This might as well be subtitled “Chris attempts to defend his mangled misappropriation of a real word.” Still, I think it’s a concept worth bringing up with the gaming community at large. It’s something all gamers are aware of – the idea of visceral combat mechanics, really tight steering controls, or really rewarding jumping mechanics – but something that isn’t discussed by designers nearly enough. Kinaesthetic sensation is truly unique to interactive media, and only in games can it be fully explored.
One of the primary responses to my Half-Life video is that I just don’t like linearity:
“the way you speak of valve’s linear decision makes it sound like you believe that the pinnacle of a game would be an open world one”
“[Games] can give us open world sandboxes to play in and live out anything we desire; And they can let us interact with an expertly crafted story in a way that no movie ever could. To knock HL2 because it’s one of these and not the other is a tad idealistic. Yes, games CAN be that, but they don’t HAVE to be that.”
Now, I’ll concede that I didn’t articulate my point properly if so many people thought this. I don’t know why; I was probably too busy cramming that video with all of the awful unfunny jokes it has to focus on a coherent point. And since I really, really, really don’t want to play through Half-life again to collect more video to remake my original point in response to YouTube comments of all things, I thought a blog post would do just fine.
Grand Theft Auto is a difficult game to comment on. It has perhaps as many unbelievable successes as it has undeniable failures. I enjoy playing parts of it, but at the same time I always walk away from the overall experience feeling frustrated. This video is largely my attempts to contextualize those feelings.
Ultimately I can’t say that it’s a good game, I think it’s simply too flawed in its overall design for it to pass for something that’s actually cohesive or coherent. But it’s certainly a game that tried hard to do do good things, even if it fell flat on its face, and for that it has my respect. I didn’t even get around to covering things like the friends mechanic or the awkward romances in the game – both of which are worthy of note, but that totally don’t work in the context of a game about a wild sociopath blowing up random cars.
I’ve seen the GTAV trailer, and I have to say it doesn’t look like Rockstar have learned much from the past few games they’ve released. Red Dead Redemption arguably had a far better open world than GTAIV – you could actually progress in various areas of the game by just exploring and enjoying the environment around you and the random encounters with animals and people it might produce. But GTAV looks to set the tone closer to Team Bondi’s LA Noire and GTAIV; a narrative driven experience that has a very specific set of events and progression to follow. We’ll find out with time whether the next Grand Theft Auto takes after its predecessor or learns from other games how open worlds should function, but if past behavior is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath that the focus will be on a player-driven open world experience.
Mirror’s Edge is a game I really want to like, but realize its shortcomings. Unlike the Bastion video I think this one largely speaks for itself – Mirror’s Edge is a great experiment I’d love to see DICE return to once the Battlefield circlerjerky stuff is over and done with. The platforming stuff is great fun, and lends itself to some really awesome time trials. I’d also love to see if they could flesh out the game’s universe and make it live up to its potential as a true dystopia and not just a setting for silly chase sequences. We’ll see whether they can get back to it after Battlefield 3, though.
In other news, YouTube has decided to block my account from uploading videos longer than 15 minutes again (even though none of my existing videos have been flagged or removed) and as a result I won’t be posting anything but frivolities to that account for a while (assuming this gets cleared up at all). They really, really suck at providing means of contesting or protesting account flagging, and as this is the first time I’ve ever run into this problem I’m sort of at a loss (especially since they insist no specific videos are the cause of the IP infringement flagging). Ah, well.
I got bored and made a thing.
Actually, I’ve been rewatching Daria now that it’s on Hulu and thought this bit stuck out as particularly poignant given the trend towards creating artificial controversy in games in the last few years. I singled out Call of Duty mostly because it was just released and watching a little girl get blown up in MW3 is probably the most flagrant attempt at emotioneering I’ve seen in years. But I could have just as easily pointed to Medal of Honor’s skirmish with the Marines over the Taliban being playable in the game, EA’s attempt to market Dead Space by showing super-offended moms, or EA’s marketing of Dante’s Inferno by both inciting fake protests and trying to offer “sinful pleasures” to people who took part in their viral ads… Offending people as a marketing gimmick – or more specifically, trying generate the illusion of offending people for a marketing gimmick – is pretty terrible. More than that, I’m not even convinced that it works – if your game sparks a debate about whether a challenging or controversial subject matter was justified in the greater context of the game’s thematic content you might get more people to play the game and find out. If you’re just putting in controversial material for the sole purpose of generating that response – like No Russian and to a lesser extent the other two scenes in the video – I think people will rightly recognize you as the equivalent of a toddler scrawling on the walls with crayons for attention.
More long-form videos are coming – I just finished recording the next one. Need to sit down this week and edit it together.