TychoCelchuuu
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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu
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Yeah, I'd be super interested in at least seeing the six pages of notes. I hope my comment didn't come off as too accusatory - I think a nicer way of putting it would be that the way I think about this podcast, it's not like Sarah and Chris are special authorities or arbiters of what's worth talking about, in the sense that if they don't bring something up then it's not part of the discussion. As far as I'm concerned, everyone else in these threads is just as much a part of the conversation, and if you were really looking forward to a discussion of all the Greek myth stuff, you don't have to wait for Sarah and Chris to do it for you: you can do it yourself, with us (and Sarah and Chris, even!) here in the thread!I think we'd all be interested in hearing your perspective on the book. You can't expect everyone to have a deep knowledge of the Greek Classics. These discussions are for sharing these kinds of insights.
So, in other words, don't be sad that other people aren't talking about what you want to talk about. Instead, just talk about what you want to talk about! I think the best way to get people talking about something is to start talking about it yourself, rather than hoping they'll talk about it, especially if you're enthusiastic about the topic and have six pages of notes to touch the conversation off.
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But maybe they did, for all we know! The book just doesn't focus on those characters.I don't agree with that though. There's definitely instances of people trying to escape from North Korea, concentration camps, and from slavery. I'm not asking for every character to revolt and fight against the man. I just think one or two of the characters should have had the thought.
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Are you similarly sad that they didn't go into all the Shakespeare stuff, or are you fine that they skipped over that? Everyone's allowed to care about what they care about, obviously, but if you're writing off the podcast for not focusing on your bugbear while you're fine with them not having focused on someone else's bugbear, that's a little myopic, no?
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I feel like I'm just repeating myself, but maybe it will sink in the second time:I found this really distracting too, to the point of it making the book a lot less enjoyable to me. I get that it's intentional and people often don't do what's best for them but they obviously recognized that they were going to die if they stayed there and tried different things to get out of it. Not even one person had the thought of escape?
I guess I thought the book was still ok despite that. I'll probably need some time to let the book sink in. Maybe the podcast will change my mind.
Both metaphorically and practically I think this works just fine. On a metaphorical level, the acceptance of death as something that just can't be avoided, because it's inevitable, and because this has been drilled into you as your destiny from the earliest age, is hardly an inconceivable mindset, right? I'm teaching the Iliad to students right now and one of the points that book hammers home is how humans are mortal. Our fate is to die. There is no getting around that. The clones in this book have the same approach to organ donation and death - is that so ridiculous?
On a practical level, people will put up with any old shit in the right circumstances. This is like asking why the population of North Korea doesn't just all rise up and liberate itself or why people on death row don't spend every day trying to break out of jail or why people in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany didn't all fight back or whatever. Humans are malleable and just because you imagine yourself trying to escape in this situation that doesn't mean it's implausible that there would be people (maybe even you, if you were in the same situation!) who wouldn't even conceive of fighting back or trying to escape.
I think people who are like "why don't they ever try to get away" are failing to look outside the difference in these two societies, ours and theirs. In contemporary Western society human rights are such a big deal that everyone is raised from the earliest age to think of themselves as special and inviolable. It's inconceivable that we'd ever harvest your organs against your will. But that's just a specific outlook we have in our society not some universal truth the whole world has always been convinced of.
If you don't believe me, look at how we treat non-humans. We harvest their organs, and their flesh, all the time. We breed them to have better organs and more flesh for us to harvest. We keep them in appalling conditions and make it illegal to film those conditions. We use euphemistic words to talk about what we do to them. And almost nobody gives a shit.
Imagine you went to a society that looked at us as monsters for what we do to non-humans. They ask "how can anyone be complicit in treating non-human animals like this? It's so obviously wrong!" My response would be "I tried not to be complicit. I was a vegan and I advocated for non-human animals. I did my best." What would your answer be? Why can't the characters in the book use your answer as a way to explain why they didn't try to escape?
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This is one of the reasons I like the game so much: it does a great job of putting you in Henry's shoes and making it believable that Henry would be freaking out over some sort of conspiracy, because that's exactly what you do with the evidence you get, even though, as you and Henry eventually find out, there was nothing to freak out about in the first place and it was all in your head, more or less.It seemed so much more sinister. Maybe I was reading into it too much or maybe it was bit of a red herring put in there on purpose, but I liked the fact that I didn't know if I could trust her. She could have been pulling my strings for all I know. I'll definitely have to replay this to parse these conversations again.
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One of the reasons I like System Shock more than SS2 is that System Shock didn't have a whole clunky RPG system bolted on top of it. That whole deal added very little to the game for me. I'll be glad to see it gone if SS3 ditches it.
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Read this book. In general I enjoyed it a lot, so I'll put my negative thoughts first and thus we'll end on a more positive note.
Stuff I didn't enjoy so much:
The page-turner nature of the book really damaged it, I think. It removed a lot of the true to life nature of it for me because the entire book is a series of memories and nobody remembers their life as a series of cliffhangers carefully designed to hook the reader into reading the next page. It's just ridiculous. Recalling a series of memories can be a narrative or it can be scattershot or it can be meandering but it can't be The Da Vinci Code, if you ask me. So I was not a fan of that aspect at all.
I think the book would have really benefitted from some sort of framing story taking place in the present. That sort of structure could have been a more naturally way to make it a page turner, because instead of relying on the sequence of memories to set up each cliffhanger, the present could have been responsible for that. It also would have been a nice counterpoint to heighten the nostalgia, if we could see what the narrator is up to in the present (presumably sitting around missing a kidney or whatever).
The very simple tone the book was written in jarred me a bit. It's a good tone for recounting childhood experiences, because it sort of matches the inner voice of a child, I think, but it didn't work for me for two reasons. The first is that a good chunk of the book is not about childhood but rather young adulthood, at which point the voice should probably not have been so straightforward, especially because ostensibly all of these memories are from the point of view of an adult looking back. The second issue is that apparently the narrator read a shitton of Victorian novels or whatever, so it's pretty inexcusable to me that her inner narrative reads like Hemingway had a stroke or whatever. That's some serious dissonance.
So much for things that didn't grab me. Now on to what I enjoyed:
Gosh, I'm sure everyone thinks this, but boy howdy is this not an evocative, true to life book. It's jawdropping how perfectly it captures things about childhood or about how people act in certain relationships and so on. So many times throughout the book I was struck by how well it described what was going on in terms that seemed true to life. Picking one example not at random but for another reason that will become clear in a sec, on page 106 of my paperback coppy, Tommy tries to convince the narrator that he's happy and so he says he's happy and smiles and laughs. She recalls:
Look at all the stuff going on here. There's the super true to life description of a thing people do - I do exactly what Tommy does! (That's one reason this passage struck me.) There's the pitch perfect way of capturing what people think about this, and also enough hints to show that the narrator herself actually isn't the final arbiter of truth here (she's wrong, I think, about Tommy doing this because he thinks it's more convincing, and she's wrong that it makes him easier to take advantage of). And in the context of what is going on in this section it's a perfect way of summing up their relationship and the situation it's in and how it's changing.Then when I said to him: "Tommy, I can tell. You haven't been too happy lately," he said: "What do you mean? I'm perfectly happy. I really am." And he did a big beam, followed by this hearty laugh. That was what did it. Years later, when I saw a shadow of it every now and then, I'd just smile. But back then, it really used to get to me. If Tommy happened to say to you: "I'm really upset about it," he'd have to put on a long, downcast face, then and there, to back up his words. I don't mean he did this ironically. He actually thought he'd be more convincing. So now, to prove he was happy, here he was, trying to sparkle with bonhomie. As I say, there would come a time when I'd think this was sweet; but that summer all I could see was that it advertised what a child he still was, and how easily you could take advantage of him. I didn't know much then about the world that awaited us beyond Hailsham, but I'd guessed we'd need all our wits about us, and when Tommy did anything like this, I felt something close to panic.
I realy liked the sci-fi part of the story, both on a basic level and on a more metaphorical level.
On the basic level, I saw a lot of parallels between the clones and everyone else in this book, on the one hand, and non-human animals and humans in real life, on the other hand. There's the use to which the clones are put - medical experiments, just like non-human animals, and organ harvesting, just like non-human animals (although we typically eat, rather than transplant, the latter sort of organs). There's the sense that once we have some advantages, we can't go back: the society in the book won't stop harvesting clone organs because they've accepted that certain diseases can be cured, and our society in real life won't stop eating non-human animals because we've accepted that certain animals are food, this despite the fact that there's nothing necessary about harvesting clone organs or killing and eating non-human animals. There's the urge to think of the sources, the clones and the non-human animals, as without "souls" or some other special "something" which explains why it's okay to treat them like shit, even though someone who thought things through with a clear head would realize that there's nothing special about us as opposed to clones or non-human animals that renders it wrong to kill us but totally fine to kill a clone or a non-human animal. There are the people fighting for the rights of the disenfranchised but at the same time they're unable to fully see the "other" as equals - they see their whole project as a sort of charity for the worse off rather than a fight for equality.
On the metaphorical level, I think the way the clones deal with their eventual death via organ harvesting is a great metaphor how we deal with our eventual deaths. For a while they're aware of it but not aware of it, innocent because they're purposefully shielded from it and because it's the sort of thing they themselves don't want to deal with. As they grow up, they're no longer shielded from it, but they still do their best to ignore it, and even once they are straight up dealing with it and getting their organs harvested they still haven't fully engaged the topic. They still use euphemisms like "completed" to discuss what's going on, just like even in the face of our own obvious mortality we often have to talk around it ("passed away," "passed on") and we often don't want to look it straight in its face even as we are dying. The sense of inevitability is strong in the book just as it is in real life: it's not really a live project ot escape death.
So, cdkr, that means I have two responses to your point:
Starting with my second point, the donors don't look for an escape because for them there isn't an escape. That is not the world they've been brought up in. They've been brought up in a world where clones get their organs harvested and die, just like we've been brought up in a world where humans are born, live for some time, and die. You don't go around that. You don't question the rules of the game. That's the human condition - the ancient Greeks thought of humans as the "thanatoi," the ones who die, as opposed to the immortal gods, the "athanatoi." To the Greeks, to be human is to die, and to die is to be human. Ditto for the clones in this book. To be a clone is to get your organs harvested until you die. That's the world.I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that none of the donors ever seems to consider escape. I assumed it would have been a major theme - life finds a way and all that. Even after Kath and Tommy are told that there are no deferrals, I suspected at least a suggestion of alternative possibilities (from Tommy), but there is a bit of frustration followed by resignation.
On a more practical level, people can be brought to see all sorts of things as normal to the point where they don't resist. People sometimes ask why prisoners in concetration camps in the Holocaust didn't fight back more often or why when there's a mass shooting people just let themselves be lined up and executed rather than fighting back. The answer is that human psychology is complex but honestly we can put up with a lot of obviously wrong shit, especially if we're told all our lives that it isn't wrong. Again, look at how we treat non-human animals. It's obvious that non-human animal cruelty is wrong, and yet we engage in it on a vast scale, all day every day, to eat hamburgers. How is that any better than growing cloned humans for their organs? It isn't, but people just go along with it, because all throughout their lives it hasn't even occurred to them to quesiton the whole arrangement. Their whole lives, the clones have been brought up to see their lives as normal, and indeed they've been complicit in seeing things these ways, because as the book so superbly points out, kids are experts at enforcing implicit rules via mob mentality. Imagine how much of your self-conception you'd have to ditch, how much of your formative years you'd have to reject, if you were a clone who came to fight back against the organ donation system.
Finally, my copy of the book amusingly had, at the end, "questions and discussino topics" which are "intended to enhance your group's reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go." I will reproduce them here for everyone's edification:
1. Why is it important for Kathy to seek out donors who are "from the past," "people from Hailsham"? She learns from a donor who'd grown up at an awful place in Dorset that she and her friends at Hailsham had been really "lucky". How does the irony of this designation grow as the novel goes on? What does Hailsham represent for Kathy, and why does she say at the end that Hailsham is "something no one can take away"?
2. Kathy's narration is the key to the novel's disquieting effect. First person narration establishes a kind of intimacy between narrator and reader. What is it like having direct access to Kathy's mind and feelings? How would the novel be different if narrated from Tommy's point of view, or Ruth's, or Miss Emily's?
3. What are some of Ruth's most striking character traits? How might her social behavior, at Hailsham and later at the Cottages, be explained? Why does she seek her "possible" so earnestly?
4. One of the most notable aspects of life at Hailsham is the power of the group. Students watch each other carefully and try on different poses, attitudes, and ways of speaking. Is this behavior typical of most adolescents, or is there something different about the way the students at Hailsham seek to conform?
5. How do Madame and Miss Emily react to Kathy and Tommy when they come to request a deferral? Defending her work at Hailsham, Miss Emily says, "Look at you both now! You've had good lives, you're educated and cultured". What is revealed in this extended conversation, and how do these revelations affect your experience of the story?
6. After their visit to Miss Emily and Madame, Kathy tells Tommy that his fits of rage might be explained by the fact that "at some level you always knew". Does this imply that Kathy didn't? Does it imply that Tommy is more perceptive than Kathy?
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Amusingly I finally decided to read t his book on the 8th, without realizing the episode was out. I finished it yesterday. Haven't listened to the episode yet, so here are my pre-episode thoughts:
I think the book would have worked much better for me if the two halves had been swapped. Putting Mathilde's stuff second has two deleterious effects, I think. The first is that it makes her character into a second fiddle for Lotto's story, because her side of things is basically filling in gaps, fleshing out scenes, and so on rather than standing up on its own. I don't know if I agree with dustincorreale that the whole thing is essentially Lotto's perspective, but I do think that putting Mathilde second has the effect of making things seem like that. The second reason is that all of the wacky batshit plot twists come in the Mathilde section, and it just makes everything feel like a crass page-turning thriller that strings along the surprises just to keep you guessing. I don't have a problem with crass thrillers in the abstract - some of my favorite movies are effectively nothing except surprise after surprise, for instance - but when this book effectively turned into The Da Vinci Code or whatever I really started to lose interest, because I was hoping it had interesting things to say about the relationship, when really all it wanted to do was drop a series of implausible surprises. Ending with the most implausible surprise of all (guess who slept with Lotto's secret illegitimate son!!!!!) just soured me more.
Putting the Mathilde stuff first would've solved both those issues and it would've made the book more honestly focused on Lotto rather than accidentally focused on Lotto, I think. Lotto's kind of a sad sack and that would be more tragic and affecting if first we get all this crazy turmoil going on and then we swap to Lotto's perspective and it's the much more trite story that makes up the first part of the book.
I share Mangela Lansbury's disappointment that this book reads like someone experimenting a little bit but not a lot. When it swapped to a play to describe the waiter being bribed to dump the wine on Mathilde I wasn't sure how I felt about it - why the shift there? What is that doing? Ditto for at the end, when we get the story of Lotto's illegitimate child but it's all being written by Mathilde, albeit with assurances from the square bracket chorus that Mathilde has "Antoinette in her bones" or something such that we're maybe supposed to be able to trust the fiction Mathilde's writing?
I'm not really sure how trustworthy those square brackets are and I'm not sure how happy I am with them either. I assume they're supposed to be the chorus but they are far too quiet for that and I never got a consistent idea about where they are coming from. I soured on them a bit when early in the book they report that Lotto, being tall and lanky, gets less blood to his dick so he's not as great a lover as he could be. That's not how tall lanky people work (I'm a tall lanky dude) but more importantly that's not how sex works, so I'm pretty sure the square brackets are supposed to be idiots, but if they're idiots they never really added anything interesting with their idiocy, just a lot of incidental comments that I can't trust because they're dopes. If they're not supposed to be idiots and this book just has a weirdly restrained conception of what it takes to have sex well, then I'm just really at sea about what those square brackets are up to.
In general I didn't enjoy the book a ton. It briefly looked like it would pick up near the very end of Lotto's story, because when he died or whatever the prose got more interesting, but then it went straight back to normal and started doubling down on wacky plot twists and lost my interest. It feels like this book had little to say: much of it is caught up in character sketches of Lotto and to a lesser degree Mathilde, but neither of these people are particularly unique (Mathilde is a walking bag of stereotypes, particularly) and it doesn't really have anything to say about the people it sketches.
Looking forward to listening to the episode! I'll probably report back after that.
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FWIW, I played for months and months and months without getting very good at all - I rarely made it to the ice level. Eventually I made it to the throne and died instantly. Then I made it to the throne again and killed it. I've made it to the throne a few more times and I think I'm legitimately better without having reached any sort of mastery or whatever.
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The best part of that clip is the guy walking past who pauses mid-stride like "whoa a robot playing golf, I'm gonna check this out" then by the end of the clip he's just as pumped as everyone else.
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I wouldn't be uninterested...
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A good book to read about culture is Watching the English. It's by an anthropologist and it's an anthropological study of English culture. Lots of people (English people especially) find it very eye-opening to see their culture described "from the outside," so to speak (the anthropologist is English but her descriptions bring to light the ways that English culture is its own thing, like Claire Hosking is talking about). I remember once years ago I stumbled on a website that was like a Cliff Notes version of world cultures for diplomats - it had an entry for most countries on earth with basic things like how to be polite, typical customs at meal times and when meeting people, and other stuff like that. It was fun to browse around but the real revelatory one for me was America - seeing all of my habits and folkways described in blunt language from the perspective of telling an outside the motions they have to go through to fit in was really interesting. I realized that I take a ton of things for granted.
That said, I also think that a lot of things are at work that "dilute" America culture, so to speak. In addition to SuperBiasedMan's point about America exporting its culture so much, America is a HUGE FUCKING COUNTRY, which means there's a lot of variation in "American" culture, but at the same time America is an immigrant nation that has had a hodgepodge culture for as long as it has existed, which means that it also has a strong homogenizing tendency that works at cross-purposes with the tendency to split itself apart geographically.
I also think that white people, at least in my experience, tend to be fairly happy to identify with the non-American portion of their identity, like itsamoose's friends. People who don't pass as white (Hmong, Indian, etc.), again at least in my experience, tend to be a bit less happy about highlighting the difference, probably because people give them so much shit for not actually being American because they're not white people. Nobody asks white people where they're "really" from in America. Meanwhile black people get shit from both directions - you've got people saying "go back to Africa" and at the same time white supremacy has spent the past few hundred years erasing all traces of African culture that it can, leaving a black American whose family hasn't recently arrived with not a lot to go on, so to speak, apart from being American, which means being a member of a society that has discriminated against you and your culture literally since day one.
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Some people are insensitive bigots who enjoy hurting people, and trigger warnings are designed to help people keep from hurting each other. So, if they want to be able to hurt people, they've got to be against trigger warnings. One way to do this is to turn them into a huge joke, which other people are happy to go along with because they're willing to have a knee-jerk reaction against anything progressive, which is just human nature generally. Since #GamerGate and gamer culture generally is one huge knee-jerk reaction against anything progressive, #GamerGate and gamer culture hates trigger warnings.Good lord, Direct2Drive has some delusional fucks working for them.
What's with the attack on "trigger warning" anyway, lately?
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The world may be poorer for the fact that Dear Esther is a game. But Dear Esther is a game.If you don't think it is useful to be able to speak about the "game" and "story" aspects of Tomb Raider, and how they support and antagonise each other, then that's clearly your choice. I submit that the world is poorer for that lack.
There is no such thing as a (good) "natural evolution" in language as contrasted with a (bad) "unnatural evolution". Language means whatever we want it to mean. There is no "natural" meaning for a word. We made up all the words.So, as you can see, I realise that the opposition in this thread is using "game" in a sense which I don't agree with. However, I disagree both that this is a general use (I think it's limited to "video game culture" only) and that this has been a natural evolution.
I really don't see any benefit to your approach. I honestly cannot make heads or tails of your Tomb Raider example. It seems to rely on the idea that it would be much easier to talk about things if game meant something other than what game means. But I don't see any difficulty talking about Tomb Raider the way we normally talk and I do not think your way of conceiving of "game" actually clears anything up. I can, however, make heads and tails of people harassing Twine authors for having not made games because they don't want queer people and trans* people and women muscling in on their gamer territory. So I think I know where I stand on this one.Further, it should be obvious from the tone of my submissions that part of my intent is to rehabilitate the more precise (not accurate) use of the word game in "video game" contexts. I am aware of how you're using it, I wish to convince you to use it more precisely and in a way which does not unconsciously perform cultural appropriation of existing fields of expression.
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This would be like conducting a poll to see whether the majority of people call a peanut butter sandwich a "sandwich." It would not be a very worthwhile use of time and money. If you check the Steam reviews for Dear Esther, even most of the negative reviews call it a game. It is only a small number of the reviews (mostly negative ones) which deny that it is a game.Where is this evidence? Has someone conducted a study, done polling with a representative distribution? I'm not attempting to snarkily imply you have no evidence, I am intrigued by the idea of concrete data on this.
I'm not sure why you are drawing this distinction. Would you say it's correct to call Dear Esther a video game but incorrect to call it a game?Tycho:
Firstly, I'd like to echo Ninety-Three's request for actual data or evidence on your claim re: the common use of the word "game". Explicitly, "game", not "video game", I note.
I realize that this is what you think ought to have happened, because you have an odd personal idiosyncratic definition of what "game" means. But just like my desire that we all suddenly call peanut butter "flim flam" is likely to be somewhat unconvincing when it comes to my suggestions about what ought to have happened in the past and what ought to happen in the future, I find your desire that we stop calling Dear Esther a game to be unconvincing in terms of how people ought to have responded to Dear Esther criticism and so on. Notice that the majority of negative Steam reviews have no problem admitting that Dear Esther is a game. It never crosses their mind to deny it. They have other issues with it, legitimate or not, but most criticism of Dear Esther that I've seen focuses on how it's a bad game, or a pretentious game, not on how it isn't a game. So I don't buy your narrative about backlash and proper responses and so on. Even if I did, we'd have to change what words mean, and that is not easy. The ship has sailed.However, I actually think that the backlash against morons saying that Dear Esther is not a game and therefore has no value is what caused this massive and quixotic inflation of the term "game" to mean "anything basically I say it is, if it's software". In my opinion, the reaction to people saying "this isn't X, and therefore has no value" should have been "you're right, it's not X. But it's actually really valuable, and your cultural and genre limits make you look like a dick". Instead, what self-defined "video games culture" did was to say "oh, no, it definitely has value, so I guess we have to argue that it is X". (This is part of the generally toxic effects that GamerGate has in a whole lot of "video games culture" contexts, of course.)
You are wrong that the word "game" has "meaning or precision that it has in all other contexts." Wittgenstein, who wrote before video games existed, demonstrated that "game" does not have any such meaning and precision.This has the sad effect that, in the context of "video games" only, the word "game" now can't be used with the same meaning or precision it has in all other contexts. I think that this is sad, limiting to culture and generally a bad thing. To deal with the cognitive dissonance this develops in people, we've had an inflation of pretentious terminology (people using ludic a lot more) and people "talking around" the area which the word "game" would naturally be used in other contexts (using "gameplay elements" and other circumlocutions to mean what people would say "game" about in other contexts).
I am not trying to swallow anything. I'm just speaking English. I have not made any decisions - they have been made for me by common usage. That is how words work. You may lament the effects of this. I personally do not lament the effects of this. But whatever the effects, you cannot argue that you are right and I am wrong. The best you can do is say that you wish that you were right and that I were wrong. But until wishes come true, Dear Esther is a game.In fact, I would argue that the insistence on using "game" in such a bloated way in specifically "video game culture" contexts is actually toxic to existing fields of cultural expression, via unconscious cultural appropriation. Taking the example of the interactive video / art installation Way To Go, as linked by clyde earlier in the thread; this is just one example of a large, preexisting field of digital and software art which has existed ever since we've had computers available to the public. None of these artists consider what they are creating to be games, as they come from a tradition in which it is understood that interactivity is a component of artistic projects without any pejorative. By inflating the noun "game" in "video game culture" so aggressively, you are essentially trying to swallow all of digital and software art into the genre and baliwick of "video games". I don't think that software and digital artists would like this to happen (and, actually, I've talked to some who were quite upset about being "demoted" to a subsidiary part of a different genre as a result of this kind of aggression).
The idea that people like Dan Pinchbeck or Porpentine are "not aware of the preexsiting fields of software art" is ludicrous. The fact that people think the label "game" best fits their software art is not evidence of ignorance, it's evidence of people who aren't delusional about about definitions calling a spade a spade. Perhaps you think Dan Pinchbeck and Porpentine ought to join you on your crusade and thus ought to refuse to call their games games, because they have the power to change the world. I'm not really buying that, but even if you're right, this is a case where they would have to use the word wrong for a while until they use it right, like the people who used "literally" to mean figuratively before they won that fight.I submit that the examples of "things which claim to be games so they can be video games" are almost all created by people who are primarily already part of video game culture, and are not aware of the preexisting fields of software art. So, there's definitely an unconscious issue here of people trying to create without being aware of the creative context in which they are now working.
Would you say that software art is a genre of video game? If not, I don't think your analogy works, because everyone in your example agrees that a book has been written. If so, then Dear Esther is a game.(By analogy, this is very much like what happens when writers who are not part of a given genre's cultural or social circle write something which (unwittingly) enters into that genre's tradition. Often, the genre which is imposed on is Science Fiction or Fantasy, and often, those writers from a literary tradition are aggressively dismissive of attempts to include their work in that genre, often claiming that the genre in question is generally worthless or hokey.)
You should probably read the link to the forum thread that I posted back on the first page of this thread. In there I explain why it's a profoundly misguided endeavor to come up with a sensible definition of "game." This is why the creator of Mountain failed and this is why you will fail any time you try.Certainly, this seems to be the case with Mountain, as the author's understanding of "games" seemed to be that "anything made with a game creation tool [in this case, Unity] is a game"; I submit that this reveals more about the shallowness of the author's understanding of tools and their limits within genre than it does about games and whether Mountain is one or not. It should be clear that, given the multiple non-game things made with Unity (including, for example, data visualisation tools: https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery/non-games?platform=&genre=943&gametype=t-all ), this argument is not sufficient. (Similarly, for example, one can use Celtx, or other Scriptwriting software to write things other than movie scripts. If Cormac McCarthy had published The Road and claimed it was a movie script, most people would have asked him to justify that statement. The response that "well, I wrote it in Celtx, which is a script writing tool, so that makes it a script" would have been openly mocked, I suspect.)
Language is not a "taboo," language is a way of attaching meaning to strings of sounds or symbols. You might not be happy with how language has shaken itself out, but this doesn't mean that you can declare by fiat that "game" means something other than what it means. You might be unhappy that Dear Esther is a game, but this doesn't mean it isn't a game. It is a game.But, as well as being harmful to preexisting fields of digital culture, this is also harmful to "video games culture" in itself. As the meaning of "video games" and "games as a shorthand for the nounphrase video games" expands, the meaning of the word "game" in contexts outside software is slowly erased in "video game" contexts. As I tried to point out with my Tomb Raider (2015) example, this means that it is now very hard to talk about the different aspects of "video games" with narrative, artistic and gameplay elements, because using the word "game" to mean "the work considered in its gameplay aspects" is now taboo. I dislike taboos, especially when they shut down reasonable or precise critical discussion.
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There is no argument anyone can ever make to convince people that they are using a word like "game" wrong except by pointing out that other people do not use the word this way. That is because words are made up, and they don't mean anything aside from what we take them to mean. If you find yourself having to fight tooth and nail to call something software poetry rather than game, because everyone else reflexively calls it a game and posts about it on games forums and gives it game of the year awards and writes about it for video game websites and video game magazines and so on, you've already lost. You can talk about why you'd prefer it if everyone agreed with you and stopped calling it a game, but nobody can ever be wrong to call it a game so long as your quest remains quixotic, as it is always going to remain, because the ship has sailed long ago.
With the except of a tiny niche of gamers who for various reasons desperately want the word "game" to mean something other than what it means, everyone who sits down in front of Dear Esther and plays (er, sorry, "experiences?") it is going to call it a video game.
It's not clear to me what your reason for embarking on this definition quest is - if it's because you want better accuracy, I'm afraid that you're mistaken in thinking that "game" is an inaccurate moniker, because it's only according to your idiosyncratic classification scheme that Dear Esther isn't a game. In fact calling it anything other than a game would be inaccurate given the way normal competent English speakers use the term.
Earlier in the thread you said that "every time you use a word to describe a thing, you consciously or unconsciously decide which categories best fit it" by way of explaining why Dear Esther is not a game, according to you. This runs up against the same worry: the category "game" does fit Dear Esther, like a glove in fact, insofar as we are using the term to mean what normal competent English speakers use the word to mean. You might have a preference that things were otherwise, but this is no guide to usage, just like my preference that people call peanut butter "flim flam" suggests that we ought to call peanut butter flim flam.
Earlier in the thread you said that to deny something is a game is not to render any sort of value judgment. This is true, although you wouldn't know it from the way most people who deny that Dear Esther is a game go about things. If you spend some time reading Steam reviews you'll find plenty of people who think "not a game" is a criticism of Dear Esther, some of whom list it as their only criticism. Here are some examples:
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198050154712/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/epiplon/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/atrithau/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/DynamiteNonsense/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/sanctorum/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/datgame/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197969569455/recommended/203810/
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Zupe00/recommended/203810/
Similar things occur with lots of other games that people like to brand as not-games, like Proteus. Perhaps the fact that people are wrong to attach a value judgment to the statement "not a game" renders all of this irrelevant, because you are not joining them in attaching such a value judgment. I think that the things these people say and do gives us good evidence of the sorts of things that happen when we brand games as not-games, especially games by and/or about marginalized groups like queer people, as Dear Esther and many Twine games are, and I think this is highlighted well by the Chastain storify link and the Game Police twitter account and the Errant Signal video, all of which were posted earlier in this thread. I think that even if (contrary to fact) Dear Esther and so on somehow weren't games, it would still be worth calling them games, simply to combat this kind of exclusion, even though branding something a not-game does not necessarily imply a negative value judgment.
You ask "why is it so important to you that all forms of (at least minimally) interactive multimedia experiences mediated via a computer are considered 'games', specifically?" I think this is an odd question - since you're the one using words to mean what nobody else takes them to mean (or, I should say, nobody else except the small niche of gamers that agrees with you - there's a lot of overlap with #GamerGate here, actually) it seems like the onus is on you to explain why you're so weird with words. It's important to me to call these things games for two reasons: first, they're games, which any normal competent English speaker can tell you after fifteen seconds of watching you play them; and, second, the forces working to exclude these things from the discussion of gaming are forces I do not like. I suspect that you do not see yourself as an ally of these forces, because you think we can still talk about not-games in the channels that we might have thought were reserved for games (video GAME forums, video GAME websites, GAME of the year discussions) but you have to admit you're in a really weird position to say "look on the one hand they're not games but on the other hand of course you should talk about them when you talk about games."
You asked "Are you sad that Microsoft Office isn't considered a game?" I am not sad. I am not sure why I would be sad.
You asked "Would you consider an executable which simply plays a recording of someone reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland a game?" I probably wouldn't. I'm not sure what hangs on this.
You note that "Maxis used to market all of their software as Software Toys specifically because they themselves didn't think they were games." Language changes over time. Maxis no longer markets all their software as software toys, because nowadays we call these things games. You may lament this change. You might want to go back to the bygone era when software toys were called by their rightful name. Perhaps you want to go back in time to before comic books were called comic books so that you can stop people from applying the label to books that are not comic, or to a time before novels were called novels because not all novels are novel. Unfortunately you cannot turn back the clock. Language has moved on. Games are games.
Say say that you are "using the English language in a manner which I think gives the things I'm talking about credit for how they are experienced, which doesn't normally require that much worry or concern on the part of people using their native language." I am not sure why "game" does not give Dear Esther credit for how it is experienced. If I thought "game" meant what you think it means, then I would agree. But neither I nor the vast majority of English speakers think this, and the evidence is that I and the vast majority of English speakers would call Dear Esther a game if we were sitting in front of it, or if we were reading about it on a video game website, or learning about its game of the year awards.
You say that you're "trying to get labelling right." But the only way to judge whether a label is correct or not is whether your usage of the label corresponds to everyone else's usage of the label. Your label here is clearly incorrect. You have incorrectly judged Dear Esther to be something other than a game, when in fact pretty much everyone calls it a game. If I label peanut butter "flim flam" I have not gotten labelling right.
I could go on, but hopefully the point is clear.
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I guess maybe all I have left to say is that if Dear Esther is not a game, then we ought not to be talking about it here, because this is the "Recently complete video games" thread in the "Video Gaming" forum. I of course think it's a game, but if you disagree then you really shouldn't be bringing it up in this thread in this subforum.
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I suppose that instead of saying "there is literally no reason to worry about whether something is or isn't a game" I should have said there is no good reason. That you can expand on your worries with various examples and various other labels does not mean that your worries are worth having or that this is a conversation that needs to come up every time Gone Home or Dear Esther are mentioned. Here are some things to mull over:So:
Obviously, pretty much by definition, "saying Y is not an example of X" is exclusionary, in the sense that you're excluding Y from membership of the category X. I'm not sure that that's inherently a bad thing, it's just a thing: it's how we as humans categorise things and manage meanings of words. This cup I have in front of me is Not a Game, and in that sense, I am being just as exclusionary and in the same sense as I am when talking about (say) Dear Esther.
However, it appears that you believe that there's an implicit value judgement being made whenever someone says something is "not a game". Certainly, in my case, there isn't: I pointedly did not say that Dear Esther was bad, or without value; I said that I don't think it's a game, and might be better described as a "video poem". There are plenty of things which you could categorise as games (and video games) which are terrible. There are plenty of things which aren't games, or video games, which have value.
My question is: why is it so important to you that all forms of (at least minimally) interactive multimedia experiences mediated via a computer are considered "games", specifically? Are you sad that Microsoft Office isn't considered a game? Would you consider an executable which simply plays a recording of someone reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland a game?
(Maxis used to market all of their software as Software Toys specifically because they themselves didn't think they were games.)
https://storify.com/TychoCelchuuu/j-chastain-on-the-definition-of-games
http://www.visitproteus.com/what-are-game/
http://www.gamedefinitions.com/
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There is literally no reason to worry about whether something is or isn't a game.
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I don't understand the question "what will the towers be in this game?" We already know. There's a tower in the screenshot!
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Easier to show than explain, eh? I'll take on that challenge:
"I took stuff from other platformers and put it all into one platformer."
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I mean, it did wipe the air clean of tension in the sense of "that was a really funny joke" - it's actually super dark humor (which is to be expected from Nick, which is one reason I love him so much). The joke is that we live in a world where the best game of the year can be something that hasn't made it past the Stone Age when it comes to gender, and more specifically the humor is that these two things are being jammed together so abruptly, which is always a good way to make a joke.Oh, I know. Idle Thumbs is the last place I'd accuse of having myopic views of games they're caught up in. That drives the point even harder to me. There was a lot of time spent on the really uncomfortable nature of lecherous lakitu and "but GOTY" felt like it just wiped the air clear of tension.
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I don't know if it gets a pass - it's sort of like saying Gone With the Wind is a great film even though it's racist as fuck. I'm sure everyone would be thrilled if MGS V weren't shitty and regressive when it comes to women, but t he fact that tit is makes it worse, not bad. If you want to say that everything with problematic elements is bad, then there's pretty much going to be nothing good left.
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At video games, yes, but being bad at video games doesn't make you the worst...
The Idle Book Club 13: Never Let Me Go
in Idle Book Club Episodes
Posted
First, she spent... years maybe? or at least a good chunk of time studying Victorian novels in depth, right, working on some sort of thesis thing? I mean, yes, studying Victorian novels doesn't turn you into a Victorian novelist, but I'd like to think someone who's deeply drawn to Victorian novels wouldn't churn out a story paced like a Dan Brown novel.
Second and more relevantly, I read the novel as a glimpse into her head, not as something explicitly written out or whatever, which means that I read it like someone recollecting things rather than someone explicitly setting out a story. And as far as I'm concerned, nobody recollects things with cliffhangers. That's just ridiculous. Maybe I'm just approaching this wrong - I should be imagining the narrator writing this all out while sitting in a hospital bed or whatever - but if that's the case the tone seems sort of off too because I'm not really sure what the narrative framing is supposed to be.