you can make long games on a low budget ā you just need good design
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iām gonna rant a little bit, please indulge me
this thread is interesting and this game (not the game itself, but the idea of it) definitely crystallizes some ideas iāve had lately. i was surprised to see
because itās similar to a comparison i was making to my brother earlier today. comparing these games that maybe at their apex aim to affect an atmosphere of some place. i might include death stranding as well. i have not played any of these games, no. iāll come back to that
and idk, i can sort of appreciate that. i definitely appreciate the idea of rdr2 over assassinās creed to some degree since rdr2 has all the weird simulationist nonsense and sense of quietude in places that assassinās creed shit never attempts. i embrace the weird overemphasis on some weird idea of realism-within-not-even-reason. the dragon-chasing of it, i can sense that. not that i agree with any of their methods. but icarian flight is something i probably seek in my media
however, i canāt be someone with the taste or language to talk about these things, because i find it so consistently difficult to appreciate newer games, and i find this to be more and more the case. i reject that i am particularly nostalgic, especially because the older games i enjoy are by and large games iāve never played before and have no nostalgia for, but also because i have begun to suss out the actual reasons, to the extent they can be generalized.
i think one thing i really mourn when looking at newer games is the taking for granted of axes of abstraction. a video game may have an abstraction in terms of how inputs translate to in-game actions, but otherwise try to smooth over as many things as possible toward something āintuitivelyā ārealisticā. an unstoppable gravity along the intersection of fidelity and that fidelity being used to show us some mundane hyperreality. real hypermundanity.
i mourn the sagging loss of these axes of abstraction! where can i find the unrealistic-as-default enshrined most securely nowadays?
iām sorry that none of this makes sense and i donāt even give a fuck about whatever this game is
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no, this is huge; I think games are the most literalizing media because the player needs to take rules at face value and obey those rules in order to create the game as an interaction. Increases in fidelity actively remove imaginative space for the player and create an increased burden for the game to hold all possibility inside them.
I play these āworld contextā games with my mouth slack-open, in a state of active looking but very different from the active scheming, optimizing, reacting mind I normally have when playing a more active game.
I donāt know how actively-remarked this is, but I think Japanās strong culture of animation sets a stronger baseline fluency in using the levels of cartooniness as a tool for abstraction. Nintendo is really clear about how voice acting and the cartooniness of their Zelda art styles are important; Breath of the Wildās art style can still represents sunsets and dew on grass and mountainscapes as emotionally real as higher-fidelity examples, if through a different tone.
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this is basically my entire thesis of videogames
the third dimension was a mistake
the only real third dimension is one made up of a discrete number of two dimensional slices
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Iāll make a Sense of Place thread soon where I talk about twin peaks and post xenogears town screenshots and pictures of my favorite corners and alleys of witcher 3, gta4, ff7 midgar slum houses etc
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Itās sort of a natural shift ā I feel like in most video game eras, past or present, if you ask the average player āWhat is this game?ā or āWhat do you do in it?ā theyāre going to tell you what the game is TRYING to represent, not what the game actually is or how it attempts to simulate it.
Most abstraction in old games is there by necessity. What an artist makes is very tied and influenced by the medium theyāre using, and the medium of video games has changed drastically. If youāre given a canvas and easel and paint and brushes, itās pretty unlikely youād make a sculpture out of them, even if you technically can.
AAA studios are machines that churn out high-quality assets. Of course youād try to use those assets to simulate a world as literally as possible.
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death stranding is a pretty video game ass video game fwiw. think kojima is very aware of abstraction in games.
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Patched as of one hour ago
- Modified the flashing effect on braindances to reduce the risk of inducing epileptic symptoms. The effect has been smoothed out and the flashes reduced in frequency and magnitude.
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well i was talking about two different things, though again it wasnāt particularly clear
first thing is about some games appearing to me to have this greater emphasis on place, but even then, i have no confidence in placing death stranding, just a gut feeling. because, again, i donāt really care about newer games by and large, they fail to interest me.
second thing is about axes of abstraction. i am sure death stranding does some cool video game shit, it is one of about 3 games of a certain nature that iāve been interested in to any degree!
but yeah i mean
likeā¦ yeah i personally would not do that but i do understand it, thus
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Yeah death stranding is a thing to play. Itās world is starkly gorgeous and very easy to get pulled into, but it loves abstracting ideas and making them useable mechanics.
It just represents this with photorealistic graphics, but it loves to be extremely gamey with them. Even though I didnāt finish it I still think it was one of like, five PS4 era AAA Games I genuinely enjoyed and could see returning to in the future.
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The representation of America in Death Stranding is unrecognizable in terms of landscape and scale or anything really. Itās like some mountains in New Zealand that happen to be vaguely shaped like America when viewed on the map.
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itās a really surreal effect when every character talks about your journey across āAmericaā which is clearly Iceland and is maybe twelve miles wide and itās impossible to distinguish whatās a game representation of space and whatās literally true in this world
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itās fuckin sick as hell
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the only liveable approach is to read it Lynchian as both true and not and just be happy youāre getting served multiple stories through ambiguity
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not knowing shit rules tbh
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The Kojima cameo in this game is literally just him rambling to a couple of rich fans about how brain dances, the actual recordings of lived experiences, lack emotional texture and how heās going to change all that.
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the worst thing about Death Stranding was the inclusion of vehicles IMO
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the only reason kojima games arenāt ārealisticā is because kojimaās only sense of place or existence is through movies and other video games
yeah this sums it up for me
i think these games are also so inaccessible. you canāt play them on a mid-range computer. you can barely play them on a vanilla PS4 and Xbone (which are still very expensive here and only really affordable to middle-high class families, or maybe pure middle class if youāre that much of an enthusiast). I keep thinking who are these for? Why are these games the most profitable when most people I know canāt afford them? Why are these games the most profitable when theyāre enormous timesinks that you need enormous amounts of free time to reach their endings? Do videogames nowadays only cater to money whales? It makes me glum about media and the value of people around me as people who can influence the world in any way. I donāt buy these games, I buy indie games most of the times. But what value is my money and spending habits if I canāt make a single dent on how things swing? If my whole circle of friends, if my whole city, hell, if my whole country isnāt seen as a profitable market or whatever because of situations completely our control (markets, economy)? We have a whole enormous group of people who are enthusiastic about videogames, and videogames cannot be made for them in any way. Itās depressing. And these games keep getting bigger and transform into something Iām more alienated from, even though this is the hobby Iāve had, that Iāve been deeply invested in since I was born. And it makes me wonder if I like videogames, if thereās something wrong with me, if Iām becoming old and nostalgic and unaccepting of new things, and then I play a new videogame that has other sensibilities and I realize, no, itās just that big videogames arenāt made for me anymore. many of my favorite games, like meauxdal said, are games i have first played in the last 4-5 years. and i guess i just have to hope there are many other people out there who have more buying power than I, and who are making games themselves, agree with my feelings of whatās interesting and engaging and desirable in a videogame so we can get new experiences with those sensibilities in mind. shrug
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anyway i initially came to this thread to post this glitch which I found it to be incredibly hilarious
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