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If we're out looking for realism and a developer puts in a sniping/covert class, we ought to both respect that style of play and EXPECT that style of play. If we fall victim to it, we should simply change our tactics.
If we're unwilling to change our tactics in the realm of gameplay and instead bully people by calling them names, ridiculing their style and trying to make gamers playing within the rules into villains, then we may as well not be mouthpieces for the hobby."
The weird thing about the constant call back to classic rhetoric is that it ignores the constant evolution of art/commerce. It’s as if everyone has spent time in ONE class on art history or spend the day on Wikipedia reading about “Art” capital letter. Then, with no sense of the actual artistic community, they’ve decided what is or isn’t art.
The movie “Battleship” is probably not art, but that’s a matter of intent, not affect. If someone out there really believed in “Battleship” and created it with their own time and money, but thought: “This will be a commercial failure, but it’s something I believe in and something I want to say,” that’s ultimately all it takes to be art.
That doesn’t automatically make it good art, but we can open up an entire discussion about the arbitration of good vs. bad via the subjective.
I just finished a master’s degree in a field that is so “artsy” that it can make you sick. I’ve been nominated for awards by one publication, and then panned by another. It leaves me wondering, even as I move on to the next phase in my career, whether I’ve ever been good at what I do.
Spend time in one graduate workshop as an artist and find out that they’re all circles of people with different ideas about how to negotiate art and culture. One person will applaud the same choice that another derides. Meanwhile, the idea of what is or isn’t art gets debated by the critics. As if their conversations about it will somehow ratify it or exile it.
Sad news for everyone, artists included: No one agrees, least of all the people creating art. I once had a guy tell me that an entire piece I’d worked on was useless because I was a fan of Pearl Jam. This guy has an MA in my field.
People like Phil Fish make the same kinds of douche-bag sweeping statements about things like Japanese games—meanwhile a Japanese developer has created a hard-core darling in the Dark Souls/Demon Souls franchise. Even his clarification about “modern” Japanese games is one clearly created in a vacuum of his own ego.
We often find ways to ratify our own enjoyment, our own biases and our own prejudices. This means that there are people out there who really believe that EA is the worst company in the world, that Japanese games suck and that we can codify art and call it a day.
We can’t even agree on morality. Who should live or die. Society is still struggling with dialectics from thousands of years ago, the Catholic Church is still sending out thank you notes and apologies for stuff that happened in the 18th and 19th centuries. The U.S. government once ratified a document that listed blacks at 3/5ths of another human being—and people thought that sounded about right.
That may seem tangential, but the point is simple: We once had a legal document that devalued the humanity of an entire culture—and many of those injustices continued into the modern era. We’re not going to agree on what is or isn’t art, and any consensus, no matter how warm it makes us feel in our tummies, is going to revoke or ratify the art or works of another.
It’s intent. If you meant to make art—if you created a thing that you value and believe in, and you did it because you went to your seething continent and dragged back the wilds of your unconscious for all of us to view in menagerie—that is art. If you cynically created a piece of commerce in order to cash in on a commodity in a passionless vacuum—that’s not art.
But hey, even if I’m wrong about my definition, and Battleship the Movie is somehow art too—I’m not going to argue for or against it by using the voice of scholars that would have mistaken a film for sorcery."
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/10/an-inconvenient-truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time.ars
The problem with gamers using the "I want a bargain" argument is that they often pay 55 bucks plus tax for a used game that's a new release. That same new game from Amazon.com (for instance) would be nearly the same price, but directly support the developer.
Publishers have actually brought the cost of games down while making them bigger than ever (look at Kingdoms of Amalur or Skyrim and compare their value per dollar to the games of even ten years ago).
Less than a coffee at Starbucks. That's the difference between a new and used new release. One supports a company that's ONLY about making money. The other supports a company that's about making money AND art.
The answers are as obvious as everyone pretends--it's just not in favor of the people shouting about overpriced games."
I don't agree."
When I read this column I was immediatly frustrated by the misinformation. I was also frustrated that there were no external citations to help find the rabbit trail where the bad information came from.
People wonder why EA (and not banks) won worst company in America.
Articles like this one, more than ever, make me feel like it's a lack of perspective and a lack of solid information.
Too many gamers get their "news" from talkback forums at sites like Kotaku. To rely on rabid fans of a site that isn't actually built on good journalism is a lazy habit."
He has, and some of the rest of us were easily able to follow along--including the bitmob staffer that found it.
If you have discussion points you'd like to bring up, I think they'd be great to read, but dissent with no content is as useless with story with no conflict.
Oh, and to wit, the author is arguing that challenge does not negate storytelling while Blow claims the two are at odds.
The argument made by this bitmob writer seem clear to me, and to many of us. You seem to have missed the point and failed to make any. I'm open to your actual point, but I just don't think I understand it."
The gameplay in Braid was amazing, but the little vignettes included were barely readable and completely overwrought.
The lesson we learn when studying good writing (be it drama, fiction or even narrative non-fiction) is that CONFLICT IS STORY.
Every time you have to duck behind something to apply a health pack, every time you struggle to climb a tower in time, every time you lose a race--it's creates narrative. Failure is also a part of someone's story. He'd be a better storyteller if he knew that.
Still, there are people who tell great stories who make miserable games. Take Jurassic Park by Telltale. That is a pretty decent Jurassic park story, decent voice acting, well written, believable characters--but the game is a pushover built on quick time events and with nearly zero penalty.
I'd rather ret-con the twelve times I was eaten by a T-Rex than to remove those failures from my experience."
I think my version is extremely optimistic. As in: If we can assume developers put every 5 dollar return they get back into making great games and then reward us all for eschewing used games in the future, then my logic works. However, if they use that 5 bucks to give a bonus to a CEO instead of reinvesting it in art, my logic is a complete failure.
So, as I'm being optimistic, I'm also aware of the pitfalls.
However, I think the same is true of the other line of thinking. It's all about the consumer, their rights and how showing loyalty will pay off. However, clearly enough money has been lost that companies thought it was a problem. Surely it's not the problem they percieve it to be, but we gamers have probably not been as loyal as we like to imagine ourselves either.
Nor is the core community, the type that posts at Bitmob for example, the same as the crossection of people who pirate games and who don't reinvest. It's a really tough topic."
One of the things I've always mentioned is that when you buy a new car these days it often comes with a free month of satelite radio, or OnStar or some other form of online support. That support is usually finite. If you sell that car, the next owner doesn't then get another free month or year of Onstar--they just get the car.
Likewise, these days a lot of Blu-ray and DVDs and comic books come with a digital copy. You can sell your DVD, but the next user doesn't also get the digital copy if you've redeemed it.
The single player experience in a used game remains free, but the online stuff doesn't always. Given that the online stuff has to be continuously supported with patches, servers etc, it's not hard to understand companies not wanting to hand that out to people who bought used.
A lot of people use the zero-sum-gain idea to say, "Well, if someone sold their game back then they're not still using it, so it's the same amount of online service." This isn't true, however, because those people can wait until the price goes down in a few months, buy a used copy for a fraction of the price (again without supporting the original publisher) and still use their original online pass.
The other argument about the car company that, again, doesn't jibe is this: You're not entering into an agreement with them when you buy a used game. You're entering into an agreement with Gamestop. It's like buying a used car from your buddy. If you buy a used car from your buddy and the wheel is gone, that's not Toyota's fault.
I know, that analogy isn't perfect, but it's just meant to illustrate that the other analogy isn't perfect either. We, as consumers, have to hold ourselves as accountable as we hold publishers. If we're not buying from them, we can't expect them to care about some mythical boycott. They're already losing our business as it funnels to used retailers.
I'm not saying either answer is an easy one--but I feel like gamers have done a poor job of supporting the originators of the art form in favor of rewarding a third party.
What I'd like to see is Gamestop paying a percentage of all used sales back to the developers. If that happened they'd still make a huge profit, but it would keep developers from losing tons of money on used sales and benefit everyone. As it stands now, I feel like consumers are backing a street vendor and then getting mad at Rolex when the watches don't work."
I'd think it completely outlandish if not for the PC model, but it would seem like brand suicide to demand a group of consumers change their understanding of the business model after 30 years of relative consistency."
This assumes we're talking about the relatively minor sanctions that currently exist.
A new game at Amazon is 60 bucks without tax and usually comes with a 10 dollar gift card for a future purchase. A used game at Gamestop is 55 bucks, plus tax. When Amazon sells their copy money goes to the publisher and content goes, without complaint, to the consumer.
When you buy a used game you aren't actually supporting the publisher, so you've already "hit them where it hurts."
You've rewarded a reseller over an artist all to save the cost of a Venti Mocha at Starbucks. I'm not sure the big drum "consumers" always beat in this war is valid. The sanctions imposed on used sales basically funnel money back into production and keep studios from being shut down and new ideas from being killed. Gamestop doesn't care about that because they'll always have Madden, Call of Duty or whatever else they need to stay in business between the next resale.
However, the complete PC style revolt against used games entirely--well that's something that irks me.
But, I'm also irked by people paying Gamestop for a product and then asking EA, Activision or whoever else why they aren't backing up their customers. They are--the paying ones--not the ones who scavenged to save five bucks."
Let me say this: PC players (and I'm one of them, so hear me out) can be pretty smug about their gaming. All of the sudden an elaborate tutorial on a console is disgusting to a particular set of gamers because 1. they didn't have it and 2. they pretend they don't want it.
However, the Minecraft community sprung up by using the Minecraft wiki. That wasn't created by casual PC gamers. A wiki is powered and produced by the hard-core.
A console user may or may not have a PC right next to his/her 360. Not every 360 user can fire up the wiki and have it next to them, or a quick tab away. ALL PC users can pull up the "Not a tutorial but still totally a tutorial" via their browser.
To pretend that having it in-game is somehow different is a bit of a cheat. It's only different because good developers recognized the need for it and the possibility that 360 users would need it for functional reasons--not for lazy ones.
If a gamer has waited until the 360 version to pick up a copy of Minecraft, it's even more likely that they don't have the same ready access to a PC as the next person. "