Like a work in any other medium.
And if a hardcore gamer can decide that “objective” fun is the only relevant criterion for judging a game, then other reviewers are free to choose whatever criteria they think are important.
What’s astonishing to me is the idea that X group of true Scotsmen hold a privilege to set the terms of discussion for everyone else.
To be clearer, here was the statement from the article “A Guide to Ending ‘Gamers’”:
This, incidentally, is also where I disagree with the people who want to stay with a strict definition of “fun”. Maybe you don’t think being scared or nervous counts as “fun” in a strict literal sense but the author here isn’t looking for Alien: Isolation as the socially conscious alternative to Grand Theft Auto.
Anyway, I’m still toying with trying to make this a Games forum discussion so I’ll let my thoughts rest there until then. Or someone else start it and you can listen to me prattle on.
Rivers of internet ink have been spilled on how and why video games are bad as a story telling medium and trying to figure out different ways to make them better, or arguing whether it should be done at all.
I don’t mind some story, but I feel AAA games for years now have been in a self imposed straitjacket. Once you’re sacrificing gameplay for story you’ve done something wrong. One of the most egregious examples is how they butchered Metroid.
Indie games to the rescue.
I’d agree Spec Ops: The Line isn’t fun. It’s yet another slow, cover based military shooter where you’re a dude with a rifle shooting other dumb dudes with rifles. So it’s a bad game.
Critics praise it for its “edgy” story cribbed from Apocalypse Now. I mean yeah, it’s clever how it’s hanging a giant lampshade on the propagandist nature of the military shooter genre, and I dig surreal reality bending hallucinations as much as the next guy, but why does that make it a good game? Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike – those are good shooters that stand the test of time. I can only imagine the horror if they suffered from modern game design. Oh wait, they made Doom 3. Actually compared to other modern FPS games Doom 3 is a masterpiece, but that’s a whole other discussion.
Which is why when they go to tell the story they take agency and interaction away with cinemas, text dumps, dialogue, QTEs, and so on.
Games are good with exploration and immersion. Yeah, let’s go over that next hill, I bet there’s cool shit over there I can hit with my sword. That’s one of many reasons Zelda 1 blew up. Or Skyrim.
Do we need to? Many of the best games ever have no more than an excuse story and are all the better for it. Carmack made an analogy to stories in porn. Sure, you can try and theoretically make it better, but it’s kinda missing the point of the medium. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I think there’s a kernel of truth to it.
According to wiki, here are the top 5 games all time in terms of sales:
Some people have argued that sandbox games like Minecraft have emergent story and that’s the future. To me that’s like saying legos has a story. Point is no one’s playing Minecraft for the pre-packaged narrative about human nature or some deep philosophy.
The only one of these I’d say has a good story (and not just a “good story for a video game”) is The Walking Dead (better than the show even), but they had to sacrifice nearly all game elements to do it. It’s a good example of how what makes good games and good stories are at war. It’s also kinda cheap, abusing the easy sympathy for a little girl.
A lot of these games you list are actually fun games. A lot do settings well, or cool characters (Portal, HL) which fools people into thinking they have a good story. Video games are *awesome *at setting and mood. That’s why they do horror so well.
I played Papers for maybe 10 minutes. That was about as exciting as data entry.
I never got why people say Half Life has a good story. It’s pretty thin gruel. Aliens are trying to kill you! The G-man is watching. Space fetus outta nowhere! It’s a great linear theme park ride, and it’s immersive to watch the scientists freak out and die in horrible ways or the aliens slaughter the army, but story? Plot? Narrative? Character arcs? Wut? It also breaks the supposed rules of why games have good stories. You’re rail roaded. There’s hardly any agency or choice or interaction with the story’s outcome. Very fun though.
One game I might be a hypocrite on is Chrono Trigger, which I adore. I don’t even think it really has a good story, objectively. Lots of standard fantasy tropes. The characters are cardboard cutouts, though they have a lot of charm and chemistry together. But it’s a scientific fact that time travel is awesome…even if it’s just a veneer. Maybe I’m fooled by the music. Then again, its gameplay is *much *less annoying than most JRPGs (along with Mario RPG). I think a lot of the battles are pretty fun and I like how the spells have a space component which adds strategy, though they’re not exactly challenging either. Maybe a case of the whole being better than the parts, or maybe I fantasize about playing a mute mop with no personality.
Planescape: Torment had a great story. Yes, the wall-of-text thing was infuriating, but the storyline behind the main character was some excellent fantasy storytelling–and you had significant choice about how you responded to the story, in what direction you took it.
As promised (or threatened, heh) I started a Games forum thread on this if people are interested. Hoping to make a clean start for the topic, which I think might be interesting, and avoid the baggage of the greater debate in this thread.
Talk about niche. But OK, what makes it not fun? Just because you’re a Nazi planning genocide? I mean, is the game itself shitty or what? Would Mario stop being fun if he was fighting for white power?
…seriously? I laughed.
I’m trying to think of depressing movies. Schindler’s List, say. Turn that into a game. You’re Schindler and you have to rescue as many Jews as possible. There’s competing resources, you have to infiltrate German society and seek allies and make really hard choices and you’re not sure what’s the obvious way. You have to sacrifice some to save others and you can’t get caught by the authorities or reveal yourself to spies. Maybe get to know the victims first so there’s some emotional punch if you lose them. But that sounds like it’d be pretty awesome actually.
How about a game where you’re a brutal dictator and the victory condition is eliminating your rivals, or some religious sect? But you can’t be so overt you get invaded or spark a counter-revolution. Maybe you can start as a rebel, sow chaos, take over, and then be an asshole. That game’s probably been made already. I know people love to mistreat their citizens in god games. That’s the thing with games, they trivialize this sorta thing and make it fun.
Yes, it’s deliberately shitty. The rules have intentional holes in them, which invite players to negotiate over what constitutes a legal move or not. It’s also possible as a player to sabotage the game – locking up progress through endlessly drawing cards and other mechanics.
What’s interesting about *Train *is how uneasy this sort of sabotage feels. Even though its a game that deserves to be broken, the implied social contract of playing as a group exerts pressure on players not to break it. It’s a game about complicity and how even a trivial betrayal of group consensus feels unsettling.
What’s particularly interesting about Train is that these effects emerge in the act of playing. It’s not an interpretation you get by looking at the game and thinking about it. It’s something that comes from interacting with its rules in a group setting.
You can trivialize any work of art and make it into something amusing. Some things only work if you try to meet them halfway.
A game that encourages people to rules lawyer sounds like a bad game to me. How can the game ‘deserve to be broken’? No Jews, gypsies or homosexuals are actually harmed by moving pieces around a board.
Marshmallow’s Schindler’s List game could be pretty fun, in a depressing kind of way.
Sarkeesian’s going to be on Colbert tonight, fyi everybody. I usually watch it the next day on hulu but I think I might watch it as it airs so when I wake up to the inevitable twitter shitstorm, I have better context.
Because having fun with a game about the Holocaust is a shitty thing to do.
Yes, it is bad game if your criteria for “good game” means “a tight system of rules that offers interesting challenges as you move toward a well-defined goal”. But game like that about the Holocaust would be FUN, which means that playing it would be creepy.
Here’s a related example. There’s a really good boardgame Letters from Whitechapel about the Jack the Ripper murders. However one player has to play as Jack and it’s a creepy experience even though the game abstracts away the murders. It’s a little hard to play *Letters *just as a fun chase game, because the subject matter colors the experience.
My whole point in bringing up *Train *was to give an example of a game that is not fun to play but that nevertheless works as a powerful and moving experience. Yes, you could redesign *Train *to be fun, but that would miss the point. It works as an experience because it isn’t fun.
Conversely, I know people for whom “A game that encourages rules lawyering and loophole finding” would be right up their alley. Doesn’t matter if you’re carting around concentration camp prisoners or crates of oranges, if you can force your opponent into infinite card draws, they’d be in heaven.
Shut Up and Sit Down recently published a review of a game called Dog Eat Dog. Sample quote:
I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this game. There are people who love rules lawyering, as Jophiel mentioned, but that’s not why the game is (intentionally, remember) created to invite lots of said rules lawyering. People argue about rules for lots of reasons, such as: they like nitpicking, they want to solidify the rules everyone is basing gameplay upon, they want a rule to benefit them, they want a rule to screw over the others, etc.
So when players find out what the game is based on*, they see that all of their spirited and passionate rules lawyering… Was to be the most successful at genocide. Their gameplay and goal – the entire time – was to murder as many human beings as they could, and to murder more human beings than their fellow players.
Yes, it’s just symbolic; no one was actually murdering people based on their game session. But I think it’s similar to the Milgram Experiment (which tested how willing participants were to obey an authority figure, even when it was something they felt was wrong). Obviously it doesn’t imply that everyone who played the game without reservations would willingly murder others in a real life situation – instead it’s supposed to encourage serious reflection on your actions in general and why you choose to do what you do and the implications thereof. To promote critical thinking instead of just blindly obeying or just going along with everyone else because it’s the least inconvenient option.
I know there was an awkward silence when somebody in the group I was playing* Puerto Rico *with noted that, even though the game has no pretension to be any sort of social commentary, the “colonists” tokens we were bringing every turn from Europe on ever larger boats (the number of tokens is directly tied with player expansion) were a deep brown color… and often ended up working in the fields…
No, their goal was to follow the rules set down by the game most ably. That the game halfway through adjusts the color to a particularly gruesome historical reality is interesting but personally, I don’t find it particularly shocking.
Chess is war, but nobody’s freaking out about taking someone’s infantry regiment with their cavalry.
I “got” it as soon as Brenda described the board to me. Railroad cars and yellow pawns was enough. However, I’ve now watched it played probably half a dozen times and most people don’t get it right away. Or if they get it, they don’t anticipate how it will actually feel to go through the motions of playing. One of the things about *Train *is that it’s not a conceptual game. It’s not an art piece to look at and ponder. It’s an experience that exists through interaction with other players in the context of a particular rule set.
What sprang to mind for me was bombarding enemy cities in Civilization II because a rival Civ had pissed me off. I wasn’t even going to conquer their cities and take their populations, I would just sit there and bomb the shit out of them until every man, woman, beast and child was dead and their culture was just a faded memory. Then I’d look at the Civ Power Chart and laugh at that memory. Take that, Zulus!
I get that part. If I were playing the game I would definitely be upset that my beautifully efficient railways were actually being used for genocide. That would shock me, and it might be interesting to play, once.
I maybe didn’t understand the part where Hamster King talks about ‘breaking the game’ or sabotaging the social contract. I took that to mean that once people find out what is happening they start using rules arguments, or infinite card draws, to slow down the game, and prevent other players from sending people off to the camps. That seems ridiculous to me. If you don’t like the game, stop playing (I wouldn’t play this game, once I knew you were playing as a Nazi). If other people still want to play, well, whatever. They are not actually hurting anyone.
ETA: to bring this back towards the topic, I think this is how gamergaters see ‘Social Justice Warriors’. They are people who want to stop other people from ‘harmless fun’, because it doesn’t suit their ideas of what’s proper.
Actually, this probably isn’t true, or is only part of the story. GGers also think SJWs are using their piety as a cover for sneaky manipulation, and are really just in it to make money or get laid.