Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

Even aside from textual narrative, any video game academic will happily talk your ear off about how one of the cool things about video games is the way that the experience of play can create narratives.

 

Ah, the life of every party, Clickergame P. Sneerjoy.

 

That’s not quite as bad as spending several lengthy posts repeatedly hollering about how an article needed an editor only to discover that the author was the editor.

Someday I desperately want to discover that a bad goose game thonkpace was actually written by a goose.

 

I was gonna ask if that blog post from the POV of the goose counted, but then I remembered you said bad...

 

i see what you did there

 

(From the article about how games are supposedly better sans story)
Says you author? I beg to differ, I found Portal 2s story as good as any novel, and i love novels.

 

*angry hissing in Umineko*

 

You can't see me, but I'm gesturing at my Steam library in confusion. I'm just gonna assume the author has never heard of, for instance, "Her Story", an experimental storytelling game in which you poke through clips of taped police interviews with a woman, showcasing a truly haunting performance by Vivi Seifert, who ate this unbelievably demanding role for breakfast and probably asked for seconds. But this is the same critic who is suspicious of people in cities who claim to have ever encountered a goose, so who the fuck knows.

 

honestly my impression of this guy is that they are suffering from a terminal disease known as 'critical lack of imagination'

 

yet another case of someone who confuses his personal likes and dislikes with universal markers of quality

i’m very confused by the “games shouldn’t have story” thing. does this man not know that dating sims exist? they’re literally nothing but story and the genre has a massive playerbase. also it’s kind of impossible for a game not to have story, because humans are the ones playing it. we add story to anything! i’m playing minecraft right now, a game with about as little story as you can get, and I still find a modest narrative emerging because that’s what narratives do.

his point about game devs exploiting people’s leisure time for their own game could’ve been interesting, but it could apply to any kind of media creator - I think it was more properly a point about media marketing than anything else. who is more exploitative, a small indie game studio who poured time and effort into a genius idea that no one actually asked for, or the Disney execs who sit around hammering out the perfect formula for a movie that contains all the right clips for a trailer that will make everyone who sees it feel like they have to watch the thing in theaters or else become cultural outcasts?

 

this guy seems to hate games lol judging by that goose article and other article titles that he wrote that I saw
wild tbh

like its entertainment, theres ppl who do sports as a hobby, thats tough fuckin work but its fun for those folk
same with creative hobbies etcetera etcetera

tbh I think it's p funny like, what a confusin guy, is this on purpose or is he rly like that, shrugs!

 

While I haven't read this particular article, I have seen that take before in general, and from my experience usually the people saying it think dating sims aren't Real Games(TM). It's a line you'll see a fair bit from the kind of person who talks about how you're not a Real Gamer if you play anything that requires less technical skill than Bloodborne. The assumption is basically that the point of video games is to provide challenges in the form of learning patterns and responding to them with precise inputs. It typically imagines "story" exclusively in terms of cutscenes, which inherently prevent that kind of technical challenge for their duration, and thus a distraction from what the experience is Supposed to be about and a waste of their time.

The idea that overcoming the kinds of challenges presented by the arguer's genre of choice might not be the end-all of what games are/should/can be about is usually dismissed out of hand.

 

How anyone can play the Soulsborne games and think story is solely in cutscenes just boggles me

 

Yeah, the simple existence of They Breathe pretty much blows a hole in the whole "story and gameplay are a dichotomy" thing. But it's not really an attitude that usually comes from careful thought about what makes a game so much as a general belief that what you like is Good and everything you don't like is Not Good.

 

i mean it fully depends on the game. Most scholars and people in the industry do think gameplay and narrative are best when working in unity towards the same goal, but that is because we have things like Bioshock, a brilliant game which truly and awfully suffers from ludonarrative dissonance in some stretches, the condition in which gameplay and narrative seem to be at odds with eachother on a fundamental, and often philosophical level. The term in fact was coined in response to Bioshock. If your gameplay invites you, as much of gameplay does, to buy into a power fantasy tinged with objectivism, but your narrative boils down to 'objectivist philosophy inherently flawed' then unless you manage some truly awe-inspiring writing acknowledging this disconnect, your game will leave a mildly discordant, confusing impression on at least some of your audience.

 

Oh yeah, I'm not arguing with that. You can sure as hell end up with a thematically and tonally confused mess by trying to tell a story with your text that doesn't match the one being told by your mechanics (*distant echo of me pointing and laughing at Final Fantasy 8 can be heard in the distance*). It's just that the particular people I have seen argue that games should not have stories because "gameplay is more important" tend to be operating off the assumption that, well, presenting a textual narrative and presenting the player with an engaging series of tasks to overcome are inherently exclusive goals.

 

i remember in my media theory class in college we had to read a piece one person wrote in like... i think the late 90s or early 2000s, that tried to argue that trying to give a game a narrative ultimately detracts from the imagination of gameplay and will always detract from a game.. and then the professor was like 'yeah this essay was published like a month before one of the most popular and revolutionary narrative-based games was released' and it was basically an example of a line of thought that aged poorly

like i can see someone pre-home consoles looking at an arcade and thinking that putting too much story in games seems like a bad idea but.... my dudes its 2019

 

It was FF7, wasn't it.

 

nnno, i remember it was one of the early ones that had like, multiple endings and stuff changing in the game based on your decisions but i also know very little about video games so i have completely forgotten what the name was.