thinking re: practicing in games and also re: sekiro the reflections option it added to replay bosses was such a big improvement that it’s weird to remember the game didn’t launch with it. i have a file with almost 300 hours (lol, incidentally i have never liked knowing my hours logged) where i got all the endings to complete all the gauntlets and now just use it to refight the bosses whenever. you have to beat each boss first so it’s not exactly good practice for learning the game (that’s still Hanbei’s job), but having a playground to freely use skills/prosthetics/items you might shy away from when the stakes are higher is perfect for um, “mastering” it. im replaying it normally for the first time in a few years and, y’know having 300+ hours that includes “rigorous” “practice” is obviously making the game very easy, but it’s also been extremely fun cuz ive learned how to play less conservatively.
i will now turn to thinking about the powers of dogs and cats in games and return with my analysis
This just reminded me, I was SO excited about Tango as a kid. For some reason, seeing Tango on the cover of Mega Man V next to Rush had me imagining all the adventures Megaman could go on together with another robot pet buddy. Just absolutely UNLIMITED possibilities having both a robo dog AND robo cat could have for Megaman.
In that official art, Tango looks like he just has another Mega Man style human face behind all the cat appendages. Did Dr. Light just take a stock humanoid robot head/brain part and stick it inside a cat body with a cat mouth incapable of human speech? Fucked up if true.
I mean, going by my completely made up canon about Dr Light having never seen a real animal before, that’s probably exactly the process he used to make Tango
i played americas army on my dads account when i was younger on some server running the pow camp map, i couldnt find anyone but i shot some guy sitting at a desk which failed the mission because i guess he was the prisoner. i thought he was an enemy!! THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULDNT PUT CHILDREN IN THE ARMY
everyone in chat started erupting about how i was a piece of shit fuckhead and i got banned from the server, but before i could feel guilty they put me in VIRTUAL LEAVENWORTH for DISHONORABLE CONDUCT complete with cellmate playing a sorrowful tune on a harmonica cementing it forever as one of the funniest things i’ve ever experienced in a videogame
increasingly i think that the majority of assumptions and claims about like the fundamental nature of like, videogames, movies, narratives, etc., could be labelled as “specious claim about human cognition”, like if you read the early 20th cent. soviet film theorists those guys (all cis men, some kind of fruity tho? :0) were not approaching the medium with the same basic assumptions about the medium that people have today, and in a lot of ways it seems like they were trying to approach the medium without many assumptions at all, and write about what it is rather than what they thought it was, idk
well, i think i wrote this post inspired by certain like Game Design Pros i’ve seen on social media / substack / medium, who i wouldn’t want to call out by name as peddling what i consider to be largely just like vibes-based posting and opinion-having under the pretense that it offers serious, even Professional advice or insight about anything, but i think it’s something that you encounter at a huge number of levels across a huge number of subjects…
something i think about is the writerly truism to “show don’t tell”. who came up with that advice? why should we think that this is good advice, and what is it founded on? i guess there’s a wikipedia page about it
so i’m taking some pretty broad swipes here. w/rt to videogames in particular you have a lot of assumptions about what constitutes a good videogame. an example might be that like big Hours Played numbers are considered something extremely desirable for a game to aspire to, even tho it often seems to be the case that many of the most successful videogames at getting big Hours Played numbers do so by making the players miserable by subjecting them to skinner box casino-like conditions
the narrative conventions of like, Commercial English Cinema Of The Late 20th Century and 21st Century So Far are simply that, imo. of course these are upheld as aspirational in anglophonic cinephilia, but there are dramatically different conventions in different cultures, different countries. There’s Soviet Silent Cinema Of the Early 20th Century. there’s Hong Kong cinema and Cinema of the Tamil Film Industry In India. Nigeria has one of the largest cinema industries in the world! None of these are going to perfectly align with american or british or australian or w/e values. hong kong cinema industry of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s did not even record sync sound. people would be completely outraged if they watched an english movie where the production didn’t even pretend to care about the words spoken matching the actors’ lips on screen (a great example of this would be a Top 10 Movie Ever Made, green snake (1993))
roger ebert coined the term “empathy machine” to describe cinema. this is an extremely vague concept premised on an extremely vague concept… so you see a lot of these in a lot of discourses about various mediums and cultures and industries or w/e imo
so yes… i essentially think that people have largely become incapable or unwilling to let go of a huge number of assumptions made in error about what are like creative, highly subjective fields where what is good or beautiful etc. etc. cannot be quantified, and that these assumptions are like, creatively binding people (on every level, including random people drawing cartoons in their house for fun, or playing music in a basement with their friends) from like, creating new forms, new genres, new styles
oh yeah! i definitely hate all of that to the point that one could consider these assumptions to be my main enemy in life, and you are right to hate them too. i love human cultural practices and aesthetic possibilities too much to care about the wisdom of peddlers.
viet thanh nguyen’s essay about the tyrrany of ‘show don’t tell’ linked in that wiki page is really good
i am also a subscriber to the conspiracy theory that the most successful thing the CIA has ever done is influence the curriculum of the Iowa Creative Writers Workshop and help to promote and proliferate a certain strain of literary fiction throughout the globe
thinking about how it felt like there was a real moment happening for both indie retro fps games and indie retro 3d platformers over the past several years and both feel like they’ve already dissipated a little bit
maybe indie retro 3d platformers still have time to grow but it def feels like the momentum for indie retro fpses (not using the other word!!) has stalled out anyway
I’ve always felt that the technical progression of video games makes people even worse about this. As if we’ll get more perfect control schemes or more perfect game design the same way we get linearly improving graphics and hardware
I think that there have always been movements counter to these ideas in every academic field, I don’t even think it’s a radical take. I think it’s pretty normal.
I think the death of academia and arts funding in the US contributes to this as much as like…mono culture over here. You can’t have movies that were funded by an arts council so they don’t have to make a profit as easily. Video games have grown as a medium in parallel to the decline of arts and liberal arts funding, so I think they’ve been hit especially hard as a medium because they haven’t really had any mass movement in that regard.
