i love how splintered it is and how i cant keep track of everything going on in videogames anymore no matter how hard i try. so much shit to never know about that doesnt care if i dont know about it or not
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The way the literature industry has been tuned to the production of infinite slop puts every other field to shame. Video game giants wish they had this kind of stranglehold on their culture. Every trad publisher makes zaslav look like a lover of culture and art, and indie publishing is almost entirely about shoveling out a bunch of shit faster than people can read. There is no āindie literatureā in the sense of indie games or indie films, even in the least idealistic sense.
But yeah, books and writing can be cool
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Iām wary in general of any analysis of group art creation that considers it a zero sum process of effort in = product out. Itās simply not true that writing 3 cool storyline branches of length x is the energetic equivalent of writing 1 cool storyline of length 3x. The efforts are not fungible.
Besides itās not like thereās a dearth of linear stories in games. If anything the wrpg āchoices & consequencesā style is a small minority.
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I also hate the choices and consequences phrasing because its used as a bulletpoint for biowarean āpick which hot alien babe to apply your genitals toā, or mandatory dialogue cutscenes where I choose whether or not to punch a reporter in the face. Itās bullshit, has nothing to do with why I play games.
Reactivity is what I really want. Clicking on a guy and seeing something happen. Thatās all it boils down to. Mount and blade is a great example of high reactivity with very little formalized writing. In fallout 1, when a guy goes into the general store and shoots the owner, do I stand by and watch, do I help shoot the owner, do I shoot the guy, do I shoot em both, do I try to talk one or both sides down, do I ditch the scene and rob the guyās house while heās occupied with murder? If the game at least tries to react to any of my possible ways of clicking on a guy, and this choice is not presented to me as a phony dialog tree, I feel a spark of joy because in reality I am in a conversation, atemporal as it is, with the game designer. It canāt ever match the freedom of a ttrpg but the best games can simulate it well enough.
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Sometimes in the course of a typical day I think about doomguy as he appears in Groove Jigoku V saying āHeeeā and āOh! busy!ā
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This looks so hot
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I think the key to liking videogames is not actually playing that many of them
I must like them, I keep buying them (and not playing them)
More seriously, a long time ago in college I wrote a thesis about how videogames mostly just need to be unashamed of what they are and stop striving to achieve the same status of other mediums (mostly I meant movies).
I still earnestly believe this though I will admit I still get sucked into a big AAA mo-capped Dad Game, Iām not immune to spectacle, Lore, or comic book pathos.
Videogames are just in the same space photography has reached where the technical ābest practicesā for āprofessional workā have been codified and the gatekeepers want to tell you that even if you intend to break the rules thereās still a right way to do it.
Coincidentally I hardly feel motivated to do photography anymore Iāve been grappling with my relationship to it after decades of pursuing it as a passion (just like videogames). And I think in both my immersion in them for like my whole life has resulted in my being able to take satisfaction with the smallest shreds of novelty in the face of an immeasurable amount of very similar work being produced out there.
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one of my favorite things about consuming so much media is that a huge portion of what Iād ever once liked to have done has actually been done by other people which is great and a relief because itās cool to see how they did it and it means I donāt have to
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Other than music, games are the only thing I really have an interest in to see where the medium goes even if the vast majority is derivative of other games or other fiction. Itās not just gemhunting but I think just nothing else provides curated cycles of action that creatives have tried to make at least formally aesthetically interesting even if they mean very little.
I sometimes worry that 50% of the reason I play games is to experience sound and music made interactive.
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Thereās nothing wrong with interactive sounds and music because sounds and music are great. Every thing I experience I transfigure into music anyway. Does music mean something? What do organised sounds even tell us about the current social landscape?
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a videogame thing i think about a lot is the existence of āAAA art gamesā - if more as a rhetorical idea than as a reality at this point. B3313 makes me think about this a lot, because itās an AAA-sized experience even tho itās a community romhack. playing it last summer gave me a distinct feeling that this is what an AAA-sized art game could look like - something that is theoretically approachable and recognizeable but structurally such a weird and unique undertaking. and i think we should have more of that! maybe David Lynchās death and rewatching Twin Peaks Season 3 has made me think more about that too. Twin Peaks is a similar kind of deconstruction of existing tropes in mainstream television made weird. so why not AAA art games?
just feels thereās been a lot of lowered expectations over the years - a lot of harping on why stuff isnāt materially possible, a lot of overvaluing of indie and mid budget things which theoretically āpush the envelopeā but only really do that in comparison to bigger things. which just feels like it leads to futher lowered expectations across the board. indies are praised for āpushing the envelopeā when theyāre doing shit thatās kind of bland but is just more interesting than AAA in comparison. and then a lot of the indie space becomes blander. and the stuff thatās weirder gets is even more obscure - itās too weird to even be considered āindieā in the same way.
one reason that i mean this idea of an AAA art game is more rhetorical than material to me right now is that itās pretty obvious why a lot of stuff doesnāt get funding in this landscape. but a lot of peopleās ādream gameā even if they had the funding and freedom would just be remaking Zelda or Metroid or whatever. we have few people who would ever use their resources to do something left-field and out there. i think thatās a failure of imagination and narrowed horizons that strikes me as a deeper problem than funding. itās one thing to not have the resources to achieve your dream, itās another to not have the dream in the first place. thatās kind of scary to me. and is something that i think needs to be fixed.
itās just so apparent to me all the places you canāt go artistically, and all the ground that is shut off by thinking about things the way a lot of people in the space do. like as long as the greatest artistic aspiration a lot of people in the space have is to is remake Zelda or Metroid, the space at large is going to stay the same and whatever isnāt that is going to stay on the ultra niches with maybe a few handfuls of exceptions here and there. which again, i think goes beyond the material reality of how hard it is to get funding and into peopleās failure to dream and imagine things - and imagine any kind of future. which is a lot scarier to me. so again, thatās why iām fixated on this idea of AAA art games.
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Not to mention the tactile fetish of miniatures how easy to assembly of a new rule modules. My bias is that video games can easily attract positive reviews from players within 1-8 hours by relying on visual arts and hidden the system mechanics. Once players figure out how the system works and organize the tables that should have been included in the manual on a wiki then most of good video games clearly do not reach the level of a good tabletop game. The true advantage of video games is the flashback-able real-time combat resolve, thereās no replacement of it.
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The two most amazing graphics effects I envied from afar:
The shower curtains in Splinter Cell (which I eventually owned to hack my xbox but never played.)
The grass in Asheronās Call 2
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running into curtains in splinter cell was the most impressed I ever was with the power of Graphics
I remember the grass in AC2 even though I only played the beta on a very underpowered machine
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I was debating playing the PS2 version of Splinter Cell and none of the youtube comparisons show off the curtains. Itās all nerd shit like Sam Fisherās face texture and this hallway is different. SHOW ME THE CURTAINS.
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Even in TV and film itās hard to find works as weird as Twin Peaks S3 that command the highest budgets - it seems you need quite a few stars to align. With The Return you have prestige tv peak, and a once-in-generation auteur rarity who makes odd, difficult films and is yet a household name. Megalopolis was self-funded for 120M by F F Coppola by selling his successful wine business, a kind of āone big one and Iām doneā thing - nothing could be less sustainable!
There are examples I can think of where idealistic producers were sold on a directorās vision - I would call some of Malickās films like The Tree of Life experimental blockbusters. Could something like that happen for games? Iām not sure I understand the internal workings of AAA game companies well enough, but the analogy between game director and film director seems to break down. Film productions are unweildy but game development seems to have even less flexibility. Malick can spotaneously turn the camera and shoot some birds or whatever heās interested in, but Iām not sure what that would look like in the game studio.
I think a lot of Far Cry 2 fans were hoping Watch Dogs: Legion would be weird and interesting since Clint Hocking was Game Director, but that didnāt work out. I heard on Tone Control Hocking say that Far Cry 2 was initially developed by a skeleton crew. The games Ubisoft make now are so much huger and āmultithreadedā than in 2008, with legacy engines and processes, itās hard to know how an idiosyncratic personality could really shift things there. I guess people will point to Kojima as an outlier - Death Stranding might be that kind of AAA āart gameā?
Maybe experimental hackers and modders following in B3313ās footsteps might be a promising model?
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I feel like youād need a Verhoeven / Starship Troopers type situation where a publisher bankrolls a 3rd person sci fi military shooter and they get the guy who did Cruelty Squad somehow to lead the project - and it happens because they are just not paying attention at all
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video gamesā version of star power is if you can get sonic the hedgehog or dante to appear in your video game
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Kojima once said that video games have nothing to do with art and are more like a service business. He believes that the key to being a successful game producer is providing different services.
The original quote has Sipping his coffee, thatās canāt be missed
HIDEO KOJIMA [Sipping his coffee] You know, videogames being interactive, itās a kind of service industry. The key to being a videogame creator is to provide different kinds of service.
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