Now compare that narrative experience the Super Mario Bros.
Im sure it’s been done, but i would love to see interpretations of a First Time User Experience of OG mario if it came out today.
I cant tell you how many games ive just noped out of because i just want to actually play the game and not read or listen to either dialogue or forced tutorial railroading for 20+minutes (even 5 minutes of NOT being in control of what im doing is annoying) when you start a new game.
Even character creation can impede just wanting to get started. Let me come back later, or engage with that as i PLAY the game. Injecting extensive dialogue or forced interactive tutorial should be a reward or a much appreciated rest from the action, not a burden i must bare.
Not every game needs to be story rich to be fun, thank you vampire survivors
That part’s wild to me, when people are like “This villain in your story seems to have said and done bad things? So that means you agree with them, yes?” No! Of course not! It’s the literal villain in the story, man!
But there is no utilitarian point of art. It exists to express ideas and to tell truth. I think maybe a lot of people get upset because from their point of view, they are paying money, and they have this relationship where it’s like “If it’s not giving me what I wanted out of this transaction, then it’s bad.”
To be honest, “If it’s not giving me what I wanted out of this transaction, then it’s bad.” is a heuristic that works well for most things we buy. If I buy candy and it doesn’t taste good, it’s bad. If I buy a car and it breaks down, it’s bad.
I think the real problem is that some people see games as a product and others see it as an art piece. Some games fail at being either, some succeed at both.
A thread of the problem is likely the publisher/developer conflict of interest. When the two can’t come to an agreement, the end result usually fails horribly in both aspects.
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’d say this is the perfect time to start a really regular and dedicated games review site. They have to start somewhere and if you’re trusted and good then you’ll get a following.
It’s tough. A long-standing rule of video games media–even well before web publishing–is that reviews don’t pay the bills. Hype gets clicks, as do guides now that independent guide writing has waned.
Buying out competition and throwing out the workers confident that investors won’t back a small dog against a big one
In an investor run economy, competition means you might lose a bet. For an investor its better to reduce competition than lose bets. This is originally why anti trust legislation was created: The market needs to be forced to compete or it will amalgamate into a giant blob of noncompeting assets.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors. This is what the trump tax cuts look like.
This is originally why anti trust legislation was created
If you look at the history of anti-trust legislation, some of its first uses and biggest targets were labor organizers. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the first and most notable cases was the US lawsuit against the Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council (also known as the “Triple Alliance” of teamsters, scalesmen, and packers) over what was then the largest labor action in US history.
It wasn’t until the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act that unions were granted safe harbor from anti-trust provisions. And it took until 1941 for the courts to finally fully decriminalize labor actions - a process that was ultimately reversed starting in the 1960s under Nixon, and extended under Ford, Carter, and then Reagan.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors.
That’s the Keynesian approach, certainly. But the Chicago School that came to dominate US economics during the Volcker Era suggested instead that we can adjust the Federal Funds rate to keep malinvestment from derailing an economy. And that this strategy means asset accumulation is now safe and profitable for large corporate interests.
Large investment banks are actually good, because they give us a steady and constant flow of price information on a private market. And since price discovery is the real goal of regulation, the advent of these mega-banks means we can let the institutions regulate themselves without any conceivable downsi- sound of the 2008 market crash
The recent layoffs at the company have been swift and impactful. Notably, several unique positions were affected, leaving entire job functions uncovered. This move suggests a potential restructuring or shift towards automation using artificial intelligence, which is concerning.
In particular, the departure of Alice Bell is deeply regrettable. Her exceptional contributions were instrumental in maintaining the company’s operations during challenging times. Additionally, her leadership in the Electronic Wireless Show podcast was pivotal. It is hoped that, similar to Indiescovery, the podcast team will continue independently to preserve its value.
These developments paint a concerning picture of the company’s future.
This is a part of the beginning of it. Centralization results in layoffs and worse products. This is why we have antitrust laws, now they go unenforced because of corruption. AI is going to replace a lot of jobs and we’re going to get shittier products while the winning corporations continue to make more money. Winner take all system is bad for everyone.
Governments should only allow big mergers in exceptional circumstances
Big conglomerates should be broken up
They are bad for the workers, and bad for the consumers. Half of the time, also bad for the shareholders (according to an old McK study). Lives are being ruined for billionaires to gamble for more billions.
You now have a chance to follow some of their independent blogs, support them that way, fuck all this big companies, they are laying of everyone for ai
The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.
Yeah, unfortunately many people seem to default to complaining about things while continuing to consume what they are fed. And not change anything, of course.
Because content distributors haven't thought of another way to get money. The only other thing they came up with is subscriptions. Some have thought of donations, but they haven't banded together to come up with an alternative. It's weak and totally mid.
Outside of straight cash and ads, off the top of my head a user could give a website data, content, or computing power. Which, as I kept writing this, I’ve found aren’t perfect alternatives.
Personal data collection seems compelling, since the data can be sold to hungry data brokers looking to optimise their ads, but tech-savvy users want to keep their data safe, either by using plugins to block ads and tracking, or by not using your website. And you’d also have to have no soul to do this.
User generated content gives users a reason to engage and return, and it also means you could save money that you’d have otherwise used to pay someone to make content. If you rely on this too much though, ethical concerns become apparent - last I checked, Reddit mods are unpaid.
Volunteer computing could maybe lower costs by offloading some server calculations onto volunteer’s computers when idle, but I don’t know if it could even be used for that. It’s probably a non-starter for websites, too; to a user it would seem like your site was asking them to install a crypto miner.
… this comment is getting too long and doesn’t really have a point. But I can’t let the 45 minutes I spent writing it go to waste so easily. Hm… what if I combined all 3 ideas?
Yes, a website that asks you to volunteer idle computer time to train an algorithm that can both be outsourced to other companies and used to analyse your personal data, which itself can be given to other companies and used to reccomend you posts you are more likely to comment on, adding value to the website! Surely this has none of the flaws that I described before.
Bro $4,000 OLED TVs are riddled with rows of home screen ads. What are you talking about that paid content has no ads? ALL CONTENT HAS FUCKING ADS. This has gotten absurd. Fuck ads.
Man…you said the issue with all of this is people not willing to pay to remove ads. I’m saying that even when you buy expensive products, you still have ads. So ads are everywhere, regardless of whether you pay or use free products. The entire business model is fucked. That’s what I’m saying. I’m not sure what it causing the confusion here.
I was saying that people will run an ad-blocker, but also refuse to pay directly for content.
And then complain that nobody makes good content.
I’m saying that even when you buy expensive products, you still have ads.
Sure, but that’s not really related to the topic. “Why are there ads in the products I pay for?” is a different issue than "Why are there ads in the products I don’t pay for?
Yea. Separate but related issues I suppose. I just feel like even when we pay tons of money for expensive products, we will get ads. Even modern cars are collecting an obscene amount of data even though we pay a shit ton of money for them. It’s completely out of control.
This is the big one. people have grown accustomed to an unsustainable system, problem is wages are still so stagnanted so nobody has money for 10 subs to things.
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