BioShock Infinite

[Forbin]

I'm not thinking of it that way. I'm saying it's not mandatory.

Agreed. But if something is obscure, it better be worth it.

[CaptainFish]

People shouldn't think of accessibility as some corruption of artistic intent. It's a noble goal, and if done well shouldn't reduce the quality of the experience.

It's hard to comment on nobility. Most mass-media is accessible, but I don't think most people would call Stephanie Meyer's ability, to make an easy to sell read book, noble.

Sometimes accesibility can oppose artistic intent. The Waste Land comes to mind. It's a poem with a shifting structure filled with allusions to several different cultural texts. There's even Sanskrit in it. It's supposed to feel like a cacophony of references that zero people would recogize all of, without the steady rhyme and rhythm that makes poetry easy to read. It's like a junkyard of culture. For Eliot to set out to make that work, and then think about accessibility would be absurd. However, I still think there's some overall worth to be gained from reading it even without knowing all the ins and outs.

I'm not an artist so I don't know, but I'm assuming it's hard enough for most to come up with compelling content in an interesting form with a distinct style that conveys a message. To suggest that every artist can make sure that most audiences can easily enter that work without sacrificing the prior aspects is difficult to swallow.

[Lork]

Wait, what?

Kind of a lame joke, but if you're not sure what I'm getting at there, I'll try to clarify.

Ken Levine, or any proponent of Bioshock really, will make a big deal about "player expression", or the idea that if given a wide array of options and gameplay mechanics, the unique way in which you utilize them can be seen as a way of expressing yourself.

I say that's all fine and good, but as a player, if I use the mechanics of a game to express something interesting, the game had better respond in a similarly interesting manner. Otherwise I'm just amusing myself at my own antics, in which case the game seems kind of superfluous. Bioshock wants you to express yourself, but all it ever has to say in response is "Everything works equally, so go ahead and do whatever you want. I don't care."

Oh, and there might be something in there about masturbation, too. Whatever.

[pabosher]

Kind of a lame joke, but if you're not sure what I'm getting at there, I'll try to clarify.

Ken Levine, or any proponent of Bioshock really, will make a big deal about "player expression", or the idea that if given a wide array of options and gameplay mechanics, the unique way in which you utilize them can be seen as a way of expressing yourself.

I say that's all fine and good, but as a player, if I use the mechanics of a game to express something interesting, the game had better respond in a similarly interesting manner. Otherwise I'm just amusing myself at my own antics, in which case the game seems kind of superfluous. Bioshock wants you to express yourself, but all it ever has to say in response is "Everything works equally, so go ahead and do whatever you want. I don't care."

Oh, and there might be something in there about masturbation, too. Whatever.

Yeah, it was mostly the masturbation angle that caught my eye.

I do agree with you though. People want to be rewarded for cool actions. If the game's just like "Here, take the tools, Do what you like, I don't care." then it becomes less interesting. After all, why bother to do the cool shit if you're not being rewarded in any way?

[Forbin]

It's hard to comment on nobility. Most mass-media is accessible, but I don't think most people would call Stephanie Meyer's ability, to make an easy to sell read book, noble.

Sometimes accesibility can oppose artistic intent. The Waste Land comes to mind. It's a poem with a shifting structure filled with allusions to several different cultural texts. There's even Sanskrit in it. It's supposed to feel like a cacophony of references that zero people would recogize all of, without the steady rhyme and rhythm that makes poetry easy to read. It's like a junkyard of culture. For Eliot to set out to make that work, and then think about accessibility would be absurd. However, I still think there's some overall worth to be gained from reading it even without knowing all the ins and outs.

I'm not an artist so I don't know, but I'm assuming it's hard enough for most to come up with compelling content in an interesting form with a distinct style that conveys a message. To suggest that every artist can make sure that most audiences can easily enter that work without sacrificing the prior aspects is difficult to swallow.

You can't polish a turd, it doesn't mean polish is useless.

[Cult of Jared]

My point (which I cleverly hid such that none could find it) was not that there should be a minimum accessibility. I was trying to point out that accessible and inaccessible content are not mutually exclusive. Starcraft 2 is both legendarily inaccessible when played versus a Korean, and admirably accessible with it's challenge modes.

Should we tune all works to have, say, a vocabulary only accessible to people with a grammar school education?

If I lack the vocabulary to read a book then there is a clear path for me to enjoy the book, expand my vocabulary. If I am not enjoying a book because it forgoes all traditional story elements in favor of philosophical ramblings then there is a lot less I can do. There is no easy access to those advanced concepts, no matter how good they might be. This is analogous to the inevitable Farcry 2: that game should* have been way easier for someone who hadn't already immersed themselves in it.

My other point was that saying "People who don't enjoy this game aren't creative enough" is equivalent to "People who don't enjoy this game never got invested enough", which strictly speaking is probably not the fault of 'people'.

*I am fully aware using 'should' makes me a huge douche.

Edited August 15, 2010 by Cult of Jared

[Karimi]

Guess I'll toss in my two cents.

I think there's a fine line between being intentionally obscure, and difficult to access. Look at men like Carl Sagan, capable of communicating extremely important information without being long-winded or pretentious. Carl Sagan was smart enough to use the kind of rhetoric that would make him very hard to understand, and it would have impressed some theorists no doubt, but there is a much greater intelligence to being able to explain complex ideas in a simpler language. The more difficult and obscure the language you use - and try to justify it as being specific to a certain group - the less thinking you have to do.

Back to gaming, Planescape for example some may say was not the most accessible game. Planescape did try to make itself accessible, its just that for some people the dialogue is off-putting, and for others the gameplay is just not their cup of tea. This is different from requiring your player to write an essay on the role of semiotics in modern psychology before playing the game to make sure that only people that will 'get it' play the game. "If he doesn't get Chomsky he certainly won't understand my game !" A good college-level science book will try to explain complex subjects in an easy language, it may be inaccessible to a first grader but it does not try to make it 'exclusive' to college students. I realize a lot comes down to 'intent' but theres also a matter of skill.

I'm not saying accessibility is mandatory, BUT what I am saying is that if you can't pull it off it says something about your ability to communicate. A talented writer/designer/etc. can make their work rich AND accessible, without relying on an obscure language to make it seem more dense.

Now you can say well what if the author doesn't want to make it accessible ? What if he just wants to write something obscure and elitist ? Well then, don't complain when people say its obscure and elitist .

[Jake]

My other point was that saying "People who don't enjoy this game aren't creative enough" is equivalent to "People who don't enjoy this game never got invested enough", which strictly speaking is probably not the fault of 'people'.

There's probably a little bit of meeting in the middle to be had, but increasingly it seems like gamers (and kind of disgustingly, "core" gamers) want to load up a game, sit back in their chair and say "impress me." When the game then replies with, "well, you have to actually play me to be truly impressed," one should maybe not fault the game for asking. Something like Gears of War, or God of War, doesn't ask too hard. It shows you expensive guts and rocks splitting in half while you, the gamer sits back and, lords it up. I'm not saying games should be deliberately opaque/obtuse about things, I don't necessarily fault a thing for asking and expecting curiosity. I don't fault a game for responding poorly to someone expressing "I'm waiting to be impressed" through their play style.

A bunch of people probably aren't going to be able to read it, but I'm also not going to be able to run a marathon without a lot of work and I don't begrudge people who are actually capable of doing that because they aren't as lazy as I am.

I quoted this just because I think the analogy is good and I agree with it.

[Thyroid]

There's probably a little bit of meeting in the middle to be had, but increasingly it seems like gamers (and kind of disgustingly, "core" gamers) want to load up a game, sit back in their chair and say "impress me."

In all fairness, that Comic Book Guy mentality's always been prevalent probably just as much in the past as it is today. Anything truly great will immediately grab their attention. Ebert described it perfectly here, '"Attention" means silence...when the film deserves and earns it. I once saw "Silence of the Lambs" with a chattering audience looking forward to a "horror movie." In ten minutes, the audience was mesmerized.'

I'm probably talking about "great" in the let's-put-on-a-show sense instead of philosphical-and-deep - meaning more like, I don't know, Harry Potter instead of Moby-Dick - but my point is that an audience needs bait. You could try thinking of it the other way round: the audience isn't being sneery at the game, but maybe they can't be bothered to try and engage with it, and with so much choice out there they simply move onto the next thing with the hopes it'll engage them better. They haven't got their noses turned up, they're just bored.

Edited August 16, 2010 by Kroms

[Chris]

Sometimes accesibility can oppose artistic intent. The Waste Land comes to mind. It's a poem with a shifting structure filled with allusions to several different cultural texts. There's even Sanskrit in it. It's supposed to feel like a cacophony of references that zero people would recogize all of, without the steady rhyme and rhythm that makes poetry easy to read. It's like a junkyard of culture. For Eliot to set out to make that work, and then think about accessibility would be absurd. However, I still think there's some overall worth to be gained from reading it even without knowing all the ins and outs.

I haven't read that work, but Eco actually does similar stuff in several of his novels. He'll include passages--sometimes long ones--from Latin texts, or snippets of French, or whatever else, and I sure don't speak Latin, but it would be a less textured, less interesting, less authentic book if he had "balanced" the accessibility such that the average reader could fully comprehend everything.

There's also a character in The Name of the Rose who speaks in a gibberish-like amalgamation of numerous different languages, and he's a fascinating, awesome character. You can generally piece together what he's saying based on the English (well, translated Italian) bits, but his speech would clearly be more accessible to someone who actually knows multiple European languages. Again, I'm glad Eco didn't feel the need to take that into account.

[Chris]

Guess I'll toss in my two cents.

I think there's a fine line between being intentionally obscure, and difficult to access. Look at men like Carl Sagan, capable of communicating extremely important information without being long-winded or pretentious. Carl Sagan was smart enough to use the kind of rhetoric that would make him very hard to understand, and it would have impressed some theorists no doubt, but there is a much greater intelligence to being able to explain complex ideas in a simpler language. The more difficult and obscure the language you use - and try to justify it as being specific to a certain group - the less thinking you have to do.

Again, conveying actual information is a completely different thing to writing a piece of fiction. Sagan was trying to impart specific, concrete knowledge.

However, even here, there are parallels. My uncle is an astrophysicist, and he has written numerous books about space. They make no sense to me. They're dense, and complicated, and require a very high level of understanding. He will never have the same public profile and broad reach as Sagan, an amazing communicator. But that doesn't matter. He's writing for other scientists. He's writing for people who ALREADY know the stuff Sagan is teaching. Similarly, a writer of fiction can choose to write for people who already read a lot of books, who don't need their sentence and plot structure to fall within traditional, accessible bounds. That's one of the rewards of reading a lot -- or listening to a lot of music, or playing a lot of games, or whatever. You have access to more complex works that you wouldn't have if you were a more casual consumer of that type of work.

Back to gaming, Planescape for example some may say was not the most accessible game. Planescape did try to make itself accessible, its just that for some people the dialogue is off-putting, and for others the gameplay is just not their cup of tea. This is different from requiring your player to write an essay on the role of semiotics in modern psychology before playing the game to make sure that only people that will 'get it' play the game. "If he doesn't get Chomsky he certainly won't understand my game !"

Yes, it is different. Fortunately, nobody has proposed anything that jarring.

A good college-level science book will try to explain complex subjects in an easy language, it may be inaccessible to a first grader but it does not try to make it 'exclusive' to college students. I realize a lot comes down to 'intent' but theres also a matter of skill.

A college-level textbook shouldn't assume an appropriate existing amount of knowledge? Maybe it doesn't assume a level of knowledge that's right completely up to the absolute point at which the class is being taught, but you're already admitting it's not starting from ground zero. Clearly, some works benefit from assuming existing competence, knowledge, or familiarity.

I'm not saying accessibility is mandatory, BUT what I am saying is that if you can't pull it off it says something about your ability to communicate. A talented writer/designer/etc. can make their work rich AND accessible, without relying on an obscure language to make it seem more dense.

Some of them can, and choose to do so. However, it's insulting to say that an author who includes an obscure language in his work is "relying on" it "to make it seem more dense." If that inclusion, to you, is AUTOMATICALLY made for such arbitrary reasons, then I suppose this isn't even a conversation that can resolve, because you're implicitly declaring that there are certain types of content that are off-limits, or at least which you claim can only represent a particularly immature motive.

Now you can say well what if the author doesn't want to make it accessible ? What if he just wants to write something obscure and elitist ? Well then, don't complain when people say its obscure and elitist .

You're looking at it from the completely wrong angle, I think. An author might want to tell a story that includes certain elements. He might then decide or realize that this will make his story less accessible to certain people, but I very much doubt there are many authors who decide, as the very first step in the process, "I'm going to make something obscure and elitist!!!"

My point is, there are a whole lot of people in this world, and they have a pretty massive range of education, experience, literacy, willingness to engage with fiction, patience, and time, and the notion that there's something wrong or "elitist" with certain creators of fiction writing for other people like themselves, instead of just targeting some completely made-up, arbitrary "average person" or "mass audience," is really depressing to me.

[Forbin]

To go in another direction. Is it possible that tiered literacy in reading is tolerated because historically reading has been a source of power?

Maybe they could learn from more current media. There's something to be said about Harry Potter's success.

[thorn]

I liked Bioshock mainly for the story and the atmosphere. Didn't get much enjoyment out of killing dudes in different ways since I was mainly playing to explore the world. I took a mostly pragmatic approach to the combat, and didn't much care how I took out the crazy people trying to kill me.

Completely ignoring the ongoing conversation and instead replying to the above post... I totally agree. I generally don't play FPSes and appreciated the fact that on easy mode I could mostly play with electroshock and wrench. Only occassionally did I have to pull out the weaponry; when facing a Big Daddy or one of the set-piece swarming splicer moments.

That's why I was disappointed when I heard that Bioshock 2 was going to be all swarming and massed battles. I haven't even bothered playing it. And despite all that there is to like about Infinite, it seems like it's following on the same track.

[Chris]

To go in another direction. Is it possible that tiered literacy in reading is tolerated because historically reading has been a source of power?

Maybe they could learn from more current media. There's something to be said about Harry Potter's success.

What do you mean by "they"? You mean, more demanding works of fiction?

I'm pretty sure there are more than enough books that have learned from more current media. I mean, we're completely awash in works of fiction, be they films or books or television shows or whatever, that require absolutely zero attention span or mental expenditure. I don't mean to be an asshole here, but seriously, it's hardly the case that you can't find a million billion books that are extremely accessible and easy to read. Do we really need even MORE authors to take that attitude? Aren't there already plenty?

Again, I don't mean to imply that accessibility is inherently a bad quality. I'm sure plenty of those books have something to offer. I'm just saying, that's ALREADY the default attitude. I would be pretty bummed if it became the ONLY attitude.

[Karimi]

Again, conveying actual information is a completely different thing to writing a piece of fiction. Sagan was trying to impart specific, concrete knowledge.

Well what is fiction trying to impart then if not knowledge in some form or another ? Be it an analogue to a society,or a warning, to a sort of empathetic journey ? Maybe my perception of the 'take-away' is different from yours ?

Similarly, a writer of fiction can choose to write for people who already read a lot of books, who don't need their sentence and plot structure to fall within traditional, accessible bounds. That's one of the rewards of reading a lot -- or listening to a lot of music, or playing a lot of games, or whatever. You have access to more complex works that you wouldn't have if you were a more casual consumer of that type of work.

I guess I'll have to read more Umberto Eco or Pynchon to speak about post-modern literature. While I see the appeal of a more 'advanced' level of art for those that are aware of lets say a certain discourse, or conceptual mapping - it can become an inside joke when it ceases to become accessible. It becomes irrelevant and obscure, I can speak to this more in terms of architectural theory (and post-modern architectural theory). Again , for me it goes back to take away, art must lend itself to a purpose beyond simply entertainment and that's where accessibility I think is important, because that responsibility towards a society, a readership or whatever is what elevates a work from being a set of inside jokes and erudite mental high-fiving.

Yes, it is different. Fortunately, nobody has proposed anything that jarring.

I must say the Umberto Eco bit to me seemed a bit jarring - to intentionally scare away a reader seems perverse although I'm sure that wasn't the intent. Again,I guess I'll have to read The Name of the Rose to decide on how obscure is too obscure.

You're looking at it from the completely wrong angle, I think. An author might want to tell a story that includes certain elements. He might then decide or realize that this will make his story less accessible to certain people, but I very much doubt there are many authors who decide, as the very first step in the process, "I'm going to make something obscure and elitist!!!"

My point is, there are a whole lot of people in this world, and they have a pretty massive range of education, experience, literacy, willingness to engage with fiction, patience, and time, and the notion that there's something wrong or "elitist" with certain creators of fiction writing for other people like themselves, instead of just targeting some completely made-up, arbitrary "average person" or "mass audience," is really depressing to me.

Yes, very few people set out saying "Lets be obscure" but the work gets lost. Or maybe it would be better stated as the 'heart of the work' gets lost in the language. Which is why its important to start with a principle. If you set out with a principle,believing in something, I think the accessibility comes from that belief, its what empowers a work and lends to the desire to spread an idea. Its a matter of good design, rather than what an artist 'feels like doing'. Sure you can design on a whim , but to what end ?

Its not a matter of addressing the "average person" its about recognizing one's role in a community which is not limited to insiders, and one's role in that community that isn't simply to the exploration of one individual conceptual thread.

Anyway, this is a bit off-gaming, I can't really speak on either authenticity or obscurity in literature. All work speaks to an audience of some sorts ,and some more simply than others. I'll concede there's a big difference between the importance of accessibility between fiction and non-fiction, but there's also a matter of wasted talent and the difference between art-entertainment, and community and niche.

PS. Side note, but what did you think of Braid ?

[juv3nal]

There's also a character in The Name of the Rose who speaks in a gibberish-like amalgamation of numerous different languages, and he's a fascinating, awesome character. You can generally piece together what he's saying based on the English (well, translated Italian) bits, but his speech would clearly be more accessible to someone who actually knows multiple European languages. Again, I'm glad Eco didn't feel the need to take that into account.

IIRC that character is a reference to Borges, just to add another layer of potential "inaccessibility" to the stack (i.e. you'd need to have read some Borges or know something about him for that reference to mean anything).

Which is great/fine IMO. I think accessibility is overrated in telling stories. Take the case of fantasy or sci fi stories set in worlds or futures that are very different than our own present day. Far too often authors end up with exposition instead of trusting the readers to figure out what's going on from context. It either:

1) forces you down some pretty narrow narrative tracks (one of the characters is either a child, foreigner or amnesiac so everyone else has an excuse to explain shit to them)

or

2) it throws verisimilitude out the window. Even when the narrator is 3rd person omniscient, being situated in that milieu, they should only be remarking on the remarkable: you wouldn't expect someone writing a contemporary novel today to explain what a cell phone is and how it works, so why should sci fi tech things get different treatment?

[Jake]

It's weird that you guys are taking such a business centric approach to this stuff. Measuring success in terms of what quantity of individuals will pick up X hypothetical created object (book, game, whatever). I mean, games are funded generally through business transactions, as are books, but that doesn't mean shit, especially when people are being as theoretical as they are in threads like this. Maybe an author really doesn't give a shit how many people will be able to read his work, or whether it will "get lost" because it doesn't sell like Harry Potter. Maybe people have things they want to say or ideas they want to write, and they don't particularly care who their target audience is, beyond "someone who might for some reason be interested in reading what I'm writing."

On the opposite end of the academic scale, there is the rolling, roiling audio fart attack we all know as The Idle Thumbs Podcast, but I think this is a decent example. We have no idea what our audience is really. Maybe we have a vague idea at this point, but we definitely had no idea when we started the podcast. We just placed microphones down on a table and started talking about what we wanted to talk about, recorded down in a medium that is potentially consumable by a large number of people (an MP3 file, which is probably as close as you can get to the digitally-distributed-audio equivalent of a book or something). Would we have been smarter to run the numbers first, to find that maybe people like a table of contents or sectioned off parts of the podcast?

Should we have made sure to boilerplate every game's discussion with a five sentence summary of the game's play-style, genre orientation, and franchise history, so people aren't confused? Should we not reference any games released more than one and a half console generations ago, unless they sold 500,000 units, as to not confuse people with esoteric subject matter?

Or is the podcast better because it assumes that -- if you've listened past the first twenty minutes, or your first few episodes without giving up -- you either already have the leg up necessary to understand the references and subjects of conversation, or are at least willing to invest the mental processing power to filter through and contextualize the parts you don't fully understand because you're still getting rewarding value from listening to the parts that you do like?

This seems like a no brainer to me (I imagine many of you are here because you appreciate that on the podcast we follow to the second of those two examples), and it seems like that can clearly be extrapolated out to other works and endeavors in other (all?) mediums.

Edit: Also, I'm pretty excited for BioShock Infinite.

Edited August 16, 2010 by Jake

[Chris]

IIRC that character is a reference to Borges, just to add another layer of potential "inaccessibility" to the stack (i.e. you'd need to have read some Borges or know something about him for that reference to mean anything).

Indeed, that character is the Borges tribute.

Which is great/fine IMO. I think accessibility is overrated in telling stories. Take the case of fantasy or sci fi stories set in worlds or futures that are very different than our own present day. Far too often authors end up with exposition instead of trusting the readers to figure out what's going on from context. It either:

1) forces you down some pretty narrow narrative tracks (one of the characters is either a child, foreigner or amnesiac so everyone else has an excuse to explain shit to them)

or

2) it throws verisimilitude out the window. Even when the narrator is 3rd person omniscient, being situated in that milieu, they should only be remarking on the remarkable: you wouldn't expect someone writing a contemporary novel today to explain what a cell phone is and how it works, so why should sci fi tech things get different treatment?

Yes, agreed.

[Chris]

It's weird that you guys are taking such a business centric approach to this stuff. Measuring success in terms of what quantity of individuals will pick up X hypothetical created object (book, game, whatever). I mean, games are funded generally through business transactions, as are books, but that doesn't mean shit, especially when people are being as theoretical as they are in threads like this. Maybe an author really doesn't give a shit how many people will be able to read his work, or whether it will "get lost" because it doesn't sell like Harry Potter. Maybe people have things they want to say or ideas they want to write, and they don't particularly care who their target audience is, beyond "someone who might for some reason be interested in reading what I'm writing."

On the opposite end of the academic scale, there is the rolling, roiling audio fart attack we all know as The Idle Thumbs Podcast, but I think this is a decent example. We have no idea what our audience is really. Maybe we have a vague idea at this point, but we definitely had no idea when we started the podcast. We just placed microphones down on a table and started talking about what we wanted to talk about, recorded down in a medium that is potentially consumable by a large number of people (an MP3 file, which is probably as close as you can get to the digitally-distributed-audio equivalent of a book or something). Would we have been smarter to run the numbers first, to find that maybe people like a table of contents or sectioned off parts of the podcast?

Should we have made sure to boilerplate every game's discussion with a five sentence summary of the game's play-style, genre orientation, and franchise history, so people aren't confused? Should we not reference any games released more than one and a half console generations ago, unless they sold 500,000 units, as to not confuse people with esoteric subject matter?

Or is the podcast better because it assumes that -- if you've listened past the first twenty minutes, or your first few episodes without giving up -- you either already have the leg up necessary to understand the references and subjects of conversation, or are at least willing to invest the mental processing power to filter through and contextualize the parts you don't fully understand because you're still getting rewarding value from listening to the parts that you do like?

This seems like a no brainer to me (I imagine many of you are here because you appreciate that on the podcast we follow to the second of those two examples), and it seems like that can clearly be extrapolated out to other works and endeavors in other (all?) mediums.

Edit: Also, I'm pretty excited for BioShock Infinite.

Good post. I completely agree, obviously.

[Psych]

I think the reason accessibility is considered more necessary in games is because in games are generally less accessible then other forms of media.

Just about every game has some unique mechanic that its players will have to learn to master in order to progress. Considering that it's understandable that some players will feel fatigued by elements that take more than just the usual amount of time and toil to penetrate.

[Cult of Jared]

It's weird that you guys are taking such a business centric approach to this stuff.

I'm not entirely sure who you are talking about, but it might be me. Which would mean I have entirely failed to make the point I've been aiming at.

Once more into the breech.

I wrote the original post after seeing 'much ado about nothing', and noticing it contained prat falls and deeper themes about trust and judging others. It doesn't matter how engaged you are, the play will reward you accordingly.

Speaking entirely as a consumer, it is frustrating that many games cater only to the super-dedicated, or the ultra-tourist. I have never played 'game of war', because reportedly their mechanics never get interesting. I am endlessly frustrated that fascinating games (eve, dwarf fortress, original starcraft) are only rewarding after the first hundred hours. My favorite games nearly always do both very well (Team Fortress, Civilization).

To reiterate, I am not talking about saleability or difficulty. I am asking why we excuse games that require a huge amount of dedication before they are interesting. It doesn't have to be that way.

P.S: Embarissingly, I have not played Bioshock past Fort Frolic. But I bet Infinite is called such because of the recursive time loop it ends in. Rapture is The Columbia FROM THE FUTURE!

[Forbin]

What do you mean by "they"? You mean, more demanding works of fiction?

I'm pretty sure there are more than enough books that have learned from more current media. I mean, we're completely awash in works of fiction, be they films or books or television shows or whatever, that require absolutely zero attention span or mental expenditure. I don't mean to be an asshole here, but seriously, it's hardly the case that you can't find a million billion books that are extremely accessible and easy to read. Do we really need even MORE authors to take that attitude? Aren't there already plenty?

Again, I don't mean to imply that accessibility is inherently a bad quality. I'm sure plenty of those books have something to offer. I'm just saying, that's ALREADY the default attitude. I would be pretty bummed if it became the ONLY attitude.

Yeah I agree, you can hit any news stand novel rack and come back with a bunch of garbage that was written for a 6th grader. But I'm not saying that everything has to dumbed down, just that maybe more books could have a complexity curve to them. An intro that sucks readers in before trying to blow their minds with how cleaver the author is.

For example Anathem starts out with simple geometric problems, and ends with string theory. And Lord of the Rings pretty much starts off with a "once upon a time", and later starts throwing songs, poetry and elvish lore at the reader. In fact Tolkien is a great example, because you can compare his rough work in the Silmarillion to what he chose to publish in LotR.

I think Jake just killed this conversation by pointing at the elephant in the room. But I think the point that some of us have been arguing is that if you're going to be obscure you need to earn it. Idle thumbs certainly does, and if it didn't, it would be the most painful awfulcast to listen to.

[Denial]

However, even here, there are parallels. My uncle is an astrophysicist, and he has written numerous books about space. They make no sense to me. They're dense, and complicated, and require a very high level of understanding. He will never have the same public profile and broad reach as Sagan, an amazing communicator. But that doesn't matter. He's writing for other scientists. He's writing for people who ALREADY know the stuff Sagan is teaching.

Really, this. Carl Sagan could have used rhetoric (in the sense of unnecessarily complicated language intended to confuse or deceive - using the Aristophanic idea of the rhetor) in his popular science works, but if he had he would have failed to communicate - his language would have been inappropriate for the context. However, if a layperson who had read Time-Life's Planets had instead looked at the science behind Sagan's conclusions on the climate of Venus, it would probably be incomprehensible - not because it was full of rhetoric and thus unnecessarily obscure, but because it was necessarily obscure. Sagan was a great populariser, but the technical conversations he had with the rocket scientists on the Mariner project would probably not have been easily understood by the average viewer of Cosmos.

That said, games kind of are inevitably somewhat exclusionary - it's just that the elite they are limited to isn't cultural in the conventional sense. It's the group which has money to spend on gaming hardware and software and time to spend using them - after which you can factor in reliable access to the Internet, reliable access to electricity supply and so on. Since most of the people who talk about games speak from inside this group, it's generally an invisible boundary, but it's certainly there. I think that's why the responses to "inside outsider" voices like the Borderhouse Blog can be very interesting - when they hit the gaming mainstream (like the recent discussions over Hey Baby and then the marketing of Privates) they often criticise or question ideas which are instinctively understood to be structural - and, as a result, one of the immediate responses is often that the critical voices are overcomplicating things - that is, adding unnecessary complexity.

OT: Really interested in Bioshock Infinite - especially the asymmetrically able AI partner.

[Jayel]

Bioshock definitely has a lot of breadth, in that it gives the player a wide variety of tools with which to tackle any given situation, but it offers no particular reason to use most of them over any others; a condition that is commonly known as shallow gameplay. Even in Far Cry 2, if I figure out some clever way to complete an objective without setting foot in the enemy base protecting it, I'm at least rewarded by not having to enter that base. Contrast that with Bioshock, where putting all the time and effort into a complex "creative" plan actually leaves me with less resources than I would have if I had gone with one of the ever present simpler solutions.

I agree with this. Bioshock does a pretty good job of introducing each power and how to use it (eg blocking off an area until you can use your newly acquired powers to proceed. anyone remember that tennisball throwing sessions when you get the gravity arm thing?). so I wouldn't say that combining the powers and killing baddies in creative ways "inaccessible" - it's just boring and mentally exhausting after a couple hours or so because it offers no tangible reward. For people like me at least.

[CaptainFish]

I think Jake just killed this conversation by pointing at the elephant in the room. But I think the point that some of us have been arguing is that if you're going to be obscure you need to earn it. Idle thumbs certainly does, and if it didn't, it would be the most painful awfulcast to listen to.

You don't have to earn anything because each project will have it's own audience. There are tons of people who, if they read Idle Thumbs, would be lost in the game discussions because of the lack of disclaimers. But those people will never read it. Idle thumbs doesn't have to earn it to those readers, because there are readers that will appreciate something because they have the prerequisite knowledge, or the wherewithal to find out. I certainly don't think Idle Thumbs is obscure because it falls within my niche of video games enjoyment, but for every work of art there will be a certain group that enjoys it, be it because of language barriers, subject matter, depth, genre or whatever. That group won't care if it's obscure, because they enjoy it. Some groups will be larger or smaller than others, but if the creator is happy to have people appreciating their work, no matter the number, they won't care whether or not they "earned" said obscurity.

OT: Really interested in Bioshock Infinite - especially the asymmetrically able AI partner.

Has that been confirmed, because I've heard this idea suggested from the way the trailer was. I'm wondering how they'll deal with it. Is it just a way of representing plasmids by having someone you order to do a specific move? Will the left hand of the first game, just become this second character with the same amount of control? Or is it more of an autonomous creation like Sheva? Irrational did make SWAT 4 which is very much about commanding AI dudes to win a mission. That game also had co-op though, so I'm wondering if that will also be an option.