(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

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

There is part of me that really wanted to like Bioshock. I really did. It took one of my pet ideas that I like to play around with (Underwater cities), mixxed it with something else I loved (Art Deco), and... then twisted it's head off.

Don't get me wrong, in general I love the archtecture of the game and some of the concepts are neat. However... I am put off by the oblivious glee people have been having killing small girls, and in general, I don't get much enjoyment out of FPS'ers. The story isn't enough to keep me there, and thanks to the 'nets, I've gotten the story secondhand anyway.

The idea that it's a moralistic play is just a sick joke. There is no meaningful choice given to you in the game, so killing the girls is just a question of which ending and how many resources you really want. If it wasn't that the game rotates around an xp system where it rewards you for killing little girls....

... ugh... It's a bad game, game-design wise, and if this is what people think are moralistic choices one can make in a computer game... it's a sad state.

(frozen)

[xyzzysqrl]

Actually, you get much greater rewards (and achivement points) for never having killed one.

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Doesn't matter. The fact is that they trap the reward system that you need to survive inside enslaved girls that people revel in killing, if you just take a casual look around the net. Kill them, don't kill them, doesn't matter. They're there to get you to kill the boss monsters. The fact that you get a reward either way for killing the girls or not is irrelevant. It's just a question of how much MORE killing you want to do.

(frozen)

[xyzzysqrl]

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

(frozen)

[http://users.livejournal.com/innerlife_/]

Minor spoilers ahead.

The idea that it's a moralistic play is just a sick joke. There is no meaningful choice given to you in the game,

Actually playing through the game reveals that to be a major theme that doubles as a meta-commentary on videogames, since you ARE a slave and can't do anything but follow other characters' orders. There's a bunch of stuff like this that's a few steps more provocative and thoughtful than you'll find in 99% of other games.

It's a bad game, game-design wise

That's both a ridiculous and ridiculously broad statement. :) Sheesh.

It sounds like your expectations for branching storytelling are far higher than current technology allows for. Check back in 15 years, maybe?

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Actually playing through the game reveals that to be a major theme that doubles as a meta-commentary on videogames, since you ARE a slave and can't do anything but follow other characters' orders. There's a bunch of stuff like this that's a few steps more provocative and thoughtful than you'll find in 99% of other games.

It's an interesting conclusion that you came up with, but it's just merely a convint one. Yes, I read about the Ryan twist, which is just yet another excuse to kill of a character so that you aren't left with a meaningful choice in the game. Any comment in the game about the metagame is put in there as a joke, not as thought provoking material, especially when you aren't allowed to think about things as you are going to be running off killing things again.


It sounds like your expectations for branching storytelling are far higher than current technology allows for. Check back in 15 years, maybe?

Try this year? Elder Scrolls: Oblivion allows for open ended game play, allows you to wander around to your hearts content, kill whoever you want, and in the end your actions pretty much describe what kind of game you get back out from it.

Check back 2 years? Neverwinter Nights 2 allows for a broader ability, more ways of accomplishing goals, and quite frankly has more going for it then your Bioshock is.

Oh, heck, let's go for broke. Try back 17 years. If we want to talk about straight branching shooter games, then Wing Commander outdoes this particular game in complexity with 6 different endings and 21 different campaigns.

Complexity of branching storytelling? We're there. We're beyond there. The LACK of all but one story line is laziness that is riddled in the FPS genre. The storytelling aspect would be wonderful, if you were actually allowed to make any significant differences in any outcome. Your Bioshock will continue merrily to it's end no matter how you play through it, because they were looking for flexibility in how you could play rather then complexity in what you could accomplish.

(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.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

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

Thank you. ^_^

(frozen)

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

The game industry may be completely screwed up in a lot of ways, but I generally assume that professionals know what they are doing. I've run into some flagrant examples of programmer arrogance in my career, but those usually get a reality check sooner rather than later. :)

(frozen)

[ineffabelle]

I kind of agree about "sandboxes" but, to take the meat world as an example, it's like "you can do what you want, but other people will try to resist you". What needs to exist are better adversarial forces.

As far as development goes, I think things are horribly unbalanced. A lot of it is language evolution. There just aren't a lot of good assembler/c (not ++) guys out there anymore that can work on bit mapping/shading/vertexing routines. (*v8 moment* kicks self and goes looking for that book on C rendering techniques)

But the game design part should take precedence. I'm not sure how the market got the way it did, but I'm definitely sad about it. I'd rather play a game with 2002's graphics and 2012's story engine than the other way around.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Um, what the hell? NWN is an RPG? Not an FPS? Why is this so difficult to understand? And Wing Commander is an incredibly simple shoot-em up. Go back and play it, it doesn't exactly hold up. It's a lot easier to gin up a campaign and a whole bunch of branching endings when your only art assets are star fields, some static illustrations, and some spaceship art.

Oblivion is a fine game, but it also is a completely different game with completely different intentions than Bioshock. Oblivion could not, and does not, maintain the level of presentation and story that Bioshock, or Half-Life 2, or any number of more linear games do. You seem to be wholly interested in the amount of freedom and the number of ending cinematics as some arbitrary measure of what makes a game good. I'm happy to not have such narrow tastes.

(frozen)

[xyzzysqrl]

... Wait, OBLIVION is your example of good game design? A game so broken that the only way to have fun with it is to subvert the developer's intent with as many mods as humanly possible?

Wow. I have to add you to my friends list solely for the purpose of dropping you from it.

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Bye Bye

(frozen)

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

If I'm going to bitch Matt out for being dismissive and insulting, I have to apply the same standard to other people. I don't think you reacted fairly to Ken. I don't see a single personal attack or unfair argument in his comments. Admittedly, Matt's got a pattern of resorting to name-calling when he'd otherwise have to listen to a contrary opinion, while I've never seen this behavior in you before.

I mean, we all lose our shit now and then - god knows I have, even tonight - so god knows this doesn't hurt my lasting opinion of you. You're normally such a sweet guy. I just don't think your response was appropriate in this case. You're seriously in Comic Book Guy territory tonight, dude, and I thought as a friend I should call you out on it. Now shake hands and come out gaming. :p

Besides, all the games you love suck and unless you can beat Civ4 on Monarch you're a complete loser. Absolutism cuts both ways. ;)

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

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

(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.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

It's not a flaw with the system. First of all, there's no reward system based on choosing not to fight bosses. So I have no idea where you got that idea. You must defeat enemies to proceed. It's a scripted event, you solve it, you proceed. In no way does it offer a way to play that cannot be played. Seriously, where are you getting this nonsense? Have you actually played the game? Are you getting this second hand? The game also forces you to pick up the controller and make an X360 profile to play it, so I guess that's bad design too, huh?

It sounds like you want this game to somehow transcend every other game in its genre ragardless of technological or budgetary hurdles, and have labeled any failure to just utterly blow your mind bad game design. I submit that you have no clue as to what it takes to develop a video game, what the contraints are, what is possible versus what isn't. Which is okay! Most people don't, and that's fine. But you seem to think you do.

(frozen)

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

I KNOW what it takes to develop a game. I've read about video game development, so I know the subject. A WHAT IF tree does not BREAK GAMES. This game only follows one switch. Kill_Little_Sister? It's a Y or N statement. It has the sophistication of a LOGO program.

You seem to be under the impression that creating a baseline tree is a complicated process that takes hundreds of programmers thousands of man hours.

The developers spent so much time developing powers so that when you exploited the bosses and their little charges that you would have cool things to do. Which is fine. Having powers is neat. They were so worked up about the (Random) Boss Battles though, that they left no other options on gaining those powers. That is a Design Flaw. You Must Fight the (random) bosses, that the developers, in their game demos, said you can ignore. They want you to make a choice about the Sisters, but they gave the illusion that it was an optional thing.

Would the game play any differently if you decided not to Kill Ryan, but help him get rid of Atlas? Not really, as you had to kill atlas anyway. Would the game play any differently if you had another option outside of killing Mr Bubbles to get Adam? Yes, but the planning stage should have planned for such a circumstance. The Designers failed to give players another option, which would not have taken that much to do, as they included the bloody ... whatchyacall it as weapon later in the game.

The designers limited choices becuase they didn't plan for them, which means a bad design was in place during the concept stage. I am not asking for Bioshock to transcend the genre, but build upon what has come before. The difference is what you believe has come before, and I have, obviously, is huge.

(frozen)

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

I KNOW what it takes to develop a game. I've read about video game development, so I know the subject. A WHAT IF tree does not BREAK GAMES. This game only follows one switch. Kill_Little_Sister? It's a Y or N statement. It has the sophistication of a LOGO program.

I'm going to repeat this for emphasis.

I KNOW what it takes to develop a game. I've read about video game development, so I know the subject.

You hear that, everyone? He KNOWS THE SUBJECT! He read about it once! Perhaps in Electronic Gaming Monthly! Do you watch G4 as well?

Once more...

I KNOW what it takes to develop a game. I've read about video game development, so I know the subject.

Wow.


Yes, truly next-gen games are just that easy to build. It's just a bunch of if-then statements in BASIC. That's how those software engineers earn their six-figure salaries. I read a lot about World War 2, I guess that makes me a soldier! I read a whole bunch about Bruce Lee, so now I'm a kung-fu master.

I'm going to end this conversation, and then marvel at your ignorance. Another game developer on this thread has already explained to you how it actually is, in very patient and polite detail, I'm not going to repeat what he said. I will, however, take a long hot shower tonight to attempt to scrub all your WRONG away. Cheers!

(frozen)

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Grr. I'm sorry. I'm going to retract that, because I really am not interested in reopening hostilities -- or contact -- with you and Andy. I'm going to keep my opinion of this sort of debate off the public record, and we can live out our lives peacefully under our own respective delusions, okay?