This.
"The traditional game industry model ... is not really set up to make games, per se.
It's more set up to make game companies. Each game is just a vehicle for the company. We're really talking more about game company development here than game development."
And it does need to change.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
My, Haven't We Come a Long Way?
I just beat Eternal Sonata, and now the credits are rolling and all the characters are judging and patronizing me :(. AND OH GOD NOW THERE IS A FUCKING SNAIL TALKING TO A CATERPILLAR AFTER THE CREDITS ROLLED.
Without spoiling too much, an important character turned on the rest of my party, becoming the final boss for no believable reason. Then another character kills them self for no believable reason (though it is foreshadowed), then the credits roll with random party characters telling me I shouldn't give up until the end or something. This is after a good 24 hours of typical RPG narrative nonsense where for some reason I end up with a dozen characters in my party that decided they had no lives and desired to follow my group around. Cait Sith Syndrome, if you will. In the basest sense, I feel I can explain "why" characters chose to do what they did and why the story followed the path that it did, but I just didn't "feel" it. I didn't "feel" that my party would so readily turn on a long time ally just because he said "lol Let's Fight!" I didn't "feel" sorrow that one character commits suicide while another one lets her monologue for several minutes, asking afterwards what he could have done to save her. I am getting a similar feeling that I got at the end of Braid, a game which, for some reason unsatisfied with being an exemplar of the interactive arts via its mechanics, had to pull a narrative switcheroo by "not really being about what you think it's about" in the end. I know I know, "art" and all that jazz, but art is allowed to be critiqued, and, feeling as if I've somehow "missed" something in Eternal Sonata (ugh), I can't say that the ending is all that satisfying to me. I suppose that an ambiguous ending, or an ending where there is a deeper meaning to "get" can cause some water cooler/forum discussions that extend the life of your game past its ending, but is that really the best way to extend the life of an interactive experience? Via tricks of the linear narrative trade?
Eternal Sonata is a fantastically beautiful game visually and aurally, and it even has an innovative combat system and faster-than-usual progression for those of us who don't want to commit 50-70 hours to beat an RPG. Thus I am a little disappointed that, while captivating enough for me to put over 20 hours into beating (which is more than I can say for many video games nowadays), I found myself lacking emotions, empathy, and understanding of the characters' motives for most of the game.
I guess games have matured? I mean, I'm thankful that modern games give me a narrative drive extending beyond being a bad enough dude to save the president from ninjas, but... do I need that same pseudo-intellectual pretension, that coy "this is our story but this isn't really our story" attitude that filled many a poetry explication in high school Literature classes? Are cheap shots like this taken from old linear forms of media the best way to expand our interactive arts?
If High School Lit is any indication, then soon all of our narrative games will "really" be about masturbation or something. Or has this already happened and I'm not "educated" enough to have noticed?? @_@
Without spoiling too much, an important character turned on the rest of my party, becoming the final boss for no believable reason. Then another character kills them self for no believable reason (though it is foreshadowed), then the credits roll with random party characters telling me I shouldn't give up until the end or something. This is after a good 24 hours of typical RPG narrative nonsense where for some reason I end up with a dozen characters in my party that decided they had no lives and desired to follow my group around. Cait Sith Syndrome, if you will. In the basest sense, I feel I can explain "why" characters chose to do what they did and why the story followed the path that it did, but I just didn't "feel" it. I didn't "feel" that my party would so readily turn on a long time ally just because he said "lol Let's Fight!" I didn't "feel" sorrow that one character commits suicide while another one lets her monologue for several minutes, asking afterwards what he could have done to save her. I am getting a similar feeling that I got at the end of Braid, a game which, for some reason unsatisfied with being an exemplar of the interactive arts via its mechanics, had to pull a narrative switcheroo by "not really being about what you think it's about" in the end. I know I know, "art" and all that jazz, but art is allowed to be critiqued, and, feeling as if I've somehow "missed" something in Eternal Sonata (ugh), I can't say that the ending is all that satisfying to me. I suppose that an ambiguous ending, or an ending where there is a deeper meaning to "get" can cause some water cooler/forum discussions that extend the life of your game past its ending, but is that really the best way to extend the life of an interactive experience? Via tricks of the linear narrative trade?
Eternal Sonata is a fantastically beautiful game visually and aurally, and it even has an innovative combat system and faster-than-usual progression for those of us who don't want to commit 50-70 hours to beat an RPG. Thus I am a little disappointed that, while captivating enough for me to put over 20 hours into beating (which is more than I can say for many video games nowadays), I found myself lacking emotions, empathy, and understanding of the characters' motives for most of the game.
I guess games have matured? I mean, I'm thankful that modern games give me a narrative drive extending beyond being a bad enough dude to save the president from ninjas, but... do I need that same pseudo-intellectual pretension, that coy "this is our story but this isn't really our story" attitude that filled many a poetry explication in high school Literature classes? Are cheap shots like this taken from old linear forms of media the best way to expand our interactive arts?
If High School Lit is any indication, then soon all of our narrative games will "really" be about masturbation or something. Or has this already happened and I'm not "educated" enough to have noticed?? @_@
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Advertising Blues
So I got home around 9 tonight, not because I just finished a late night at the office, but because I haven't finished my work yet and just decided to get some food and finish it at home. I could rant about that, but it's more of a mild annoyance than a topic worthy of a full blog post. That is, assuming that it stops occurring so frequently, an assumption I hold onto like a battered wife holding her black eye and smiling as she reminisces about the golden days and tells herself they're coming back, just around the corner. I'm not sure what my "golden" days are in this metaphor since I have been crunching constantly from the day I entered the industry, an unfortunate side effect of being put on a game being rushed to completion in less time than it should really be given, laid off, then being hired and put on another game being rushed to completion in less time than it should really be given.
This post is about what was waiting for me when I got home. An apple software update. An innocuous yet pesky blue-iconed window that I usually close out of habit while I'm trying to get work done. Since I am waiting for a build to finish, I decided to go ahead and accept the updates to get it out of my way. After telling it that I don't want to reboot my computer now (have we still not found a way to ubiquitously update software without bringing the user's system to a full halt?), I was greeted with a followup window advertising some new software that I might want to download.
So next I decided to play some PC games. I opened my Steam client, which took a while to load as always, possibly because it's loading these ads in the background of this software suite that I paid for. That I paid a lot for, as Steam games, despite digital distribution, are just as expensive as boxed games. And yet they still feel the need to open a second window of ads and further peck away at my dwindling economy of attention when I just want to enjoy some games that I have paid for in a short break period sandwiched by long hours at work. They don't call them ads; no, they call it "Update News". Closing that window, I see an animation in my main steam client (which defaults to the "store" tab instead of the more useful "my games" tab upon opening, to guarantee diverting your attention to their advertising) that cycles through a list of huge budget games that everyone knows exist anyway. Particularly interesting is the ad for Fallout 3, boasting a "100/100" score on Gamespy, a site that uses a 5 star rating system. Yes, there is a huge difference between 5/5 and 100/100, but who am I to judge marketing spin. Even more remarkable is that I purchased the PC version of Fallout 3 from Steam on the day it came out! And they're still advertising it to me??? They know what games I purchased from them! Not only are they wasting my time and attention, they aren't even doing it efficiently!
It would be interesting to see a study of our modern economy of attention and how much advertising and constant update reminders cost us in this economy. How many times a day do you find yourself updating something? Do you even know what you're getting when you update it? Is it improving your use of the software, or just moving some GUI components around so you have to relearn where things are? I recently had a stressful time trying to put together hospital bills and insurance statements after heart surgery due to the piles of junk mail that would pile up when I got home from 12+ hour shifts at work. Do you ever have these problems? spam, pop unders, telemarketers? Seconds of your life, robbed from you by a faceless corporation's childish need for attention. A shame really, as time is the most nonrenewable resource.
This post is about what was waiting for me when I got home. An apple software update. An innocuous yet pesky blue-iconed window that I usually close out of habit while I'm trying to get work done. Since I am waiting for a build to finish, I decided to go ahead and accept the updates to get it out of my way. After telling it that I don't want to reboot my computer now (have we still not found a way to ubiquitously update software without bringing the user's system to a full halt?), I was greeted with a followup window advertising some new software that I might want to download.
So next I decided to play some PC games. I opened my Steam client, which took a while to load as always, possibly because it's loading these ads in the background of this software suite that I paid for. That I paid a lot for, as Steam games, despite digital distribution, are just as expensive as boxed games. And yet they still feel the need to open a second window of ads and further peck away at my dwindling economy of attention when I just want to enjoy some games that I have paid for in a short break period sandwiched by long hours at work. They don't call them ads; no, they call it "Update News". Closing that window, I see an animation in my main steam client (which defaults to the "store" tab instead of the more useful "my games" tab upon opening, to guarantee diverting your attention to their advertising) that cycles through a list of huge budget games that everyone knows exist anyway. Particularly interesting is the ad for Fallout 3, boasting a "100/100" score on Gamespy, a site that uses a 5 star rating system. Yes, there is a huge difference between 5/5 and 100/100, but who am I to judge marketing spin. Even more remarkable is that I purchased the PC version of Fallout 3 from Steam on the day it came out! And they're still advertising it to me??? They know what games I purchased from them! Not only are they wasting my time and attention, they aren't even doing it efficiently!
It would be interesting to see a study of our modern economy of attention and how much advertising and constant update reminders cost us in this economy. How many times a day do you find yourself updating something? Do you even know what you're getting when you update it? Is it improving your use of the software, or just moving some GUI components around so you have to relearn where things are? I recently had a stressful time trying to put together hospital bills and insurance statements after heart surgery due to the piles of junk mail that would pile up when I got home from 12+ hour shifts at work. Do you ever have these problems? spam, pop unders, telemarketers? Seconds of your life, robbed from you by a faceless corporation's childish need for attention. A shame really, as time is the most nonrenewable resource.
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