I said: whether or not some past piece of art should be disregarded, and by whom, ought to be evaluated on a case by case basis, and then gave a basic structure to how that evaluation should proceed.
You said: if that were true, no one would ever study Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will.
I’ve been trying to show you that that’s entirely incompatible what I said ever since.
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ok yeah, and also what about the older ‘God’ games that precede minecraft? in populous playing the game well initially only means that your village’s land size grows and its populations swells. In the end part of the a game your village literally bumps up against the enemys until you claim that territory as well for lebensraum.
In general most (mainstream at least) god/simulation games have always acknowledged politics and/or ethics in some way.Eg in Simcity 2000 your budget choices would be sagely commented on by city planning experts, rather than having the game just let you see the pure effect on the simulation. Black and white had the moral choice aspect of god games as a core mechanic.
They genre name ‘god game’ stuck because the political and ethical connotations of the form were so obvious.
So saying that minecraft maybe could be ‘read’ from an ethical standpoint doesn’t really seem like that obscure a question, to me.
if God’s perspective on Creation is the same as the one in the original Populous, that would explain a lot about the state of the world and the history of our interactions with Him
I have for a long time really wanted to read an in depth article about the ethics / politics of city sim games. i feel like there was something pretty smart on Sim City and Will Wright awhile back, don’t know if it was just a post on here or a blog article or something* but i would be really tickled to see like, a fivethirtyeight style statistical analysis of Sim City vs. other city sims vs. actual city planning/historical data. But people don’t take video game writing that seriously I guess, idk.
*aside: How many clicks could certain quality sb posts have mined if they had been posted in a more visible situation? Even our outrage/meltdown threads would probably rack up massive hateclicks if given proper publicity. Total missed opportunity to bring in mad revenue by monetizing our content generation. Speaking of that, does anyone else miss the frontpage?
How many clicks could certain quality sb posts have mined if they had been posted in a more visible situation? Even our outrage/meltdown threads would probably rack up massive hateclicks if given proper publicity. Total missed opportunity to bring in mad revenue by monetizing our content generation. Speaking of that, does anyone else miss the frontpage?
not exactly sure what you’re getting at here (but still intrigued).
What do you mean by more visible situation or proper publicity?
SB hosted user blogs? or a curated best post of the week thing on a front page? Or articles on a front page inspired by individual posts/entire threads? Or less nobly, sending out SB posts in clickbait form to the larger cyber-world?
oh nothing in particular, just musing about the Quality Posting that occurs on SB from time to time vis a vis the genral boringness of other video games writing that exists.
idr if you were on the old forums or not but it used to be that posts that were deemed Good could be promoted to the front page of the site. tbh i never really looked at it before, but i do sort of miss the outward-facing feel that it gave the community, which has a virtuous and natural tendency towards introspection
btw the second bit wasn’t meant to be targeted directly at you but i am glad you responded
While obviously not quite the same as the tone of writing on this forum, the podcast does capture some of that outward-facing feel (I get the impression that most new members on this site come here through the podcast now)
Yeah, I’m not really a podcast person, but I’m super glad it exists, because it’s nice to know that people who put a lot of energy into this forum are also doing something that might help to actually get them some recognition for it.
mind, it’s not really the end of the world if what happens at sb stays at sb, but every now and then something random reminds me that there is some pretty good writing happening here almost all the time that very few people will ever read, and in the click driven economy of the 21st century that’s kind of… charming, i guess?
Also we’re at least googleable now, just in case someone ever types “the true chinua achebe starts here” into Google
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anytime i put more than 10 minutes/several paragraphs worth of effort into a post i feel like it’s a waste tbh. should probably just start a blog, at least anything i write will have some kind of posterity there.
on the other hand it’s nice to have some kind of audience and it feels low-pressure in a way that trying to be a Blogger doesn’t. idk im just paralyzed when it comes to personal projects like that but that’s a whole nother thread
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I agree, but the retrospective me is always more appreciative than the now me. I’ve probably done some of my best non-academic writing in axe posts, and at the time I was thankful that it would be gone in a few days, but from the future looking backward I occasionally regret not trying to do more with it.
Then again, everything always looks better in the rear-view, I’m sure if I actually had to live with the things I think are so great I would think they were bad anyway. Tears, in the rain…
Yes, if we’re going to be patting ourselves on the back, I do agree that part of the reason the level of writing in many posts tends to be solid is that I don’t have to worry about presenting this stuff for an audience, I’m just talking to ostensible online peers.
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What podcast.
I wouldn’t say it’s an obscure question, actually I think it’s kind of an obvious question and I think my answer is the somewhat oblique one?
God games are going to implicate the role “real” gods are supposed to have on human affairs, and try to address the question by offering “good” or “evil” paths and/or just being cutesy to sidestep the question altogether. Will Wright games are emblematic of his green center-leftism. Grand strategy and 4X games very rarely have any goal other than consumption of rivals and ultimate victory; even in a game like Civ 5 where there are ostensible non-military or non-expansionist victories (“culture” or “science” victory) it is still framed as a victory where you do it better than everyone else and therefore inescapably dominate them in some field or other.
My response to all this is, they’re games and directly attributing ethical effects from the games onto their players is as dubious as directly attributing an increase in violent tendencies to the playing of violent games. That isn’t to say videogames can’t affect your thought processes (obviously they can, otherwise why play them) but rather to say that I think the relationship is far more attenuated and complicated than A = A.
Yeah, I think we can consider a game to have done it much better if the play manages to express the theme of the project (isn’t this much of what SB harps on? And why we’re still talking about Dog Days?) but like other pop art games are designed to fulfill their form’s demands first. A strategy game must be engaging strategy; a shootman must have good shoots (and really Dog Days doesn’t trip over itself in this regard, it manages to make ridiculous nailguns feel appropriately ridiculous and thus aesthetically appropriate).
Spore is a grand example of Will Wright and his team sacrificing their thematic content (watch & learn about the spread of life (oh and memes == genes)) but retreating under game mechanic demands; the player needed agency and the metaphor immediately imploded.
This argues that thematic expressions are pretty well baked-in to game genres. Shooters are going to lend themselves to tales of power abused, of control; city-sims, by acknowledging the presence of government and its ability to solve problems are inherently left-wing in a modern American context.
Creating new meanings in existing genres, then, can only come from mechanical shifts – and so we get expansive games when they chart new mechanical/genre territory: Stanley Parable, Kentucky Route Zero, etc.