Jake

Idle Thumbs 206: Owen Wilson's Nose

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So I think the impulse to try and layer in meaning in abstract games has a laudable intent. I think many of these developers start off with the theme relatively early, and are trying to work out how to express a particular dynamic entirely through gameplay. The thinking goes that a game is made of rules and procedures, so if you're going to do storytelling, if you're going to express a theme, that theme should be baked into the rules of the game instead of using rules that could work for any game and just painting your themes over the top, like adventure games do. Of course, then you have to frame the game so that people will notice that the rules are supposed to have thematic resonance, and it's probably okay for the game to be cookie-cutter in the parts where it's not trying to advance its theme. Which is why we have so many indie platformers about breakups!

 

I imagine there'd be more acceptance of using story and character to develop theme if it was more common to use mechanics to advance theme. It's a criminally under-used tool for storytelling, particularly because there aren't a lot of people who want to use games for storytelling who also believe that use of mechanics is more important to games than dialogue and characters. (Ian Bogost doesn't count; he apparently has little interest in storytelling in games.)

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Thank you, creators of Ori and the Blind Forest, for allowing Chris Remo to utter the sentence:

"What is Moon?"

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I find that difficult to believe, based on the significant barrier to entry for these games. The way Guitar Hero and Rock Band got over that barrier the first time is through novelty; now that these games aren't new, and most people have given it a go, are people still going to be willing to spend at least a hundred dollars for a guitar that only works on one game they've sort of already played? Harmonix is used to making games for a niche audience (in this case: people still playing Rock Band 3), and they are apparently intending to ensure backwards compatibility with the standard instruments, but Guitar Hero Live has a different button layout so the home console versions will require a unique, expensive peripheral.

 

My sincere hope for Harmonix's game is that they can leave behind the annualized peripheral arms race and focus on Rock Band as a platform that can be refined and executed without the need to buy 60 dollar games or 90 dollar keyboards every 13 months. I loved Rock Band, but I just don't have the kind of life where I can be a reliable consumer in that way - but I want to support the game, you know? I like Harmonix and I like their games and I want them to keep making more weird, dumb music stuff.

 

I guess the fact that Activision is apparently getting back into this makes that less likely, huh? I'm not sure competition between the two platforms actually made the games better last time out so much as it just forced people to pick either one game or the other.

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Rock Band 3 already did a pretty decent job of settling into that platform position, I have faith that a next gen revamp will continue that trend.

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I'm ok with it being cheesy FMVs because I found the character animations in Guitar Hero to be really creepy.  The drummer especially moves like an animatronic figure you'd see at Chuck E. Cheese or in Five Nights at Freddys.

 

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Fucckk I wonder if you can programe them in midi.. Id hook them up to ableton and make sick robobeats. 

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I think the phenomenon of ascribing arbitrary "deep" meanings to abstract games is an unfortunate side effect of the way people talk about games.

 

Most conversation about games is essentially "mechanically illiterate", because that's the thing that is unique to games and hasn't really had a chance to develop a critical grammar. To this day, when the average person says "I have a game idea", it's almost always a narrative or thematic concept rather than a mechanical one. Very rarely would you hear a prospective game designer say "I have a game idea...there are red and blue dots and based on the number of dots visible to one dot, it has a number assigned to it..." (Working game designers are fairly likely to speak in those terms, but that's a different population from the standard critical / consumer apparatus.)

 

To make matters worse, people have been in such a hurry to make games "meaningful" in an artistic sense that rather than let this grammar evolve naturally, they try to enforce critical conversations cribbed from other media, ones which focus of theme or narrative content.

 

I think we're still a ways off from your game-playing layman being able to think critically about the interaction of mechanics in and of themselves, and also a ways off from designers consistently having the confidence to give those designs an opportunity to stand alone.

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Agreed, so much agreed. It's better in boardgames though. And I see more and more references to good works that take a comparative approach across different gaming media, which is helping me develop that literacy at least. In addition to which, I think video games are fundamentally defined by the video aspect; this introduces syntax elements of thematic and narrative nature regardless of the aesthetic or political intent, be it authorial or interpretative. It's an interesting tension really, as I think the deeper ludological "grammar" is very incompatible with the more superficial "meaning" grammar. Do bear in mind the superficial adjective is meant for the context of gaming only, since in almost all other communication I see the superficial "meaning" as more fundamental.

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