Dragonfliet
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Posts posted by Dragonfliet
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I don't know. The thing about these complaints is that the desire for in-depth articles is simply too great for the supply. Like it or not, Video game news is mostly just fan-service type stuff. Hey, did you know this is coming out? Hey, isn't this neat? This is because they have to produce things all the time in order to keep readers (which takes a lot of time), and also because it's difficult to keep inventing deep dives. The thing is, the writers and the sites have already done most of the deep dive pieces that are possible. Sure, it's been 3/5/10 years, but they already wrote it, and re-writing it isn't fulfilling for the writer, and it doesn't really drive clicks for the site, so they don't revisit it. It's been nice that Kotaku has done that series of Schreier articles, but then the rest of their stuff is just the usual. It's always been like this. Partly it's because the industry is a niche, and while it has problems, they tend to be the same problems they've always had (more or less), and with the same kinds of opportunities, etc.
So for me, it's just more of the same. Sometimes there is a great article on whatever site, and I"ll check it out. Mostly it's small little nothings, meant to generate clicks and provide a small piece of fandom. Sometimes Polygon is better, sometimes Kotaku, sometimes RPS, etc. Waypoint always puts their most interesting ideas into a podcast I'll never listen to. It would be nice to have deep-dive articles every day, but not even the Washington Post or the New York Times has that. And they're covering everything. -
This is a late bump, but I thought this was an interesting subject worth chiming in on. I would say that, on a whole, I largely agree with you and your assessment of narrative games. I disagree about many of the conclusions. This is because the conclusions are based around the idea that the narrative and the gameplay are somehow not entwined, while at the same time make a fallacious point that other "good" (or "meaningful") works of narrative are more tightly entwined.
I will talk about the latter first. The idea that the the medium and the message must be tightly wound together is a well-meaning one, but also doesn't really apply very well to longer works. Look, for instance, at A Clockwork Orange, the Anthony Burgess novel (not really one of the greatest books ever written, but a marvelous one), which is gorgeously written in a florid prose of the language of the protagonist. It's honestly a difficult book to read at first because the patois is thick and alien, but the reader grows to understand it. Is the book about the evolution of language? Not at all. Is it about growing understanding of the world we inhabit? Also, no. It's a great gimmick. It's a neat thing. It's a pretty surface on which to put the story. The same can honestly be said about much of Anna Karenina, which I think is easily the best book ever written. Tolstoy is a true master of realist fiction, and yet the book lingers for the sake of lingering. It is a combat system that repeats again and again because combat can be cool, and gratifying. I will argue for a brilliant combat system (or puzzle system, etc.) in the same way that I will argue for beautiful prose. Pleasure is an acceptable reason to engage in pleasurable pursuits. We can certainly have argument about how effective x or y lingering is, but that is another conversation.
Which helps to get me into my next point. In truth, Anna Karenina could have removed the entire scenes with the artist Mikhailov. They do not speak to the ideas of morality and personal choices and societal judgements, etc. that the novel is resting on. They are very much extraneous details, and largely a distraction from what the novel is masterfully trying to get at. And yet, they force us into a state of consideration about art and intent and reception that does, in turn, color the ways in which we might look at ideas of love, family, duty, etc. that permeate the novel. While largely unnecessary and there "simply" to give us more to savor (this would be an argument to make, not a fact given), the fact that it is included forces us to reconsider the work as a whole because of it. The narrative of Bioshock is about control and power, and the gameplay, just combat and exploration, is about power, and makes an important statement. While the narrative foolishly throws all of its work out the window for a mediocre meta twist (hey, you're playing a game. Get it?) that ultimately makes no sense (you are freed from the need to obey...and then immediately keep doing the same obeying actions, as that is the only way to keep progressing through the game), the gameplay continues to be about the exercising of power, and the joy in which having power brings you, and how, ultimately, the only goal of power is to completely crush your enemies. It's quite effective. The Call of Duty games continually make the point that guns and explosions are the solution to all problems--and even if they try and complicate this, but saying that guns and explosions are the source of the problems, they ultimately reiterate the idea that there is no way out, and the only way to fix those problems...is with more guns and explosions. That sounds like a pretty tightly intertwined narrative meaning, no? The crux of your argument is that the dilution of narrative scenes, of dialog and tightly controlled directorial control, somehow equates with the dilution of narrative meaning, and I simply disagree with this notion. The dilution of those scenes creates a different narrative meaning.
I think that many game directors and/or writers fail to really look at their work and see how it can mean things. In the same way that writers/directors/whatever can do so (I'm reminded of Pan's Labyrinth, where del Toro thought/intended that the fantasy-land was real, only to be contradicted by the work: the young girl had to die in order to be brought to fantasy-land, and she did so in saving her brother--yet the brother, who was still alive, then appeared in fantasy-land. The rules of the world necessitated that this ending be read only as a fantasy, and not reality). And so they have combat that undoes the narrative's intent, of things that merely sit, flat, and don't do much more than exist, spreading out the narrative. This is, like many things, a simple inattentiveness to the whole. Largely, this inattentiveness is a monetary one (there is no time/money to look at the completed game, with all systems figured out, all major bugs ironed out, etc., etc. and then completely redo major sections to make it a more cohesive whole), though many times it is simply a creative failure (in the sense that most artists fail to completely live up to their work's potential, not a more pejorative sense).
This is a whole lot of me being grumpy and nitpicking, even though I largely agree with your premise and illustration of ideas (with tons of games mentioned as examples). I want to reiterate my close support (minus these small nits) to your original point. I would also point out that the state of narrative in games is flawed, at best, and anemic, in all honesty. There is nothing even scraping at the feet of Tolstoy in terms of depth of meaning with mastery of execution. Not by a long shot.
As to your original question, about what games meld narrative and gameplay. The easiest answer is the molleindustria game Unmanned. It is perfect in how it works gameplay with narrative to create a nuanced and thoughtful game. Shadow of the Colossus does a surprisingly good job of it, contrasting the thoughtfulness of the puzzles with the simplicity of the narrative and the barren loneliness of the world. Both The Stanley Parable, and Beginers guide do an amazing job of making actions narrative meaning (the former in a jokey, delightful way, the other in a painfully invasive feeling way), Crusader Kings II makes the game of thrones feel serious and impossible in a way that few narratives that focus more on people do, The Witcher series does a surprisingly great job of making you feel that choices must be made, while hammering down how terrible choices are--thus proving the wisdom of the non-choice the protagonist claims to wish to occupy, as well as the inherent impossibility of this. Papo & Yo captures the idea of the games/maneuvering/etc. of being the child of an alchoholic entails (though the ending is terrible, as it overexplains it's already very obvious metaphors to absolute death). Far Cry 2, as has been pointed out many a time reinforces it's political ideas (that again get overexplained) through it's gameplay (which is similarly done to death). And the Prince of Persia reboot from 2008 (I think) is the absolute perfect example of this marrying.
It is a lighthearted fantasy that is easy, and with no consequences. If you die, Elika saves you, there are no problems. You are a necessary tool, but Elika is the one telling the story/driving the narrative. And pretty early on they introduce the problem, that Elika's father let the devil out (whatever its name is) in order to save his daughter. No one (neither the prince, elika, or the player probably) can believe that he would do something stupid. They kind of understand, but recognize that it is the stupid move. But then Elika is the one that defeats the devil--she has always been in charge of the narrative, and it was always her story, and she was always the one with the powers necessary to overcome death (reminiscient of her ability to save you from death, again and again). This sucks, because you have built a relationship with her, and have come to care for the character (even more so if you chose to interact with her more), and it sucks because even though it was always her story, you were involved, and wanted it to be your story. Then she just steals the ending, and beats the bad guy. And then you are forced to slowly carry her to an alter, and the game refuses to end. The voices of the devil call out to you to let him free in order to save her. And the game won't end. The only way to avoid this is to refuse to finish the game, which is essentially unthinkable for a Video game player in the same way that to leave a dead one dead is unthinkable to a kind of person with the power to bring them back, and an emotional attachment to them. And so you do what you had sworn, hours early, that you would never do, and fall into the viscious cycle, again, of bringing the dead back to life, which will bring more death, etc.
Of course, PoP is also a lighthearted, not brilliantly designed, not brilliantly written, and ultimately pretty shallow game. It does this shallow thing very well, but with no real nuance or complexity to it. Because art is hard. And of course, most people that played it missed this idea nearly entirely. Even as unsublte as it was. And the game bombed. They should have, it turns out, focused more on making the combat harder (and thus longer, and more repetitive, as you died from more enemies and had to figure it out), and undermined the idea that this was the easy fantasy part, and the hard part would be the inescapable choice.
I'm finishing up my PhD in a Lit/Creative Writing program (all I have to do now is get a tenure track job. In this market. LOL), and I do have the answer to the conundrum, but it's a very bad answer that won't make anyone happy: think about how the gameplay affects the narrative. That's it. Raymond Chandler just does hard boiled stuff, yet thinks about how those shackles can turn insightfully into the narrative. He doesn't change them to fit the narrative, he makes the narrative fit them. Writers and designers need to stop more and consider what they are saying with their actions/systems a little more carefully. It's hard. It's just the difficulty of art. Combat isn't a problem. Puzzles aren't a problem. In the same way that realism or magical realism isn't a problem. They are things that can either be stiffling or freeing. Mostly I think that we should talk about specific games more often and praise what they do well, and kindly point out the failings, and engage in deep thought about them. It's quite a stupid answer, but I think that it's the only one we have.
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Honestly, I really liked Infinite Jest, but it's a book that I don't really recommend to people. It doesn't break new ground, and it doesn't really do anything masterfully (it does things very well, but it's also a bloated, saggy mess in a lot of ways). It follows along the lines of Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow, but without the stronger unifying themes, and groundbreaking aspect of them. And yet it's somehow longer. It's weird saying this, as I really, truly like the book a lot, but it's not for everyone. You're not wrong about the endnotes, twmac, there are a LOT of boring, uninteresting, and useless ones. After a bit, they start to become more and more important, but that's after a bit.
The advice I literally give to everyone about the book is what I said above: read the first 50 pages. If you're having a fun time, then keep reading. It is a delightful book in so many ways (his whole scenario on videocalls is amazing, for instance). If, however, you're not having a great time, but are willing to slog through this to see where it goes: STOP. The book never goes anywhere. That's actually kind of the point. It's a thoughtful meditation on modern life, but it's also a giant prank on the reader. You will never figure out why things are happening, and you will never get plots resolved, and you won't feel like you spent your time well. Again, if in those first 50 pages you're having a lot of fun: it'll still be a lot of fun. But yeah. You might just want to bail.
I had this book on my comprehensive exams for my PhD, and though I re-read a lot of very long books (Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, House of Leaves, Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Don Quixote), I skipped re-reading Infinite Jest, even though it has been a decade since I read it. I started reading it, and quickly realized it would be a waste of my time that could be better spent thinking about Anna Karenina (or gushing about it to poor folks who haven't had the delight of reading it), or decoding Ulysses. It just isn't worth it. I went over notes I had taken, and read a few essays about it, but it didn't have the depth or the power of these other books. It's long because it values length, not because it spends its time productively.
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I too, am playing. Dragonfliet on Origin. It's a broken game, in many ways, but the kind of broken I can quite enjoy. We'll see if they fix the loading screen bonanza, and add more variety of gameplay, but for now, I'm satisfied enough to fly around like ironman, and to run around with my giant Colossus shield, whacking scars.
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The internet: where people play games that are really good, and unique and thoughtful, but if you have some metahumor a poster doesn't like, they somehow lose almost all respect for you.
The VR version of Superhot was so much more fun for me. Mostly because it felt much more like a puzzle. The original game was a pretty even combination between shooter and puzzler, but the VR implementation is so much more brainy, and less about your reaction times. Great stuff.
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I enjoy hearing stories about how video game writers get jobs in games, because they're all completely insane. It's almost never that someone submitted great work, or wrote a great story, or IF piece, or short film, or whatever, and always that they happened to be doing web design, and chatted with someone about comics, etc. It's amazing that games have as good of stories as they do, with the inane-seeming nature of recruitment.
This was a great episode, and I loved hearing Webb's humble, hard working origin-story, and his thoughts on this process.
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On 12/30/2017 at 5:37 AM, thepaulhoey said:I bought an Oculus a few weeks ago as it was going for £350 on Amazon, which was low enough to make me finally bite. There's some great experiences with it and a lot of really mediocre stuff as well and I think it's still not quite wide consumer ready in the current state.
Software
The main problem for me isn't the hardware, it's the software. The Oculus Launcher thing can be incredibly sluggish and unresponsive to your actions e.g. launching a game, quitting a game, opening a menu, there can be seconds before it responds to what you've picked and it's just frustrating. Then there's games crashing when loading but only displaying an error message on your monitor, so you've got the headset on and you're wondering why it's taking so long so you have to take it off and have a look at the screen. Also the fact that the software crashes enough that this is a problem. I've had a few weird rendering errors in games where I was getting a bizarre ghosting going on at times which made things totally unplayable. Overall as with anything in its early days there's plenty of teething issues.
Controls
Aside from those more technical imperfections, the controls are another area where developers still have a ways to go. So I'm not using room scale, I simply don't have the space for it(and I think a lot of people will be in the same situation as me) and a lot of games claim to work OK in non- room scale but they simply don't. Take Rick & Morty VR as an example, you need to turn in 360 degrees but without a third camera the Oculus can't track that very well, with the controller signal being blocked. This makes trying certain things basically impossible. A really simple solution is to allow you to rotate with the analogue stick in 90 degree increments but R&M like many other games don't implement this. Another issues I've encountered a lot is the floor being calibrated incorrectly, basically when I crouch to pick something off the floor my hand is hitting the floor in real life but the object in the game world is about 6 inches lower so I can't pick it up. Many games have lots of little issues like this, I'm sure things will improve over time. Some stand out games in terms of controls are Robo Recall which does teleportation very well and Arizona Sunshine which has direct movement via the analogue stick implemented in a way that doesn't give me motion sickness! It's very impressive and some of the levels make great use of you having your two hands moving freely, like exploring a mine using a torch. I tried Alien Isolation with the MotherVR mod and it's incredibly immersive but made me feel very sick. I'll try again, maybe I've built up some immunity now.
Overall
If you're a tech geek go for it, as far as I can tell unless you have a 16ft * 16ft area for room scale the Oculus is the better option because it's about half the price. If you're expecting something that's polished with some proper games, you'll be disappointed because most of the games are still very short and some are pretty much just fucking about(Rick & Morty, Job Simulator, Accounting) rather than a proper interesting challenge.
I've still got a bunch more games to play, Raw Data looks great as does LA Noire(which keeps crashing despite me meeting the requirements :(). I'm hoping it continues to improve because it's a really neat technology and it can be incredibly immersive.
A few helpful notes on this: You should really treat the Rift as $60 more expensive than it is. While it doesn't NEED a third sensor: it does actually need a third sensor. I don't have a huge space for my main play area, only about two steps forward and back (more to the sides), but "roomscale" makes everything better. You don't have to rely on snap turning to navigate, you don't have to remember where forward is, etc. Perhaps as a result of that, I have also never had any issues with the floor, etc. It also makes it so there are never any jitters, or sketchy tracking. It sucks that they will sell you a mediocre experience, but a great experience is really a small upgrade from that.
Raw Data will benefit a thousand times over from a third tracker. LA Noire, unfortunately, runs like garbage on the Rift, as Rockstar has made no effort to make it compatible with the Rift. People have got it working, but it's still a bit of a mess.
I would also recommend launching games from the desktop, rather than the headset launcher, for this very reason you mentioned. Oculus needs to work on their storefront (they are, and have a beta of a new "home" experience, but it's not quite ready yet).
I would also recommend games like Lone Echo (which is, hands down, the best VR game out there, and one of the better games of 2017), Arizona Sunshine (which has a surprisingly good story), I Expect You to Die (an escape room game that's loads of fun, and works with front facing cameras only), Chronos, Edge of Nowhere, Superhot (which is actually a completely different game than the non-vr version, though with reused assets), The Invisible Hours (more of an interactive play than a 'game,' but really excellent--think of it of a game version of sleep no more), Wilson's Heart, Rec Room, Thumper, and Onward. Avoid the simulator type games (they're cute, but worthless).
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Out of curiosity, why are you still playing the first one? Destiny was a frustrating game that had some really great gunplay. Destiny 2 keeps the gunplay, and fixes the game.
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Sooo, how are people liking it? I have only done a little bit of end-game stuff, but I'm very, very happy so far. The story missions don't suck like before, and the world missions are well written, and way more varied. Public events are more fun, the heroic modifier is a great way to go about it, etc. I've only played a few strikes, and no pvp (I suck so bad at it), but I'm a happy dude right now. We'll see how this goes over the next month, however.
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So it looks like most everyone is sticking with the PS4 version rather than moving to PC? I'm still a bit torn, honestly, about which version to pick up.
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On 4/3/2017 at 0:28 PM, Beasteh said:Good timing - I've just finished reading a couple of Miéville's novels. I did read PSS a few years ago, but it put me off reading any of his other works (that and his marxism, although it doesn't really come on strong in his work). Glad I went back.
He's incredibly imaginative when it comes to the worlds he creates. All I've read have excellent worldbuilding. Whereas PSS was a rambling epic, these two are mercifully short, and all the better for it:
The City and the City - loved this one until the end (more on that in a moment). Ever been to another culture where something utterly bizzare is treated as normal? The way the two cities ignore each other is exactly that. It's crazy and yet it makes sense somehow. Nods to police drama tropes were a nice touch. The plot benefits from being a whodunnit that mutates into a conspiracy, but upon reaching its denoument, it fails to satisfy.
Corporations did it to steal artifacts. How mundane! It's meant to read like a fake-out, but just feels like the author bottled it at the critical moment.
Embassytown - Miéville does SF, and he does it well! Makes the Ariekei really alien, generally avoiding typical SF tropes (such as "aliens are just like humans with one trait turned up to 11!"). I wish we learned more about their society though. Miéville also chooses to play with language - and this is central to the plot, rather than some kind of nerdery. Plot itself builds to a conclusion, stakes getting ever higher, and then sticks the landing. Probably the best one to read for folks new to Miéville.
Miéville is incredible, and not only would I recommend Embassytown as a great start for most people, I would argue it's his best book. What he does with language is absolutely marvelous.
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4 hours ago, osmosisch said:The characters and their arcs start to flesh out a lot after the first 100 or so pages. You get a feeling for what's more and less important. The whole Year of the X thing is eventually explained to some degree. The nature of the toxic waste area and so forth. How to handle the footnotes. There's a hump at the beginning after which you realise you can just kind of relax into the book and enjoy the ride. Which is not to say you stop paying attention, but that you've learned to trust that the book's going somewhere and has meaning and structure.
I'm sure there's people who are put off by this, or other aspects of the book, and I feel its status has become unhealthily elevated.
Except that then the book complicates things, piles on tons of plot points, and specifically refuses to give any sort of conclusion or payoff. I mean, it's literally the point, and a kind of re-creation that the father (can't remember his name right now) is doing with his movies. Honestly? I would say that the book never really progresses from the first 50 pages. It just gives you more stuff. More characters, more details about most of them, more plot points, more observations about the world, but never in a way in which things actually add up. They are stacked on top of each other, and then the pile is given a little shove, and then the book ends abruptly. I think this is also its point, and part of how it works overall, but I would argue very fiercely about this being payoff or telling me everything I need to know.
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On 12/21/2016 at 7:45 AM, osmosisch said:All it asks of you is to pay some attention and be willing to be puzzled for a while, knowing it will eventually pay off and tell you everything you need to know.
Uh. What? Where the hell does it eventually pay off and tell you everything you need to know? During my MFA one of my advisers talked about how they stopped reading DFW entirely after finishing Infinite Jest.
But you're right about the other parts. It's not a difficult book at all. It's also very fun and funny. My recommendation is always for people to read the first 50 pages, and if they're really enjoying it, then they should finish it. If they aren't loving it though, and just want to find out what is happening and why, that they should put it down and walk away very fast.
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RE: Destiny, Overwatch, and transmedia storytelling.
I actually want to begin this by talking about the problem that this question actually gets at, which is most evident in Destiny. Destiny is a game with a singleplayer story, told over multiple hours, with the story playing into the other modes, and the story is garbage/nonsense. As pointed out in the email, a lot of it begins to make sense, but ONLY if you dig through the lore that isn't even available in the game itself (which is a bizarre choice). This is a huge problem, and the reason it is a problem is that the story drives the game, and yet it is incomprehensible, leading to a game that feels disconnected and incoherent. The lore is simply a bandaid that attempts to patch that problem.
This is completely and utterly different from Overwatch (caveat: I played the crap out of Destiny, and own it, but only played a half-dozen hours of Overwatch, and I don't even own it). Overwatch is nearly completely disconnected from the tranmedia storytelling. In the outside-the-game story, good guys like the Winston and Tracer, fight against bad guys like Widowmaker and Tracer. In the game, any group of heroes fight against any other group of heroes. They can be all Tracers vs all Tracers. It's a competitive shooter. That's it. There is TONS of personality in the game, shown entirely through in-game barks, animations, and playstyle, and it makes the game fun. This personality is likewise represented in the animated shorts/comics outside of the game, but with, you know, actual narratives. Again, they are separate from the game. The game isn't made more sensible through the transmedia information, but rather, there are other, different things out there that are related to the game. Knowing that Tracer is gay neither adds to nor takes away from how she plays. Knowing her history with Widowmanker doesn't change how they play against each other, etc.
There are good parts of transmedia storytelling, and bad ones. Overwatch is a multiplayer shooter. It has oodles of personality, but it's all limited to making for a fun and balanced game. Overwatch media is about telling linear narratives that have the same kind of personality as the game. This is great. Destiny the game is a singleplayer shooter (with multiplayer aspects I'm ignoring for the purposes of this) that leans heavily on its story, but is the worse for that. Destiny the transmedia experience is merely about patching the holes in Destiny the game. This is a problem.
In the end, a game should have everything it needs to have as a self-contained unit. Overwatch has that, Destiny doesn't. If there is additional content outside of that game, it should be along the lines of: Oh, this is nice too! Overwatch has that, Destiny doesn't. Transmedia content should be like a Starwars toy. It should be a neat thing that is related to the movie, something that has connections to it, but you can enjoy on its own (ie: more like Overwatch). It shouldn't be something where you have to go find the toy to understand what even happened in Starwars.
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Congrats Tanukitsune. Page 98 is all about book promotion, it seems.
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Episode is (finally) up!
Ah, crap! I had read this years ago and then entirely forgot to raise it. (Although we probably aren't the right people to discuss it anyway, as total newcomers to the author.)
As was pointed out above by MarkHoog, I would LOVE for you two to discuss "A Small, Good Thing." This would be a perfect little bonus episode. It's literally the same story as "The Bath" but so dramatically longer that the mood is completely and utterly different. It's really wonderful to compare the two, and a worthy example of how what is cut dramatically affects the story. They are both great stories, but they come across so very different because of the cuts. You can find it in Carver's collection Cathedral (which is outstanding), or you can find it in pdf easily enough.
As a writer, I hate the idea of Lish's changes, coming, as they did, as an oppressive dictation, but they're so damned good. I often still prefer the Carver versions, as they are kinder and more mellow, but the tenseness in the Lish versions is really powerful.
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The magical realism discussions have been pretty infuriating to listen to. Largely this is because both Rob and Danielle seem to have very little understanding of what the genre is, while they simultaneously are dismissive of it. For instance, calling the Grayson books magical realism is pretty eye-rolling. The books are great, but are as close to realism as a playdough car is to a ferrari. Granted, the difficulty with the genre is that it overlaps so many other things. For instance, when does a story stop being magical realism and become fabulism? Or surrealism, or urban fantasy or etc.?
We can trace a path from Franz Kafka to Jorges Louis Borges (and Bruno Schultz), and from Borges to people like Carpentier and then onto Marquez, Allende, etc. Sometimes people will lump Calvino into the genre, but that feels like a stretch (cosmicomics perhaps being closest?), and then there are contemporary people like Karen Russell (who, like Kelly Link and Aimee Bender is more of a fabulist, most of the time--though there are instances in all that are clearly magical realism in all), or George Saunders, who get called magical realists, but don't seem to fit, exactly. Only sometimes. I would argue that Haruki Murakami comes close at times (A Wild Sheep Chase does this wonderfully, whereas some of his books are fabulist or even sci-fi, with a surreal twist), that Salmon Rushdie is a perennial favorite (Midnight's Children is the best example, as it tells the story of India--and Indira Ghandi's rise to power through a malevolent kind of magic), Chitra Divakaruni touches it from time to time (but is largely a writer of realist fiction), Angela Carter is a postmodernist writer who lives also in the magical real. Tim O'Brien isn't normally in this camp, but Going After Cacciato is a marvelous book that veers into the magical (or is it surreal?), and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon certainly leans hard on the use of magic in a wonderful, interesting way.
I do find it interesting to see the focus of this discussion resting on the "belief" that magical things happen in real life--which is certainly an aspect of certain books/stories, to the exclusion of the other piece of magical realism, in which the magical elements intrude as the only seeming way to make sense of what is happening. For instance, Salmon Rushdie doesn't think that Indira Ghandi is capturing people with large noses, but how else to explain the trajectory of his country's history? It is a way of approaching the insanity of the political process (as well as criticize Ghandi's awful tendencies) in a way that both seems more ridiculous (magic) and yet, somehow, more natural an explanation than reality. It is this sharp break that shows how ridiculous things can be, that claims that surely reality/realism fails to account for how we got to this place/decision/outcome/etc.
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I played through the new Bioshock update (hooray for free updates!). It was strange to play the game again. There are a lot of the ways in which it's still great (laying traps for big daddies and the like), but man, the story suffers quite a bit from time. I had forgotten what hollow caricatures all of the people in it were. Oh well, it was fun, and enough that I'll probably replay Bioshock 2 in the not too distant future (Infinite can go hang itself though...).
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So my novel is finally out! It's a novel about mountain climbing, but mostly about the media, and interpretation and the like. It has a chapter that is a little choose your own adventure story, and it's pretty damned awesome. I'm so glad to have basically done all of the work on this badboy and to actually have it in the world. I can't say how much of a relief that is. Now I can start the next batch of hard work over the coming few years.
http://www.kernpunktpress.com/store/p5/Mount_Fugue_by_JI_Daniels.html
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I've been teaching a college composition course themed around video games. I'm using the following:
“Small Worlds”
“Loneliness"
“Canabalt”
“The Marriage”
"Maninchi”
“Dys4ia”
“Back to the First Date”
“Gunpoint (Demo)”
“Today I Die”
“Flow”
“Façade”
"Swing Copters" (tied with Ian Bogost's essay in The Atlantic about the game being a peak into sublimity)
“Real Lives”
“Passage”
“Every Day the Same Dream”
Unmanned”“Aether”“Depression Quest”“Cart Life”“The Graveyard”“Icarus Proudbouttom Teaches Typing”They're all free, and only Cart Life requires any significant amount of time to play. Some games (Canabalt, Flow, Gunpoint, Swing Copters) have no real narrative that's worth examining, but I use them as examples of the gameplay being the meaning--something tied very heavily to my course design, for my particular course.For me, the emphasis is on the understanding of action as speech, and the ability of the students to recognize and find out writing (through essays we read and that they research), but also videos, etc., and incorporate the visual, motion, and actions of parties as an inherent part of discourse. We spend a lot of time just breaking down games, very simply, and then I build the class out to making more nuanced arguments. The final project has the students creating a game as part of a small group (sometimes a Video game, but generally a boardgame, for time/expertise reasons) that addresses a problem (anything from obesity to climbing the corporate ladder to domestic violence, etc.) in the form of a game in which the structure of the game conveys/reinforces the idea that they have researched. Then they write a postmortem breaking down the project and how it was able/not able to address the problem sufficiently.Hope that helps, and good luck! -
It was pretty weird listening to Rob talk about how disappointed he was that the PS4 didn't have a UHD Blu-Ray player while simultaneously telling us that 4k and HDR don't really matter to him, really. Whaaaaaa?
Edit: and him describing HDMI 2.0a (or b? whatever, the difference is very minute, but probably a) cables as having "built in DRM." Whaaaat? Rob, HDMI has ALWAYS had DRM built in, way since 1.3. 2.0a allows for 4k HDR @60hz (verses 2.0 which allowed for 4k, but only at 24hz). Hearing Rob talk about himself as an audiophile/videophile and then having no idea what is happening with the tech is a little grating. Look, not everyone needs to know the ins and outs of tech specifications (it's boring), but please know what they are doing if you identify yourself as being someone who cares about these things, instead of rattling off some silly the DRM is in the connection! malarky.
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Kudos on the new exercise routine! Once you're a few months in, it gets so much easier to just keep going.
I'm also trying to cut back on food. Over the last two years I've been gaining weight on purpose (and going to the gym regularly), going from a fit 155 to 180. Unfortunately, a good 10 pounds of that gain (I'm being generous I'm sure) is me excusing bad eating choices because I was "bulking." Ugh. Worst is when you know what you're doing as you shove the food into your face, but still manage to justify it to yourself.
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Um, the aim of the game is really just shooting stuff. The SP story missions are decent enough to get you going, but from there, strikes and then raids are the meat of the game, and quite a lot of fun. Or, if you're into multiplayer, that is really solid.
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I'm so happy you got it working, even if it was a nightmare to get there.
Clickbait Games Journalism: Polygon vs Kotaku
in Video Gaming
Posted
Oh, no, I don't think I'm being down on it. It's not particularly thoughtful, or full of insight, but it's useful and/or fun stuff.It's there to serve a population of people who care about games (and the subculture surrounding them), which means that it's mostly stuff that serves that need, with occasional in-depth stuff.