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The Errant Signal Thread

BelisariuS.F

Augur
Joined
Mar 23, 2010
Messages
388
Someone else's comment: he spent 14 minutes talking about how bad it is that a 4X game (you know, explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) that is about expanding your own state at the expense of other states, is a game about expanding your own state at the expense of other states.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,983
It makes me sad that criticism is so consumed by prissy sanctimony that you guys think it has no other existence than political hectoring. I don't think, "Tssch, the damn fascists are conflating Sparta and Athens! Burn them! The game is shit!", it's that seeing such a stark mass of history elided into a non-contingent string of characters over city tokens makes you think about the nature of the abstraction, how it adds up into the whole Civ package, and how it interacts with the "fantasy of history" Civ generates. It's fun and natural to think about it and talk about it, not even just for some obvious constructive critical purpose like Building a Better Civ N+1.
The thing is, his critique was BAD. Those barbarians have goody huts that can teach you technology no other civ has even discovered yet. They aren't being dehumanized at all. No more so that the individual military units of another civ. It's a global scale game, you can't negotiate with every fucking unit that has a reason to fight. It certainly isn't worth creating a separate faction for animals (who don't do anything aggressive barbarians don't also do) just to appease some stupid notion of political correctness.

This wouldn't serve building a better Civ N+1, but a worse one, one bogged down with retarded crap like a gay rights protest in the middle of world war 3.

And he gave no examples of how to improve or fix anything to begin with. If wonders are such a bad thing, how would you display that aspect instead? What exactly is wrong with the hoover dam giving production bonuses? Was it supposed to give a 30 minute history lesson before it let you continue? How are you supposed to have a focus on millions of people at a time? That makes no fucking sense.
 

Cowboy Moment

Arcane
Joined
Feb 8, 2011
Messages
4,407
His points are, indeed, mostly obvious consequences of Civ being an abstract boardgame. I suppose it's fair criticism that Civ really shouldn't try to paint itself as a universalist celebration of the total accomplishments of mankind, when it's really a kind of "soulless state" simulation. Thing is, his video makes it seem like the whole idea of this kind of game is somehow evil in and out of itself, which is strange. It's like arguing that "Lolita" is an evil book, because it embraces the perspective of a child rapist.
 
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Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
His points are, indeed, mostly obvious consequences of Civ being an abstract boardgame. I suppose it's fair criticism that Civ really shouldn't try to paint itself as a universalist celebration of the total accomplishments of mankind, when it's really a kind of "soulless state" simulation. Thing is, his video makes it seem like the whole idea of this kind of game is somehow evil in and out of itself, which is strange. It's kind of like arguing that "Lolita" is an evil book, because it embraces the perspective of a child rapist.
It's all smut that should be banned from our schools.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Transcript: http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=640

Due to the proliferation of free and cheap game tools, the ongoing exodus of developers from AAA studios to smaller companies, and the rise of digital distribution, there are more games than ever. And this poses a problem for platform holders – how do you handle the onslaught of content? Historically platform holders would limit the number of slots they hand out to smaller titles and cherry pick games that look to fit whatever corporate initiatives they have going on. But increasingly platforms aren’t as self-absorbed, especially when the next Goat Simulator or Flappy Bird could prove to be the next surprise hit. The Android and App stores have opened up to degrees unheard of on consoles. The big three consoles have also started to open up, although some are more reluctant than others to open the floodgates. And the rate at which Steam has Greenlit games has done nothing but increase since the service’s launch. But this has resulted in complaints that the trickle of new content has turned into an uncontrollable flood. There’s been an increasingly loud call for Valve in particular to back off on the releases, to institute some quality control, to effectively return to an approved curated list of games to buy rather than an open and vibrant library.

But I’m not convinced curation on the part of the platform holder is the answer here. Curation in a museum setting makes sense – there’s a limited number of walls and floor space so a decision must be made as to which works to host. More than that, curation is an act of editorializing, of building a collection of objects that in being brought together makes a statement. Different museums get curated by different people with different goals, and the result is that the Louvre and the MoMA and the National Gallery all have different specialties and focuses.

So curation is a great way for art galleries to define what they value. It’s great for private collectors interested in showing their taste through their selections. It’s even great for things like the Criterion Collection, which highlights important or influential works of film with what they consider a definitive home video release. In all of these situations, the beauty of curation is in the selection AND the exclusion of works. Curation is a commentary on the works that get chosen by placing them next to one another and apart from the rest. What curation isn’t, and has never been, is a safety net so you don’t accidentally buy a bad game, or a filter to keep the games showing up under “new releases” germane to a specific demographic.

Look, I know I went over a lot of this in the Greenlight video, but I think it’s worth revisiting – both because people are still bringing up the idea that the best thing to do is to block games from release, and because that Greenlight video made some frankly terrible, arguments, including but not limited to: “The cream will rise to the top”. Yeah, that was a dumb thing to say. Discoverability remains a major problem on any open platform, and I was wrong for dismissing it. In this brave new world that has eight or nine releases a day, how are we supposed to find the wheat from the chaff? How can we know what is truly worth playing?

Well, I’d like to think that at least part of the answer to that is through more and better criticism. I’m actually shocked by how many of the people advocating for various platforms to clamp down on releases are also game reviewers. Lots of releases mean job security for a game reviewer. I mean, the whole problem is that there are too many games being released and no one knows how good they are and they might make a bad purchase or miss a great game. You know who’s supposed to help with that? Reviewers!?

I’m just going to be blunt – through no fault of their own, most professional critics and reviewers are trapped in the hype machine. I don’t mean “Game journalists are corrupt and evil and AURUGUGH,” I mean that writing jobs are scarce and views and clickthroughs are king. The job of the modern reviewer, if they want to make a living reviewing, is mostly to tell people exactly how much to “get hype” for the upcoming major releases, and maybe squeeze in some top tier indie and digital stuff where possible. The result is a world where five or six indie games are hitting Steam a day and no one knows if they’re any good or not, both from a consumer advice perspective and an analytical perspective. And I’m as guilty as anyone when I spend two weeks writing about a half-baked Thief sequel instead of something smaller but arguably more intimate, touching, or important. And we do it because the information most people want right now is to know whether their hype in Watch_Dogs is validated, not which of this week’s 25 Steam games are genuinely worth looking into. There simply isn’t a big enough market for lots of focus on smaller games yet, and the blogs that do that sort of stuff are usually done as passion projects. But passion projects aren’t breadwinning projects, and we continue to push some of our most important critics to the sidelines.

But in a world where your options for games this month aren’t just Watch_Dogs or Wolfenstein but a bevy of tiny, small, medium, mid-tier, B-, single-A, and AAA games, the critic’s job changes. It’s no longer about whether we give GTAV a rubber stamp to justify the money it’s going to make, but about explaining which games truly carry merit to our audiences. Critics and reviewers stop being hype validators and start being active guides and tastemakers to an entire ecosystem of games big and small, with each critic cultivating their own audience with their own tastes. Critics and reviewers become, effectively, independent curators of a myriad of canons rather than a monolithic canon approved by bean counters at a digital distributorship. And maybe the increase in demand would mean an increase in pay for the game writers already doing a lot of this work for free. Well, a man can dream, anyways.

I suppose I’ll close with this thought: Who would you want curating the list of games you find worth your time? Apple, who already limits games about politics and sex? Any of the big three, who are still playing catch up on this whole small developer thing? Valve, who many erroneously assume will be benevolent forever? Or a myriad of writers who each have their own ideas about what makes a game worthwhile, each one contributing to a sense of which games have what kind of value, and producing their own curated list that doesn’t prevent you from buying most things but instead encourages to buy specific things? If the problem is too much choice and too little information, the answer is more information – not fewer choices.
 

Gozma

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2012
Messages
2,951
Reading this on the Codex is funny because it's 100% a solved problem here. There is no chance I'll never hear about some indie game I'd love. Hell, the Codex brings me the watchable Youtube video critics too.

Codex is also a little too small and evil to be an easy, uncritical money spigot for some indie that can make their game a fad like a Something Awful or Neogaf can.
 

AN4RCHID

Arcane
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
4,730

Some good points, but I don't see it as "curation" for Valve to not include every sketchy indie game that gets submitted. They are selling products and don't offer refunds, they should have some minimum quality standards for their library.

Campster also seemingly has a lot more faith in the ability of game reviewers to "seperate the wheat from the chaff" than I do. By selectively featuring unknown games, XBLA, Steam, Humble, PSN, etc... can give small games a chance that they would never have on a totally open platform. Look at the relatively open appstore: good games get buried regardless of critics promoting them, and shitty games with good marketing rise to the top. As an educated consumer you might be able to find the good stuff, but for creators it's not a healthy platform.
 

Grunker

RPG Codex Ghost
Patron
Joined
Oct 19, 2009
Messages
27,386
Location
Copenhagen

I had a similar reaction to his Civilization video. I also think it's sort of a pointless exercise to identify what kind of perspective Civ puts Empire-building in, though it might be interesting for someone's who's never considered that point. However I do think the discussion he has about Civ's mechanics is pretty interesting. I was about to turn off the video but thought what the hell. The disconnect between the celebratory view Civ's writing and AV-design has on humanity and the view purported by its gameplay gives rise to what I think is a constructive discussion about how Civ-like games could be made to actually celebrate the things the game clearly wants to (qua said writing and AV-design).

So yeah, beyond the sort of banal "James Bond is totally chauvinist"-point which I agree is boring, there was an interesting discussion about mechanics in there.


Cowboy Moment provided some decent counter-arguments to Franklin's greenlight video a few pages back. (and btw CM, he replies to some of those in the Curation vid)

I'm not sure I agree that Franklin's argument hinges as much on the AppStore comparison as Cowboy Moment claims, but I do think Franklin's expectation that a company should have some kind of responsibility to non-profit venues like the free distribution of art and entertainment is pretty non-sensical. Overall I think that his views on this whole "democratize the games market"-thing displays that his understanding of politics is flawed. He has a far better games critic than he is a commentator.
 
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Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
4,318
Location
Hyperborea
Reading this on the Codex is funny because it's 100% a solved problem here. There is no chance I'll never hear about some indie game I'd love. Hell, the Codex brings me the watchable Youtube video critics too.

Codex is also a little too small and evil to be an easy, uncritical money spigot for some indie that can make their game a fad like a Something Awful or Neogaf can.
I'd say coming here solves that problem almost completely , indie or otherwise. Don't have to go to the gaming sites and deal with their spin and hype-doctoring, don't have to see Youtube comments, I can get educated critique of games, I can come here after E3 or any other game shows are done and any games worth the attention will usually still have their own threads on the front page. Only thing missing is a release date thread.
 

Gozma

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2012
Messages
2,951
Look at the relatively open appstore: good games get buried regardless of critics promoting them, and shitty games with good marketing rise to the top. As an educated consumer you might be able to find the good stuff, but for creators it's not a healthy platform.

I mean, when has promotion/marketing ever been successfully quarantined from "essential quality"? Especially from the creator side. There's no chance curation from the side where profit is the ultimate goal is gonna turn away highly promoted crap.
 

Dim

Not sure if advertising plant?
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
562
Location
Syndi Vegit notanatzi
If cureators do that too often people will stop listening. This principle is true for every single testable source of information.
I also use lists & tags or a recommendation system. If only critics and game reviewers a user liked would allow the user to combine their scores.
 

AN4RCHID

Arcane
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
4,730
This mentality would see MST3K films banned from store shelves; it would expunge badly written books from Barnes and Noble, it would seek to not just mock but eradicate works that don’t achieve a certain level of quality.

This is a nonsensical argument. No one is saying that bad games should be "banned" from distribution platforms. Steam carries hundreds if not thousands of bad games. Barnes and Noble isn't compelled to, and doesn't, carry every incoherent manifesto submitted to them. Nobody wants that. There's a big gap between poor quality games and broken amateur messes that only exist to trick a few people into buying them blind. As a store, Steam absolutely does have a responsibility to not sell non-functional products. The comparison to buggy games like Watch Dogs is stupid; the game is still playable and presumably being patched. If it was 100% unplayable by anyone who bought, Steam would yank that shit out of the store, and rightly so.
 

TheGreatOne

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
1,214
"like in Actual Sunlight" GODDAMNIT STOP MAKING REFERENCES TO INDY SHIT NO ONE'S PLAYED, YOU CANT NAME DROP SHIT LIKE THAT AND TREAT IT LIKE IT'S DOOM OR SOMETHING :x
 

AN4RCHID

Arcane
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
4,730
Ugh. He spends about 30 seconds talking about the actual game design, and the rest on literary masturbation over the story.
 

Grunker

RPG Codex Ghost
Patron
Joined
Oct 19, 2009
Messages
27,386
Location
Copenhagen
you ask that question like you don't know the answer
 

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