(no subject)

[egypturnash]

As a side note, since some people seem to want to convince me that Bioshock is actually a really good game - an opinion you're welcome to have; it's clearly a finely-crafted instance of an experience I simply don't care to have - I would like to note that so far, the only FPS I've actually enjoyed as a game is Thief, which I've been playing on and off the past week via Rik's machine. I had fun with System Shock 2 a couple years back but by the end, I was sick and tired of the basic game mechanics and just wanted to find out what happened to SHODAN. I really don't like FPSs.

As I've gotten older, I've slowly learnt how to see people as, well, people. I'm not very good at it; I never was. As video-game technology marches on, the creatures the games pit you against have gotten more like people. When I play some games made in the last decade or so, I can feel them training me to see people as just things. I'm still working out what factors make this happen; it's only a handful of games that do this so far.

I really think that the increasing drive for 'realism' in video games means that the game industry has a big moral quandry coming up. The forty-year-long focus on the hurt button as the core mechanic becomes creepier as the things you hurt become more and more like people. What happens when the project lead on a game focused on killing and blood plays his game and feels that weird sense that it's gnawing away at something in his soul? What happens when this is a regular occurrence?

A few major choice-points over, there's another me who went into video games. Is she (or he; I might never have transitioned in that life-path) getting ever more uncomfortable with these themes, or has it been completely burnt out of her by this point?

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I feel bad that my methodology in it is mostly 'sneak up and knock people out' so far - when I can manage to do something without even knocking a guard out, I feel a lot better! I am, however, playing it on expert, because, well, I'd be doing my best to not kill anyone anyway.

I dunno how it went over with FPS fans, but it's one of the few first-person games I've actually enjoyed playing. And I think it's the only one where I'm actually enjoying the gameplay instead of just suffering through it for the story or the technical awesomeness.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Your image of PC gamers doesn't even begin to touch on the way we get our asses kicked online by Koreans who are willing to do mathematical analasies of the best possible moves to make in any one of the endless crappy Real Time Strategy titles available to us!

Also, one time I was playing Convenience Store Tycoon and the chip rack in one of my stores totally ran out of chips, but the clerk I had hired was totally bugged and he wouldn't re-stock it, he just got stuck in one of the freezer cases, so I fired him but he still wouldn't leave the store, so I had the new guy I hired call the police on him, but even they couldn't get him out, so like I had this perpetual standoff going on and no one ever bought beer or other quenching beverages from that location because it was always surrounded by cops trying to talk this guy out of the freezer case!


The most recent Console system I owned was a Sega CD, though recently I've had the opportunity to play the Xbox 360 some, and as I've mentioned in my journal a few times, my sister's boyfriend sometimes brings over and leaves his PS2 over here, so I get to play with that. I'm stunned by how as the technology advances PC gaming and Console gaming are starting to converge, I mean, we're starting to get very meticulously well thought out, polished, and bug free PC games, and consoles are starting to lock up unexpectedly from overheating, or dropping frames that are hard to render, or even needing to download game patches from the internet! Quite amusing.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

3: bingo.

One of the reasons I avoid FPSs in general is that they feel like dehumanization training. Like the kind of stuff I read about being put through in boot camp so that when they say 'shoot', you shoot, and your moral qualms come after.

I have a low enough Humanity score to start with.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Er, the middle paragraph is supposed to be encased in the html tag: okIamAFiddlyEmotional-Retard

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Zap the door knob, twist your controller clockwise or anti-clockwise as indicated by the arrows on the screen, and pull the controller toward your body.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I generally avoid gore-fest horror films, too. Evil Dead 2 amused me for its sheer absurdity, but most of the stuff that centers around gore effects? Bleah, get it the fuck away from me.

I avoid horror games too. The one time I tried to play one of the much-loved Resident Evil games, I threw it away because of its hideous fucking controls, never mind the looming prospect of being forced to do and stare at really nasty things. When I bitched about the controls I got told that this is somehow normal for horror games. Ew.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

No spoilers, but there's a cut scene in Thief later on that's about the best thing I've ever seen. To this day it ranks as one of my favorite game moments ever. :D

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, "America's Army" doesn't exactly help matters in this regard. >_>

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

When you say "twist the controller," do you mean "rotate the controller in-hand" (i.e. so that the top of the controller is perpendicular to the floor, or entirely upside-down), or do you mean "describe a circle with the tip of the controller" (i.e. so that the top of the controller remains upright but the cursor travels in a circle around the objective on screen)?

Because I've been doing the latter, and it works, but is hideously hard to do consistently - and if they expected the former, I'm going to feel very foolish for making things far too hard on myself.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Oh, Thief 2 is definitely the strongest of all the Thief games. The bad guys are REALLY GREAT and hair-raisngly weird and freaky, and the level design is stronger. In particular, the design of Masks and the bank are unreal crazy good.

Thief 3 does have the single scariest level in a game I have ever played ever EVER EVER EVER EVER. EVER. And I'm sure you know which one I'm talking about.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I've heard Rule of Rose is sort of a bad game, but the content/plot presentation is so amazing that it's worth playing anyway.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

At PAX this year, I was seriously creeped out by the Army-sponsored immersive FPS experience thingy. (Disclaimer: I didn't play it. I just saw the 50-foot-cube curtained-off thing with a humvee (or however the hell you spell the original military incarnation of that vehicle), and the huge sounds of explosions from within, and the wide-eyed line of teenagers waiting to get into the coolest thing ever.) There was a vibe coming off the whole thing that the Army is the ultimate in real-life FPSes, and it's the most superreallistic game ever, and the implications were too painful to think about for long.

(Gratifying, though, was that the lines to play Rock Band were longer. I approve of games that glorify music.)

(frozen)

[xyzzysqrl]

I like to shoot things. I'm fine with that.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's a fantastic _STORY_ but as a game it's pretty lame.

(frozen)

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

It's not so much laziness as a production problem. Branching storylines tend to require significantly more game data (object descriptions, models, textures, animations, sounds, movies, script code, and so forth) than a linear storyline of equal play length. Game data require more time and money to produce as it become more detailed, so multiplying the amount of game data required is often a losing proposition financially. The game will either be shorter than usual, more expensive to make, or lower in quality as a result. Branching storylines do offer replayability, but for every person playing through the game multiple times to try the alternatives, there are many more playing through once and moving onto the next big thing. If a game offers (say) ten hours of gameplay from beginning to (one) ending, most players will find it much too short. In addition, many branching storylines have common story segments that players will have to play again and again to get to the branch points. After a while, most people will get tired of playing those segments and give up before exploring the entire game. The "save often, fail often, and reload" school of design (especially prevalent in PC games) will definitely wear out the enjoyability of those repeated segments. (As much as I liked Half Life 2: Episode One, I wouldn't want to play the fairly difficult "escort the civilians across hostile territory to the rail yard" mission again.)

Open-world sandbox games can offer a lot longer gameplay at the expense of storytelling and controllability. If 90% of your time is spent wandering around an open environment with nothing much beyond random encounters, that's not necessarily much of an improvement even if you can do whatever you want. It's also easy to "break" the story script if you do something that no one anticipated or tested. If the player can go anywhere and do anything, developers have to create a fully-populated world for the player to go and do things. The amount of game data required escalates drastically when it can no longer be "faked" or "implied" by channeling the player character down specific routes.

If it were easy, more developers would be doing it.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Erm, okay, imagine yourself holding the controller, your thumb is on the A button and the A button is facing up toward the ceiling. When I say twist the controller I mean rotate the controller such that the A button faces a wall, and then so it faces the floor, it's an action very much like turning an actual doorknob.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Bioshock is an FPS first, front and center. There seem to be a lot of complatnts from people who wish that Ken Levine and co. had made a completely different game, which puzzles me. Because they're a FPS studio, they make FPSes primarily (Tribes: Vengeance, SWAT, SS2) and their most critically acclaimed game was an FPS where you blow mutants away with your guns and your gnarly powers.

The moral choice in it is significant, because honestly, I can't think of another FPS that actually has any moral choices at all. Unless you start to invoke Deus Ex and its sequel, which are primarly focused on being RPGs with a FP interface, at the expense of the action and balance of Bioshock and SS2. I can't even begin to comprehend how expensive the dev costs of Bioshock would be to build in tangible consequences for dozens of smaller moral decisions, 5, 6, or 7 endings and a Deus Ex RPG-like open-ended structure into a game with the level of production that Bioshock has.

The developers knew what they were doing, and a they were emphasizing the FPS nature of the game, and building some choices into that framework. For their intent, I think they made a game that people will still be talking about twenty years from nowT. he philosophies in the game are explored seriously. You don't have absolute control over decisions like you might in an RPG, but it's not what the designers wanted to emphasize. It's not the ultimate game for all people, it's a game for FPS fans who want something brilliant. You still, at your core, need to like the genre to enjoy Bioshock. If you're merely tolerating the act of running around spooky, dimly lit corridors shooting or hiding from bad guys, you're playing the wrong game.

And with regard to vending machines, you're stealing from a maniac who's trying to kill you, and from companies in the game who have probably long since jacked themselves and their employees up with plasmids into raving lunatics that roam the city trying to chop you into pizza toppings... morally, I'm square with that. You CAN get zapped if you fail at hacking a vending machine. And you do have to expend valuable adam to beef up your hacking skills. It does injure you, so there is a consequence there! Not a plot consequence, but man, on Hard, those first aid hypos start getting scarce...

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Which is to say that your radius and ulna bones in your forearm should be pivoting around one another... in fact, forget the controller is in your hand, just hold out your hand with your palm facing the ceiling. Then rotate it such that your palm is facing the floor. At the same time you will pull the controller in toward your body.

I ... I could make a flash animation if I'm not making myself clear.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

I'm not enamored of realistic violence, either. I also feel the same about realistic language or sexuality in games as well, but that's another issue. :)

So far, every game I have worked on has been essentially rated "T for Teen" even if the gameplay itself was complicated enough to fall into an older market segment (Battlezone and Battlezone 2). Aside from that, there has been no realistic violence, language, or sexuality in any game I've worked on. I've been helping out on Mercenaries 2 for the past few months and even that is fairly bloodless (if nihilistic).

Adding graphic violence, strong language, or blatant sexuality does not make your game better. It might make it more realistic (depending on the context), but I think it's more often a crutch to get more attention or appealing to specific market segments. (It's often a matter of "if you can't be good, be controversial".)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

YOU need to play Planescape Torment. :) it's exactly the sort of whimsical, brainy, plot heavy, incredibly rich dialogue-driven RPG that would never work on a console.

I took the PC path because whatever consoles I had at the time, I was always drawn to PC games (well, at first, Atari ST) because they were deeper, they were riskier, they were taking chances with design. I have yet to see a console game as good as Planescape Torment. The only console RPGs I like were PC games first (Morrowind) and RTS/civ games don't really "work" on consoles. There's no console equivalent of Star Control 2, no console equivalent of X-Com, or Alpha Centauri. I do like plenty of console games, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me I had to pick one or the other, I'd pick PC in a heartbeat. There are so many game genres that will never be represented on consoles because they simply will not move hundreds of thousands of units.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

So it's...a bad game because you don't like the intent. Contrary much?

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

It did infuriate the Vatican! :D That has to count for something.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

The Army already uses FPSes for training. :P

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

If it were easy, more developers would be doing it.

Thank you. ^_^

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

When your reward structure is based around fighting bosses that you can choose not to fight, but in order to advance you must fight them, so you end up fighting them even if you never ever really wanted to, then there is a flaw with the system as it offers a way to play that can not be played due to the system not offering any reward for doing so, and specifically as you end up handicapping yourself significantly if you in fact, do what the developers suggested you could do, and not fight them.

Yes, bad game design.