I interpreted the discussion as, vague discomfort with the structure that couldn’t be justified by the narrative conceits you’re so good at teasing out. Yet, everyone mostly enjoys playing it, and Felix tried to make a consolidating statement: sometimes game are dumb but fun, and we can ignore meaning if we choose.
And I think at this point we’ve been complaining about games for long enough that we can slip between semiotic criticism and mechanical enjoyment. We aren’t going to consolidate them but we can keep fighting for it to be better.
to clarify this a little bit, when I said “I’ve pretty much given up on vidcons having any real politics or anything meaningful to say,” I mean “I don’t expect any novel synthesis of large-scale production and message beyond what ueda or kojima appeared to be reaching toward 15 years ago, and I don’t expect the sophistication or nuance of that message (likewise for characterization in narrative works) to reach the level of pretty much any other artistic medium.”
the exceptions to this nowadays are very clearly telegraphed as exceptions and what’s more, few of them gain anything from being classed as games as such rather than interactive art (e.g. Nathalie Lawhead’s stuff), and more than that I still feel like a lot of these don’t really justify the additional effort of being interactive (I can barely make the effort to play something like Tacoma or Edith Finch, and I’d definitely rather that Scott Benson had just made a movie), if not for the production outlets and audience expectations around “videogames” that already exist. this is just personal taste, though, obviously.
I’ll also concede that I’m about as outright dismissive as anyone who’s spent this much time thinking about vidcons can get when it comes to trying to tease out any redeeming elements of colonialism 4 kids, and I know this is a disappointment to a lot of longtime posters here.
well, I did like wolfenstein a lot, and that had a lot of money put into it, but that was unusually smart and straightforward
what else in recent memory really accomplished “this storytelling conceit is unique to videogames and the writing would pass elsewhere and the game doesn’t ask you for input more than it can justify give the range of possible outputs” ?
firewatch? soma?
campo santo and frictional are still in business so that’s good
Maybe we’re not seeing revolutions since the indie blossoming has settled down, but interesting things keep happening. You devour games fast enough that it may be obscuring you to recent triumphs.
Prey rebuilds the guilt-trip narrative of BioShock, Spec Ops and reframes the sanctioned actions as pre-game start; both the player and the player character have no memory of them. It asks, will you take responsibility for actions you performed? It’s an interesting conversation with modern discussions of systemic racism and the like. It doesn’t stick the landing.
Metal Gear Solid V is the most complete warlord simulator attempted, and makes a solid advance on the techniques of Far Cry 2. The revelatory moment while you are racially segregating your soldiers, becoming fully conscious of your actions, is the best thing that team has ever pulled off (or ever will).
The small human stories the walking sim movement created don’t feel revelatory next to linear media but have opened important palettes to be incorporated.
Kentucky Route Zero brings cross-media influences deeper into games and feels natural while doing so (by the way: new cross-media in advance of the next episode!). Its technical advances in adventure games come from rejiggering dialogue trees as a stage actor’s inflection – the player’s choice obviously doesn’t affect the game state but invites participatory play, and that’s important.
Papers Please and Cart Life (only one of those games is actually playable though) advance ‘empathy through doing’ in a way that games are uniquely suited to. This appears to be tricky ground to cover without feeling voyeuristic so it may not be widely influential, but small games of ‘realistic task implementation’ should be taken up more widely (particularly for AAA pace-breaking busywork that needs to shade character).
Her Story is fragmented and clever and necessarily participatory.
[italicized titles because I’m being respectful here, clearly]
oh yeah KRZ and Papers Please and Her Story are all fantastic, it is actually absurdly dismissive of me to not mention those (I’ve recommended each of them to regular-ass people, even!)
I was making a point about the obvious dunderheadness of big games like this but my position is hilariously indefensible as framed
Indie blossoming (cool term! @BustedAstromech) has died down but I think we’re on the verge of a new wave of adequately funded interesting independent projects funded by medium sized publishers with equal parts money and gall. Annapurna in particular stand out (they’ve picked up publishing rights to the KRZ complete package) and I haven’t touched much of what they’ve done, but it’s interesting to see places like Devolver even funding some nuanced (queer) stories like Red Strings Club. I think the case is going to continue to be that cutting edge, bizarre, politically engaged and important games will continue to be fringe productions outside of the mainstream, which in my understanding is the case in nearly all creative mediums that are audience/market-based and have a “mainstream.” I totally want an “independent cinema” styled market for games, but that’s unlikely to blossom until games grow further away from their past as purely hobbyist media that are often rated by their mainstream audience predominantly in terms of feature sets and potential playtime.
I think some of the difference between games and other media is that it’s easy to enjoy games on a mechanical level and ignore the message/story/point. I might watch a film just because it’s pretty, but if it’s saying something gross then that’s much harder to ignore. I (probably) won’t read a book just for the prose but I would play a game just because it’s satisfying to move around in. I am a bit of a mechanics nerd, though, so this effect might be stronger than average for me.
This doesn’t mean games can’t have a message, but rather that there are multiple independent axes on which games can be compelling, so a message isn’t strictly necessary.
I think the way you’re separating “mechanics” from the rest of the experience is a bit of a fallacy. Ask yourself what it is that you enjoy in these mechanics, and the honest answer isn’t likely to be entirely abstract and dry. Games with deep mechanics tend to have themes of adversity, mastery and dominance.
I think the reasons I play most games are pretty abstract and dry. The ones that I can engage with in another way (or multiple ways) are more the exception than the rule.
I mean, I kind of don’t want to defend myself here because I’m going to end up sounding sort of soulless (or boring or cynical), but the large majority of my game playing time is with games that I enjoy because of competition (Smash Bros, Battlerite, Rocket League), games that have excessive complexity or interlocking systems (Roguelikes, Factorio, League of Legends), games that require lots of muscle memory and repetition (Dustforce, N++, Trackmania), or puzzle games (Witness, Puzzle no Jelly, Zachtronics games).
I don’t think the main reason I enjoy any of those games has something analogous in other media, and if it does it’s not nearly as compelling there. I think you’re correct that mechanics aren’t entirely independent from other aspects of a game, but I think my point still stands even if they’re somewhat related.
following up on this (and I should probably cut this out into a new thread), I’m playing Tacoma now after having gotten it in a bundle, and I have some thoughts:
it’s primarily impressive to me as a work of engine scaffolding, the same way that titanfall 2’s factory level or both it and dishonored 2’s time-traveling levels were; that they’re actually able to animate what they want to do conceptually within the world they made, and fit the UI around it, is extremely neat!
generally, the writing / sound design / environment modeling are all very good. however! its politics are so impeccable as to be distracting. I don’t think this would as much of an issue if the game were less discursive, or if its narrative didn’t effectively happen all at once and reduce the characters to archetypes, and the near-future cascadia-first nations state that it envisions and the labour struggle in the background of the game’s story are definitely smart on their face, but there’s nothing more to it, it just is, and it makes the whole product feel (accurately) like the work of alt-comics intelligentsia who are conspicuously miles away from the rest of the industry (which is very PNW of them) and leaves me wondering if they shouldn’t just be having a dialogue with/in another medium for which being proactive isn’t the entire point. but the way they’re telling this story definitely exacerbates this feeling relative to gone home, which had much more confidence in its own aesthetic and didn’t come across like it wanted you to behold its good sense to nearly the same degree.
if not for that engine scaffolding, which is really neat, I still come away feeling “why is this vidcon?” in a way that I don’t with Lucas Pope’s work, which is a lot cleverer and more ludic with its politics.
like I get that the production economies of walking simulators can’t be instantaneously transposed onto another medium and they don’t need to justify themselves to me and there are dozens of reasons why representation in and of itself is sufficiently lacking in vidcons and important to enough of their audience that it has enormous value as it is, full stop, b u t…
it’s kind of impossible to think about a game like this other than in terms of its developers? it feels like a progressive industry piece for progressive industry people (to a significantly greater extent than did firewatch, for all the posturing about campo santo being a dream team), and it’s annoying to not be able to kill the author when I’m trying to engage with a work of fiction.
I don’t know if that’s necessarily a game problem as much as, they didn’t pull off their message within storytelling or play. We reject other media that’s barefacedly ‘look at me being good’, but the best movies have relevant moral themes implicit in their construction. If they failed to make their politics seem natural within their world they failed, same as any other media (and your take tracks with what I played from this before it came out).
it’s also almost depressing to see a game about 2088 that is so intensely rooted in the present moment? give me queer afrofuturist Buckminster Fuller or some shit, not PDX dinner theatre
I also just noticed this only got a console release on xbox and not ps4, which tracks almost 1:1 with heavy-handedness
anyway it’s a fine piece of interactive storytelling that had a lot of hard work and talent go into it and it shows, but I don’t think it has anything to say and as a character study it’s only OK