TychoCelchuuu
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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu
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The charity has existed for many years and has done tons of good. I used to volunteer for a nonprofit and we got money from the Lucas Foundation. I know it's hip and edgy to hate people but when someone donates $4 billion to charity sometimes it's worth it to maybe stop and think "maybe this person has just done more good in his life than everyone I have ever met, put together."
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Ah. Well in that case I only don't understand Tanukitsune and so on. Looks like you'll get greenlit this time, though!
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Look in the center of the picture. There's a clear dividing line.
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I don't understand what you don't get about Greenlight. Sure, you have lots of reservations about your game being greenlit and stuff, but that's not really "not getting" Greenlight.
I'm with LaCabra - I don't see what there is for ANYONE not to get about Steam Greenlight. People thumbs up games. Games with lots of thumbs up are greenlit and Valve publishes them on Steam.
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If you pickpocket people at the party and you get caught too many times, the guards do come after you, though.
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To be fair, I would probably have the same kind of problems if the Spice (whatever it is) in Dune was not "Spice" but "paprika". Now I can at least think that it is some spice that is unknown to us.
I guess a big part of the problem is the fact that it was not immediately clear to me that whale oil in Dishonored is actually magical whale oil, because of, you know, video games. In the same way, I don't assume that glowing wrench in a video game is a magical wrench, or that a highly explosive fuel tanks are fundamentally different from real world fuel tanks (which tend not to explode very easily), or that a machine that wouldn't work in real life would have some weird physics behind it when the easier explanation is that the designers cut corners a bit. And so on...
I would like to read a book on the history of science and technology of Dishonored, though. I still find the range of things that have and have not been invented quite incredible.
Here's how you can tell that "whale oil" is to whale oil in the real world like "spice" in Dune is to spice in the real world.
1. Whale oil in the real world comes from actual real world whales that have no supernatural properties. Whales in Dishonored are not real world whales. They look different[/url, they have fins that are anatomically impossible for actual whales, they have supernatural powers (charms made out of their bones can do crazy things), the Heart hints that there is something special about them, etc. None of this is true about real world whales. The whales in Dishonored are different from the whales in real life, and so are their respective oils.
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You've made me feel bad about pulling the thread off topic, which is quite an achievement, because it means you've made me feel bad for not ruthlessly promoting myself, which is a place I'd never thought I'd be. But in any case, I guess I do have some shit to plug. After making my X-COM tutorial I started playing through the game, so now I have an in-progress Let's Play of X-COM on YouTube which might be enjoyable for people who liked JP LeBreton's quick look at the original and wanted more, but not enough to play it, and also you have to enjoy me talking instead of JP which is a dubious proposition at best. I'm up to episode 6 but here is the first one which picks up where the tutorial left off:
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You have to acknowledge that there is a common element found amongst all games, yes? A common element that is not found in other media?
Well, yes. There's also a common element found amongst all movies and television shows that other media lack. And there's a common element found amongst all books that other media lack. So what? I've already said elsewhere in this discussion that I have no problem treating gameplay as "the thing you do when you play a game." I just think that as a concept it's empty and useless for games criticism.
This whole thing started when I objected to Frenetic Pony's arguments along similar lines as the person who commented on the article - Frenetic Pony vastly oversimplified things by adverting to "gameplay" rather than actually describing the applicable features of the games in question, and in doing so rendered the argument invalid because the different things lumped under the single heading of "gameplay" were actually different enough to make Frenetic Pony's point incorrect. If you think your definition of gameplay solves Frenetic Pony's problem, then it's helpful. If you don't think your definition solves the problem, then I'm not sure what your point is.
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That's difference between good gameplay and bad gameplay, as I already described when I talked about Thirty Flights.
So good gameplay is gameplay that gives you a rush when you overcome the challenge, whereas bad gameplay is something that doesn't give you a rush when you overcome a challenge? But gameplay itself is overcoming challenges? Surely that's underdescribed and overinclusive. We overcome lots of challenges that aren't games. People who managed to keep their house from flooding during Hurricane Sandy by stacking up a bunch of sandbags weren't playing a game.
It sounds like you're heading in the direction Bernard Suits went when he described what games are. That's fine. You could then describe gameplay as "what you do when you play a game." I hope you see why someone might think that this term is less than helpful when it comes to game criticism. It is about as useful as La Cabra's term "filmwatch" which describes what you do when you watch a movie. Yes, your definition works just fine, but it tells us nothing for us to label something as "gameplay" or "filmwatch." We need to describe what it MEANS for gameplay or filmwatch to be of a certain kind.
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It's little things such as things requiring electricity only running on whale oil. Why just whale oil? To me, it seems like someone at some point just thought that it would be rad if whale oil was the main source of energy in this world, you know, because Moby Dick is cool (or something). The fact that there seems to be a serious shortage of the stuff (if I remember the announcements correctly), yet no one has come up with viable alternatives, suggests to me that the history of the world of Dishonored is not fully thought out.
I don't understand. Are you saying every time there is a shortage of something, people will come up with a replacement, and that because this hasn't happened in Dishonored, it's a badly thought out world? Haven't we seen shortages of all sorts of things all throughout history for all sorts of reasons?
Even weirder* is the way in which the whale oil is converted to electricity. It seems to involve, well, nothing at all. It just happens. The developers of Dishonored didn't craft a completely new world; it is very much rooted in ours. At least there is no indication that the physics of that world are fundamentally different from ours (apart from magic).
"Dishonored works exactly like our world except where it doesn't, so therefore I don't understand how part of Dishonored works differently from our world." That's a very confusing sentiment to me.
That is why it seems super weird to me that they give such alien properties to such a common substance. I don't remember if Lord of the Rings fundamentally changed the properties of one particular material or object that is common between our world and the Middle-Earth, but at least I didn't find the world as confusing and fragmented as that of Dishonored. There were magical swords and trinkets, of course, but it was never claimed that this was caused by trace amounts of Tungsten in the blade. In fact, I would probably be more comfortable with Dishonored, if the machinery ran on some magical substance and not on refined whale oil.
I think your mistake is calling whale oil "a common substance." It's fairly obviously not common. It can be turned into electricity with almost no effort. It explodes when jostled. Bone charms made from whale bones have magical properties. The whales themselves are hinted to be supernatural beings in some sense (use the Heart in various places). Lord of the Rings has magical racist swords that glow blue when orcs are around. What are those made out of? Magictanium? What is mithril armor made out of such that it works the way it works in Lord of the Rings?
I mean, if the universe doesn't make sense to you, then it doesn't make sense to you, but I can't possibly fathom why someone would find Dishonored more or less plausible than any well crafted fantasy world. A lot is left unspecified and unsaid, but there are hints to almost all the big mysteries and it strikes me as much more internally coherent, consistent, and interesting than most fantasy worlds we see crafted for video games.
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I love how my points are being ignored. Is anyone able to point out where I'm wrong?
Tycho? You keep repeating your main argument, but you've ignored my definition.
Nach, "Gameplay" was commonly used by gaming magazines in the 80s, not the 90s.
Next up: Defining "Playability"!
Gameplay doesn't seem to me to be a rush you get from overcoming a challenge because I think you could remove all hedonic aspects of gameplay and still have whatever gameplay is. You could get zero rush from something and still be playing it.
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We got into this discussion because I disagreed with most of what Frenetic Pony had to say: most of the responses to my criticisms focused on my semantic point about how pointless it is to just say that "gameplay" is what matters when really the concept is so broad and amorphous that you're not really making much of an argument. My response to Frenetic Pony encompassed more than just that, so maybe it was a mistake to focus on the semantic issue because "semantics are fucking boring," so maybe it would make sense to focus on the more precise criticisms if we want to keep talking about the shit Frenetic Pony was plugging. For instance, did Spec Ops really fail because it had the same gameplay as Battlefield 3, only it didi it worse, and this combined with BF3's larger marketing power meant that BF3 won? My original claim was that this is ridiculous - Spec Ops is a much better single player game than Battlefield 3, which had a travesty of a campaign, while Spec Ops is a much worse multiplayer game than Battlefield 3, partially because even Spec Ops' own lead designer thought the multiplayer was a stupid idea. By no means do they have the same gameplay and by no means is BF3 indisputably better - it is, in fact, obviously worse when it comes to single player.
Frenetic Pony apparently wants to lump "shooters" all together into one big pile and say that because there's no difference in gameplay between Spec Ops and Battlefield 3 except insofar as BF3 does the "gameplay" better, that plus its PR advantage explains its higher sales. I think one reason Frenetic Pony is mistaken about this is because a tendency to call everything "gameplay" and then look at all the similarities between BF3 and Spec Ops (modern day setting! Guns! Uh... sand sometimes?) leads us to vastly oversimplify things, but we can ignore the whole semantic issue and just pretend that "gameplay" is a perfectly fine word. Given that assumption, I don't think you could find anyone who would say that BF3 has better single player gameplay than Spec Ops.
edit: the response to Fenetic Pony's post on Gamasutra brought up the semantic issue too, probably because Frenetic Pony is only able to make the far-too-quick argument that BF3 is just Spec Ops only better because the word "gameplay" is acting as a stand in for whatever you want it to mean, but again we can ignore semantics if you find the issue boring.
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Yeah, Windows 7. I don't think it crashed at all or had any glitches aside from the FMV cutscenes being tiny because they played at their original resolution.
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All this talk of ambiguous semantics is reminding me of "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokol. But really, tl;dr.
This is a vast mischaracterization of the article I linked and the position I've been pushing, I think, and it's not super charitable to Twig. Labeling our debate as a piece of "tl;dr" and linking it to Sokol suggests an anti-intellectual "let's just stop thinking about things because the bigs words you're all using are just a smokescreen for bullshit" sort of position. Just because we're trying to talk about video games in a manner more sophisticated than "holy shit did you see me chainsaw that alien in half" doesn't mean we're accusing each other of bullshit for bullshit's sake. We're all trying to figure things out - I'm just suggesting that existing vocabulary is unsuited to the task.
@vimes: surely you don't think that slowing the movement speed in TFoL or The Stanley Parable would ever get you even a tenth of the way towards Dear Esther, but even if it did, that's completely irrelevant. My point and the point in the article I linked is not that "gameplay" doesn't matter. It's that describing it as "gameplay" is ridiculous because "gameplay" doesn't mean anything. Some people think some things are gameplay, some people think those same things aren't. Some people think some things are gameplay in virtue of having characteristic X, other people think things are gameplay but that characteristic X is a red herring. And so on.
GAMEPLAY IS A DUMB WORD FOR TALKING ABOUT GAMES. It doesn't help us! Nachimir, the first of my posts that you cited was 100% sarcastic. As you point out, to the extent anyone agrees about what "gameplay" means, the agreement is very sloppy, debatable, and vague.
WE NEED MORE SPECIFIC WORDS. The Hunicke et al. article linked is one of the many efforts towards moving past "gameplay" and I'm glad the work is being done. It's still far too vague but like I said it's a start.
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I spoke very specifically of level structure when I mentioned design, but if you want to get aesthetics out of what I said, I guess that's fine.
Gameplay encompasses the mechanics and the design, both of which can and do overlap. I don't know many people who would disagree with that. So, what are mechanics? The methods of interacting with the world. What is design? The structure of the world, the aesthetics, the "feel" (admittedly, the most wishy-washy part). I don't know many people who would disagree with all of that.
Now you're even disagreeing with yourself about what gameplay means! Does it include aesthetics (as a subset of design) or does it not?!
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They're not a pain to get running on modern PCs at all! Just download from Steam and play. I just played through Dark Forces 2 a few months ago. Worked just fine.
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Err, "what we have here is failure to communicate"?
I don't understand what you mean by 'told in the same style if you're speaking about gameplay rather than aesthetics'.
I think "gameplay" is a silly concept that explains nothing and means everything. So, keep in mind that when I explain something in terms of gameplay, I don't think I'm really doing anything helpful. That has been my point.
In terms of explaining the point, I've been adverting to what gameplay means to me. (Note that what the word means TO ME might be very different from what it means to other people. One of the biggest reasons why "gameplay" is such a worthless term is that everyone thinks they know what it means but nobody thinks it means the same thing as what anyone else means. Everyone Twig talks to apparently agrees, although I'm guessing Twig is just not noticing areas of disagreement, but whatever.)
What gameplay means to me (please see all the earlier caveats - this is the last time I'll note that I don't like the term!) is what the player is DOING in the game. Gameplay is what video games have that no other medium has to any significant degree - interactivity. So the difference between Thirty Flights of Loving and a Wong Kar-Wai movie is that to get from beat to beat in TFoL, you have to hit the use key, use the movement keys, and look around with the mouse, whereas in a Wong Kar-Wai film you don't have to do anything.
Now, "hit the use key," "use the movement keys," and "look around with the mouse" also describes everything you do in the opening of Half-Life, everything you do in the opening of Half-Life 2 with the exception of using your fire button once if you throw the can, everything you do in The Stanley Parable, everything you do in Gravity Bone with the exception of photographing the birds, everything you do in Dear Esther (although that uses a flashlight button rather than a "use" button), and so on. There are no puzzles to solve in any of these games aside from some mild exploration which consists of finding the right path and sometimes collecting a few items (Half-Life, TFoL, and Gravity Bone). So all of these games are basically the same when it comes to gameplay.
They are, of course, wildly different games. Why? Because of the stories they are telling. Not because they have different gameplay. TFoL has much more in common with a Wong Kar-Wai film than with any of the other games except Gravity Bone. Half-Life has much more in common with sci-fi films than it does with any of the games except HL2. The Stanley Parable has more in common with Douglas Adams books than it does with any of the other games. Dear Esther is its own love story that has basically nothing to do with the other games despite playing almost exactly the same. Walking around and discovering the story is PRECISELY the same to me in Dear Esther and in Half-Life 2's opening. It even feels the same because they are on the same engine. The difference is everything other than the gameplay.
Twig thinks gameplay is more than how you interact with the world. It's a combination of how you interact and the design of the world, which includes aesthetics. That seems to me preposterous. You can't change the gameplay of a level by making all the orange walls into blue walls, unless you happen to change the way the player navigates somehow by making certain paths blend in or whatever. Gameplay to me seems entirely divorced from aesthetics, which is why we have broad genres describing broad kinds of gameplay (FPS, RPG, RTS, TBS, Adventure, etc.) that have literally nothing to do with aesthetics.
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Or another Yoda Stories.
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Gravity Bone flashes a ton of different scenes linearly, and only at the very end: up until that point it's linear without any flashes (just like HL and HL2). In fact, by the time it flashes anything the gameplay is basically over. The player has no control during the flashes and almost no control after the flashes. And actually, Half-Life 2 did the flashing thing too at the end of the "no weapons" segment (teleportation in Kleiner's lab). Dear Esther is slower... but does that change the gameplay? It seems like exactly the same gameplay to me, only slower. Playing chess faster isn't playing a different game, is it? What is gameplay? Gameplay is a dumb word. And even if Dear Esther doesn't count, then TFoL, The Stanley Parable, and other games have the same gameplay. Or they don't. Because gameplay doesn't mean anything.
If the language is there but everyone disagrees on the details then this means the language isn't there. As long as we use ridiculously broad words like "gameplay" that don't mean anything, arguments will go in circles forever and we'll never have the precise kind of criticism that games deserve. We need definitions and vocabulary, not broad claims about gameplay.
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I've heard journos struggle with it, too.
Also, nobody is saying that Thirty Flights and Half-Life 2 have the same game mechanics!
I am! Specifically the early part in Half-Life 2 where you have no weapons. Same thing in Half-Life 1.
I've never said any such thing, and I don't think I agree with the emphasis on "immersion". Games played in virtual reality don't automatically have better gameplay because they're more immersive.
My point wasn't that you've said this stuff, my point is the same point as the article I've linked twice about how the language we use to talk about games is just really not where it needs to be yet.
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