“great structure for an online community” doesn’t flow off the tongue as nicely and you might be accused of coded language and losing that dev company contact.
1 Like
Red Dead Online is way better imo by virtue of making everyone so lethal a fresh noob can duel with someone and win
Also the structure of the missions and accepting them and doing playlists makes infinitely more sense than… Whatever GTAV does
The discussion of Kentucky Route Zero generally, however, can be somewhat overwhelming to trawl through as a newcomer, and in order to fully take in much of what Alec Meer and others have written about Cardboard Computer’s point-and-click interactive fiction, you’d have to pour yourself a cup of relaxing peppermint tea and set aside a whole day of reading, like I did.
RPS just made a post to go with their video review for Kentucky Route Zero with this bit in the liede. Maybe I’m being cynical, but the framing of games journo writing about KR0 like it’s some kind of a sub culture that the uninitiated are interested in, instead of, y’know, the game itself, is emblematic of a preening quality that always bores me when I see it in games writing. I can respect being a part of an industry cohort, where you want to point your readers to the writing of your peers, but ack… No long-form take about KR0 can be more interesting than actually playing the very interesting game, without “context” framed by pretentious, thoughtful explorations and think pieces!
3 Likes
I think it stems from the desire to demystify and make accessible. “An initiate’s guide to this esoteric subject”.
Exemplified by this framing to knowledge:
Kentucky Route Zero is something that really does benefit from discussion and exegesis – it’s underplayed and conversant with theatrical devices games haven’t been popularly in conversation with.
Unfortunately, our culture that can only observe an object for the briefest quantization of time before it slips away is ill-prepared to treat a work best observed with a week or a month or even years of rumination between its chapters.
3 Likes
thinking about putting together a business plan for a gaming vertical, pitching it to angel investors, and having to tell them “yeah you won’t make your money back, but at least you’ll have interesting stuff to read”
I’m curious where people see games academia within the whole games journalism/criticism situation.
I was recently feeling an urge to escape the slow speed of academic publishing to spit out some more writing on games but it seems like the options now are either:
- Slog away at a blog (blogslog)
- Youtube criticism
- Blag a spot on some kind of open journal/zine/podcast
- Write a book(???)
Kinda rambling here but feels like games writing is kind of stuck between the rigorous but snail-like pace of academia and the commercial but flexible updates of games journalism/influencer channels. Maybe it’s not so much of an axis.
3 Likes
As a professional, I find almost all of games academia to be decidedly unhelpful and removed from what we’re doing. So, so much of it is investigating problems we’ve worked past, with case study games that have so many fundamental issues they can’t approach what they want.
10 Likes
Pretty fair summation, the ivory tower is no joke.
Academia’s goals often overlap with hobbyist criticism and I’m honestly not sure if they’re that different beyond a formal publishing process and different rate of output. Spending months on a 7000 word paper and having 5 people read it is one of the circles of hell if I recall correctly.
6 Likes
I think it is a huge problem with a lot of practitioner-oriented disciplines that the academics are inevitably far less capable than the practitioners to a degree that shouldn’t be an impediment to them producing valuable work but more often than not really is.
it takes a lot of being really honest w/ yourself and striving past most of the criteria on which you’re actually evaluated to be able to stay sharp while still hanging on to the professional benefits of academe, it helps if you’re doing niche work that’s obviously not commercially viable or if you’re working on (actually useful) infrastructure because you’re absolutely going to fall behind as an architect but you can make up for that in other ways
5 Likes
I am heading into an MA with the intent to study some thing to do with games that I suspect will expose me to a lot of work that will send me into existential periods where I ask if any of what I or my peers are doing is really that interesting or useful? I think it will be useful as a professional training environment that will put me in a place with people and into conversations I normally wouldn’t take part in, but I have my doubts being a games academic has much more prospects to it than being a hobbyist writer or dev.
Sorry if that’s negative and also maybe ignorant. I’m just a graduate whose worried about his future.
4 Likes
my main piece of advice is that most grad programs will let you get by without getting to a point where you can prototype [whatever substantive concepts are in your field] relatively quickly, and you should not let this happen. likewise for joining a professional community that you like. do those two things and it’ll be super worthwhile
6 Likes
Everyone who comes near academia (whether or not they intend to stay there) would do well to confront those feelings early. It can be useful for networking, community and so on but if you’re not going to be a career academic then you’ll want to check whatever boxes they have and hopefully learn useful skills within some kind of safety net. Tuition fees complicate things further.
As Felix says, rapid prototyping is a hugely useful experience in almost any practice. Community makes sure you’re not just some kind of hermit creator who makes shit but never sees the fruit of its reception.
2 Likes
Thank you both.
Community makes sure you’re not just some kind of hermit creator who makes shit but never sees the fruit of its reception.
This is probably major reason going into an MA program appeals to me. In my undergrad I was very productive and engaged with my studies, but kind of alone in that regard. Professors let students pass because it’s undergrad and not a big deal, but luckily I found a lot of encouragement and support from some of my professors as someone who showed signs of wanting to do more than just filter through. For that reason, I think some of my despair and cynicism has an optimistic and pragmatic counterbalance when I think about what I’m going to be doing with my time in a Masters program.
I don’t want to feel like I’m there just to write papers for passing marks so I’m not gonna let myself feel like that by not doing that, if I can help it.
2 Likes
Postgrad at least feels like you’re on more equal ground with peers and staff as a creator. There’s more of a courtesy there that if a student likes one thing but hates another, the staff will be understanding (assuming they’re decent people). I hope it helps you find what you’re looking for.
Back on topic, Kotaku seems to be hemorrhaging writers at quite a rate
2 Likes
to be fair, robert yang had a tweet a while ago where he bemoaned the lack of devs releasing their design tools and having that create this really horrible environment for learning because there’s almost no way for students to get trained on industry-standard tools outside of UE4/Unity, and both those tools have so much goddamn scaffolding on them that it’s impossible to really practice design; for a student in an industry-facing program, it’s a way better bet to just focus on the workflows that make a game look polished even if the underlying designs are pretty shallow because polished games get students hired (even though people complain about how students don’t know how to design things)
and then to have most of the information sharing gatherings be these huge gated industry events that require travel and a $1500 ticket that most schools can’t afford even with an educational discount makes things even more difficult for academia - most schools that are sending students to GDC or w/e are doing so through industry grants or award shows. the UCSC games MS stopped getting GDC passes for students years ago, despite our school being stupid close to GDC
there’s just so many proprietary and/or gated tools in the game industry and it’s really tough for academia to use already-existing games as case studies because the phenomena we’re interested in often requires data that the game doesn’t really offer you without some sort of modding or proprietary tool. and meanwhile the people doing these studies are trying to justify their jobs to the rest of the school while largely being ignored by the industry they’re ostensibly a part of. it definitely goes both ways here imo
6 Likes
A lot of the divide between academia and industry again comes down to a difference in speed and commercial needs. For most developers, there’s not really an incentive to get involved except the promise of future labour. Due to the slipping admissions standards of most universities that charge tuition fees, the quality of students coming into and out of academia is not great. There’s also too many games students for the industry to support.
I agree with most of your points otherwise spacetown. Industry doesn’t make it easy to co-operate but then they are almost separate businesses united only by their subject. I say this as an academic who dabbles in various realms.
1 Like
iD-style open-sourcing should be a standard practice. If they can find the source code…!
I don’t think I understand the tools request, though. Bespoke tools are characterized by their bugs, inflexibility, and documentation that only lives in the head of the devs actively working on it. Unity’s much easier to learn and use than Unreal because it was built for users, not adapted from a workhorse shooter engine decades-old. Valve’s Source underperformed as a modkit because game engines had gotten big enough that half-done user-focus didn’t cut it anymore. I don’t understand how opening engine sets helps students.
I think schools need to get students one capstone project that illustrates that they understand and can do polish, but that’s not the primary skill they should be teaching. The trick is people need both and it’s so hard to be even good at one much less prove it. It’s never appropriate to use a polish project or a game engine to teach design fundamentals outside of videogame-specific ones. Paper prototyping and iteration is so much quicker I can’t imagine any program not spending the bulk of its early training on that.
The technical disciplines still have a very good channel with academia. I like how Ubisoft frames their academic R&D programs. But it’s almost all engineering, same as it’s ever been. Whitepapers about math are a lot more convincing than those about design.
It’s interesting to consider how to get more academic design papers presented at a place like GDC. There’s an undercurrent of it but I’ve been to enough unconvincing ones that I’ve grown shy, and I imagine this is shared by the conference organizers.
So much design lives and dies in that last 5% of polish that I’ve rejected lots of negative conclusions; I’ve read and listened to more than a few that directly opposed things I’ve implemented and had to conclude the presenter was wrong in how they implemented their test. It strikes me as similar to the replicability problems currently social sciences are dealing with; their test conditions may just be too far from real-world to be applicable.
3 Likes
You know, the academic design work that I find most useful is the artist-in-residence work like Robert Yang or Pippin Barr. Giving people the means and the remit to push aesthetic edges is super-valuable and under-served in the market. I think the bleeding edge coming out of certain design programs was hugely important in the nascent indie space of 2010-2014.
4 Likes
Robert Yang taught me more about LD through his blog than any of my teachers ever did, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
2 Likes
I would like to see more features in the style of Polygon’s Devs Make Mario–while they aren’t interviews beyond “what is your level” I got to know those devs better than yet another conversation could reveal, and it’s satisfying to see how their ideas translate to the constraints of Mario Maker. I especially liked ZUN cramming a shmup in.