Death Stranding 🐋

[21012]

@jodeaux

in comparison seems sloppy, incoherent, unfocused and verbose.

ok but none of those things mean he didn’t think really hard about it anyway. i’m not introducing value judgments into any of this

[diplo]

@jodeaux

My contention is that any “meaning” within his work is coincidence and not the product of meticulous planning like you might find in a Souls game.

I understand it’s your contention but can you substantiate this in any way besides “Just a Feeling” because so far all you’ve done is demonstrated that he makes dumb tweet and reiterated a premise. Like if you can’t point to specific stuff within his work and the dev process why is this a conversation

That’s not to say Kojima’s games can’t contain some deeper subtext, but I don’t think that’s his concern as a creative person, so we should stop giving him credit as such.

“I don’t think that’s his concern”

Ok, but is it his concern or not

[dylan]

Please stop fighting everyone it’s christmas

[21012]

[disestablished]

[jodeaux]

@diplo

I understand it’s your contention but can you substantiate this in any way besides “Just a Feeling” because so far all you’ve done is demonstrated that he makes dumb tweet and reiterated a premise.

Ok, so everyone here seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of my posting some of his old tweets. I don’t think I ever explicitly stated that a tweet was the sole reason for our difference of opinion did I? I posted them for the hell of it, because Kojima is a guy who unabashedly loves Dan Brown books and thinks about boobs when he sees eggs benedict. I think that’s who he actually is, you’ll have to give me some time to comb through his entire oeuvre to prove definitively that is the case.

I feel differently about his work than you do. I think his games are equally ham-fisted garbage and uncanny works that elevate the medium. I think his games lack focus at times because he’s more interested in unpacking his influences than creating a cohesive experience.

I tend to value cohesive experiences more because they require a greater level of skill and focus. I’ve praised Kojima several times already in this thread, so I don’t understand the mild hostility I’m receiving for simply stating my uncontroversial and widely held opinion.

[anothersphere]

Well.

It’s too easy to just ascribe Kojima’s new baby as learning to speak purely from garbling its inspirations.

Just clearing up, I meant this is a prevalent hater stance towards Hideosyncracies.

[21012]

@jodeaux

Ok, so everyone here seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of my posting some of his old tweets.

you drew a straight line between his tweets and his creative output and invited us to assume apparently forgone conclusions from this observation

@jodeaux

I think his games are equally ham-fisted garbage and uncanny works that elevate the medium.

nobody said otherwise, though, and you’re the only one arguing taste. this isn’t even the conversation.

you said death stranding isn’t about anything and nothing kojima makes is about anything because he likes dumb shit so he’s dumb and just wants to remind us of the dumb shit the likes. I’m saying it’s inarguable that everything kojima does is or is meant to be About Something and that is entirely separate from whether or not that makes them any good. you’re supporting your conclusion with the wrong argument, is all

I mean it’s easy enough to criticize his games without even needing to misrepresent them. re: his relationship with fandom and mimicry, sure, mg1+2, snatcher and policenauts were absolutely just “what if movies I like were a game”. but by mgs1, 20 years ago, he was already repurposing his influences into their own identity and moralizing about it, and I don’t think david bowie references have much to do with the way things turned out from there. regardless, they can be more than one thing at once: considered and messy, self-interested and appropriative, meditative and base

not sure what a “cohesive experience” entails in this context, though, so who knows

[u_u]

honestly the main thing one can learn from Kojima’s tweets is that dude is fucking down for whatever with Mads Mikkelsen

and like

that, to me, is the mark of artistic genius

[LWJoestar]

I wonder if this trailer has any interesting synch-up points in it like the last two had

[Dracko]

[Iacus]

@Brooks

@VastleCania

if anybody could do it we’d all do it

Gimme Koj’s obscene budgets and I’ll certainly give it my best mash

Same.

Also:
https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/940881910158544896

[BustedAstromech]

@Brooks

Gimme Koj’s obscene budgets and I’ll certainly give it my best mash

unfortunately more money means more people and above 20 people you have 10 different departments making 10 different games that are hopefully aware of each other

The skill of shepherding a strong voice through a >$20 million budget is underrated; it was hugely responsible for killing Japanese AAA production from 2005-on.

Kojima’s one of less than 10 people in the world who can do that in a game this big, and that’s important because even though he’s a mess he’s so interested in creating games about everything that it’s the only time I get that encompassing Great Novel feeling – these are games about everything and everything stupid on his mind and it’s a different feeling when you’re in that world for dozens of hours compared to the scope of a smaller-budgeted game

[Brooks]

So I just have to be a nosy micromanager, no sweat

A pleasure even

[BustedAstromech]

Sometimes I envy my boss the design director, who spends the whole day talking shop to people, working things out. But he never gets to touch the real numbers and massage it himself. His hands are bound. So much is reliant on getting it exactly right (e.g., Jaime Griesemer’s famous talk about 0.2 seconds being critical in balancing Halo) that I would find that infuriating. And our game has sloppy parts because not everyone knows everything and not everyone is as picky as I am! And we’re focused on procedural systems interactions, and we have the massive headache of open world, and, and, and

Plus he’s responsible for all the paperwork stuff the Creative Director sloughs off onto him

[Iacus]

Surely some of the problems could be alleviated by improving the production process?
Encourage communication between departments, streamline the content pipeline, foment a culture of sharing project status early and often…?

I mean, I’m aware I’m not the first person on earth to think this, it’s just that I wonder how much of wrangling a big budget creative project is due to the frictions inherent to managing a big organization, and if that can be massaged somewhat.

[VastleCania]

I work with like 30 other people at a business much less complicated than game design

And still, nobody seems to know what anybody else is doing

I suspect that organization is the biggest obstacle to uh

every human endeavor

[Brooks]

Our codeshop definitely knows what everyone else is doing but there’s only like 6/7 devs on the payroll and we (try to) run Agile so it’s not actually hard

[Father.Torque]

One of the many things I like about my job is I do it all by myself, basically.

Most worthwhile human endeavors, however, can only be accomplished by cooperation, which requires organization. In general people don’t talk enough about the effects of bureaucracy except as vague complaints, though as a newly important social phenomenon it preoccupied a lot of eminent 20th-c. thinkers.

[la_ciel]

@jodeaux

I will freely admit, my analysis is pure speculation meant for forum fodder. I’m reading each response with curiousity because I thought it was fairly obvious Kojima is an idiot savant.

I don’t feel like being explicitly that girl today, but this stuck out to me

maybe think a little more before you say things like this