplayer features into games that can function perfectly fine or even better without these features automatically being on. I've heard many complaints already from my friends playing Watch_Dogs who were being annoyed with constant hack attempts on them while they're trying to simply play the game on their own. While Watch_Dogs at least has an option for turning it off, being unable to pause a game where you're not even trying to play with other people (like in Need for Speed: Rivals, as he mentioned)...that's seriously a thing that shouldn't be continued.

Offering the player more things to do is a good idea, but most of the time, those things really are badly implemented and don't work at all with the core gameplay. Who actually wanted to run around and grab collectables in [PROTOTYPE] instead of having more creative mini-games that would utilize the fact that you were a mutant superhero? I dunno if that's a good example, but I'm tired of mini-games that are annoying sidetracks to what I'm actually playing the game for, like almost all of the mini-games in Kingdom Hearts II.

...who said he was talking about Lamar?

But anyway, I will agree that using Franklin was a really bad example: he fits the universe he's in, and it makes sense why he is the way he is. I actually like him the most out of the GTA V protagonists (which...isn't that hard, honestly.)

Silent Hill pre-Homecoming is seriously such a good example for what I think gaming can do to evolve as a story-telling medium, so I'm glad you brought it up. I get sick of choice systems in games like inFAMOUS, where the game blatantly tells you how you're being judged. Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, doesn't ask the player with explicit questions; the game sees your choices as how you play, and I love that. That's the kind of choice system I want in games, rather than more GOOD GUY/BAD GUY meters and special prizes for sticking to one or the other, but giving nothing to the player who actually thinks out each choice and concludes that being aggressive or nice here and not there is better.

 

He shows a video to display "Franklin" talking. The only person talking in that video is Lamar. He has never played GTAV.

Anyway, the way he talks is that what he wants is less games. I used to love David Wong. I read a lot of his works, but he always talked vague ideas. He betrayed his own words to become an SJW, and now he's finally talking specifics to show he really has no idea what a video game is or why they're good. The story is the weakest part to a game in most cases- the best case being Dark Souls. It almost has no plot, but fans read the description for every item until they had crafted lore and a tangible universe. Laying the seeds and creating a setting are much more important than integrating a story and gameplay (the most basic terms possible here... What type of gameplay does he want linked to the story? Why does he want less combat games if he wants "gameplay" linked to a story? What type of story? What part of the story needs to be linked that he feels isnt'- the narrative, the setting, the characters, the dialogue, the actual events tied together?) He's saying nothing- but it's the way he writes that gets people a little high on his words. He writes in a way that denies all other possibilities and says nothing. All I see here is a man who wants games to be movies. Suggesting To Kill A Mocking Bird or Pulp Fiction have game adaptations (whether he was being figurative or not , he said this) is nearing stupidity- there'd be no game aspect. Saying that playing games with your friends is bad (I know he was harping on these games being only playable with friends, but he omitted that the only game he mentioned that was co-op only was that Need for Speed, while Fable has AI's fill in and has a single player. I'm not sure on Unity as I don't care.) is just dumb because he wants the immersion (Something that doesn't even exist... the word they want is engrossment. If immersion existed in video games, a microwave signaling my now burnt hot pocket wouldn't take me out of the world of Bioshock Infinite). Saying that games need less mini-games is dumb because people hated that Infinite lessened the Bioshock 1 experience. Saying that there only needs to be one console is a horrendous idea because even back on the NES when Nintendo basically had a monopoly they did some pretty messed up stuff (just to reiterate... exclusives are the single best thing for the console market and if you don't like it, tough. Console players don't like PC exclusives staying exclusives. We get met with "Oh well" rightfully). He's just... he's just wrong. Even when he wrote about Infinite he was just mind blowingly missing the point. Like when he talked Elizabeth's reaction scene? You know, like when he said how the aggressive dickhead soldier is checking for bullets on bodies of soldiers because he's low on ammo while his companion realized that rebellion isn't a romantic tale made no sense? It's clear he didn't even play Infinite, as he could've easily used a better example- why is Elizabeth finding money but they're eating out half-finished candy bars out of the trash? Why not buy food?

Either way, he's very, very Wong. He's factually wong on many levels and at some points even being childish and ignoring how life works (that console monopoly thing kind of irks me).

Still, his writing is very intoxicating. It's easy to see why people sides with him- he makes his points so well that you feel you need to side with him. But he also wants games to movies so I really can't be bothered.

Addendum: Lissen, I get wanting more engrossing games with more stories. But if we had that all the time like we did after Bioshock came out (who played Singularity?), it wouldn't be special. Not every game needs to use narrative to make it so you don't get off the couch. Look at Mega Man. I know lots of people who played HOURS of Mega Man and didn't beat one level. They kept playing because the challenge was inviting and the combating and jumping through an obstacle course you know you can beat is engrossing on its own.

 

He seems fairly emotional? I suppose that's partly the point. Saying that, I agree with one of his points completely, the AI, which has not shifted in games for a long time, it's not got more dynamic or intensive, it's basically the same, and quite exploitable in various games. Not saying it needs to be harder, but it needs to be more tense and harder to figure out, plan on the fly and stuff like that.

Apart from the points are alright, but the arguments are fairly 'eh' for me.

Video games are the only mass media that offer people choices. Tabletops are usually great in choice but their story and characters suffer because the choices usually have to be made on the fly. A GM might plan things very well, but like video games they can't address everything the player will do, and when they do have to address it, it usually has no repercussion or effect on the story or characters, it plays out how the GM planned, or how they have to alter it on the fly, but all the unplanned stuff is not good basically. At least from what I've seen of tabletop experiences.

 

Ok so my post got fucked up a bit somehow and it's 2AM so this will probably not sound as well-written as I intend:

Within the first...8 seconds(?) I heard Franklin talking...but I already did agree it was a bad point to make.

I don't really give a damn what he did before; I'm just sticking to this article and the words contained in it, if that's ok, and in this case, I didn't find him at all sounding like a Social Justice Warrior (something I find VERY annoying.)

I can't speak for the author, but I can at least say what I interpeted from his writings:

Dark Souls is one of the best cases of a strong game that also has a strong story, it does this by making the story and the gameplay work well with each other and respect each other (I feel so weird typing that). The idea of finding the story for yourself rather than it being crammed in your face to interrupt the gameplay and remind you OH YEAH THIS HAS A STORY is well-done. BEYOND: Two Souls is a terrible case, because it's pretty much a pick-your-adventure that uses quicktime events to wake up the player and give them a false sense of agency: it lacks both well-done game mechanics and a well-implemented/well-written story.

The idea isn't having LESS combat games, but more high profile, non-combat games to balance it out a lot better.

Ok, I agree that immersion is a bad reason to not want multiplayer features in a dominantly single-player game. The idea isn't that playing games with your friends is bad though, but that forcing you to log into systems essentially meant for multi-player features while you're playing a dominantly (if not solely) single-player game is pretty bullshit. I can say for myself that uPlay is the best example of how shitty that system is, at least on the PC platform. I can't legitimately play Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a game that I bought on Steam, which features no multi-player, unless I sign into uPlay, a system designed around primarily multi-player features. We get systems like this, yet we get fewer and fewer co-op features with stronger consoles? The Wii-U is the system I want most party because of that very reason.

It's not that I want less mini-games in games. Frankly, I liked the hacking mini-game in Bioshock 1, because, to me, it made sense in its world, and I didn't find it boring or annoying, but rather an entertaining way of keeping some variety in the game. Which is why I didn't bring it up; I specifically brought up the collectables in [PROTOTYPE] and (most of) the mini-games in Kingdom Hearts II; the first example makes no sense either in terms of testing the player's skill with the game's mechanics (beyond running and jumping, I guess?) or the game's story, and the second example was an annoying, non-entertaining way to stretch the length of the experience (though at least they usually did fit in the game's worlds.) However, I do find the Riddler trophies in Batman: Arkham Asylum/City to work as a mini-game, because they actually make the player test the game mechanics in different ways while also making sense with the story.

Like I said, I'm on both sides of the argument pertaining to console exclusives. I agree with your points, but I am still a consumer with limited income...so yeah, no big answer there ._.

(Implying the guy didn't even play Bioshock Infinite is pretty damn harsh) Could you explain how he missed the point on this? Not because I think he's right or anything, but simply because I didn't quite follow what you're saying here.

I don't think he's saying that EVERY game needs to use narrative either; I'm just disappointed that each year, it's always the minority of games that are interested in connecting gameplay with story in meaningful ways, and the majority are only really doing one or the other well. If they try doing both, it's usually with a clear, jarring disconnect. Maybe the population is just not as interested in these kinds of games as I am? I dunno. I love my action games, and I love my story-driven games, but why are we being so accepting that these elements can't work well together?

 

Dark Souls has a 'plot' made up primarily by the gamer and the community at large. It's basically emergent storytelling. You can tell this by players who have different experiences, one may go to the Bell Gargoyles first or go to Valley of Drakes and Blighttown straight away using the Master Key. The order to get the greater souls is up to you. It's like early Zelda games in a lot of ways. But none of this is storytelling, a narrative for the player.
The thing is it isn't well written, because with Dark Soul's 'story' is that there is none. It's about an undead character ****ing **** up for hours for no greater or clearer reason then being 'the chosen one'. Now the world has depth, it has stories in the background but they're in no way connected to you, the player or your journey. You're experiencing the lore and such of Dark Souls by observation and item description but your not experiencing a real story, it's not Mass Effect, you're not fighting the Reapers or have a goal in mind that's not simply fetch quests. This isn't bad though, Dark Souls was never a narrative led plot, it was a get out jail, explore and fight **** till you kill like a king or god or something and you assume its role. It didn't need to impart a reason for the player to experience the game more than old school fighting stuff. I will say is that it's excellent for a 'Show, don't tell' experience that really immerses you in the world's stories.

Beyond Two Souls has a narrative, it has a story to tell with characters and its plot. It's not a good one, not because it's a bad game but because it's a poor story. The implementation isn't a bad way for a game to tell a story, I mean I loved Heavy Rain and it worked well for what it was aiming for, because it was a cinematic experience to interact with and alter. It didn't need gun battles or explosions to invest into it, you needed a deep narrative, interesting characters with an interactive world and a branching story.

A good combo of action and narrative is The Last of Us. You have time to just wander this world a bit but still keep the plot moving and the characters develop at the same time. It was also well paced for it, you had moments where you'd be fighting a new group of enemy every few rooms, and you'd think, 'I can't take anymore, my resources are low I can't handle anymore' and all that tense stuff. then you'd be riding a horse as a conversation between Ellie and Joel happens and your watching the environment unfold, figuring out what's happened. Perfect equality between cinematic storytelling and in depth gameplay.

 

Shattered Memories took it to a whole other level, unfortunately the game itself is painfully dull. From what I' ve read on forums even the people who loved it have a hard time sitting through it again and again just to see the alternate endings.

In my own short lived experience, yes. But from what I' ve heard there are exceedingly creative people out there who can make it fly. At least it leaves you perfectly free to have your character say anything, a video game will just sporadically give you a couple options to choose from. This might solve that issue eventually, but we' re not there just yet.

Yeah, I thought it found a nice way to not let the scripted stuff get in the way of its gameplay.