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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3092 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 16, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Since this is videogames week in this thread:

Has any game’s story (ie not player-generated interaction or content) ever emotionally affected you in a major way?

I found Spec Ops: The Line more engaging on an intellectual level than emotional, but it did still affect me emotionally. Better to go in blind (if that's possible for a game that came out over a decade ago). You can probably finish the whole thing in six hours so it's not a huge time investment.

I'm a simple man and if a story wants to manipulate me, it will. Gone Home and Firewatch both affected me in a lasting way.

Disco Elysium did affect me as well, but it's a different thing: the aforementioned walking simulators want to change the way you look at people in the real world. DE gives you an absolute trainwreck of a character and lets you learn to love him by slowly discovering his past and possibly putting him on a path of redemption. Since he's the protagonist, it doesn't transfer to the way you relate to people that are similar washed-up losers around you in real life. I also don't have any spoilers that spoiled my spoiler.

I am also a scaredy cat, and Thief: Deadly Shadows pulled a switcheroo on me, by first teaching me to love the darkness and then making me play one of the scariest levels in video games history.

I'll skip the games that I played as a teen, since that's a whole different level of hormones and angst.

I’ll second…well, several of these. Everything Fruck said about Mother 3 held true when I played it. It’s brilliantly composed and written. I’ll add Cave Story for similar if less dramatic feelings.

Disco Elysium made me laugh so much, but it also made me feel this sense of…it’s hard to describe. Investment in this train-wreck character and his personal journey. A sort of aching empathy I associate with certain books. It’s vivid.

There are, of course, games that evoke through atmosphere rather than story. Breath of the Wild conveys this peaceful emptiness, even though its story is bland at best. My favorite for this effect might be Starsector. Its story is well-drawn but not what I’d call emotional. But when you’re out in the void, scrounging dead colonies for lost tech, the environment just draws you into the premise. It’s somewhere between tense and chilling, and I think that counts.

There are, of course, games that evoke through atmosphere rather than story. Breath of the Wild conveys this peaceful emptiness, even though its story is bland at best. My favorite for this effect might be Starsector. Its story is well-drawn but not what I’d call emotional. But when you’re out in the void, scrounging dead colonies for lost tech, the environment just draws you into the premise. It’s somewhere between tense and chilling, and I think that counts.

Weird. Starsector always felt especially hands-off and unemotional to me, like a game that specifically does not want you to get invested. Not sure why though.

Great question, there are to my memory 4 games that have had a large emotional impact on me. Mother 3, the gameboy advance follow up to Earthbound, did so several times as I mentioned in an earlier thread. What's most impressive about Mother 3's manipulation though, is that it manages to do so despite telegraphing the shit out of every major plot point. Nothing catches you off guard in the main plot for Mother 3, especially if you have played Earthbound (although there are some good twists inside most of the chapters). It barely disguises the masked man, but his unmasking destroyed me anyway. Same with pulling the final needle (until Nintendo wimped out). It's hard to talk about without spoiling it, and I don't want to do that because more people should play it.

Anyway I blame the music, which is brilliantly composed for emotional resonance. Good music is kind of like a cheat code for emotional impact, it sucks you into the narrative and adds substance to it, subtly maneuvering your brain into emotionally established patterns. Which brings me to two other games that have brought tears to my eyes - Journey and Nier. Journey is a pretty simple game that was designed from the ground up to manipulate people's emotions, which is a bit cheap in my eyes, but it did a good job of it, which made it handy in the "vidya isn't art like films" arguments that were popular at the time.

Nier probably doesn't need the proselytising I used to do for it these days, what with the remaster, but if you like emotional experiences in video games and haven't played it, you really should. All three of the main characters are designed to be off-putting, but each of their tragedies pulls at your heartstrings regardless. But if Nier's characters and story are a one-two punch Keiichi Okabe's gorgeous soundtrack is the follow up uppercut that puts you on the floor. Kaine's story is a great example - her theme is the beautiful Kaine/Salvation a soft and ethereal piece with lyrics that seem to be a melange of Gaelic, Greek, and Japanese. It plays when you first meet her and then again, sometimes slightly altered, when she takes the story lead at other times. So when her story comes to a climax in one of the endings, and the triumphant Kaine/Escape starts playing, it was a a real challenge to maintain my composure.

I am still not happy about the last of the four, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The baby scene is too cheap, it's such a jagged tonal shift from the slow drip-fed mystery you were just walking through that it still ticks me off. Which is not to say the sequence itself is badly done - it isn't at all, it just didn't belong tvoec imo.

Disco Elysium got me real good, many times. It's a beautiful story, and the writing is, as others have mentioned, stellar.

Outer Wilds was another one. The sense of exploration, the beauty of the world they've built, the terror of certain environments. I can't recommend that game enough.

The original Halo, playing it in like 2002. The story was super compelling and thrilling. The beginning of Kingdom Hearts, the island where the protagonist lives, was a great part of the story

Several. Note, I watch games more than I play them, in part because games are often not compatible with Mac especially early on in its release and my computer also often lacks the appropriate specs to properly run them. This means I tend to gravitate towards story-heavy games, where the enjoyment is mainly on the narrative and less on the gameplay. You can find a synopsis of any of these games online, so rather in this post I will try to sell these games to people who haven't played them before.

The main one that comes to my mind is SOMA, which is perhaps the piece of media that did the most to get me interested in sci-fi. In this game, the protagonist is a man who has brain damage and goes in for a new experimental brain scan to explore treatment options. During the scan, he blacks out and wakes up in a mysterious facility. This is a relentlessly bleak and nihilistic game that tackles topics like consciousness, brain emulation, artificial intelligence, morality and so on and while there's probably not much new there for the seasoned Mottizen who I assume is intimately familiar with all of these topics, it places its philosophical musings in the context of a very affecting story that stayed with me long after the credits rolled. The part where you have to extract the security cipher from Brandon Wan, as well as the ending, are some of the scenes that I still think about from that game today. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this game is probably one of my all-time favourite pieces of narrative media in general, and I always strongly recommend it to people who haven't played it or experienced it in some way.

There's also OMORI. This game is very unlike the previous in that it doesn't grapple with Big Themes or Big Ideas and rather tackles a more personal story. Now, it is an RPG Maker game, which are typically horribly written and put together, but this one is quite well done. You play as a hikikomori who routinely loses himself in a dream world he's made to cope with reality called Headspace, and watch as his mental state slowly unravels. This game is willing to go to incredibly dark places, and the last third of the game in particular is especially fantastic (albeit very emotionally draining). I do have my gripes with it - the game has a huge amount of unnecessary padding, for one, but the story more than compensates for it. And there's a late-game plot development which might be seen as cheap, but which I personally think works very well and which the game wouldn't be the same without.

Seconded SOMA, the ending really got under my skin.

Mount & Blade Bannerlord had me spend a day mulling over whether to support a failing roman empire that eliminated smaller cultures or a short-lived barbarian kingdom. But I guess that's more cerebral than emotional.

I'd again give it to Cyberpunk 2077. I've certainly done a lot more thinking about that one than about any other game's story that I can remember offhand. Especially wondering about how my perception of the deuterogonist changed over time, and how all the prospective endings made sense. I was genuinely sad that the game ended and I wouldn't get to explore it any further, and that I had seen the last of those characters.

I remember a review which said there are more hours of gameplay after the “end” of the game than before it. Were they playing it wrong?

Oh no, that's possible. It depends entirely on how much sidequesting content you leave over before you finish the main quest. The overall amount of content is the same regardless of how early you finish the plot.

I for one finished the main quest as the very last, after having meticulously cleaned out the entire map. And then my precarious structure of QoL and difficulty mods broke and I couldn't start the post-game anymore even if there was anything left to do.

Bannerlord is essentially player generated though, it merely provides the scaffolding for player decisions

In general, yeah, and especially so if you play the Sandbox mode. But I did play the main quest once, and it does force you to make that decision.

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