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Editorial Felipe Pepe at Gamasutra: Why are we abandoning gaming history?

mondblut

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I actually expected my article to be labeled GG for how it attacks journalists, but nothing...

You don't broadcast on enemy propaganda channels in the middle of war. Even if you have something terribly important and worthwile to stay. You just don't.

Your piece is now hanging next to Lie Alexander's. Don't you feel in a need of a bath? :|
 

pakoito

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Humm... perhaps. I'm a bit weary of asking the pioneers thenselves, they usually left the industry or don't care anymore. Asking the obscessed, sperging fan sometimes is better.
http://www.raphkoster.com/ is very active on twitter and in general, and I'm yet to see him reject an opportunity to talk his MUDs/MMOs.

He also retweeted your article.
 

Gragt

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin
The main problem is not a lack of historical awareness but a lack of critical thinking. Why care if some moron learns of Fallout if he will still think that Fallout 3 is a better, more complex, game? The problem with video games is one that plagues books and movies, and that is deliteracy, i.e. the deliberate dumbing down of arts and culture in general. In all history, it has never been this easy for us to access quality content, and for cheap or even for free thanks to the public domain, yet, given the choice, most people willfully chose to consume crap—we're talking of people who refuse to read a text to the end if it does not feature pictures every three paragraphs, or if it is not set in an easy to digest "top 10" format. I'd rather ignore them and instead focus on those with the maturity to reach past the effortless.

History is important, and it is interesting to learnthe stories and details surrounding the creation of a game and its genealogy, but in the end the game itself is its own best explaination. Yes, Wizardry drew its inspiration from other games—which also drew their own inspiration from other sources for that matter; I let you guess which!—but what matters most in the end is whether Wizardry is good or not, and why. Just labelling something as a "labour of love" or as "having soul" won't cut it since that sort of cliché tells nothing about the quality. Likewise, the heart of the problem is not to stupidly claim that turn-based systems were implemented only due to technical constraint, but to fail to see the advantages—and weaknesses!—of turn-based compared to real-time.

I believe that Roger Ebert was mentionned earlier, and that's good, because Ebert was a fantastic film historian but a mediocre critic. At times I think I am too harsh on the man, especially after reading one more time his great reviews of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Taxi Driver, but then it only takes a moment to remember that he similarly praised mediocrities like Casablanca, or light crap like Star Wars or Indiana Jones to, dull his luster. Yes, film criticism is more respectable than video game criticism, but it is always disapointing disapointing to see Citizen Kane receiving so much praise—deservedly so—while better Welles movies are ignored.

Mind you, I appreciate the endeavour and good intentions and wish you good luck with it. I simply hope you will be able to reach the goal you set.
 

Arkadin

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I believe that Roger Ebert was mentionned earlier, and that's good, because Ebert was a fantastic film historian but a mediocre critic. At times I think I am too harsh on the man, especially after reading one more time his great reviews of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Taxi Driver, but then it only takes a moment to remember that he similarly praised mediocrities like Casablanca, or light crap like Star Wars or Indiana Jones to, dull his luster. Yes, film criticism is more respectable than video game criticism, but it is always disapointing disapointing to see Citizen Kane receiving so much praise—deservedly so—while better Welles movies are ignored.

At least Ebert tried to bring attention not just to The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil--certifiably Hollywood system productions--but also Chimes at Midnight and Othello, which are herculean individual efforts in filmmaking and just general artistic perseverance, but also completely outside of Hollywood's funding and production methods, thus much less dangerous to the status quo. Ebert is good for some of that exposure to works like this slightly outside the norm, although he still is often rather affected by common consensus on what should be canonic.

As a critic, he seems to have seen his job as mediating between populist values and higher ones for the public. I mean he's practically the king of "it's good for what it is." Which sucks to a degree, as does his incredible bias for and against specific filmmakers...Tarantino, Scorsese, Spike Lee, Herzog could practically do no wrong, while some could do no right. But I imagine without his ability to like, or seem to like, entertaining popcorn films like Indiana Jones, some of us would never have kept reading him and never would have heard of someone like Ozu Yasujiro. I wouldn't mind if a video game critic right now had this awareness of past and non-mainstream trends like Ebert did and still gave an occasional "it's good for what it is" review of a current popular game, so long as he were still making a broader or deeper discussion of games a part of his discourse. It would be a great step forward.

In any case, I have yet to read Ebert apologizing for F.W. Murnau or D.W. Griffith and their "technological limitations." Again, a great advancement on where we are with games writing.
 
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JarlFrank

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Very good article, Felipe.
There is an entire dimension to this that is not discussed in the article. When I started reading, I thought it was going to be about actual preservation of the games. There is a huge effort to restore movie classics that are found in some backwater archive (e.g. Metropolis), and the certain loss of many defining movies from the early era is widely mourned, yet the same thing is happening to games, and (except for some enthusiasts), nothing is done about it. In fact it is getting much worse, with games working only as long as the company server exists. Yet nobody cares.

Of course this has to do with how video games are viewed in society. Despite claims to the contrary by some indie hipsters, games are not regarded as a form of art. In Germany, this is even enshrined in law: Movies are art, therefore the Indiana Jones movies are allowed to be shown freely on TV, because art is an explicit exception to the swastika ban. Games are considered toys, therefore the uncensored Indiana Jones games (containing swastikas) are not even allowed to be sold.
Similarly, there are laws that require book and movie publishers to hand in copies of everything to the national archives, yet the same is not true for toys, nor for games.

That's true, but at least we have this thing in Germany (althogh I haven't been there yet and have no idea about its quality of preservation and presentation): http://www.computerspielemuseum.de/
 

JarlFrank

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Here's what the website of the computer game museum says (the description is only availble in German, not English, so let me give you a quick translation):

Bestand (Januar 2012):
ca. 22.000 Computerspiele und Anwendungen
über 300 Konsolen und Computersysteme
über 10.000 Zeitschriften
sowie Automatensysteme, Literatur, Medienkunstobjekte, Archivalien, Merchandising-Artikel und Videos.
Mission des Computerspielemuseums
Computerspiele sind ein bedeutsamer Bestandteil unserer zunehmend durch digitale Technologien geprägten Kultur. Das Computerspielemuseum setzt sich aktiv dafür ein, die Kultur und Geschichte von digitalen Spielen einem breitem Publikum mit Hilfe von Ausstellungen, medienpädagogischen Angeboten, Veranstaltungen und Publikationen zu vermitteln. Ziel ist es, das Verständnis von digitalen interaktiven Unterhaltungsmedien zu vertiefen und so die Medienkompetenz zu erhöhen. Im Bewusstsein dieser gesellschaftlichen Verantwortung bietet das Computerspielemuseum vergünstigte Zugangsbedingungen für Heranwachsende, Erwerbslose, Familien und Schulklassen.

Des Weiteren sammeln und bewahren wir Computerspiele, die benötigte Computertechnik und andere, mit der Computerspielekultur verbundene Artefakte, um heute und in Zukunft ein besseres Verständnis unserer Gesellschaft zu ermöglichen. Oberstes Ziel dabei ist eine gute Erschließung und Beschreibung, um einen möglichst breiten und geregelten Zugang zu diesem Ausschnitt unseres digitalen Erbes zu ermöglichen.

What we own (as of January 2012):
22.000 computer games and applications
over 300 computer systems and consoles
over 10.000 magazines
as well as arcade machines, literature, media art objects, archives, merchandising objects and videos

MISSION OF THE COMPUTER GAME MUSEUM:
Computer games are an important part of our culture that is influenced more and more by digital technologies. The computer game museum actively strives to show the culture and history of computer gaming to a broad audience, with the help of exhibitions, media-pedagogic offerings, events and publications. The goal is to deepen the understanding of digital interactive entertainment media and this way increase media competency. In the knowledge of this public responsibility, the computer game museum offers reduced entry prices for children/teens, unemployed, families and schools.
Additionally, we collect computer games, the required computer technology and other artifacts connected to computer game culture in order to allow a better understanding of our society today and in future. Topmost goal is a solid collection and description, to allow a broad and controlled access to this part of our digital heritage.

In a later paragraph they also mention that they're working on finding ways of better preserving digital data so it becomes easier to keep all that shit alive. Should I ever go to Berlin again, I'll definitely visit that place and see what it looks like there.
 

tuluse

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Gragt

If you want to criticize Ebert, point out that he used literary analysis on films and often missed how they used motion pictures to be powerful.

He was always clear that he reviewed movies from the prospective audiences point of view. So Star Wars is appraised by how an adolescent would view it [incredible] and the Godfather is view from how an adult would view it [incredible].
 

Irxy

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Star Control II is a shining counter-example; a complex space RPG that features intense battles, hundreds galaxies to freely explore
Should be star systems, obviously.

Great article, btw.
 

Watser

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
We also have/had a computer museum in Denmark, Ikast. However I believed it had to close due to a lack of money/funding and was possibly outsourced somewhere else. It used to be the worlds largest collection of computer games, arcades and consoles.
 

Archibald

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I wouldn't consider any of Larians games popamole (Beyond Divinity was bad but that was mostly due to other reasons than not wanting to make complex game) so I always viewed D:OS as natural progression of their previous stuff.

Real-time and action combat were mandated by publishers. Divine Divinity was going to be turn-based, but no one would fund them until they changed it. Because you know, it "doesn't sell".

Then their first turn-based game sells the most of any of their titles.

I'm aware of that. I'm just no agreeing with this idea:

The moment developers are freed of the shackles of absurdly high sales expectations, they miraculously develop the ability to create niche games with deep mechanics again, as so recently proven by Divinity: Original Sin.

My point is that Larian always shown this ability regardless of what their game was. Something it worked out, sometimes it didn't but they never looked like popamole developers.
 

Grauken

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Never heard of them, but they certainly have an illustrious circle of writers, just google the names and you see lots of SF/fantasy genre drama

Which I admit doesn't say anything about their ability to publish books. They do look like the self-publishing arm of one those writers (Vox Day) and seem to be rather new and they mostly deal with SF/fantasy, so their experience with a large scale book with lots of picture is probably limited. But again, that doesn't to rule them out

Also they offer this, http://www.castaliahouse.com/downloads/astronomy-homeschool-bundle/ which if they have hardcover editions off, would actually be kinda neat and maybe give them the experience to pull something of like the cRPG book
 

felipepepe

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The problem with something small like this is making it available for people everywhere at a decent price and keeping it in print. They are on amazon with various e-books, but the paperbacks are mostly sold-out.

I'll be releasing the e-book everywhere, including Pirate Bay, so the paperback & hardcovers would be my main reason for a partnership.
 

Grauken

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Did you try talking to the guys at hardcore gaming 101, they published a 700 page tome about adventure games similar to yours, maybe they have some advice that could help
 

felipepepe

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Yeah, Kurt Katala is a bro and is even writing for the book. He self-published it on Amazon, and advised me to do the same. Seems to work pretty well for him.

It seems to be the best alternative, but that means that each book will cost $35, even with me not making a dime on it. :/
 

Grauken

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Honestly, I don't find that price to be very high, some good hardcover coffee table books are way beyond that, but yeah, not a good price if you want to reach the masses

but I have my doubts about that anyway, because it's both a book and then about cRPGs, talk about niche :(
 
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dnf

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Vox Day, the editor from Castalia House offered to publish a hardcover version of the book, anyone ever heard of them before?
He was Hugo nominated this year for a novella called Opera Vita Aeterna i think. He got the 6th place... out of five :lol: The guy is really hated in SJW circles, so that's a good thing. He also brags about selling 6 million copies of an 90's FPS called Rebel Moon, can someone confirm that? Here's video of some of his games:

 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Vox Day, the editor from Castalia House offered to publish a hardcover version of the book, anyone ever heard of them before?
Weren't the Vox the dudes that kept shooting at you in Bioshock Infinite, thinking that you're Cumstick?

and being right of course

Oh, nevermind. Just Googled it and it seems he's some kind of fundumbmentalist loon that constantly raves about the decline of civilization and how he hates and is better than everyone.

So basically HHR and Lyric Suite rolled into one.
 

Grauken

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Try googling John C. Wright or Tom Kratman, it only gets funnier from there

admittedly I like Wright, he writes the kind of crazy I enjoy
 

felipepepe

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Richard Garriott just retweeted my article.

tumblr_inline_nb10ivVWJL1sj4s0v.gif
 
Joined
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Divinity: Original Sin
Fuck felipepepe. That's a brofist combo...:bro:

Maybe you should interview Lord british and ask him what's a paladin... since spoony never did.
 

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