This is strongly argued and I agree with much of what you’re saying.
Producing fan work as a hobby seems a reasonable way to spend leisure time, definitely.
I like political statements and agree this empowers the message. When practicing political speech I think a lot of societal barriers can be broken.
There’s also a strong case to be made for fan works when they serve as training wheels: make Mario levels before you’re ready to disassemble platformer mechanics. By analogy, it’s painting an “after Gogh” during your art studies.
Yeah, a profit motive distorts my whole perspective of it; and on The Internet in The Year 2017 notoriety might as well be the same thing. There’s a big difference when we see this as a small nice thing vs the attention of the world at a level competitive against the original. Scale is dangerous and something like Axanar vs Star Trek or AM2R vs Metroid is much different from fan videos sold at conventions or ROM hacks.
So am I arguing that a high level of craftsmanship makes fan works ugly? Maybe I am; I look at fan works of obvious quality and see effort wasted, pushed in service of someone else’s dream.
It’s also the effect that widely distributed fan works have on culture. With infinite remixing culture people can spin endlessly within a rut laid down by formative childhood memories, and media entities will gladly service this cheap desire. I take aesthetics seriously! and, especially in games, the ‘feel’ of a place is one of the most important and lasting impressions of other people. I hate to see this constricted for sedentary comfort.
I write this while working on a piece of zombie IP; where I once was free I am now enslaved. This does not color my view.
X only does in a roundabout way, in that X8 has a reploid variant that is able to activate/deactivate the virus at will, and as such they do deliberately choose to attack humans although they need to virus to override the safeguards that’ve been put into place.
MMZero has an interesting take on it though, in that Mavericks simply are “whatever robots don’t agree with Neo-Arcadia” (and Z4 extends this to humans).
my cave story fangame was gonna be great but i never managed to get the physics right despite ample reference material
i might write about it in detail at some point eventually, i might even try to make it again if i ever need a break from BB
you return to mimiga island
the “escaping the cave” motif is mirrored in you starting outside and descending into the bowels of the earth
mimiga town is now a post-industrial city, mother 3 style
sand zone is an oil field, the labyrinth is a prison for mimiga dissidents
you start with your max health from the end of CS but have to trade health away for items in shops because you threw all your old weapons already in a commitment to pacifism
I like this a lot! This makes the Dracula/Castle relationship more dynamic and symbiotic.
I’m a little hopelessly optimistic.
I couldn’t find a specific part of your post to quote for this, but my understanding was that the ending was changed late into the project because the original was leaked? My problems with the ending were with mid-sentence contradictions. Supposedly DLC since then has added context to alleviate this but shrug?
I’ve been on and off working on a Persona fanfic for a few years, not in reference to characters but mythos. Persona 3/4 are kind of infamously queer-hostile, the latter especially so, given how it contradicts its own thesis. So, of course, I’m using the tropes of the series to make it more gay and also to make it something that can reflect my lived experiences in a small southern college town. Hell if I know if it’s any good, but it’s been therapeutic for my own mentality as well as for letting me correcting the flaws of my favorite game series.
Other changes to the mythos include:
Making Personae function more like Stands (which are clearly the original inspiration anyway) for the sake of sequence writing.
Shadows manifest in the mind, hunt down and eat victims via their dreams.
Rather than Greek and Japanese mythology, the Personae here are from more modern versions of fantastic beings. Pop stars/Rappers/DJs/etc. It’s practically Jojo by now, but I am giving contextual reasons, so I feel justified.
It’s also worth mentioning that I have several original projects I’m also working on. I don’t think about fan projects in lieu of original ideas, I work on them because of how they uniquely resonate with me. Fanwork is just another form of discussion.
What I heard from talking to narrative folks involved in ME1 is that this was the ending planned from the start with the middle squishy. It resonates with my feeling; it’s a lot more high-concept (like ME1) and less tv-drama (like ME2, ME3).
This is interesting! I find myself agreeing but something in me says that this attitude is wrong.
I guess…I blame capitalism??
But seriously, I can’t think of a better answer. AM2R was a labor of love for a game that often gets ignored by the company that owns it. It was a way for a creator to take the thing they love and introduce it to a new audience, while engaging with its design in a meaningful way, however successful that may have been. Frankly, they should have been able to sell it! Or at least live in a world where creating meaningful things is not punished by corporations.
So I guess what I’m saying is: Fan works can certainly be pushed in service of someone else’s dream, and I agree that that’s a problem. But I don’t think the problem is the people creating it, it’s the system in which they labor.
Yeah this is very true. Weaponized nostalgia can certainly lead to a depressing lack of originality. But in my opinion, people are going to get stuck in nostalgia holes whether or not corporations profit off of it. My grandparents live in a world where Elvis was the best musician ever John Wayne made the best movies. Frankly I feel like we live in a world where aesthetics are changing at an incredibly rapid pace, and where I can’t swing a cat without hitting 15 artists. Maybe we’re just seeing what people always wanted to do anyway, but never had the tools or the time.
Anyway, I tend to agree with you in some ways. I think that creating a fan work can be a good stepping stone to creating something more original. And I think that fan culture can get gross and stale very quickly. But I also think that’s sometimes it’s perfectly fine and very meaningful to stay within the realms of fan creations.
In general I am super pro-original ME3 ending but I take a more cynical tack, which is not so much that the ME writers had a really interesting introspective question to ask as that they wrote themselves into a corner and respected themselves enough to do what they had to to write themselves out of it.
I got a lot out of it. It was my empty wander simulator, my tactical shooter; all the rough patches modernized genres left behind in the grim overbudgeted 2000s. Now that we have infinite games on Steam that seems quaint but I spent a lot of time in that presence.
Had I not spent dozens of hours already doing so in ME1 I would have dreamt longer in No Man’s Sky~~
Well, that and the ludonarrative dissonance question. What happens when the unstoppable force of Assault Rifle Jesus meets the immovable object of Extragalactic Cthulus?
Man. This is so weird to me! It’s such an obviously bounded game. I mean I definitely enjoyed the spaciness of it, but like, maybe I just played too much Freelancer in college.
That and as a bonemarrow FPSer I am very critical about kineticism in shootmans (much much less critical of other genres of vidcon kinetics). 1 is just so bad in that arena, and gets worse after unfavorable comparisons with 2 and especially 3.
The big difference to me was being on the planets and looking around, at that scale, at that fidelity, at that tone of seriousness.
I really enjoyed (much of) the combat! In that I played through it three times to get to highest difficulty. I have a thing for realtime action with pausing and deep skill benches, and, while similar to BioShock, they avoided its chaos. It undeniably feels like porridge, though, and the sequels have much better combat except:
They no longer try to model long-range outdoor sniping
They never create encounters ridiculously hard by virtue of their inept AI programming (ME1 base: start a fight and everyone mob-rushes); this became fun at the limits of my skill and puzzling through an encounter through multiple failures
The strict denial of status effects while enemies were shielded was a major bummer
Re. the OP the Sonic vs industrialism thing is interesting because I read even or especially the “natural” locations in the first few games as just as robotic looking as any of the robots, and feel like that’s where most of the charm comes from, this artificially vibrant astroturf universe of weird checkered repeating textures and those indent things in all the hills. I think you could make a parallel with stuff like the Bomberman games which similarly have this battle between Bomberman and mad scientist type living in a giant robot in the middle of industrial hell zone. But Bomberman’s design is grounded in the smooth, rounded plastic and gentle colours of a children’s toy and so is the modular look of even the early, gentler stages, and all the monsters that move around in them. So I’d argue that in Bomberman the conflict is almost between two different images of modernity, that of a kind of chipper innocent prosperity of clean plastic set against harsh abrasive metal, flashing lights, overstimulus, etc, and wonder if Sonic games are doing something similar, or if there’s a general ambivalence in a medium made possible by technology around that technology and the recurring desire to extricate the good parts (fun toys, pleasant colours, friendly artificial people) from the bad parts (capitalism??)
tbh i am generally not convinced that fan work is more subversive than original work just because at this point I don’t know that anyone can tell the difference. i like this post abt it https://medium.com/@midboss/on-fanwork-and-what-is-outsider-d0ae7372bfe3#.vwcz75uzm and also wrote something on own blog http://myfriendpokey.tumblr.com/post/155956576970/the-close-analogy-between-original-indie-games… i guess (saved u a click) i feel like they’re both valuable but wouldn’t call either subversive as i think both involve the dream that, like, you can “fix zelda” in this purely internal way as a question of design and arrangement without having to start out from an awareness of all the external factors that make that game what it is. it’s like a license to draw a line between “aesthetic stuff that can be changed” and “social stuff that can’t” where if you can just get the former really, really right it will somehow compensate for and offset everything gross about the latter, like if you design the perfect zelda then it will somehow escape the generally horrible conditions within which that perfect zelda would still be produced, distributed, and consumed. I think there’s value to both, don’t want to diminish ways in which the former can feed into the latter and still absently fall into doodling My Perfect Videogame but also feel that the idea of subverting anything within this framework is sort of wishful thinking - at least in 2017 when every company seems pretty happy to have a “base” of fan enthusiasts as long as there’s no chance that the latter will be able to get a cut of the money, and to have indie devs on hand fine-tuning the mechanics for all the old IPs.
I wanted to get into fan stuff once or twice but was sort of hamstrung when I realised the only videogame characters I had any kind of affection for were Namco’s Sky Kid and problematic ribbon lizard, Birdo.
castlevania games have made reference to monsters being prevalent in the countryside outside of dracula’s castle, ecclesia is the biggest contender in this regard for how much of the country you actually explore
so does portrait of ruin. the castlevania games take place, pre 1999 (i think, maybe before. maybe pre-portrait of ruin) in a very definite dark and violent world of adventure. there are a lot of different people tied to dracula’s mythos that eventually help the belmonts (the d’nasty family etc) that i wish the games would have gone more into
