Most videogames are worse than the shittiest reactionary steven seagal movie I could find, I dunno what else to tell you, at least that’s 90 minutes as opposed to 20-40 hours
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last of us 2 is better than la takedown though
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Well alright but I’m not holding The Last of Us at gunpoint demanding you to give up your dignity & worldly possessions, and i get admittedly kinda intellectually constipated when people act like thats whats happening when someone says “this insanely popular series about Hard Men and Women doing Hard Violence for Hard Reasons doesn’t do it for me”
Sorry for all my fucking dogshit posts i literally deleted too many out of anxiety and maxed out my limit i mean u no harm IGNORE ME
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but can videogames get fans more mad when someone says they didn’t like some part of it than a movie could
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i honestly just want to know why parker and pals like the game. i already know why everyone dislikes it, its the same reason i wont play it, i just dont need to waste my time to know i dont like it, i am curious what people who arent complete psychopaths got out of it
like i guess if you have to play the game for work thats different and the complaints can be more interesting becuase youre getting paid (jesus christ you better be) and so your time doesnt feel as wasted when you dont like it
BUT ONLY STUPID PEOPLE LIEK THIS GAME USUALLY, AND THEY JUST SAY ‘ITS THE BEST EVER’
ITS A RARE OPPORTUNITY TO HAVE PEOPLE WHO LIKE IT BE AS WELL SPOKEN AS PARKER AND CUBA thats whats interesting to me here
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I really am trying to sit with the irony that i can spend hours contemplating the ethical value of fuckin Steven Universe but this prestige drama action game is where my brain draws a line, i wanna be clear i mean no personal rudeness towards any of u and this probably is an aesthetic narcissism of differences thing
like fair deuce parker you nailed it i think if this was a game about anime teens i would literally be nicer about it 
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yeah I’m not saying that the game is making the player make the choice. I think that would be a very different game and I know that the game doesn’t contain a moment like that.
However the way that it engages with Joel’s character is to ask the player to imagine themselves in that position. The way you engage with Joel’s character moment here is to think about the trolley problem, lol. Praise for TLOU: I think the moment we’ve been discussing is very effective at helping the player think about the differences between themselves and Joel, and at prompting them to think about they would have acted if they’d had their hand on the lever. I think that the fact it works is interesting and worth talking about even as I think that the actual content of Joel’s Problems is not super interesting.
And yeah, I’m tired of it. “How far would you go to save the people you love?” is very, very common fodder for stories and that “how far will a dad go to save the people he loves” is basically one of the most dominant plots in our media culture, period. It’s worth thinking and talking about why a game with this plot got funded, why games about realistic relationships between parents and children don’t happen as frequently. It’s not just because of The Industry but because something about the doingness of a videogame, the verbiness of it, privileges certain kinds of stories… and interestingly, certain kinds of metaphors. I’m sure that for some of the people who worked on this game, cutting up Ellie’s brain or not was a metaphor for realistic things they’d experienced in their own lives. But games always do the brain chop thing instead.
This is also interesting to me because I have had to work on entertainment products in the past where I was trying to wedge a more realistic interpersonal story into an action story in a way that didn’t seem ridiculous. Drama and stakes doesn’t mean that the final question the guy has to answer is a silly one. It is hard for a lot of really complicated reasons and I wish that I could more frequently collaborate with people who found that challenge interesting.
The funny thing is that I think Naughty Dog has constantly been giving themselves storytelling goals which it is unusually hard for them to achieve with corporate-and-gamer-approved videogame verbs. Tens of hours of TLOU2 consist of quite literally an extended version of this brief moment at the end of TLOU1… both of these experiences make players want to stop. They make players want to say no to the game, and they’re both games where you can’t do that.
I don’t think the only interesting approach to a game about the desire to say no or to yield or withdraw is to make a character study game where you can’t do that. I don’t think the fact that the game is a character study is itself a whole answer. There are things about the industry and about games-as-verbs that draw people into this trap over and over. ND was drawn in twice! They explored the same question twice and they gave us the same answer both times–it’s interesting to them that we can’t say no. Why? Acres of possibility here, I think.
And I do think it is worth pointing out that this story is a really really really tired one. It’s really old. It’s about the most normal story you could possibly tell. I don’t have enough time to write now about how “how far would you go to save the people you love” has a politics to it, about how that question could mean different things but we almost only ever ask it to people like Joel and Ellie and not to other people in different contexts.
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it wasn’t that it felt bad or unpleasant, it took me out of the experience. it was just too heavy-handed and gratuitous, and lessened the impact of the ending. I doubt they’d consider that a success?
I mean we’re arguing in circles here but I just think the way that part was done worked against what the game seems to be attempting to do. that’s all. no problem agreeing to disagree.
I think the strongest part of the story is what happens after the shootout. Joel has to confront the problem of explaining what happened, but he doesn’t have the tools to explain it or even lie convincingly. It’s a moment where he underestimates her maturity and reveals that his actions were at least as much about what he could not give up as they were about protecting this girl’s life and agency.
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I don’t know anyone else but it’s very easy for me to become invested in a plot. Doesn’t even have to be a great one. Before I knew it I wanted to know what was going to happen to Joel and Ellie. I liked the relationship they forged, I sympathized with Joel’s inability to turn a blind eye to Ellie dying. He never seemed too fussed with saving the world from the getgo. I loved that you get to play as Ellie for that one section, I felt like it gave the game a chance to catch its breath mechanically and narratively while still keeping the drama (and action) simmering.
The combat encounters rewarded my ability to adapt to fluidly changing conditions and gave me enough tactical flexibility to feel a strong sense of agency. Like what I appreciate is the game giving you the opportunity to be proactive vs reactive. I mean I love Quake but that game basically always has you on your back foot because a new monster closet has just opened up next to you. IME I run on instinct and adrenaline in those types of games but here I feel a bit more cerebral.
It also generally kept me from feeling too comfortable which is when I start to feel bored in most games, like I don’t think there was too much power creep. Unlike in many action games of recent years where you eventually upgrade the player character into something unstoppable.
Resident Evil 4 also did this dance very well and also managed to hook me into its silly plot about alternative zombies. It takes itself less seriously (other than its commitment to The Lore) so I can see why it doesn’t provoke the same discourse. Leon is much prettier than Joel though, wish I could pull off that hair and that jacket but ultimately I’m just a middle aged guy who sorta looks like Joel.
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I see the same tone as Last of Us in a lot of trashy soap operas that I compulsively watch like The Boys or White Lotus or Squid Game or any of the other million shows about voyeuristically watching hopeful personalities get torn down by tunnel-vision narcissists sweaty with power. No surprise the HBO show was a success.
More than anything else the pessimism is what puts me off, not necessarily Joel being “doomed” but the rhythm of little episodic engagements and interactions all serving the same dull conclusions about “human nature”. Ellie’s medical murder carries the full support of the seemingly only morally coherent organization & provides a final judgement to the mini-plots. Everyone is just too self-concerned & emotionally at-odds to ever behave in a morally unified way (a Zionist wrote this?).
It’s the Omelas story but w/ the conclusion that Omelas is a bit 2 utopian, and in fact, anyone objecting is just starting their own slightly altered iteration of Omelas. I don’t necessarily think it’s impossible to appreciate Conservative games, but it does read as a very conservative outlook to me.
I feel like Life is Strange sort of does this, similar trolley problem type ending but w/ true lever control.
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i do think its funny that a scene that is like “press the button to cinematically kill” is kind of like a resident evil qte… gamers (me) love and yearn for qtes still
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and everyone picks the worst, more nonsensical choice and treats it as the “true” ending because you save several lives instead of one
I’ll argue the life is strange ending instead if that game is less aesthetically off putting or whatnot for everyone
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That town got what it had coming to it
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Finally found the link i was thinking of when this topic popped up:
iirc, someone posted this very link among one or two others here on SB, and would be cool to know if the author would have expected to be proven right so quickly (at least when it comes to the PS5, heh)
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