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[Nillo]

If the game is a joke, then it's only fitting that the reviews are also jokes. Worst case is you've lost zero dollars and a couple minutes of your time.

[Tanner]

i mean, the game isn't a joke... or at least i wouldn't call it one. more like a humorous anecdote. it's a weird distinction to make but it serves a greater purpose than to just deliver a punchline. it's more about relating an experience. i guess my problem with the reviews is that they're, like CA said, embarrassing. they miss the point (or at least appear to) so hard. it's just such a lovely little short that seeing those stupid jokes attached to it in a nearly official capacity offends me. i guess i should just take cool frog's advice and "quit gettin' mad [about] video games".

[rj]

how do you do it is really really really good

[gimymblert]

The problem of game is that it's diversifying but the infrastructure is still the same. Although we can equate this to library, a library don't discriminate on books, just because you have novel, dictionaries or comics don't mean it will be excluded. Imagine a world where only dictionaries exist and novel start to appear ... first they will have a structure close to dictionaries but no one would know better, and dictionaries reader would judge it based on its dictionary value, they fill different market niches and different need, but one need is more expected through simple tradition and exposure.

That's not new, sim city was lambasted because it has "no goal" people where confused about how to complete the game, bis repetita for the sims. etc ...

Manga wasn't enough animation, photo was too much like painting, cinema too much like theater, it's the cycle of art.

[s0]

the infrastructure of steam is good, the problem is that the "demographic" using the infrastructure is skewed.

that said, multiple cultures do coexist on steam to a certain extent. ive never seen any of the numerous hidden object games hated on or spammed with joke reviews for instance.

[gimymblert]

What I mean is that the infrastructure for other media is more diverse and thematically constructed. It's like all game should subscribe to the same aesthetics by virtue of being interactive media, there is a distinction between software type but barely within game, genre are still under the same aesthetics of challenge, despite we have now evidence people appreciate more when it's well done (telltales game). A confusion that extend to dev, while david cage is not very good, he get the "format" down better than a game likle the order 1884 who don't know what it tries to be (aside for a art director dream, it's almost a genre now, beautiful game with "shit" everything else). Give telltale the order team and bam! I'm really curious what will be the next david cage game, if they remove the main problem (david cage) and lift someone with talent we may have a winner.

[SirNiko]

I feel like How Do You Do It would have been just as 'good' and well received if it had been a five minute low budget film. The interactivity is meaningless and it's easy to not get caught just by coincidence if you're rotating the dolls when mom appears. That last bit could have been solved with a button expressly dedicated to hiding the dolls, so the player is torn between experimenting and putting the dolls away every time they hear a sound. The "playing gameboy in bed" game on Game and Wario captured this pretty perfectly.

The random mashing of the dolls together makes the girl seem stupid. It would make sense if you were simulating a one-year-old manipulating toys with no understanding of the real-world things they represent, but the girl is old enough to at least articulate them to mimic what she saw in the movie. Instead we get heads and legs bashing into each other almost randomly, like QWOP with the humor replaced by imagined satirical intent.

I like short experience games but this one seems pointless. I got far more enjoyment out of the mocking 'reviews' on Steam than I got out of the actual game. I can understand somebody finding this to be an amusing vignette, but I would question the intelligence and honesty of anyone who nominates this for an award over anything that actually features interactivity.

[MeshGearFox]

So what you're saying is we need a game about making dolls fuck that has legit mechanics and puzzles n shit?

I'm down wittit.

[SirNiko]

Dragon Age is already a game.

[gimymblert]

There is also the notion that a short movie isn't judge on the merit of long movie, then why short games are such under scrutiny.

BTW it's the experience of the main writer of the game, it's silly but apparently almost all women "get it", i'm not a women and get it too, and it's free so there is no notion of value. The interactivity is meaningless and it's kinda the point, she is clueless and will not have any more clue with the dolls, but at the same times that's the only education little girl have on the subject most of the time, it capture perfectly the situation. Trying to not get caught isn't really part of the story, it's the awkwardness of the situation that is the point. I don't think it's pointless at all. I would definitely say it's genius, I would nominate it myself!

Yes it could be better because the first time I played it I thought there was some interaction:

Now the reason I held "how do you do it" so highly is that it is a perfect demonstration of those effect. Interaction there aren't just illustrative they part of the expression of the stakes, that is the mystery of conception from a children point of view, the system is shallow ( rotate figure and collide them) but perfectly embody the behavior, and what makes it break from mere "illustration" (aka redundant or pointless addition to given information) is that each collision is rewarded with thought snippet and therefore act as a pay off that validate and express the closure of the works. As repeated collision and different poses give different snippet it allow a sens of progression. It work even greater because there is an illusion of progression where there is none and this is relevant to the theme, the little girl remain absolutely clueless even though her thought (imagination) progress on the matter and the audience is embarked in witnessing where she goes (which make the interaction meaningful). The punchline (the mother return) works because the tacit complicity of the audience and the knowledge distance between us (we know how to do it) and the girl (she still doesn't). It's a very rare and brilliant example that sublimate what I demonstrate above and actually show the full mastery of the concept beyond the direct use (as in the serial killer example).

Most point stand, Here I give a better deconstruction of the interactive framework that allow understanding of this little game (I use it as an example): http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=32220.msg1098115#msg1098115
This quote was a sample from it.

[gimymblert]

Remember that cinema started with stupid things like this (the sprinkler sprinkled):



It was fun and movie was about fun not story
so was animation ...

[MeshGearFox]

When you see it...

[Tanner]

It was fun and movie was about fun not story

yo actually this movie is basically the first with any kind story or plot at all. almost every other of the lumieres' early films were just pretty things moving or people just looking into the camera, like the filmic equivalent of a still life. of all the movies to pick you picked probably the worst one to illustrate that point

i knew that early film history class was going to pay off someday.

[gimymblert]

But that's why I picked this one,

Wwe are talking about form of game that goes from being just about fun to actually saying something, even though the transition is much more diffuse in game because it's an overlap of multiple disparate forms and also it's a post modern media and the concern of all media already diffuse in how we make games, confusing the things a bit more.

Don't forget that the ideal game to go against those form of game is tetris aka game don't need plot, I would argue that movie doesn't too (transformers plot is taking a backsit for the spectacle which is as legit as story) but we are now train to expect plot in some form so it must be at least serviceable (ie plot hole not to be too apparent they are distracting).

So basically I kind of cheated by showing a transition that falls apart by modern standard (barely a 'modern' movie) since we are at this point, but also it would take sometimes for a true form of movie to happen (birth of a nation). Also we haven't yet a true Eisenstein even though we have already multiple kuleshov moment (passage, lim).

Note:
I think we already have multiple instance of birth of nation scattered across multiple game, but haven't yet the Eisenstein to make sense of them. Understand we haven't a theory of montage that goes across all game presentations and interactivity. I think I'm going toward that if you read that link under the quote I posted.

Note 2:

To iterate a bit further, I tend to considerate those game has "mono frame" akin to the single frame movie like "the sprinkler", a montage of these systems would be more interesting in the long terms, and game already do this in a mechanical way (shifting between menu mode, combat mode, exploration mode, dialogue, etc ...) but rarely meaningful (even though they are player driven montage that allow focus on different information) and when it is it's gimmicky (at best to make a point) like in metal gear (solid 3 notably with killing the boss or the fight with ocelot at the end).

A lot of it have to do with that game expend on montage with the crossing of the fourth wall, aka interaction, All those mode are internally consistent in this framing but inconsistent between them (control are different in menu, battle, or talking mode) I think a narrative framing of control can happen too but is rarely used except as a gimmick in some game (FF8 have some instance I remember, and ten they lost it those experiment later). Those limit expression of narrative gameplay as game have very hard time expressing introspection, there was some attempt but  don't remember them well too.

Also another problem is self insertion as in narrative self insertion (role play is solved, How do you do it is role play actually). Things are still crude, moral choice and karma haven't yet expended to a full system where you profile the player as a character, here too, it's a lack of narrative consciousness in the use of the mechanics, they are crude exposition, as while the game can competantly introduce develop character to the player, there is barely good way to introduce the player as a character to the game plot so it can reacts.

[Tanner]

love you gimmy. you know more about film theory than i was anticipating haha. i see what you're saying and totally agree. i'll definitely read that link

[gimymblert]

Oh I edited while you were replying

[Boreal]

Vulkan is OpenGL Next!

https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/overview/2015_vulkan_v1_Overview.pdf

Notable points:
- official debugging suite
- SPIR-V shader bytecode
- unified desktop & mobile
- supported on OpenGL ES 3.1 (OpenGL 3.3-ish) hardware
- implementations later this year!

[SirNiko]

There is no sense of progression, or even an illusion of progress. The player mashes the dolls together and text appears in order. It's immediately evident that any position you rotate the characters will elicit no meaningful reaction from the girl. Most of the text is meaningless variations of "is this right?" that don't provide any value to the player. The mother appearing is neither a shock nor does it convey any sense of awkwardness - it only provides a sense of relief to the player that they can stop randomly mashing the dolls together.

The end result is the player imagining not the emotional state of the little girl, but imagining that the game is actually any good at conveying any emotion at all.

The concept could have been better executed if the player were presented with some alien physiology that left them truly clueless, or some comparable task such as assembling a machine with no knowledge of the components. If the goal was to replicate the awkwardness of being caught doing something you shouldn't have, simulate the player (not the character) being observed playing the game by making embarrassing announcements through steam (real or not). Somehow the game should try to make a player who can't relate to this experience (I can't, having never done this) understand it, whether by faithfully recreating the experience or offering some kind of parallel. This game doesn't do either.

There's just no creativity here. Nothing new, original, or exceptional was done here except to explore an extremely narrow anecdote with minimal effort. The fact that reviews on steam consist nearly singularly of mockery of the game is evidence of how terribly the developers failed to accomplish their goal of relaying their anecdote to the player. Compare it to Gone Home which, despite being aggressively mocked on steam, garners thousands of detailed, unironic positive reviews. In the end, this is more Goat Simulator than Gone Home, except with far less content or effort.

[Impmaster]

so apparently valve is gonna make a big announcement at gdc at 3 pm on march 3rd. they also recently revealed their new vr headset. Should I be feeling hyped?

EDIT: My bad. Apparently they're doing a physics optimization conference thing. I guess my friend was just trolling me.

[kriyo_funions]

...

afaik the game was concieved over a weekend, it doesn't need to meet your dialogue of games.  it's short and it doesn't need to serve any purpose, other than being a short vignette into a childhood experience, in that regard it's relatable rather than abstractly mechanical.  it doesn't seem to want to achieve a deep emotional impression on the player, or really achieve anything other than presenting an experience.  the game appeals aesthetically and conceptually, the execution as a whole is charming, made with a sense of humor, nostalgic-y, and unique.  It also reflects the devs themselves, it's exciting in that regard, it brings in the personal and human.