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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

As for autobiographical games, it seems like an interesting idea at first but you'd need a lot more crazy people with unusual crazy ass life stories making games, and moreover they'd need huge teams to help them. The autobiography in Keys of a Gamespace felt positively cliche, even if it was true; I mean, game developer who spends all his time participating in WoW raids neglecting his girlfriend, and it turns out he had deep-seated childhood issues with his father all along? It's like an internet forum troll topic.

i don't think it being generic or common is necessarily a drawback, it might be a benefit, because more people can relate to it. there are a lot of people like that in the world, and playing it may help those people think more clearly about their situation, sort of how the tv show 'hoarders' helps people who have a hoarding problem think about their situation

so i don't really think that a life or experience has to be exceptionally unique in order to be worth writing about. there are plenty of works about the normal mundane parts of life and how even those can be important. there's are books about a woman's experience with abortion for instance -- nothing special about their experience, it's a pretty common one, but someone felt it was worth writing about and others feel it's worth reading

that said i felt that this started off pretty slow, which doesn't make me want to finish it. the walking between areas and the taking items and bringing them to other areas slows down the game too much and feels unnecessary, and there isn't enough ambient stuff to explore as you traverse those fetch quests. backtracking is mainly fun if you discover new things each time you backtrack, and can do new things in old areas, which wasn't the case in backtracking in this game

@c.a. sinclair - what? why does it attack me if i get close then?

[s0]

@c.a. sinclair - what? why does it attack me if i get close then?

I thought you meant the robot that walks around on the pier? It's been a while since I last played the game but I'm 90% sure that one is non-hostile.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i don't remember where it was, since it was about 10 years ago, but i don't remember any pier, i remember some type of mechanical cave or tunnel system

[s0]

You should really try the game again when you have the time. There's a reason why it's so revered by so many people.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yeah but people revere portal too, and there's reason for that, but that doesn't mean i liked it even when i played through it; sometimes a lot of people can like something that i wouldn't like

i'll probably try it again eventually though, just not in the near-term future; maybe in another 10 years

[gimymblert]

A lot of artgame still reference mainstream game as achievement (even notgame), I see the distinction as a non issue, the main point of the naming is to label game that would push further the experimental part of game as expressive by tossing the fat "gameplay filler", and see if we can build something WITHOUT those filler (actually that's the definition I respect).

Now let's talk about gameplay filler. They are immensely fun and rewarding, but ultimately they only pad access to the meaning and separate form vs content.

I mean it's like the bad song in bad disney who just stop the story, yes they are great and you can enjoy the movie ONLY for them but ultimately they don't contribute to the "narrative".

How many guy I need to kill (whether in silent hill or in cod) to get the point? In a movie it's either one or it's a background for another stake (personal or relational). what's more, the way the character fight in the movie is a piece of information while in game fighting is just a key to a lock, the fight might be meaningful but not the fighting.

IF the way you fight (and not just sequence to sequence but moment to moment) was part of the interactive discussion past gating, if fighting with "attitude" (let's be  brave, sneaky, etc... and the game recognize and react to the attitude) was an important way for the player to speak with the game (as char does in movie), it would be meaningful. Imagine mass effect if fighting WAS the "dialog system" (what you do in the field matter to other character).

For all its flaws (pacing) and shortcoming (execution), heavy rain is the closer to a "full modern narrative" game as it makes "any" actions potentially meaningful (play with your kid, do NOT react to a qte) but still fills up with filler (participatory waggle, shaving wtf) who functionally totally replace actual gameplay (because they were unnecessary to immersion as the success of the game show) at least in a full narrative game (so they already do in vanilla adventure game). It's mass effect without the boring shooting, scanning, traveling, hacking.

NOW feel free to rage because i said gameplay is unnecessary, i'm not saying that though, just that regular gameplay is nothing more that filler in narrative term (even in deus ex).

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i agree that it's usually used as filler, but as mentioned there are games that use the gameplay for the theme. example: in alpha centauri, all the technology improvements you can learn are "visions of the future" in the sci-fi sense, each increasingly building on the ones before to make the future feel more and more alien. similarly, the different "factions" that are playable in alpha centauri represent different visions for the future that different philosophies have

so when you gain a new technology improvement or meet and fight a faction in the game, it's definitely not filler, it's related to the overall theme of the game as an exploration of potential futures

[s0]

i really want to write an eva-style response and say no one except game design nerds who read gamasutra cares about any of that or i could say that i'd rather have real interaction than a narrative, but i actually see where you're coming from. i always thought it'd be nice if some jrpgs were reduced to just the boss battles because they're usually the only relevant battles and all the other fighting is just a dum timesink.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

strategy rpgs are usually 'jrpgs with only boss battles' in a sense. games like vanguard bandits, kartia, and so on have a set number of battles, you can't take any optional battles

some games in that genre do have random battles though (like final fantasy tactics) but usually the random ones make up the minority of battles

[s0]

yeah but i kind of see srpgs as a separate genre. i meant "traditional" jrpgs like dragon quest, final fantasy etc.

or actually i didn't even mean "traditional" jrpgs because traditional jrpgs aren't "story-driven" and are often more about exploration which is kool. i meant jrpgs with a heavy focus on story and non "strategic" battle systems starting from approx. the snes era.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

the closest i can think of then is chrono cross: in chrono cross, if i remember correctly, it had random enemies, but they gave you no xp, only bosses did. so it was impossible to grind to kill a boss

[gimymblert]

@CA
It's called visual novel and some are truly terrific.

@Paul
I'm not saying all gameplay are filler. "Fighting faction" and tech tree are actually meaningful event, but the actual fighting gameplay can retain all it's meaning if it is replace by an automatic resolution (and some games does just that). edit: if you make meaningful event Within the fighting gameplay (aside from winning or losing) it make them important.

[s0]

i haven't played chrono cross but i'm assuming the regular enemies don't have any direct relation to the narrative and are just filler (according to gilbert's definition). the problem isn't so much grinding to kill a boss it's that most of the game is just a distraction from the story, which is the main focus.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

@neoshaman - i do wish there were a civ-like game where you only made "high-level" decisions instead of detailed decisions about where to move each individual unit (i actually have designed such a game too; perhaps i'll make it one day)

@c.a. sinclair - ah, yes i see. it's interesting that there are no jrpgs like that; it seems like something they would have tried already, but i can't think of anything similar

[s0]

i do wish there were a civ-like game where you only made "high-level" decisions instead of detailed decisions about where to move each individual unit

not civ-like at all, but i remember playing an "educational" life sim game where you played as a random person anywhere in the world from their birth to their eventual death. the gameplay consisted exclusively of making important decisions that would affect the life of your "protagonist." the game had no real graphics iirc, just a world map, text messages and a few stats. it was pretty nice and the only srs gam i ever really enjoyed. it was cool how differently it played depending on where in the world your character were born and where they lived (you couldn't choose, for realism's sake). i wish i could remember what the name was.

EDIT: Found it! It's very appropriately called Real Lives, you can d/l the trial version here: http://www.educationalsimulations.com/eval.php

[gimymblert]

@CA
I hope you mean story in the broader sense, I don't won't to broadcast the wrong sentiment lol
But yeah they are distraction.

Actually I have a habit to play games twice, one in uber easy mode to enjoy the narrative and one in uber hard (no transition to middle ground) To enjoy the gameplay, obviously most game have them loose enough. Of course I don't do that for pure gameplay game (ninja gaiden) which are pure uncluttered joy.

Side note:
I like how golden eye and perfect dark handle this. Easy mod where very arcade and straightforward and have only a loose sense of story or narrative immersion (tell a very loose story). The higher the difficulty the more involving the gameplay and story where involving because they had "shared STAKE" which is not a contradiction of what I said (in a pure analytical way, they were just illustration) and there was more story event (they were objective) and give additional light on the overall story, so replaying level on higher difficulty was rewarding + time trail mode where only about gameplay. So i'm not saying that they are unnecessary OR cannot work together, but just that are not necessarily the strength of interactivity (I would say they belong to the intermediate aesthetics of "participatory narrative").

Warning - while you were typing a new reply has been posted. You may wish to review your post.


There is such a game I can't remember the name, it was in early art game movement, after 12 September and before passage (who start the peak and decline). Also Kudos.

edit: Oh misread and you edit a bit further lol

However here is the wikip of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yeah i played that game and kudos. i didn't mean 'sim games without moving units' i meant 'games where you manage an entire empire and try to conquer the world but don't have to micromanage food numbers or movement on a grid or buying and selling individual libraries in towns'

[mirosurabu]

Games are tricky because they often have a bunch of slightly related (sometimes quite unrelated) things put in one place. If I put a painting in my game, will that make it art? Because of cases like these, I always take the relationship between individual elements (cohesiveness) into account too. With that in mind, Deus Ex is a "fps enthusiast" game with some omg-im-so-artsy feel in the background (I never finished it, for a record).

I would go on to disqualify every game that is "bloated" (or has lots of "fat", as Timmy would say) because spreading focus across multiple elements ALWAYS decreases their quality. Music with vocals almost always has less interesting music (there are exceptions of course), but the good ones emphasize the relationship between the two, not just their sum.

Now, regarding analytical aspect, it's often interesting enough, but the emotions you get out of systemizing things are trivial and definitively not unique to video games. While solving problems and mastering skills are excellent things to do, they do not make 'art'. I'm not sure if I should explain why, but let's say that I can easily identify the difference between how I feel when I code and how I feel when I, say, listen to music. The former has little to do with feelings and more to do with gaining abstract knowledge, while the later helps with identifying emotions.

I thus think that "expressive games" are way to go (given that no art can be good without being expressive, of course), but only if you want to fully focus on discovering mechanics that give you this "expressive power", not just write stories or direct cutscenes, in which case you should just learn writing/film production.

TL;DR Deus Ex is no art. This topic's game is bad.

[cystem glitch]

i haven't played chrono cross but i'm assuming the regular enemies don't have any direct relation to the narrative and are just filler (according to gilbert's definition). the problem isn't so much grinding to kill a boss it's that most of the game is just a distraction from the story, which is the main focus.

Dude, have you played Chrono Trigger? All the non-boss enemies enemies are guys walking around and you can avoid most of them if you don't want to fight. It has one of the best stories and is one of the best games I have ever played.

chrono cross is a bag of poops.

[s0]

i played chrono trigger. i didn't know how similar chrono cross is tho.