Made a new Gamasutra article: The danger of letting the gaming industry curate its own history

[Ninjerk]

^ the strength of street knowledge

 

[Destroid]

Keldryn Do 3rd person games like GTA use a different ratio to first person? FPS room geometry looks really strange when you switch to 3rd person, it's was a very odd moment the first time you witness this.

It's pretty unfortunate that the other students had a poor breadth of experience, but you can't really blame them for what console systems they have or haven't used, whether you have access to those is pretty much up to luck as a teenager.

 

[octavius]

We had a much bigger tolerance for what we now call shity game mechanics in the past, and I think that's for two reasons.

One, we didn't know they were shitty mechanics. Nobody was here telling us that the way we played games, reading a lot of text and without quest compass was the wrong way to play. And of course, because gaming was just about the gameplay back then. However hard to access the gameplay, it was still gameplay (*) . It's even more blatant if you reload games from the days of the 8 bit, not consoles, but computers. Just try : half-of-them are nearly unplayable, even for a crowd that is as hardcore as the codex is. Action games are sluggish, hardly moving at 10 frames per second if you are lucky and the sun shines, mechanics are obscure, the ways the characters move make no sense at all and you are to figure all of that, the basic concept of moving your characters by dying a thousand time and going through hours of reloading on the slow drives of back then. But back then, yes, we actually considered that gameplay. So, in a way, you could argue that there is no such a thing as a bad game, just games with very awkward mechanics to the current player. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ; gameplay is in the muscle/nerve reflex of the gamer.

I found out the hard way that it's not easy to emulate the eccentric rubber keys of a ZX Spectrum...
I was able to replay games like Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach, but that was just about it.

 

[Keldryn]

Keldryn Do 3rd person games like GTA use a different ratio to first person? FPS room geometry looks really strange when you switch to 3rd person, it's was a very odd moment the first time you witness this.

I can no longer recall the specifics from the various articles I read at the time (6+ years ago now). There's not really a hard and fast rule about it, but in both cases, you need to build "rooms" a little larger (doorways always need to be wider, too). It depends a lot on the position of the camera in either case, and on how it follows the player in third-person games. FPS games can get away with lower ceilings, but you generally need to make all of your ceilings higher in a 3rd person game to accommodate the camera.

It's pretty unfortunate that the other students had a poor breadth of experience, but you can't really blame them for what console systems they have or haven't used, whether you have access to those is pretty much up to luck as a teenager.

I wasn't intending to blame them; I was lamenting their breadth of experience because of what it means for the industry. Also, they weren't generally that interested in learning about the older stuff when it was presented to them.

 

[octavius]

I recall finding System Shock extremely clumsy when it was still relatively new, but I was very young then.

I just don't understand why people have problems with System Shock or Ultima Underworld?!! I don't have any hands and never had a problem playing them... Those two games are in my top computer games EVER MADE and I still play them almost once a year!!

Hmm...why lump them together? UU was an extremely elegant game that could be played exclusively using the mouse. System Shock was a more complex game which rewarded you for being a mutant with three hands. I first played SS1 5-7 years after it was released (had to use a boot disk for Win 98 to even make it run) and recall having some problems with the controls initially. But ironically enough I only used 20 hours to complete it the first time, but had to spend 30 hours to complete the more modern mouselook version...

 

[MrContinuity]

It will only get worse, especially with apologists like Boyd saying that "games take too much time"... I bet every student in those classes has a multiplayer game that they really love - like DOTA, LOL, TF2, Callofiduty - with hundreds of hours logged in. Take a decent "Top 100 games of all time" list and play 2 hours of each game - that's 200 hours, less than what some biodrones spent on Dragon Age: Inquisition in the last couple of months.

Sure, not every game will be perfectly understandable in 2 hours, but it will help gain awareness of the different types of games out there. It will show how little you know, and give hints of where to go from there. BUT THAT'S ASKING TOO MUCH!

The kind of attitude Boyd characterizes has a sort of melancholic race-to-the-bottom aspect to it that is plain sad. Appreciation takes time just as it does in finance, you don't appreciate a piece of music by putting it on fast-forward and then claiming to know it, you have to take the each thing as part of the whole to give context to a work.
A house doesn't stand on a single wall no matter how well built.

Even J.C. agrees with me. or something.

 

[Ninjerk]

THATS NOT A QUOTE FROM THAT SCENE INFIDEL

 

[felipepepe]

It's a self-defeating attitude. If games like Ultima IV are too demanding and people should experience it by reading an article instead of playing it, then why the hell waste 10-20 hours playing fucking Cthulhu Saves the World? Just read a review instead.

 

[Sykar]

"Games have never been more widely played" as a positive point says all you need to know. Sure, it's nice, but what does that have to do with quality?

Also, I'm curious:

Lie: Super Metroid was about Samus’s ‘maternal instincts’.

Who said this? Hipsters who desire videogames to be acknowledged as art?

eh, it's pretty obvious looking at her relationship with the baby Metroid. (I wouldn't call it "what SM is all about" though, just an element)

You mean the relationship in which the "maternal instincts" were so strong that she had no problem donating the infant Metroid to scientists for research purposes. Yep, dem "maternal instincts".

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Well, how the fuck are you supposed to care for one? It's a giant floating jellyfish that feeds on body fluids. And as a bounty hunter she probably lives on microwave diners.

 

[Sykar]

Well, how the fuck are you supposed to care for one? It's a giant floating jellyfish that feeds on body fluids. And as a bounty hunter she probably lives on microwave diners.

 

[Jick Magger]

The 'maternal instinct' angle was only added after the fact by Metroid Other M, which was probably the worst thing to happen to video games since the crash of 1983.

 

[Sykar]

The 'maternal instinct' angle was only added after the fact by Metroid Other M, which was probably the worst thing to happen to video games since the crash of 1983.

Other Crap is retarded shit. Worse even that it is so rabidly defended by braindead hisper fucktards who had never played a Metroid title before, which I as a fan from the original Metroid, and who played all titles until Metroid Prime 2 find to be especially insulting. I never had a WII console, so no Metroid Prime 3 for me

 

[Melan]

Frightening stuff

It is both reassuring and alarming that the bits and pieces I have picked up from playing games, following game development news, and then designing a few Thief and TDM missions makes me better qualified to teach game design than actual teaching staff. If my career ever goes to hell, I will have to check to see if one of these places is hiring. I even have a ZX Spectrum, so I also qualify as an archaeologist (and living fossil!).

 

[octavius]

Since I like you so much, I brought you a gift.

http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/11/why-we-get-nostalgic-about-good-old-games/

Ugh... what he says isn't wrong per se, but the way he puts it is idiotic, like that was the only reason to feel nostalgic. He never once considers that perhaps some good old games are in fact better than recent ones, or that many people who go back to nostalgic titles enjoy them perfectly well - they were indeed as good as he remembered.

Yup. In my experience most of the CRPGs I liked as a kid are still good, and even the classics I never played are very enjoyable. I wonder if those people talking about rose tinted glasses and nostalgia have actually tried to play older games themselves? Or maybe they only played console games made for children?

Incidentally, the weird thing is that when it comes to books it's different for me; much of the stuff I liked as a kid I find only mediocre to quite good when I read it now, like Dragonlance, Raymon Feist and Thomas Covenant. Modern fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire (at least the first 3.5 books) is just so much better. Too bad I can't say the same thing about modern computer games...

 

[Ninjerk]

Since I like you so much, I brought you a gift.

http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/11/why-we-get-nostalgic-about-good-old-games/

Ugh... what he says isn't wrong per se, but the way he puts it is idiotic, like that was the only reason to feel nostalgic. He never once considers that perhaps some good old games are in fact better than recent ones, or that many people who go back to nostalgic titles enjoy them perfectly well - they were indeed as good as he remembered.

Yup. In my experience most of the CRPGs I liked as a kid are still good, and even the classics I never played are very enjoyable. I wonder if those people talking about rose tinted glasses and nostalgia have actually tried to play older games themselves? Or maybe they only played console games made for children?

Incidentally, the weird thing is that when it comes to books it's different for me; much of the stuff I liked as a kid I find only mediocre to quite good when I read it now, like Dragonlance, Raymon Feist and Thomas Covenant. Modern fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire (at least the first 3.5 books) is just so much better. Too bad I can't say the same thing about modern computer games...

What's the point if you can read a review?

 

[Delterius]

You wouldn't youtube a game.

 

[MrContinuity]

THATS NOT A QUOTE FROM THAT SCENE INFIDEL

I wouldn't know since I never played it because it's old.

 

[Machocruz]

Wow. None of the others had played Deus Ex?

Nope.

Also, nobody else had ever played any of the following games/series: Wizardry, Ultima, The Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, any Sierra graphic adventures, SSI's AD&D "Gold Box" games, Thief, System Shock, Wasteland, Wing Commander, X-Wing, or any real flight simulators (Falcon, etc). I'm pretty sure that nobody else had played either Fallout game either, but I'm not 100% certain of that one.

Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

But seriously, anyone who hasn't played Thief needs to shut the fuck up about stealth games, 3D level design, and nostalgia.

 

[SCO]

I can just imagine they getting lost on the lost city and not being able to ascend the tower because they don't look up to find the small wooden plank you must rope-arrow.

(much less this alternative)

 

[hemtae]

Sorry for the bump, but I thought this was somewhat relevant.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/...ing-abandoned-games-even-museums-and-archives

 

[Archibald]

They say that modifying games to connect to a new server (or to avoid contacting a server at all) after publisher support ends—letting people continue to play the games they paid for—will destroy the video game industry.

Fascinating. One has to wonder how industry is alive at all if bringing back 20 years old MMO game could destroy it.

 

[pippin]

 

[rado907]

So being aware of what the developers who came before you had to deal with is also important. Sure, it's possible that you will be the one to come up with a brilliant solution to a previously insurmountable problem. Most likely, you'll realize that those "morons" actually put far more thought into a solution than you did.

This is the core of my complaints / peeves regarding PoE and Diablo 3 - in the course of the development of both games, the lead designers rejected tried-and-tested techniques just because they knew better. Here are a few examples from Diablo 3: At release, the game, as far as I remember, had no mass identify. How dumb can you get? The unique items were basically buffed up rares. It took them 3 years to make the uniques truly unique. These are basic things that D2 and other games had figured out before.

But the problem that the article quoted in the first post broaches highlights one of the untested assumptions of our time - namely, that we live in an age of virulent, unreconstructed, uncontrollable, and all-conquering loosely-defined progress. The idea - and many people believe in it - is that EVERYTHING about our age is better than before, and than EVERYTHING from even 10 years ago is "old" and inferior to what we have now.
Of course, this sentiment is obviously untrue in any context sufficiently far removed from, say, iPhones. Yeah, recent times have indeed seen progress in wireless communications. So what?

If you ask around, you'll find that many people feel that movies from 15 years ago, such as Fight Club and the Matrix, are "old." Movies from the 1940s do not even enter into consideration. They are black-and-white, old, and clearly inferior to modern cinematic masterpieces such as "Iron-Man" and "Batman." The fact that the fundamentals of cinema have hardly changed since about 1935 does not register.
I would draw a similar comparison to books, expect that nowadays reading itself seems to have become a reactionary (?) mode of the transmission of information. Nowadays one soaks info by watching the movie, or, at worst, laboring through 500-600 words of Wikipedia.
In gaming, significant progress has been made in terms of graphics; and that's about it. Ultima VII and the original XCOM are far more complex than most modern games - but people don't know that, because they refuse to even play those titles. Loom is in a class of its own, and it's a, what, 1990 title?

The cult of progress has taken over the entire culture in the West. The fact that notions such as "same-sex marriage" have never been regarded as anything but absurd, and are seen as demented monstrosities by most of the world, does not register with many people in the West. They are told that SSM is normal and good by the TV, and that's that.

Three big drivers of the cult of progress are: the cult of science, its concomitant utopianism, and the rise of the advertisement industry. The core dogma of the cult of science is that science will figure everything out, and bring about heaven on Earth. Science thus defined is implicitly progressive; and, moreover, reforms aiming to bring about utopia must also be intrinsically progressive. On the other hand, one of the main function of the advertisement industry is to convince one to throw away one's slightly aged goods, and acquire this year's versions of the same goods, in order to cope with the problem of "overproduction" and to maintain the "consumer economy."

 

[agris]

Three big drivers of the cult of progress are: the cult of science, its concomitant utopianism, and the rise of the advertisement industry. The core dogma of the cult of science is that science will figure everything out, and bring about heaven on Earth. Science thus defined is implicitly progressive; and, moreover, reforms aiming to bring about utopia must also be intrinsically progressive. On the other hand, one of the main function of the advertisement industry is to convince one to throw away one's slightly aged goods, and acquire this year's versions of the same goods, in order to cope with the problem of "overproduction" and to maintain the "consumer economy."

Where in your diatribe do you link consumerism and lack of historical perspective or context with science? This is some wacko shit if I've ever seen it. Get your GD bullshit out of here. While I do agree that marketing wants us to think we're on a steady incline to the 'next best thing', making people neglect that which is older and superior, you put forth no evidence that this is somehow related to scientific progress. What I've made bold in your quote is distilled bullshit; 200 proof, absolute triple-A grade schlock that reflects such a complete lack of understanding of science that, if we lived in a more fair and just world (perhaps this cult of science utopia..), your obvious lack of education would have been remedied at an early enough age to prevent such conspicuous ignorance.

I say GOOD DAY, SIR!

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