osmosisch
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Everything posted by osmosisch
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I see your point, and agree with this interpretation of the plot but again I think a lot of genre fiction in other media also does this (action movies, fantasy and romance novels, etc.). It doesn't strike me as commentary on purely video games. That does not contradict what I said, I can get place and mood from films and novels.
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Well, I don't agree with your interpretation of the plot that much - I don't think it's a commentary so much as a reaction/playing with expectations, which also applies to a lot of genre fiction in other media, ie. the protagonist is important and there must be an Important Thing Going On. Nothing specifically video gamey about it in my view. I don't understand what you're trying to say about the notes. I know the artefact Firewatch is a game. I just think it's a game that made some choices that are at odds with each other that made it less effective for me. I think it maybe summed up best as: when I try to recall my memories of playing Firewatch, I end up with memories that are not much different from having watched a (pretty nice) film. Stuff happened, The End. I don't feel like I did very much. That's not what I look for in games.
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I notice you're not engaging with my explanation of why I think so. Superbiasedman got it. To clarify, my position is that: - the experience of traversing and exploring the lovely game world would not translate well to a movie at all. - the experience of the plot would translate to a fine movie or short story. - the conflict between a strongly realised character (Henry) and the first-person perspective made me enjoy the game less
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I was trying to say that I didn't like this part of it. I've never liked playing someone else in first-person games. I'm performing the actions, I'm making the choices, then I want nothing to snap me out of that immersive loop. Looking through someone's eyes but not inhabiting their headspace feels dissonant to me. If I'm meant to empathise with but not be Henry I'd much rather not be stuck in his literal head. I think in the end the game landed in a sort of uncanny valley for me of realistic storytelling about believable characters - that didn't work for me because I was then asked to act as one of those characters even though their actions and words then didn't fit what I'd actually want to do. This is why Tom Chick's central conclusion rang true for me, that this would have been lovely as a film or novel but felt jarring/dissonant as a game. Both making the decisions but also not making them just bothered me.
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That's exactly my biggest complaint about the game: for me this didn't happen at all, as opposed to Gone Home, because Henry brings so much of himself into the game that I couldn't map myself onto him. It was like riding on the shoulders of someone else instead of being them.
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Er, so I ran into even worse shit. This game sure ramps it up.
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Haha, I do exactly the same thing. Play until I fuck up too bad to deal with emotionally
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Idle Weekend February 12, 2016: Mad Skills
osmosisch replied to Chris's topic in Idle Weekend Episodes
For me one of the first multiple-character/PoV games to spring to mind during that discussion was the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, especially the nuclear bomb scene. Although the multiple points of view didn't do much to illuminate things as far as different perspectives goes, it did let them pull off a character death to great effect. -
Great stuff Vlad, tweeted some of it out for what it's worth.
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Idle Weekend February 12, 2016: Mad Skills
osmosisch replied to Chris's topic in Idle Weekend Episodes
My 5-year-old is really enjoying the game as well. Especially nice is just going around exploring when the puzzles get too hard. One of her other favourite games is Proteus, this scratches a similar itch except prettier and with bonus puzzles. -
Bloodborne (Dark Souls 2 successor (Dark Souls successor (Demon's Souls successor)))
osmosisch replied to melmer's topic in Video Gaming
Maybe it's just that the Souls games give me a handle on a fantasy that's fun and exciting to me, being a knight/sorcerer/whatever exploring the ruins of a lsot civilisation. I've never wanted to be a Lovercraft protagonist, or cosplay van Helsing. I really enjoyed the different style in Bloodborne, but it's just not something that resonates as much with me. -
Holy moly, some of these late-game enemies are just nuts.
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Bloodborne (Dark Souls 2 successor (Dark Souls successor (Demon's Souls successor)))
osmosisch replied to melmer's topic in Video Gaming
I don't find the Souls games to be oppressive at all. Because all civilians/civilisations are already dead and you're mostly investigating places where everything's gone to hell way before you ever set foot on the scene. Bloodborne is to me oppressive/depressing, the Souls games are more tragic/fascinating. It's being mid-apocalypse vs. archaeology. Maybe it's just that the relative modernity of Bloodborne's setting makes it more depressing to me than the Souls game's escapism into fantasy. Or just that horror tropes never really connect with me. -
Bloodborne (Dark Souls 2 successor (Dark Souls successor (Demon's Souls successor)))
osmosisch replied to melmer's topic in Video Gaming
One of the things that kills it for me is the lack of multiplayer (I really, really hate the having to pay for plus system). Another is the oppressiveness of the atmosphere and in general rather wearying brown colour palette. Finally, the lack of build variety and difficulty of getting upgrade materials means there's very little to try out. -
That sucks man. Feel better. Maybe you can turn to SpeedyDesiato for comfort?
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Duelyst! Final Fantasy Tactics Hearthstone crossover! Yt's good!
osmosisch replied to osmosisch's topic in Video Gaming
I know right, it's killer right now with all these cool games coming out. -
Goddamn these are depressing and frightening times to be alive and a parent.
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Oh, yeah, Chris also confirmed that it's correspondent to MMO relationships, like in Cybele. I wonder if my lack of response to Delilah (by which I mean I never felt I built up any kind of meaningful relationship with her) was intentional in this way, meaning to refelct the kind of superficial, temporary relationship I've never really gone in for.
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I read over on reddit a comment from Chris to the extent that the game is partially meant to echo a kind of adolescent experience where you have a brief experience that while it's going on seems super important and central to everything, but in the context of the rest of your life ends up just being a blip, ships passing in the night. I think part of my lack of engagement with the story may be that this is not an experience I'm familiar with. Perhaps it's just that I've had a nonstandard life in this respect, or perhaps it's that it's just more f an American thing, where people move around a lot more and make this sort of experience more likely. Regardless, it's interesting.
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I didn't mean to imply that it's about solving problems, more about dealing with them. I think the way the game's problems are largely caused by overreactions and unresolved issues does speak to this idea. Please share your interpretations, I love talking about this game.
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David Lynch's Josh Brolin's Campo Santo's Fire Watch With Me: A Motion Picture Event
osmosisch replied to TychoCelchuuu's topic in Video Gaming
Would you say...you're the Accidental Asshole? -
I'm conflating my own problems with Tom Chick's there a bit so it's making things muddled, apologies. I was trying to explain why 'poorly suited for its story' does not equal 'not a game' for me, but using my own complaints to illustrate this. As for what the game's trying to convey - mostly I believe it's themed about running away not solving your problems - instead you carry them in with you. All the weird shit happening in the game ultimately comes from people's fucked-up heads. The problem for me with this is that I'm frequently being pulled out of Henry's head by immersion-breakers like him saying things that don't fit the Henry I've started to construct in my head. My mental space diverges too much from the fucked-up headspace the game tells me Henry's in. Contrast again to Gone Home where I was curious and worried exactly in sync with Katie. I'll say I don't agree with Tom Chick that the Firewatch story could never have been conveyed in a game, but I do agree that this game did not convey it very well to me. Don't take me wrong, I really enjoyed my time in this game, I just wish it had worked better for me.
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I believe the distinction is in the fact that I don't assume symmetry. The fact that a spoon is poorly suited to cutting doesn't mean that you can't cut something with a spoon given enough effort. Suitability to a given task does not have consequences for what category that thing is in. So, Firewatch is a game to me, and it does some things very well, and others less so. One of the things it did not do very well for me was allowing me to assume the role of the main character, which made it (again, to me) poorly suited to convey the experience I think it was trying to convey. This does not make it 'not a game.'
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I don't find it hard to draw a line between "X is not a game" and "X is a game, which means it's poorly suited to convey idea/story Y." The "not a game" complaint is usually used as a method to deligitimise an experience that doesn't fit the shoot mans to level up mold. I don't believe that's what's going on here.
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To me it seems like the opposite is true: his argument is "Firewatch is a game, and that fact plus the choices made about how to execute it makes it at odds with the story it's trying to tell."