Which game(s) did you play, Reid?

A little of Witcher 1 and 3

To be fair to the games, I'm that way with most games. Non-campy power fantasies are just not my thing.

Witcher 3 seemed solid as a game.

Apparently Skyrim for Alexa wasn't a joke. They really made it.

Looks really good & interesting.

I've noticed recently, and it's begun to bother me, how much games lack subtlety. Every game rarely strays past the most overt basic mechanics, and all of the story is basically just spoken at you.

I replayed Myst/Riven recently and was impressed by how much subtle storytelling is there. There are many books to read, so many things to look at and think about. Morrowind had that too, and loads of quest, NPCs and objectives which don't follow the traditional formulas, and dialogue which sometimes hints but doesn't state. It holds up so much better than Skyrim, where every NPC acts so ****ing weird in dialogue.

The Fallout games usually try to have some subtle stuff, but usually that means a minor story about a person who did something weird after the bombs hit, and comes across more like easter eggs/jokes than an attempt to flesh out the world or anyone in it.

I think older World of Warcraft was more subtle, too, and even that wasn't subtle for its time. The red Defias story is still one of my favorite MMO narratives. Later on, though, they committed the cardinal sin of making the player the sole agent capable of moving any aspect of the story forward, and every important character in the narrative suddenly knows and cares who you are. Plus dumb **** like the ****ing fight where you had to make a boss do a barrel roll, an orgy of 2011 meme culture that was and still is aesthetic terrorism.

The shift from Portal to Portal 2 felt similar. Portal had more subtlety to it. Sneaking behind the walls and reading the graffiti is how you learn about the world. There's character and story there, and you're left to piece it together yourself. GLaDOS was also a great villain, who was subtle enough to allow you to think about the world and puzzles. Portal 2, though, I felt couldn't ****ing help itself with the memes. I remember at one point trying to play the game and hearing Cave Johnson's voice playing annoying, shouting, unsubtle dialogue as I was looking around and, instead of enjoying it, I thought eventually "can this guy shut the **** up for like two seconds?" At that point I felt Portal 2, despite having a higher budget, better design and having a bigger story, was the inferior entry. It killed off the subtleties of Portal, replacing it instead with an orgy of 2011 meme culture that was and still is aesthetic terrorism.

With the new Battlefield games we get more of it, too. The trailer for the new Battlefield WW2 game was aesthetic terrorism. ****, can we just get a decent battlefield game like 1942, but modernized, without all of the stupid memes, shouting, unnecessary explosions and bull****? Can you ****ing not? Just please, keep thinks tamped down for a bit?

I could go on, but I think you've gotten my point. Why can't games ever do anything without being dramatic, in your face, unsubtle, it's like an industry of tacky decadence.

I guess I was right to stop playing games after I stopped playing morrowind in high school then? Lol

Then again last time this came up, Jon`C was able to list like 10 great games that have come out in the last decade (portal 2 and skyrim included)

I do think Morrowind is very cool insofar as it gives players verbal directions ("turn left past the spooky bridge") instead of map markers or compasses or waypoints or whatever. It demands more attention than a game in 2018 typically would, but it definitely connects you with the world and makes the simple act of walking around feel a bit more evocative. That said, I think you are one of a very small minority of people who actually enjoys reading big blocks of text ingame, whether as books or dialogue or w/e. :v

I do think RPGs in general have a big problem with overwriting--since games writers aren't pressed for time the way film and TV writers are, they're happy to have their characters babble out paragraphs and paragraphs of exposition, and this sadly didn't get any better when they transitioned from text to voiced dialogue. At least in Morrowind it was easier to skip out of. Bioware's games suffered from this a lot (after playing Mass Effect 2 I discovered i could skip 90% of the dialogue lines after the first sentence and hardly lose any meaning or context) although they've gotten a bit better w/each successive release apart from Andromeda.


As someone who loved both Portal games and hated the meme culture that sprung up around them I think you're maybe overstating the difference between the two games, but I do see what you're getting at.

I've been listening to Valve's developer commentaries on HL2, Portal, etc. and been startled by how uncomfortable they often make me, mainly because they're exemplary of a lot of the design trends that you're complaining about--make sure the player isn't confused, make sure the player knows what to do, make sure the player feels powerful, make sure the player feels smart, etc. It's stuff that Valve was very good at back when they made a lot of games, and stuff that pretty much every medium-to-large game studio wants to emulate. But it does come with costs--Alyx Vance is completely neutered to make sure she doesn't annoy the player, or make the player mad, or make the player feel dumb, or whatever. It's only because Valve had talented writers & pretty good taste (especially for the early 2000s of games) that she doesn't come off as the ridiculous waifu fantasy that Valve's design philosophy kind of required her to be.

So, back to Portal, the first game was based on the work of some students who were brought in from Digipen, and iirc it wasn't expected to be much of a success. When it became a smash hit and they started development on Portal 2, they shuffled the teams and (I would imagine) brought it more in line w/Valve's very player-friendly design philosophy. I think we disagree abt how funny and good the result was but that's fine.

I do think the "make everything easy for the player" design trend that has basically defined games for the last 15 years has had some bad knock-on effects. When it works well, as in Valve games or, more recently, Naughty Dog's recent stuff, it's thrilling and great and perfect. The last Uncharted was one of my favorite things I've played in a long time. When it's done poorly, or even just competently (e.g. Far Cry 5) it can become grating and boring really quickly, in a way that a mediocre systems-driven game from the early 2000s doesn't. And I think developers are finally starting to get wise to what we lose by making everything easy and obvious. Breath of the Wild takes a big step away from those trends, and the success of the Souls games has been thoroughly noticed by developers


This is basically what Battlefield has been since BF3, and it's not really to my taste either, but...1942 was a weird upstart game that tried something crazy that happened to work. Battlefield is a quadruple-A blockbuster franchise now. I think it's unfair to expect it to be a janky, seemingly straight-laced war shooter where dudes drive aircraft carriers into each other and crash jeeps into planes.


Don't watch the Ubisoft E3 press conference, haha.

But really, AAA is gonna be huge and dumb and loud until it stops making money by being huge and dumb and loud. That doesn't mean there's not a lot of games out there that are doing something different--Arkane has been carrying the imsim torch (despite never seeming to make any money at it), Fullbright and Campo Santo are doing very cool stuff with FPS games, Finji & Infinite Fall are putting out great, thoughtful games, etc. I think there's probably more Good Games out there now than ever, they're just overshadowed.

What do you have against cars randomly falling from the sky and women soldiers with hook hands and blue eye liner beating a sexually exploitative German soldier with the bat from Inglorius Basterds?

Admittedly, I've never felt more entitled to be mildly annoyed that there were women soldiers in a video game. This game completely abandons any kind of realism or historical faithfulness in order to create a rollercoaster amusement. It's so different from the WWII games of the mid-2000s. Even though it's hard to imagine now given the state of tech then, those games made me feel fear and disgust at the senseless loss of life. They even made me feel deep respect for WWII vets.

This is fun, stupid violence for its own sake. The WWII theme is just a skin placed over the exact same game mechanics as every BF entry, I presume (I don't know I haven't played since BF 1942).

Huh, you really don't play games?

I think Skyrim and Portal 2 are great games. They work as examples of that larger trend in gaming that I'm pointing out. There's plenty of worse examples I could have picked.



Unfortunately, yeah. I've noticed though, as I get older, I find combat in games more and more unbearable. It's all so repetitive and uninteresting. I think that's part of why I search for other things, because the other things don't do it anymore.

Like, in Skyrim, if you don't feel like running around slaying Draugrs, what's there to do? You can't even do guild quests, because half of them send you into dungeons.

I wrote a thing once on Reddit how much I love the quest 'Paranoia' in Oblivion. A quest where a crazy person asks you to spy on NPCs, and you're given many options to either fuel into his paranoia, or deny it. It's a lovely side quest.



I haven't played the Mass Effect games, so I'll take your word. (I have ME1 and ME2 on steam, but after hearing about the utter disappointment of 3 I decided not to get involved).

For me, it's not just the amount of dialogue, but how dialogue is used.



In retrospect, I think you're right. So many ****ty "cake is a lie" references:



Part of it might have been accidental. Portal feels layered. GLaDOS has a kind of stilted voice, but generally the delivery is smooth and emotionally calm:



I really like it, you do get the sense when you're playing the test is structured to calm you down. You find out about the horrors when you get to the fire pit part, or earlier realize the horror if you're an observant player who explored all of the nooks. I think this juxtaposition created much of the game's atmosphere.

Compared to Cave Johnson:



The delivery to me is very frantic. I'm prone to anxiety and I can't sit there and listen to that, it's so over the place and unstable, I feel anxiety listening to it. I probably would have appreciated it more if the delivery was less campy. It's not the content of the dialogue, either, it's the delivery.



Right, alot of that stuff is good, in the right amounts. Thing is as well, I think my complaint doesn't have to come at the cost of narrative clarity. Subtlety is just that, it adds resolution and detail to parts which expand and clarify the narrative without changing its overall message, in an ideal world. I find though that games have entirely scrapped any amount of subtlety, probably due to time constraints, like how Skyrim was basically unfinished. So instead all you get is what you see, and because there's no amount of subtle storytelling permitted, the only storytelling mechanisms people use now feel like hammering nails.



Yeah, it would be silly to suggest every game should follow one design doctrine. I suppose my complaint is towards how much that design philosophy has dominated the entire industry more than how much any one particular game follows it.



Hah, well it wouldn't have to permit some of the silliness. But just having a normal shooter again, before CoD ruined everything by adding unlockables. I just want to get in a game, run around and shoot people. But that's a different complaint.



I hope the next economic crisis wipes out the major AAA studios and opens the realm again to creativity.

They gave her a cockney accent, top. That's how 14 years try to fake a British accent at a slumber party. I feel like if they actually had some creative vision, it wouldn't be offensive, but it appears creatively bankrupt, they just want inclusiveness because they know it's politically popular to be inclusive. Which isn't really a bad thing, you know, it's just.. well sometimes I just don't want the political sphere to expand into everything. Like, if you have a vision of an alternative history WW2 with women soldiers as your vision, hell yeah, fine by me, but doing it because it's the right business choice is ehhh.

That's actually kind of why I like EU4. If you're a European nation, you reap strong benefits from colonizing and brutalizing natives. It's codified as a game mechanic. Is it ****ed up in a sense? I guess, but when I'm playing I don't have to think about the consequences.

I agree, too, with how disrespectful it is. They heard that gamers still prefer those settings, even though the 00's were a glut of ****ty WW2 shooters, but they don't want to repeat the format because it's hard to have loot boxes in a game that's historically accurate. So they do "alternative timelines" because balancing history is hard, and it's hard to have loot boxes & unlockables when people have standard gear. So they don't change out of any creative vision, it's because they want to sell more ****. F that.

I didn't buy the WW1 Battlefield and I won't buy this. Since we're in the 100 year anniversary of WW1, my family has been compiling a timeline of events of our ancestors who fought. My great grandfather fought in the Canadian 1st division from 1914-1918, fought in a battle less than 25 miles from where Hitler's division was deployed, was among the first division to be gassed by the Germans, etc., and I have two Americans who started fighting in 1916. Their descriptions of fighting, having people get hit by shells 20 feet from them, waking up in the morning to find the soldier a few holes over was hit, and so forth, coming from a 19 year old is impressive (we still have all of their journals and letters). Having a tacticool alternate history shooter that's just reskinned BF3 doesn't do any of that history justice, it's just.. lame.

I'm expecting Death Stranding to be a bit of a car crash, because historically that's what happens when someone lets Kojima off his leash.

It's too bad, too, because video games could be a very powerful medium for creating an anti-war piece of art that captures the horrors of WWI. Instead, we get camp.

I think our culture needs a WWI movie right now. It's more topical than most people realize.

****, maybe, but it at least looks like it has some novelty, which makes it leagues beyond anything else a AAA dev is working on right now.



100% agree.

I was thinking, too, about the way women are portrayed in video games, and it got me thinking about the medium in general. If you want to simplify and break down conflicts, you can generally categorize them into these heuristic categories:

• Man against man
• Man against nature
• Man against self
• Man against society

Of these three conflicts, there's one that's easily programmed into a video game, and is consequently the dominant format, man against man. Basically all video games are of this sort: it war games, strategy games, most RPGs, it's the single most universal video game conflict. Man against self is often cringey bull**** in video games, and man against society is hard, because dialogue is very challenging to get right in a video game.

Of these conflicts, there's a gender split between what sort of conflicts men and women would have been likely to face historically. Man against man and man against nature are more typically "masculine" conflicts, whereas man against self and man against society are more typically "feminine" conflicts, in the sense of what society expected from them: men were expected to be leaders, militaries have historically been comprised of mostly men, whereas women are expected to form the backbone of society, required to raise children, be emotionally supportive.

In other words, the conflicts women most likely faced, historically speaking, don't fit well into video games. For instance; Angela's Ashes is an interesting and compelling narrative when considering Angela's perspective. But how could you possibly gamify being expected to be subservient to a husband who wants to blow all of his money on alcohol? The dialogue technology just doesn't exist to make such a game doable, and, despite real historical examples existing of women who didn't exist in such situations, right, we know that this sort of struggle is pretty typical.

So, instead of game developers working on making titles which actually reflect the historical conflicts women have faced, which would be, you know, hard, and, you know, genuinely interesting, they just sort of shoehorn women into the man vs. man conflict. Hence a woman beating up a Nazi with a club. "Yeah but a woman did a thing in a war once," you might say, "yeah, but more than that, women were raped by the Wehrmacht."

I mean, there's a reason games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are more popular among women than Battlefield, and it's not because of innate gender stereotypes, and it's not because you don't have women going around beating people up, it's because the kinds of conflicts which people relate to are affected by a wide range of historical and real-world conflicts. Men want to play war games because we still feel we're supposed to fill that role of dominant aggressor, and it's how we imagine ourselves in history.

If you want games that better represent women, learn how to make games where the central conflicts better represent the sorts of conflicts women want to deal with, and how they might fit into history.

But, hey, we all know that sort of **** won't work commercially, right? Video games are for men. /s

We had Wonder Woman. I can think of no better way to teach people about WW1 and create a good role model for women: just be a stunningly beautiful Israeli model with superpowers so you can physically dominate men. That's a super realistic role model for women! So positive.

I think there's a lot about that movie's feminism that captures what's regressive about a lot of feminism. Here's the skinny: Wonder Woman is primarily powerful because she was raised in isolation from society. However, women who are raised within society are corrupted and made submissive by it. So the foil for Wonder Woman is the of the other female characters in the movie: a secretary, who is portrayed as fat, submissive and dumb. Only because the foreign woman is raised outside of society does she feel empowered and not assume that she should be submissive and accept the role into which society forces her.

Those two characters represent the dual nature of a certain kind of feminism out there: on the one hand, women are supposed to be strong, yet on the other hand, the systems of oppression that are keeping them down are so powerful and invasive that they are completely insurmountable and inescapable, and changing them is impossible. They're strength is nothing in the face of the forces that are opposed to them and oppress them. The position of inferiority is supposed to be internalized.

But, yeah: I thought the WWI elements of that movie were kind of underplayed. There are trenches, but, aside from that, the Germans are effectively portrayed using all of the cliches that are usually used to depict Nazis. It might a well be WWII.

You guys should check out Paths of Glory if you haven't already!

One game I remember some teenage girls taking a liking to was The Sims.

Another is Mario Cart.

It's been a while since I've owned a machine that can play modern games.

Earlier this year I re-lived some of my childhood when I pulled out an old joystick and played the GOG Dosbox version of TIE Fighter, as well as JK in wine (multiplayer works too). And the year before that I beat Dark Forces again.

I'm still interested in any game with the following traits:

1. Runs on Linux
2. Minimal system requirements
3. Minimal time investment
4. Stimulating enough that I don't feel guilty for not using my time for something creative such as programming / math / music / writing, rather than semi-passive consumption. Actually, my go-to way to waste time via consumption these days is music, which to me has a healthier culture surrounding it compared to gaming. Even music feels more participatory, since I can explore any song or album I like without being chained to it until I 'win'. Maybe Morrowind comes close in terms of freedom and richness of things to explore.

For example, 2048 was amusing. If my math professor can get addicted to it, it's good enough for me.

A trend I noticed around the time I gave up gaming back in my late teens was for games to require more and more assets, but not necessarily more interesting mechanics.

If I wanted to be dazzled, I'd watch a movie rather than drop $3k on a gaming rig that has the complexity of a Disneyland ride. The next game I play will probably be Grim Fandango.

I think this dumbing down of games might also be due to the audience growing older. All those people who grew up with the first video games are now in their 40s and 50s. I'm 34 years old and don't seem to have the reflexes I used to have. I really like the new Doom, but it's often too fast for me. On the other hand I played Tomb Raider, which is holding you hand throughout the whole experience and it seemed to get exactly to my comfort level. It's acutally a shame, really. I'm not even sure if I could handle Jedi Knight on hard anymore.

I just finished Dishonored + the DLC and started Dishonored II and this game is ****ing stunning.



Relevant to the prior discussion, too--Dishonored is really carrying on the imsim torch of Thief and System Shock etc. There's very little railroading, every level is a big city block full of buildings and hidden items and secret passageways, lots of lore packed away in books and notes, etc etc. I regret not playing it until now.

Damn, looks good. I will.

Hmm. Did you play Doom on a console with a controller or on a PC? I originally bought it (well, got it for "free" via a $60 ms store credit when purchasing an xbox) for XBONE and even on easy I didn't play past the first campaign level. I just can't make the controllers work for FPS for some reason. I bought it again on Steam sale at some point and I've been planning to try again on PC but just haven't gotten around to it yet. I'm thinking I'll be much better with mouse & keyboard.

I really enjoyed the Dishonored series. They built a great world, and the games feel really slick. It's definitely a series worthy of three or four replays.

I played on a PC. I didn't play while properly sitting at a good desk, though. I'll try that as soon as I actually have a proper desk at home. ^^

@38:00

Todd Howard thinks we're all stupid, doesn't he?

I mean, he's right

What's wrong with being stupid?

Is soccer bad because when your team scores you get an artificial sense of accomplishment?

Of course I stopped playing soccer AND video games at about the same time in my life, but that's my fault. I'd probably be healthier mentally and physically if I had kept up both. I guess the introvert in me was just bored because I didn't see either activity as creative enough to warrant my time, but the trick is to find time for sports stuff AND nerd stuff.

But yeah, gamers are the jocks of computing! Programmers, artists, writers, mathematicians... those people are the real nerds!

What's healthiest is when you have a closer and more symbiotic relationship between content creators and consumers, which is why we're all here pining for the simpler times of Dark Forces II and Massassi. I haven't even tried to mod games recently, but my feeling is that for a while there it was harder to get into. Maybe it's easier now with things like Unity. But more there are also obnoxious things such as DLC replacing the more open / less predatory Doom / Quake-style modding communities...

On the other hand, unlike soccer, games make you fat :|

I always chuckled when my fat-ass neighbor would fire up his N64 to play a snowboarding game called 1080, with the theme song belting out the lyrics, "work your body! work your body!"

u makes u fat, RJ

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're fat."

Warren Spector just tweeted that he likes our game I'm ded

It's all downhill from here...

1. What is your game?
B. Who is Warren Spector?
iii. What is a tweet?

https://twitter.com/Warren_Spector/status/1011948705346441216

He made Deus Ex!

https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/07/09/quit-buying-skyrim-remasters-if-you-want-them-to-stop-says-bethesdas-todd-howard

He's talking about you Jonk

Actually, kind of. It's interesting how basically the way video games/the internet is structured now is like a slot machine. The game Todd Howard shows is like a slot machine: pretty flashing lights, satisfying, and addictive mechanics.

In a sense all of this is very immoral, we as a society tolerate manipulating people who are less able to control themselves. It's interesting how Facebook et al are intrinsically immoral, emotionally manipulative systems we allow to exist.