'Get Out Of Jail Free Card' Solutions to Design Dodginess

[dartmonkey]

Reading various opinions around Bioshock Infinite got me thinking about how faults in games can sometimes be justified or explained through an in-universe detail, or because the perceived fault is intended to mirror the protagonist's experience in some way. For example, one could argue that a confusing and fractured narrative (produced through whatever production/personnel difficulties) evokes empathy for Booker's plight.

 

It's very difficult to know authorial intentions (and you could argue they're irrelevant anyway) but I always feel like I can sniff out BS. It happens a lot in films. I have heard arguments that the superfluous ninety minutes of the three-hour Wolf of Wall Street is intended to bore the reader, evoking the dissatisfaction the protagonist increasingly finds with his indulgent lifestyle and mirroring the MOREMOREMORE fatigue of '80s excess. This conveniently justifies/disguises what I perceive as a fault. However, if anyone has managed to get through Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, they'll know that the reversed narrative (that begins with the violent culmination of the story - a horrendous shaking steadicam attack - before gradually, scene by scene, calming down, becoming 'readable' and providing context) is a REAL grind the first time round, but by the end the authorial intent is very clear. It's a confusing mess at first, and very difficult to stick with. A second viewing is infinitely more rewarding, and in a more affecting way than something designed to tease the reader the first time round with a more puzzle-like narrative (like watching Memento or The Sixth Sense again knowing the 'twist').

 

The 'it's-supposed-to-be-broken' argument often feels like an author or fan-based retcon rather than a design 'solution'. So I thought a thread discussing examples might be interesting. The Bioshock multiverse can now be used to justify anything and everything (in another universe there exists a Bioshock Infinite where everyone's expectation were met and/or surpassed!) but can you think of other examples of content being used to excuse deficiencies in form, intentionally or otherwise?

 

I can think of a couple of clever intentional instances. Mario 64 did well to make the camera a little dude on a cloud, abstracting it from the mechanic. When the camera got caught somewhere I visualised little Lakitu squished against the wall and laughed off his incompetence. Similarly I forgave my idiot Pikmin as they succumbed to fire or water thanks to poor pathfinding. Bless 'em.

[BobbyBesar]

The literary version of this that springs to mind is the unreliable narrator. Almost anything can be hand-waved away with an unreliable narrator, to the extent that it's sort of a joke even when it was obviously not the intent of the author.

 

However, even when it was the author's intent, I still have a problem with it. It's probably one of the hardest technique to actually use effectively, and while interesting in the hands of a master, it's an incredibly dangerous game to play for anybody else. If the author is presenting me with an unreliable narrator, they better have a pretty damn good reason, and I better be confident that the author is way smarter and / or more rigorous than I am. The ambiguity has to serve a purpose, otherwise it just ends up in the "who cares" category: so you write a made up story, and then you don't actually tell me the story you made up, but tell me unrelated things that may or may not have fictionally happened? Fuck you. There's only so many levels of indirection that I'm willing to stomach.

[sclpls]

I don't have any absolute rules about this. To the point about a boring passage in a film or book, for example, there are instances when I think a boring section absolutely is justified (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is a masterful example of boredom used for a heightened literary effect), but people will naturally disagree based on their idea of what a particular work is about, and how it accomplishes its effects.

 

I also am glad CLWheeljack brought up the unreliable narrator, as its something I've been thinking about a lot! My favorite short story, Melville's Benito Cereno has one of the great unreliable narrators of all time. By contrast, the book I'm currently reading for my book club, Swamplandia! has an unreliable narrator effect that is causing a lost-at-sea feeling among our group, and has made us deeply ambivalent about the merits of the book.

[tegan]

what if we have all these tutorials because the protagonist has amnesia

[clyde]

I think that the greatest thing about Adaptation is

that the work so successfully takes the audience along on the journey of the narrator becoming more and more unreliable, rather doing it in a masturbatory fashion.

I don't have much use for a work of art whose sole purpose is to make its audience a stooge. There is a difference between subverting expectations and wasting the audience's faith.

[bkbroiler]

This is what kills me about Spring Breakers. If you think it is a badly made, badly acted piece of shit, you can't argue that because people are like "it's SUPPOSED to be that way! You just didn't get it, maaan!"

 

I like that aspect of Pikmin, though. Little buggers don't know any better.

 

People say this a lot of Spec Ops. That it is boring to play because it is satirizing military shooters. I don't really buy that one exactly.

[Gormongous]

People say this a lot of Spec Ops. That it is boring to play because it is satirizing military shooters. I don't really buy that one exactly.

 

In general, I'd expand this to a lot of "subversive" games the past few years that claim the evocation of negative emotions as their goal. "You're bored because the game is supposed to bore you!" "You're disgusted because the game is designed to be disgusting!" It's the biggest "so what" I've had with games lately. What is the point of eliciting a certain emotion if it doesn't serve to cement a larger ludic or narrative theme?

[BobbyBesar]

In general, I'd expand this to a lot of "subversive" games the past few years that claim the evocation of negative emotions as their goal. "You're bored because the game is supposed to bore you!" "You're disgusted because the game is designed to be disgusting!" It's the biggest "so what" I've had with games lately. What is the point of eliciting a certain emotion if it doesn't serve to cement a larger ludic or narrative theme?

 

"Just because a game seemingly aims to be bad on purpose doesn't make it any less of a bad game."

[bkbroiler]

The laughing scene in FFX is supposed to be awful because Tidus is forcing himself to laugh to forget the bad times (I think?). Then he starts laughing more genuinely.

 

I think that scene is awful, but the "HAW HAW HAW" part that everyone makes fun of is totally that.

[aperson]

A lot of what is lauded for being commentary or meta is pretty much just "it's a video game!" I know that video games often present the illusion of choice rather than actual choice, that AAA games have you shoot a bunch of dudes for flimsy reasons, that AAA plots often make little sense - I don't need other games to tell me this. I find it really strange that anyone gets kudos for these trite observations.

 

I've always felt that it's best to lead by example. Instead of make Scream and illustrate how stupid horror movies are - something everyone who watches horror movies is fully aware of - just make a good movie. And while Scream is supposedly some sort of commentary it's really just a dumb horror movie in itself. The same is true of many of these "it's a dumb video game" games. Games are dumb  - we know!

 

I haven't played Spec Ops but from what I gather it feels like they at least tried to have some sort of point and it seems well-intentioned. Whereas with something like Far Cry 3 it's just "yup, this is super super dumb because video games are super super dumb and this is just a video game." You made a game - congratulations? The "commentary" is impossible to distinguish from the games played straight.

[bkbroiler]

I remember Far Cry 3 being a game where everyone thought it was some sort of hyper meta commentary and then everyone was super bummed out when they realized there was nothing more to it than a bunch of bro douchebags fucking native chicks.

[TychoCelchuuu]

It's half the opposite, sort of: the writer of Far Cry 3 loves to talk about how smart and meta and subversive the narrative is but in actuality it's just a bunch of racism. More reading:

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/why-player-side-killing-conversation-writer-far-cry-3/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/criticalintel/10211-Far-Cry-3s-Citra-Is-Straight-From-the-Freakshow

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/19/far-cry-3s-jeffrey-yohalem-on-racism-torture-and-satire/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/09/fire-away-spec-ops-far-cry-3-writers-on-criticizing-fps/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/13/spec-ops-fc3-writers-on-whats-next-futurism-bioshock/

http://gamechurch.com/guiding-lights-an-interview-with-far-cry-3-writer-jeffrey-yohalem/

http://iam.benabraham.net/2012/12/far-cry-3-and-designer-inducements/

[Gormongous]

It's half the opposite, sort of: the writer of Far Cry 3 loves to talk about how smart and meta and subversive the narrative is but in actuality it's just a bunch of racism. More reading:

 

This might just be my own rule of thumb, but if the writer of something ostensibly dumb or racist or sexist has to go around explaining how it's really subversive, then it's not subversive. No one needs to explain what's subversive about something actually subversive, like Crime and Punishment.

 

In fact, doesn't the need to explain what's subversive actually make something not subversive?

[TychoCelchuuu]

Yes.

[Merus]

what if we have all these tutorials because the protagonist has to make their suit work or pass a medical

 

Re: FFX: I will defend that laughing scene because it's clear in context everyone else thinks he's being weird but they're not saying anything because Yuna's making him do it and girl gets what she wants

[bkbroiler]

It's half the opposite, sort of: the writer of Far Cry 3 loves to talk about how smart and meta and subversive the narrative is but in actuality it's just a bunch of racism. More reading:

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/why-player-side-killing-conversation-writer-far-cry-3/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/criticalintel/10211-Far-Cry-3s-Citra-Is-Straight-From-the-Freakshow

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/19/far-cry-3s-jeffrey-yohalem-on-racism-torture-and-satire/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/09/fire-away-spec-ops-far-cry-3-writers-on-criticizing-fps/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/13/spec-ops-fc3-writers-on-whats-next-futurism-bioshock/

http://gamechurch.com/guiding-lights-an-interview-with-far-cry-3-writer-jeffrey-yohalem/

http://iam.benabraham.net/2012/12/far-cry-3-and-designer-inducements/

I haven't looked at the Far Cry stuff in a while, but I remember it all seeming pretty desperate and grasping.