Never, because this is good.
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i appreciate you sharing this, iāve been having some similar thoughts lately that iām still not sure how to get into words. like, i donāt give a fuck if a game is āfunā or āgoodā because iāve already played enough games that give me that and if iām in desperate need of that, i can always return to them. what i look for now is a game that is interesting in some way and has heart (tangible love+craft put into it, āa reason i should careā basically), no matter how the pieces fall from there
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Yeah itās always interesting to talk about what āpurposeā games serve in your life. For me it tends to be one of three things:
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Chill time. This doesnāt necessarily mean a āfunā game, but something that helps me to decompress from whatever stressors I have in my life. Ex: Slime Rancher, Factorio, Minecraft, Sonic Adventure, Katamari
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Intense time. Something that gets my blood pumping or my brain going somewhere interesting. I donāt equate this with āquality.ā Itās more important that a game has at least one hook into my brain. This is more what yāall are talking about, though my criteria is different. I want something that will punch me in the face with something interesting and doesnāt waste my time at all. These are very rare games, and they tend to be pretty different from each other. Itās more about the hook than the content itself. Recent examples: Post Void, Rym 9000 (for about 45 minutes but i think iām done), Earthworms (which I dropped as soon as I got bored)
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Social time. Either streaming or podcasting or multiplayer. As long as the game doesnāt absolutely suck, then itās more about the company. In fact, Iād prefer a game that doesnāt really get in my way much, just give me some mechanics to engage with while I hang out with folks. Recent examples: EDF 5, Dragon: Marked for Death, Halo 2
I think I could split all of my media āconsumptionā into these three categories, really, and I donāt think Iām that different from anyone else. But itās category 2 that is the rarest and most precious, the games that I will remember forever, or at least for a while. I play maybe 2 or 3 of these a year, and I can rarely tell you what games are going to be that level. Most just donāt quite make it.
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I want to contribute to the Last Guardian discussion but my hands.
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I smell a podcastā¦
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what if we were all forced to smell podcasts
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I hear this is being poised as the PS9ās killer app
Donāt worry, itās a revolting kinesthetic experience without RSI.
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played Ico for the first time last year and the main thing that stood out was how brutal the rubberbanding was for holding hands. i donāt know if it was my controller or what but it felt like i was yanking that poor girlās arm out of her socket every time i moved, which was an interesting feeling and maybe intentional (casual brutality of heroism etc) but idk nothing else managed to break through the coat of moral varnish which had accrued around the thing since release.
i wonder how the Below guys feel about Hades, the weird and gradual reversal of signifiers over the years for what constituted a kind of morally proper videogame, to the extent we can imagine such a thing. silent vs talky / sexless vs fanfic-ready / opaque and punishing vs āaccessibleā in what sound like kind of cloying and conservative ways. ueda games feel horribly familiar to me from the earlier context but i can imagine a point where they could feel distant enough to be uncanny yet again.
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the US manual describes it as āpullingā
I read the animations as yanking and pulling but I like that the resolution and camera distance and game mechanic needs give it a little bit of ambiguity for the player to determine how violent it is. The first time I played it, I decided it was just a limitation of the realistic arm length and the insenstivity of player run speeds, so I ignored it. This most recent time, I decided itās mean! and so I always give a quick call and generally let Yorda figure it out at her own rate. I reserve arm-pulling for a fight, where it feels anxious and terrified.
Iāve been calling Below the endpoint of the āminimalismā indie aesthetic. I think roguelike games are fundamentally game-like objects closer to card games and itās just not tenable to go at them with anything but maximalism and, eventually, the Blizzard-esque generosity that āexpands the marketā that indies have fallen towards.
Melos makes games interested in mechanics largely in how they serve the narrative, not as the direct creators of the aesthetics, a very different approach. Like, this:
There are already enough treatmills. Why make new ones?
feels very removed from the perspective of designers and players interested in putting new mechanics together in interesting ways for the physical, mathematical interaction of them
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Thatās true, but I do think pretty much all indie games take some of their bearing from a kind of moral laundering of the format as a whole - hereās this thing, that everybody feels at least a little dubious and ambivalent about on some level, how do we rhetorically move the pieces around so that we can squash down that momentary feeling of revulsion and dread.
Below feels aesthetically distant from 2020 zeitgeist things like Hades and A Short Hike to me but I think at least part of that is just due to a gradual historical switcharound in relation to which parts of videogames feel āunacceptably horribleā as opposed to āregular horribleā. If difficulty or minimalism were the solution to a perceived moral problem in watching numbers go up, I do feel games about watching numbers go up are partly involved in presenting that as solution to a perceived moral problem with difficulty in turn (i.e. in that theyāre cosy or comforting rather than elitist, inaccessibleā¦)
I donāt know if either Hades or Below really presented themselves as Moral too overtly but I feel like neither of them completely make sense without the idea of the Moral as a kind of scuttling background presence, whose favour could be channelled with certain elements and signs, as it climbs around the furniture taunting the people who made Pathologic 2.
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it is interesting how the two Ueda ps2 games influenced a ludicrous amount of 2010ās games from indie to AAA, but itās also kind of fallen out of favor as the Main Thing now in games. whereas throwing a weirdly sexless Dream Daddy type narrative With Snappy Aaron Sorkin As Written By A Tumblr User dialogue into your otherwise unrelated genre game is now the big thing. and yes iām just going to continue to blame Dream Daddy for all our current woes.
that said i donāt think the Ueda influence has fallen out of fashion nearly enough for those games to feel novel or weird at all. there is still a big subset of aesthetic-focused, hyper-minimal games that receive a lot of hype (iām thinking of that Sable game that comes out this year). to me i canāt really stand Ueda anymore. Ico was my very first PS2 game and i did like it at the time - reminded me a bit of something like Myst, except more approachable. but i think his gamesā ideas are pretty skin-deep and i think the whole obsession with a kind of āpureā non-violent minimal approach to gameplay that purports to have greater deepness and yet somehow is ādeepā in all of the same incredibly shallow ways is a trap. iām actually far more interested in someone like Shinji Mikami who managed to inject a lot of weird personality and character into a more well-explored genre.
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ico is exactly what it is, i donāt think it purports to do anything more than what it does. i love its mindless, shallow opacity and singleminded commitment to beauty. itās good to hold hands and walk very slowly and carefully. the metamoralizing tone feels like a retroactive product of bad criticism and dubious influence (the nier games absolutely reek of that shit on the surface). context is important but imo itās a better work if you treat it as a work rather than a critical statement of intent about medium elevation or whatever. itās a āvideogame-ass videogame.ā but also sotc kinda pisses me off so idk
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i say this as a Homestuck fan: really Dream Daddy not Homestuck?
iām going to give Homestuck a tiny bit of credit for being the first to do something like that, whereas i give no credit to Dream Daddy. also Homestuck universe spawned Undertale and a bunch of other things whereas iām explicitly thinking about a very particular type of recent indie game trope.
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I think Moral Opprobrium is so closely related to Aesthetic Critique that they motivate works in the same way. Below (and the team, and even moreso Kris) are absolutely driven by a desire to prove whatās good and true and implicitly whats bad and false about other products. They were wrong, unfortunately! But what they made still has beauty in it as long as you like broken things.
Supergiant is more grounded and prosaic and way more community-driven. Theyāre middlebrow to their core, and interested in entertaining in exactly the same way. They want to innovate to find better ways of entertaining more than to illuminate or communicate aspects of the human experience. Which is fair enough! Of course, analyzing middle-brow might tell us more about the culture around it than anything in the work itself, and I think thatās where Hades lives. Itās very good iteration with 3 or 4 very smart, subtle incremental innovations that will be copied for years.
I love it
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Whatās that smell? Is itā¦ is it Uedacast, the new ongoing SB podcast coming exclusively to Spotify?
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I would actually organize a podcast btw but Iāve never actually done one. Just letting everyone know Iām not being totally facetious.
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Yāall got me redownloading The Last Guardian for a second play through now.
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