videogame things you think about a lot lot lot

lmao oh my god, perfect

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damn this game looks good

non videogame things i think about alot

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I think about the gamer desire for games to look “real” a lot. I think gamers should be forced to take a college-level lecture series about the, like, politics of wanting a game to “look real” or “feel real,” on the very day they turn sixteen

The realest game I ever made was the one about having dinner with my parents’ friends where you can extend your frog tongue and steal their food while they’re talking about property values

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i saw someone on facebook the other day complain that a dragonball z game didn’t have realistic graphics

why would it?!

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I am routinely battling game students using realism as if they all know what it means. I press for clarification every time but the answers are never satisfactory. See also: immersive, fun, good game design etc

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i remember at uni being taught never to use “physics-based” as a descriptor

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One of my favorite things I studied in school was realism in literature, I feel like I have a way to articulate what it means in a historical context.

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what was some of the theory you read there? Would be interested in having more tools to discuss this myself

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And honestly DBZ games look better than the cartoon has ever looked.

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I read these two out-of-print works of literary theory and history: Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, and Elliot by Harry E. Shaw, and Realism and Consensus in the English Novel by Elisabeth Deeds Ermarth. The former has the most tangible examples of how English authors in the 19th century understood and did work with “realism” while the latter was the more theoretical of the two, dealing a lot with art history and, most compellingly, situating perspective painting as the precursor to what a tradition of realism would later on entail. I also remember this whole collection of essays about the Victorian novel, especially about the bildungsroman. Also, at the time, a lot of the ideological aims of realism as a form were put into perspective for me while studying 19th century film, like silent movies, industry films, the origins of montage as a poetic metonym for visual images, this book on German Expressionism and Film by the contemporary Rudolph Kurtz.

My take is, realism is a perspective one can adopt or stand in (after it is artistically created by someone) which reveals to the observer a semblance of a system connecting disparate things. Realism is a mode of seeing at odds with things like an earlier romantic or figural way of seeing the world, and thus conveying stories and constructing morales. The morale and drama of a realistic novel, like Jude the Obscure, seems to notice that one’s legal relation to a member of their family is more real than anything intimately discovered between people in Victorian society, for many complicated reasons including bureaucracy, class, gender, wealth. And by the same notion, rather than increased and grotesque graphical fidelity, maybe a kind of videogame realism can be glimpsed in the representation of systemic things, or systems themselves, like how every 90s FPS game had barrels or boxes that explode if shot, the way players learn to manipulate games like reloading a level to reset spawn timers, or the way Pathologic 2 acknowledges save-scumming in its story and mechanical design. But that is just my feeling on it.

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I just like that the “time it takes to see a crate” issue from that Old Man Murray article was never solved, we’ve just morphed it into an even more annoying problem

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My favorite thing about the Start to Crate article that gets overlooked is how OMM complained that there’s all these crates everywhere but never any pallets. How are people moving these waist-height crates around??

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Worse than the absence of pallets is the stacks of pallets sitting next to the crates!

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Piles of pallets sitting in the general vicinity of crates, like spoor

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image

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… forklift was operated … ::tastes pallet:: … 3, maybe 4 hours ago

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i presume OMM were huge fans of shenmue based on only this information

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often think about how great rondo of blood is

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Second Life compresses all graphics, no matter what format they start out as, into JPEG2000 to display in the Second Life viewer.

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