I just wanna know why whenever they make a complicated problematic protagonist game it’s always about sympathy for right wingers and not about being a Maoist executing land lords or something.
9 Likes
I know this is so close to a reactionary posture at this point that there may as well not be any difference for most people (even if everyone on selectbutton knows better than to fall victim to the “all fiction should be moralizing” straw man), I totally get @AutomaticTiger’s perspective that when you have subject matter that’s both personally alarming and appears unexamined it’s pretty much the worst of all worlds, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever play days gone so my defending it on @cask’s testimony alone is a not very interesting broken record. I just want more hostile art.
“sympathy” is a really interesting choice of word there and it’s making me think about why my position on this is always so stubborn, I don’t think I rate the potential for sympathy very highly in these contexts and I find it a lot more value neutral and character driven in practice
3 Likes
Fair! I really don’t want to seem like i’m just being a jerk killjoy it’s just not fun when the specific hostile art is part of regional movements that have driven real life people I know into hiding? And this is a big fun AAA tentpole open world game?
That makes me feel a bit uneasy, is all.
10 Likes
I have it on secondhand authority that the staff at Bend are boring Tinder dates
14 Likes
I do think that the game is actively unsympathetic to its main character but as you are boots on the ground in this particular real world nightmare conflict I defer to your concerns, and you’ve been magnanimous in this exchange. If someone made a game where you play as a CPD officer that kettled us last year there’s no reality in which any defense of “well he’s a shithead” would make sense to me, and rightfully so.
10 Likes
i’m not convinced that a project like days gone can mean much of anything to anyone outside of faltering suggestion and vague, empty thematic allusions
how can any of
and of course
, the realities of this shit, how can this square up with decency? am i too cynical?
whose fault is it, anyway?
like, do modern games even contain the possibility of challenge given the stipulations? i’m thinking you have to go pretty far around your ass just to get close in these towering triple-aaa shitheaps.
what are the exceptions? am i going to play death stranding in a few years and finally be 100% given up on the possibility of “big” “good” games that can mean more than fuck all?
3 Likes
this post is not necessarily that serious but i’m just alarmed that maybe i’m really done with games. i can’t even imagine good ones coming out anymore, really…
Disco Elysium, Baba is You, Outer Wilds, Hypnospace Outlaw, Dragon Quest XI, The Under Presents, Elsinore, Anodyne 2, and Devotion all might as well be top 20 or whatever of all time for me and those all came out in 2019 alone. Many of them are rich with meaning, even!
6 Likes
all of those are distinctly not big games outside of DQ11, right?
1 Like
correct, they’re not, but I did almost list Mortal Kombat 11 and then deleted it at the last second because I felt people would ignore the rest of what I had to say
8 Likes
last of us 2 is good sb is just too scared to open its heart to god’s love
4 Likes
The last of us too
2 Likes
No, I read Neil Druckmann saying he wanted to Button Button a crowd of Palestinians
2 Likes
No. It cannot survive. Or only by lucky accident. The pull of market- and publisher- and culture- and organizational-constraints is overwhelming and specifically destroys almost all attempts at meaning and morality unless they’re developed in a secret lonely garden (which I fought for and briefly found for myself a few spare times).
AAA communicates best nonverbally; the world art and specific animations that illustrate a scope and sweep and observation in some very specific games; mechanics and loops iterated in a cross-studio ‘scene’ communication into some highly-tuned machines. We get an ever-rarer instance of a strong voice poking out in a snippet of writing or characterization but it’s weak and dim next to an authorial voice that can be heard from a film. Linearity seems to make all this much much easier - even in games, most of the most successfully ‘directed’ projects have strict linear throughlines and often leave the mechanical integration by the side. Rockstar has made an artform of strongly-defined narratives occurring despite the game they live in.
13 Likes
Mortal Kombat 11 had that bit where a dude ended the transatlantic slave trade with his time wish, which was pretty badass.
11 Likes
hey you goblin
how refreshing it must be to work on a game that could even be thought to have underpinnings of any sort
gonna leave this company soon i promise
10 Likes
Well in Hitman you usually end up disguising yourself as a low-wage worker in order to murder billionaires
7 Likes
Can I have my username changed to keurig?
EDIT: Thank you!
