Compared to other companies, Valve let the community use alternative community servers. Even if Valve does not care about the game anymore (sigh, one of may all time favorites), it’s possible to maintain community servers. This is something any other game wish to had, without hacking the system; it’s just part of the game. And people can even use modded communities and there exist some really cool stuff (admittedly I never tried them, I would play the game if it didn’t have the bot problem).
I still don’t understand what job “game journalist” entails.
Say a politician takes bribes. A journalist can investigate public record documents and paper trails, and visit state houses, to interview workers to uncover what’s going on there.
Game studio is working on a new sequel, but hasn’t announced it. But this is a private company that’s not required to report to anyone. They’re not consuming taxpayer money. What, legally, should a game journalist be doing to reveal this info?
They’re basically just there to echo press releases and provide scheduled interviews, all of which must be basically at the publisher’s approval, since there are far more journalists than interesting studios.
It’s also possible that he did say all of those things and they’re only changing the story due to the negative reception. It’s a Sony site/interview after all.
Technically it’s possible, but the article includes the transcript that Druckmann himself posted, so that would mean he is faking a transcript to call out Sony’s edits to what he said.
It’s an unpopular opinion in most forums, but I love most gaming journalists. I prefer their podcasts and their articles and their opinions way more than any YouTuber/streamer. I just get more insightful and less bias information from them.
People should just stop thinking about gaming journalism as a monolith, and start thinking of it as any other job. Some people are capable of doing it and they show it, others are completely incapable of writing a decent article without resorting to snarky comments or biased opinions.
A local website in my language employs a YTuber as a reviewer for reviews on games that he is a sponsor of on his channel, and those articles are laughable to say the least (I’m not going to name the games nor the person). But I’ve also read good articles on the same website, written by people who actually care about their job and have the skills to do it well.
But for some reason, gamers keep parroting this awful opinion of gaming journalists being incapable of playing games or having opinions on things. No, it’s just that certain journalists are better than others. (And for god’s sake, people should stop using the Cuphead video as a talking point. It was not a true review, it was a joke video, ffs)
There’s a reason for the early rise in popularity of independent gaming reviewers and it isn’t the hard-hitting, honest quality of mainstream entertainment journalism at the time. With the advent of influencers though, it feels like everyone is just regurgitating the same pre-approved, publisher-friendly nonsense. I’m sure there are exceptions, but it feels more difficult today to find an honest review when every random internet personality is signing sponsorship contracts that require them to praise the game every 20 minutes.
Without journalism (or just a third-party in general) providing perspectives and communication in some way, you are relying primarily on the information coming directly from the companies themselves.
In this case we see that Sony was willing to fabricate quotes about an interview.
People watch star trek and listen to fortunate son and miss the message in both of those pieces of art so I’m pretty sure someone would miss the political message in just about anything.
Does anyone really listen to RATM anymore? Tom Morello is a multimillionaire who hordes money instead of giving charity. Hes a hypocrite and a sell-out.
Music and film don’t demand that you engage with them in the same way as video games. There are some games where you literally cannot play them without engaging with their narrative and message. Spec Ops: The Line is a good example of this. It actively pushes back against the player’s natural inclination to play it like a modern military shooter and not absorb the message.
It’s actually very possible to miss the message of Bioshock. Andrew Ryan built the perfect city and Atlas ruined it. Andrew Ryan cast him out, but Atlas brought the player character as his final ultimate weapon. You eventually rebel, saving the capitalist Utopia.
I have seen people who abided by this interpretation. Any art with any level of subtlety can be misinterpreted. It’s inherently subjective and depends on the viewer’s personal biases.
Are you unfamiliar with capitalism as a theory? Or Ayn Rand? Yes, capitalist utopia. That’s the entire libertarian ethos. Libertarianism is a political framework, pure capitalism is its economic policy.
Don’t get me wrong, the only Libertarianism I’ve ever known is intertwined with Capitalism. But they aren’t the same thing, and I always read BioShock as being a take on Libertarianism specifically.
I dunno how you could miss it in Spec Ops, that game is extremely blatant with messaging. I recently patient gamered it and was rather unimpressed. Bioshock still holds up though.
IMO it was a mistake to patient gamer Spec Ops. The whole point was that it was a pushback against the rhetoric of the US military and simultaneously a critique of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (and knockoffs thereof), which had just exploded in popularity. By not playing it when the things it was critiquing were in the zeitgeist, you don’t really get the same experience. Plus, the marketing for the game deliberately hid the fact that it was intended as a critique; it was marketed as yet another modern military shooter.
I think you can patient gamer it but it only works if you’re heavily familiar with that time.
I was really into COD4 and grew up during the Bush administration so I knew exactly what Spec Ops was critiquing. If you don’t have that experience though I agree it does not land.
What I didn’t like was the blunt messaging. I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got. As a game, the clunky movement/cover system, simple enemy AI, and guns that just didn’t feel great hampered the experience. It’s very linear and there are forced choices (eg white phosphorus) that give you control but no choice but to be evil. The graphics are lackluster compared to its contemporaries, but I did enjoy the soundtrack at times. I really got into it with a few of those songs. Unfortunately that only happened a few times during the weekend I beat it in. It was okay, but I was expecting a lot more based on what people said about it.
Appropriately for the thread, the WP scene had a choice: walk away. It kept telling Walker to walk away. The player could have shut the game off.
That’s the pivot point: if you’re just playing a game about Walker, then having a choice doesn’t matter, you’re just being told a story about a lunatic. But, if Walker is a stand-in for you, and you’re playing the game “because you wanted to be something you’re not - a hero”, then not only is playing on a choice, choosing to play war porn in the first place is a choice.
I was expecting something a little deeper or more subtle than what I got.
That’s the problem when these things gain reputations. The reputation builds it up to be more than the piece of art can deliver.
Now imagine playing it when it was new and you weren’t “expecting” anything but a military shooter. It would still be just as blunt, but it landed back then far more effectively than when you go in knowing the reputation the game has built in the many years that followed.
IMO a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game. The vibrant tree that you pass that burns up when you look back, etc.
As far as gameplay goes it is very linear. The only “choice” is to stop playing. If I remember correctly the development behind Spec Ops was very rushed so they didn’t have time to so any of those branching paths.
I appreciate it like I would a visual novel more than I do an interactive game.
a lot of the subtlety comes from the imagery and symbols around you as you progress through the game
One of the things I did appreciate about the game was seeing how grimy and worn down everyone got as the game progressed. That was an excellent small detail.
I dunno. Math asks me to just accept it’s normal to have 60 watermelons and is trying move bulk orders of melons on a regular car. The goal is to figure out the problem and not accept that the person who is a wholesale watermelon dealer in denial is commiting tax evasion.
Or to discover that the melon seller has a regular job in ag and gets a bunch of melons on the side from the field and sells the harvest at cost to make up the part of their paycheck that was paid in perishable food.
Should we shame the seller for breaking the law or sympathize for being forced into that situation? People don’t have the energy to care; they just came for a maths question.
but… this is not the math you see at STEM, this is the math you see at high school at best. There’s no deeper meaning in actual STEM math problems, they are way too abstract or specific. There’s no watermelons, it’s just some a, b, n1, nk… maybe some physics formulas that apply to velocity, mass… I read 0 problems in my uni math and physics courses where they used real world examples.
I see your point but that’s for high schoolers, not STEM students or alumnus.
It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.
Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.
Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.
So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.
This is what bothered me in the original discussion, making it seem like being in STEM somehow doesn’t prepare you at all for critical thinking in general. On the contrary, I believe too there are people who develop it in part because of the S in there. It’s not necessary, but it’s an important tool.
Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext. We ask kindergarteners to do that with Dr Seuss.
It’s almost like they shouldn’t have bought a bunch of gaming studios. They could have at least had the decency to sell them again or made an agreement for independency. The irony of an American company opting against the latter isn’t lost on me.
aftermath.site
Aktywne