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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27718 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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I'm of essentially the exact opposite opinion. The linear game has almost no reason to exist. If my input has no effect on the outcome, why is it even required? All I'm really getting is a movie, but made objectively worse by the fact that it insists upon repeating a given scene until I complete an arbitrary task.

What's the point? Is there a movie that would be improved by making me win a round of Tetris every ten minutes to stop it from rewinding? Hell, why even have death animations or other displayed failure states in a video game? After all, it's not like the protagonist being eaten by monsters or falling down a hole to their death is what "really" happens.

Those failure states exist to create the illusion of agency. No game advertises itself by telling you the princess can already be considered rescued, because that's the artistic intent, but hey you can come push buttons if you want to see it. No, they want to create at least the pretense of the player's input having consequences.

So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.

Those failure states exist to create the illusion of agency. No game advertises itself by telling you the princess can already be considered rescued, because that's the artistic intent, but hey you can come push buttons if you want to see it.

Just because the princess gets rescued in the end doesn't mean that the story is the same. In the case of a video game, instead of "the princess was rescued," it would be "you rescued the princess." The fact that you, the player, actually put forth effort to cause the princess to be rescued is a huge leap. Video games are at their core more immersive than movies. 3D and now 4D movies try to make it so that you're literally feeling the things that the main character feels. Video games are simply the next evolution to that. Now, instead of watching James Bond shoot that bad guy, you are James Bond, and you are shooting that bad guy.

So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.

The point of the game is the game. Mario isn't about rescuing princess peach it's about platforming. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics. It's just complaining that the game chess doesn't have a canon ending.

John Carmack put it best: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

It's just complaining that the game chess doesn't have a canon ending.

It does. Shah mat; the king dies.

Unless it's a draw...

Video games became irrepairably damaged when FMV cutscenes became more than cheesy mid mission rewards, and when Metal Gear Solid became an interactive movie. The gameplay loop should be the point, not the opportunity to see a badly rendered aerith get stabbed followed by a yellow polygon shaking irascibly.

My synthesis take is that the ideal game has actual narrative consequences for gameplay events. You fail a fight? Someone dies saving your ass. It's the total divorce of choice from consequence that so many modern games favor that makes the design space feel stale, everyone is afraid to actually make choices matter.

I don't think people really want this, I think you'd see most loss averse people (aka most people) doing what they can to rewind or close the game out if this were to happen in order to avoid taking the hit.

I think people don't actually know what they want, until you give it to them. Baldurs Gate adopted a lighter version of this philosophy to smashing success, I think if you made it both possible to save-scum at lower difficulties, and difficult to perfectly recreate a path (Lots of small random chances that shape outcomes leading up to specific choices) it would be wildly successful. It's not gonna be my next project, but I have some notes in this regard for the game after the one I'm working on where I plan to add some elements like this to a Fire Emblem style tactical base game.

People play roguelikes, including the ones that take dozens of hours per run, and it is my impression that most of them don't rewind (if only because it's inconvenient to constantly backup the savefile).

I'd expect players who don't like irreversible consequences to simply not play the game.

If my input has no effect on the outcome, why is it even required?

Forcing a player to do something may have more impact than making them watch someone else do it.

But I agree. OP makes too good a case against his own position and then never truly debunks it. Gaming is clearly different, I don't see why the same standards should apply.

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