[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 225 KB, 372x482, 1433930251690.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
6668430 No.6668430[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

>He's a good kid? A good kid? Why? Does he help the fucking poor? No. He sits on his ass all day, smoking dope and jerking off while he plays that fucking game. If that's our standard for goodness... then no wonder this country's screwed.

>> No.6668434
File: 249 KB, 426x454, 1430371392962.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
6668434

>>6668430
Wrong board m8 but I'll discuss vidya with you if you want.

I found GTA 5 kind of boring, open world games don't really do much for me, I got my fill out of San Andreas ten years ago and only played 4 through the story really then stopped.

Never been to America but I know a guy who did and he said that GTA 5 perfectly captured the look of the California beachfront. I don't know about the people though, to me they came off as edgy teenage cynicism like something out of that movie Idiocracy.

Also the world wasn't as interesting as it was in San Andreas. The areas outside of the city were handled poorly and felt small and linear because of that highway loop.

>> No.6668440

>>6668434

I actually did want people to discuss the quote. Although I think, speaking of vidya, it has degenerated and the industry has been gutted of its middle of the road devs. Someone on /v/ yesterday mentioned this and I really agree.

/v/ babbies mostly have no idea what gaming excels at as a medium. They're begging Nintendo to turn Zelda in to another elder scrolls series. They constantly wank over po-faced realism.

>> No.6668446

>>6668430
i both help the poor and sit on my ass, jerking off

what does this make me

>> No.6668453

>>6668440
Not him, but kind of agreeing. Would like to see more purely mechanics based stuff. Typing of the Dead / Cook Serve Delicious style I mean.

>> No.6668454

>>6668430
Define good, OP.

>> No.6668470

>>6668440
If you want to talk about what gaming excels at as a medium I'm probably your guy. I once wrote a 35 post long critique of The Last of Us' weaknesses as a video game.

As for Jimmy, I can see why this quote could be interesting. Michael's judging Jimmy for being lazy, implying that there's no 'goodness' to this. However Michael's a criminal and has killed innocent people before regardless of how the player goes about playing the game.

Michael's values are interesting, lots of people say he's a sociopath but I think that there might be more to it. In a strange kind of way Michael seems to find a kind of virtue or 'goodness' in what he does. And arguably there is some, he works hard and puts himself in danger for the sake of improving his situation and that of his family. This work might involve murdering people but it's still work.

And Michael seems to hold a lot of quaint, old-fashioned values for a criminal, something which I think I remember Jimmy calling him out on. Even in what you posted you can see this. "Does he help the fucking poor?" This is a very quaint and simple idea, it's probably the first thing that would come to a lot of people's mind when they think of a 'good' action. And the fact that it occurred to Michael interests me. Maybe it means that he holds a lot of the same values as normal members of society and his situation just forced him into his way of living, or maybe he's a sociopath and I've forgotten loads of important stuff. It's been a while since I played.

>> No.6668474

>>6668470

video games are shit but The Last of Us is one of the only good games I've played

>> No.6668479

>>6668474
Interesting, elaborate further. I'm not trying to be flippant, what you've written has me curious.

Why do you consider the game good?

>> No.6668480

>>6668474
Sturgeon's Law

>> No.6668492

>>6668474

Pure cancer detected.

Can we get a doctor over here?

>> No.6668493

>>6668440
It's funny how so many of them don't even realise that GTA is a satire on Western life....

I guess they're so wrapped up in their fictional realities

>> No.6668502

>>6668440
Gaming isn't a medium at all.

>> No.6668505

>>6668470
You can twist your titties any way you want but at the end of the day Mikey is a ruthless killer with little regard for anybody else.
The only thing he even remotely seems to value from an emphatic point of view is his family, and maybe close friends, but his relationship to them is kind of shoddy.
There's that mission very early on where you save Jimmy from the boat, and it is insinuated that Michael almost seems to care more about his expensive boat than his son.
His wife is also a cunt, and so on.
If I also remember correctly, he also doesn't want to meet his best friend Trevor, and even betrayed him in a way, again showing little remorse.

If a man displays that kind of behavior there's really no place for statements like ' his situation just forced him into his way of living'.
A statement like that can only justify so much, and I think the almost complete disregard for people, through killing and what not, all for personal gain is not one of those situations that can be justified.

Basically I think he's a fucking psycho.

Note, I finished GTA 5 like a year ago so I'm probably remembering thing wrongly, so I might be talking complete shit here.

>> No.6668635

>>6668505
No, that sounds more or less right now that I think about it. Whenever he helped someone close to him it was usually because of how it served him in some way.

>> No.6668676

>>6668454
Not op, but the absence of evil

>> No.6668709

>>6668505
>>6668635
So... They accurately portrayed an aging psychopath? They usually chill out in their forties.

Remember how half-assed Franklin's story was?

>> No.6668768

>>6668470
I want that 35 post long critique of The Last of Us. The fact that it got so much critical acclaim for it's narrative deeply disturbs me. It gave the player zero agency and it's plot was Children of Men minus any redeeming qualities.

>> No.6668792

>>6668768
>It gave the player zero agency
This is absolutely fine. The whole "A lifelike world where your choices actually matter" thing is a fucking gimmick.
>and it's plot was Children of Men minus any redeeming qualities.
Yeah, this. What a fucking tired, boring game it is.

>> No.6668807
File: 50 KB, 1280x720, maxresdefault[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
6668807

Grand Theft Auto protagonists are always the sort of people who would run someone over on their way to work and simply dismiss such an act or rationalize it away. Michael is no exception. In fact I'd say GTAV exemplifies these terrible qualities a person might have more than any other game. Other GTA protagonists do terrible things for certain, but our three 'heroes' are special cases struggling to validate their behavior. Rockstar's games never have any heroes or villains. Antagonists for sure, but no heroes or villains. Just like real life.

>> No.6668833

>>6668792
Player agency doesn't have to deal entirely with choices it could be just how much of the events the player feels like the have a hand in. Having so many fucking cut scenes and putting all the big moments in them defeats the point of making a fucking video game. Either make it interactive in some way or go write the novel you don't even have the capacity to articulate without multimillion dollar production backing it up.

>> No.6668879

The aesthetic wasn't as good as IV, everything felt cheap. There were plenty of diversions, but while SA gave them this feeling of kind of solitude, making you want to see them through, V made them feel boring and not worth it. The uncanny valley of side activities

Franklin was boring
Trevor was just too much, and the fact that he killed that LaD character was kind of a slap in the face

>>6668493
I think everyone realizes that, but I think Rockstar itself ultimately dreams of a writing ability that gets away from it

>> No.6668885

Guys, who got >>6666666 ????

>> No.6668892

>>6668885
froge

>> No.6668898

>>6668502

this

despite the artistic talent needed to create a convincing game, the games themselves have absolutely no artistic or lasting value.

>> No.6668920

>>6668898
Games are the ultimate medium

>> No.6668928

>>6668898
We're 20-30 years in give or take compared to the thousands of years literature has the hundred that cinema has. This medium is in it's weird teenager stage and doesn't have the maturity needed just yet. Give it time and they will.

>> No.6668938

>>6668479

Because he cant handle real games, so an interaxtive movie will do foe him.

>> No.6668947

>>6668920
My dick is the ultimate medium.

To have a good story you must fuck the mechanics. To have good mechanics you gotta have no story. And if you have both it's one in a million.

>> No.6668966

>>6668430
>>6668434
>>6668440

The thing is, most of the video games with "great" writing actually suffer from their gameplay mechanics
The Last Of Us can be a gripping/heart-wrenching story, but the shitty gameplay elements force the game to work in spite of its forced covershooter mechanics

Many games with great stories really don 't need to be games at all. The games that actually use the interactive media to tell a gripping story are very rare.
Video Games still need to mature before they can be taken seriously as a medium, and this endless race for prettier visuals will not work in their favor as artists who were just getting a handle on their old toy now have to do something completely different.
Environmental storytelling is something rarely used in video games, but it's perfect for them. Take Spec Ops: The Line, it uses very simply visual tricks in order to convey a mood, something most video games miss entirely. When your team is screaming about the horrors of war, it's in a bloodstained concrete jungle. When they're messing with water trucks, a refreshing blue shade becomes the prominent color. As the game progresses and everything goes FUBAR, the creamy gold sand begins to look less like a vacation spot and more like the sand of a gladiator's arena.
Even small things like how the protagonist, Walker interacts with the world when the character presses a button changes. As Walker descends further into madness his execution kills become more barbaric, instead of clean headshots he begins beating and tearing at people. What was once professional camaraderie, "Kill confirmed" "Target down" further descends into screaming breathlessly " I WANT HIM DEAD" "KILL THAT FUCKER"

Spec Ops: The Line is probably one of the best uses of interactive media, it's a shame it doesn't get as much recognition as other games.

>> No.6668973

>>6668470
>I once wrote a 35 post long critique of The Last of Us' weaknesses
I've played it only briefly. But a huge flaw I perceived (game design and experience wise) is a lack of control over the pace of how the game is presented, its flow (at least in the beginning) is really not good.
Like, when you start there's all this "wow" stuff that really builds up expectation then suddenly you are playing a boring tutorial. It goes from "this is gonna be awesome" to "lame" in a really abrupt way.

Is anything related to that in your critique? If not, do you agree/have also perceived this?

>> No.6669009

>>6668973
>Like, when you start there's all this "wow" stuff that really builds up expectation

Except that "wow" stuff was blatant emotional manipulation cut from the same cloth as fucking Disney cartoons that came out half a century ago.

>> No.6669018

>>6669009
Yeah, but I'm talking more about the flow, not if the "wow" was really wowy.
I agree 100% with you though.

>> No.6669093

>>6668966
>>6668947
>>6668928
>>6668920
>>6668898

Okay so I'll share my views on this games as a medium/games as an art form thing cause I think we have some serious potential for good discussion here that you don't see everyday lol. Bear with me cause it might be long (but someone read this pls :( ).

So, games have entertainment value + a potential for artsy value. When I think about what make I like the games I like it usually comes down to a combination of these factors:
- Mechanics: good mechanics + innovative ones
- Gameplay: like, how well designed the gameplay is and the flow of the game (also I really like mind bending puzzles or really hard stuff that is well done as in not just trial and error)
- Aesthetics
- "Storyline" (I mean, everything "written", not just the plot lmao)

For me the artsy bit lie in the last two while the first two are more 'technical', ofc you need some sort of genius to have really good game design and mechanics but it's a different thing. And I think the "technical" stuff is more related to the entertainment value. Unless it's a mechanic that expresses something, which I think could be possible but I fail to recall any existing example of that.

Now for the possibilities on aesthetics you have pretty much a combination of the possibilities of visual and audio arts. It's like a combination of classic visual arts + music + cinema.
And for the storyline you kinda have all the possibilites of literature.
So the artsy bits lie in those parts and there is where you gonna find some artistic value if you find any.
So with the combination of that + interactivity you have a really good medium for art, idk how someone thinks that wouldn't be one (if something good has been done with that it's a very different thing though).

But at the same time you have some problems to orchestrate that well.
> To have a good story you must fuck the mechanics
Although I don''t agree you must, it's really easy to. Cause a good game kinda needs everything of that glue together somehow.
Suppose you wanna have something that is purely the artsy parts (screw the mechanics and gameplay), you will probably end up with something like Dear Esther. I still don't know exactly what I think of that because it was so boring I didn't focus well on the narrative lol. Let's suppose it's actually the most awesome masterpiece ever written in the story of literature, it somehow loses value because of the fucked up gameplay and you should just release it as a book instead.
(1/?)

>> No.6669118

>>6668966
What's your view on games with a developed lore such as TES? I mean, with written medium that goes beyond the scope of gameplay?

>> No.6669137

>>6669093
>>6668947
> To have a good story you must fuck the mechanics

Now that is some bullshit right there. By that logic films can only have a good narrative if it stops the visuals dead in their tracks while the characters drone on and on in exposition. The best films do the exact opposite and relay information and draw emotions from their visuals at least as much as there is dialog or monologues. See 2001: A Space Odyssey and the works of the masters of the medium: Tarkovsky, Bresson, Bergman and so forth.

How that relates to video games is almost entirely identical to the problems literature and cinema have: showing instead of telling. But in games this rule is "interactive" instead of taking that away from the player.

Think about this before you say I'm "anti-story" or whatever. In Game-X wouldn't it have a greater impact if YOU buried the body of your avatar's spouse instead of just watching a cinematic of the burial?

>> No.6669170

>>6669093
It's kinda the same problem you have with movie adaptations of books. Take a really good book, it probably has some very good style (which is a part of its aesthetics that is not translatable to a movie) and some thoughtful stuff that relies on you reading and thinking about it and it can take 50 pages to describe a second time-wise, such as to give you a deep sense of everything that is being expressed in that second. On a movie is just a second, you can only do what you can do with visuals.
However, cinema has a visual part that books don't, which can be used for different levels of 'artistic value'. It's kinda the same thing with games for me.

And another thing is that a game requires too much stuff tied together, requiring so many different abilities that is hard to achieve some vision together as a team. Also, as mentioned in >>6668928, it's a really young medium.
If you think about it we could have a really good work of art that is this really great book that comes in an amazing box with amazing paintings and with this amazing LP with really good music and everything ties together really well. Afaik we don't, cause that's fucking hard to achieve.

On the topic of having artistic value
> define art
Is Pulp Fiction 'art', for example? Cause if you take it, the written part is just a meh gangsta story (fun, well written, good dialogue, but still). What makes it really good/having arstici value (as I see things) are the aesthetics and how it goes against a lot of rules about how a movie should be done.
In a very naive definition, I'd say art is about creating or pushing forward some kind of aesthetics or style; capturing the human/society condition/dilemmas/feelings/behaviour/etc, having good insights about it, etc; and defying imposed "rules". Those three can be done in a lot of different ways.

Aesthetically-wise we already have some good stuff pushing it forward.

"Capturing stuff"-wise I can't think of anything really good in that sense, but again, the medium is still so new. That's why storylines that are total tearjerkers are considered "amazing" by critics today, because til yesterday you had nothing but gameplay and mechanics (or some "really good" storylines that are pretty much your basic genre fiction with less detail), so it's a surprise that people are starting to care about that more now and anything less crappy is gonna have "masterpiece status" according to the mass critics because of that.

Now on the defying-stuff wise, we have really a lot of games that do that. I can't think of any that does that "society imposed rules"-wise, but a lot do in a sense of "how you are supposed to make games" and that has a lot of artistic value for me. It's like the same value of a lot of artsy movies or of using a type of speech that wasn't considered literature before.

We may not yet have something that is godly tier when comes to art, but artistic value is certainly there, each day more imo.

(2/2 I believe)

>> No.6669180

>>6669137
Yeah, that's what I meant, although it's really easy to fuck up one if you wanna have both in movies as well.

>> No.6669181

It's pretty funny that all the longest, most in-depth and thought-out posts on the literature board right now are debating what makes a video games fun to play

>> No.6669186

>>6668430

>implying that helping the poor makes you a good person

>> No.6669192

>>6669186
Ah, I see you too have read Zarathustra. A tip o' the cap to you, good sir.

>> No.6669196

>>6669181
who cares about fun, anon
we are having a discussion about what makes them valuable patrician art pieces.

>> No.6669202

>>6669196
No, you actually aren't

>> No.6669215

>>6669192
>Stereotyping makes you a good person.

>> No.6669228

>>6669170
There's also the fact that games are still a CS thing and the mindset is still a let's make money one.
It's usually approached by tech guys and some artsy tech guys are pushing it forward in that sense. I think very few people approach the medium wanting to make a work of art yet, while on other mediums we already have that for a long time and it's already part of our culture to approach them like that.

>> No.6669229
File: 160 KB, 687x1024, myles.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
6669229

>>6668446

Paying homeless people to let you jerk off on to their face does not actually count as helping the poor.

>> No.6669252

>>6668807
>just liek reel lif
fucking die now /v/ scum pls delete this thread mods holy shit

>> No.6669305

>>6669118

The TES lore is near meaningless at this point
Its obvious that the majority of it came from improv in a DnD campaign of ages past.
The games often don't match what the lore says something be like.
Bethesda is an entirely different company,they seem completely uninterested in good storytelling. At times in Skyrim, the main story seems to be something they felt obligated to write. Bethesda is much more content to just create a sandbox to play in then actually use it to tell any kind of an interesting tale.
In general, lore of a game is an integral part of world building, as it is in any other medium. The more alien a world is, the background knowledge and alternate history it should have explaining its existence. Games have an advantage on establishing lore and building a world over film and books. Books would be obligated to have a long history lesson (boring and bad) or have only bits of it revealed which may not 100% satisfy curiosity or even explain the whys of the world.
Games can have this lore be in books, it can be shown through the animation and opinions of people. In video games you can see the attitude of the poorest poor to the richest noble if you really wanted to. By the nature of actually being in the world you are granted a better perspective on this alien world.

The specific written medium as lore in video games is so wildly different and open to opportunities than previous mediums before it. But there is a fine line, to have lore in a world that doesn't say anything about the world at all is as egregious as having a real book in our world that says nothing. Lore shouldn't just be fluff or something to take up the player's time, if it's written it should express the history that led to the current situation, or the opinions of the people. The problem with written lore in video games in the TES manner is that it can seem very mono-perspective. Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't think of a piece of written lore where academics refuted each other or even disagreed. If there's a history book there is usually only one author if there is one at all,this author's statements on history are fact, nobody disagrees with him.
This is the major thing that stops many video games from having a fully realized world, most of the population seems to just coalesce in ideology and truth, any group that goes against this is the game's stereotypical "bad guy"
Which also brings me to: video games need to get a much less juvenile view on morality. The medium is starting to go into adolescence so we are seeing less and less of this, but the shadow still lingers. Arbitrary morality systems, or rewarding good less than evil (but really in the end good is rewarded more down the road) makes the choice less about what the player really believes, and more about what ending they wish to see.

>> No.6669324

>>6669305
~continuation
Good/Evil dichotomy in most games is pointless. Where the real choice you make is to either play as the authors intended or kick a baby over the 50 yard line.You CAN be evil, by why would you want to? Other than causing narrative dissonance and trying to undermine the plot there is no real reason to be "evil" or make "evil" decisions in video games.

>> No.6669356

>>6669170
>In a very naive definition, I'd say art is about creating or pushing forward some kind of aesthetics or style; capturing the human/society condition/dilemmas/feelings/behaviour/etc, having good insights about it, etc; and defying imposed "rules"

Why do people always come up with these pretentious definitions of art? That art must be deep, i.e. "capturing the human/society/ [...] etc, having good insights about it" and so on.

Art only needs to be a conveyance of an idea through the visual.

The only point you hit on correctly is that it's about creating an aesthetic/style. Everything else you rattled off is fluff.

Too many people are stuck in the wicked state of thinking art must be beautiful, or that it must say something, or that it must mean something, or convey something, etc.: it doesn't.