Ocarina of Time and the Manufacturing of the "Gamer Canon"

[anthony]

I suppose Breath of the Wild has replaced OoT as the defacto GOAT in the gamer canon



One day we need to talk about Nintendo fetishism.

Had to happen eventually. I imagine very few people go back to OoT now. It'd be weird to keep talking about it. People don't really go back in general. Media is tv to most people, not a library. There's no big RELEASE and HYPE you can follow for OoT. It won't compete to win GOTY  (very exciting sers), you can't measure its NUMBERS against other dogshit coming out lately. It's just a nice thing that exists. Most gamers are at this point tired ZOGlings who will only consume what's in front of them unconsciously, or they are fanbrained degenerate weirdos who will do whatever mass marketing, working now hand in hand with transsexuals on youtube, tells them to.

My thinking is actually that gamer canon, and canon in general will gradually become impossible to maintain as this becomes more normal and widespread. To have a canon you need people capable of thinking with history in mind and exercising personal taste. Yes, in the past this was heavily meme driven from a few centralised points, hipsters still exist, we have trannies horrifically revising the 2000s into some terrible grey textureless nothing about genital mutilation, but I think people are becoming uniquely dead to history now.

The only people who will care about anything more than a year old in the future will probably mostly be broken weirdos who belong to internet personality cults (subscribe to my youtube channel by the way) whose selections will become increasingly status conscious and neurotic. These outliers will get more discerning, but taste will not get better.

You may see what I'm describing already, I think video games are going to become like movies, and the only people conscious of the past will be oldfags nobody respects just unthinkingly fond of the fodder of their own youth (which probably is better, but they aren't discerning or thoughtful on this), and trannies, who will just pick random garbage from this and that point to decorate themselves in like their thrift store pickup cottage grandmacore outfits.

Think of how major forum enemy He/Himzel (Hazel) talks about anything, that's the future of taste. There's your future canon maker, for the 1% of people who care to at least sort of posture towards caring about the history of anything.




Now as for BotW,

As I may have said here before, I don't know, I absolutely loved BotW. I think it's absolutely brilliant in almost all that it aspires to be, manages to be one of the most interesting things I've ever played while also remaining accessible and friendly to just about everyone. It looks nice, it's super fun, it's conceptually super advanced (what it playing around and surviving outside was fun rather than a bunch of gay autistic menus early access vomit for people to make youtube let's plays out of I will kill and bury Project Zomboid), it SHOULD be held up as an example of a peak in video games and what they should aspire to be.

However, as with all nice things, it's mostly misappreciated. I look at the animals on /v/ and nothing said about it makes any sense. It has been declared an "open world game", and so now it is seen as belonging to a class of, mostly western, works, despite its completely different intentions, aspirations, and executions of a barely familiar premise. From that point on people do the counter strike indiana jones 4 thing and declare random things it does "bad game design" as a constant ritualised affirmation. "Weapon durability" is BotW's "spray patterns". As in all of these cases people will mostly just genuinely freak out at you if you ask "why is that bad?" on any particular point raised. As I said in that other thread, I have screenshots of this happening. Maybe I can find some now.



I don't remember what this thread was about, Metal Gear I think, it just always goes like this. Can look for a botw thread I posted in later if that's a point of particular interest.

I really like this thread and wanted to get myself back into posting. Hope we can get some life and interest here.

[Guest]

The biggest piece of shit in the "modern canon" is undoubtedly Disco Elysium. Whenever people are asked "why is Disco Elysium good?", they inevitably respond with one of these three statements
-It has brilliant writing
-The political commentary is nuanced
-The characters are interesting and fleshed out
This is the entirety of the so-called genius of Disco Elysium, GOOD WRITING. No review of the game ever points out that the gameplay is essentially equivalent to a visual novel but worse because there's hours of random meandering around and a forced day-night system that adds nothing to the game, that the skill checks are actively retarded because there's essentially never any serious punishment for failing, that there's only one path in the entire game and the "endings" are just variations on a single idea... there's a million things to critique about the game, but no critic ever points any of the problems with the game. Why? It's almost as if they look at signifiers of quality rather than actual quality in video games, and since Disco Elysium pretends to have something intelligent to say ("you shouldn't dwell in the past", a literal nothing moral that Aesop probably wrote about in a more succinct manner), pretends to know things about politics (the political quests of the game are basically equivalent to one of those retarded political compass memes that leftists post on twitter) and has characters with more than one trait, it should automatically be elevated to the status of classic. The praise that Disco Elysium gets really shows that modern game critics aren't looking to actually critique video games, they're looking to critique the idea of what a video game is inside their head.

[anthony]

The biggest piece of shit in the "modern canon" is undoubtedly Disco Elysium. Whenever people are asked "why is Disco Elysium good?", they inevitably respond with one of these three statements
-It has brilliant writing
-The political commentary is nuanced
-The characters are interesting and fleshed out
This is the entirety of the so-called genius of Disco Elysium, GOOD WRITING. No review of the game ever points out that the gameplay is essentially equivalent to a visual novel but worse because there's hours of random meandering around and a forced day-night system that adds nothing to the game, that the skill checks are actively retarded because there's essentially never any serious punishment for failing, that there's only one path in the entire game and the "endings" are just variations on a single idea... there's a million things to critique about the game, but no critic ever points any of the problems with the game. Why? It's almost as if they look at signifiers of quality rather than actual quality in video games, and since Disco Elysium pretends to have something intelligent to say ("you shouldn't dwell in the past", a literal nothing moral that Aesop probably wrote about in a more succinct manner), pretends to know things about politics (the political quests of the game are basically equivalent to one of those retarded political compass memes that leftists post on twitter) and has characters with more than one trait, it should automatically be elevated to the status of classic. The praise that Disco Elysium gets really shows that modern game critics aren't looking to actually critique video games, they're looking to critique the idea of what a video game is inside their head.

I agree broadly with you but Disco Elysium never struck me as offensive. I played it once (probably the best way to go) and had a fine enough time.

Something I'm always making an issue of is gamer/media racism, which only exists towards the Japanese. Western games that manage to not entirely trip over their own feet and faceplant into sheer offensive retardation are praised as masterworks, while Japanese works which are worlds beyond them in ambition, conceptual complexity, and execution, get laughed at as the works of retarded ignorant monkey people punching typewriters with random results (Kojima).

Is Disco Elysium a masterpiece? If you live in racist-gamer world and Japan doesn't exist when we're discussing quality, it's at least very impressive. I don't live in that world. So I thought it was nice, and don't have a lot to say beyond that. I also think I have more coherent positive things to say about it than any of its champions.

As I've said elsewhere, VN should probably be the baseline foundation of any game, with new parts built on top as is necessary or cool. DE is a bit like that. As you say it's like a VN with a few extra parts. To me that's very good. That's very conceptually advanced for a western work. They were able to resist the urge to make a full blown boomerlootervania with roguelite elements. It's a game about walking and talking. With "RPG" (more specifically "CRPG") elements worked in more as a joke than anything to serve as "gameplay".

Is any of this canon-worthy? In my opinion, no. It is not worthy of my canon, which extends to Japan. Japanese PC games were doing this as a baseline 20 years ago no problem, and beyond.

If you want to talk about why normalfag gamer canon is such dogshit, it's because it does not extend to Japan. And when it does they are reading Japan as American. Metal Gear is an anti war work, Silent Hill 2 has great themes about depression, etc.

People just close their minds to Japan in a really obscene way.

Now back to DE, I don't really consider your "problems" to be real problems. It just is what it is. Why does time pass? They want the game to fit in a certain timescale, they want to show off the city at different times, they want a mild but not pressing sense of urgency, it's not pointless. It's not a hard gameplay puzzle either. They just wanted it that way. That's something I can say for DE, it has a bit of character. I can actually say "they wanted it that way". It's not a pointless work. You can say it's a bit limp, sure, it was made by weird euro-communist nerds who perhaps aren't the most inspiring characters. But they made something, and it's expressive and unique. I don't feel like I should hate them.

You're right that it is misappreciated. Most things are. True in every direction. But if we just take it as it is it's not obscene. It just struggles to compete with Japan, like everything else.

[Guest]

Now back to DE, I don't really consider your "problems" to be real problems. It just is what it is. Why does time pass? They want the game to fit in a certain timescale, they want to show off the city at different times, they want a mild but not pressing sense of urgency, it's not pointless. It's not a hard gameplay puzzle either. They just wanted it that way. That's something I can say for DE, it has a bit of character. I can actually say "they wanted it that way". It's not a pointless work. You can say it's a bit limp, sure, it was made by weird euro-communist nerds who perhaps aren't the most inspiring characters. But they made something, and it's expressive and unique. I don't feel like I should hate them.

It's understandable that the DE devs want to make the game fit into a certain timeframe, but it works actively against this in it's story. Events are not based on the time in the game, they're entirely based on whether you've completed the previous event. The game effectively runs on two clocks, one that is based on the displayed time, and one that is based on triggered events. It's somewhat absurd to me that just because devs "wanted to do something" and didn't just put in elements for the sake of it, we should ignore the clear flaws in their works. Yes, most devs only design things because they're in other video games, but that doesn't mean people who don't do this should be praised for it even if their games are flawed.

[Guest]

I suppose Breath of the Wild has replaced OoT as the defacto GOAT in the gamer canon



One day we need to talk about Nintendo fetishism.

Had to happen eventually. I imagine very few people go back to OoT now. It'd be weird to keep talking about it. People don't really go back in general. Media is tv to most people, not a library. There's no big RELEASE and HYPE you can follow for OoT. It won't compete to win GOTY  (very exciting sers), you can't measure its NUMBERS against other dogshit coming out lately. It's just a nice thing that exists. Most gamers are at this point tired ZOGlings who will only consume what's in front of them unconsciously, or they are fanbrained degenerate weirdos who will do whatever mass marketing, working now hand in hand with transsexuals on youtube, tells them to.

My thinking is actually that gamer canon, and canon in general will gradually become impossible to maintain as this becomes more normal and widespread. To have a canon you need people capable of thinking with history in mind and exercising personal taste. Yes, in the past this was heavily meme driven from a few centralised points, hipsters still exist, we have trannies horrifically revising the 2000s into some terrible grey textureless nothing about genital mutilation, but I think people are becoming uniquely dead to history now.

The only people who will care about anything more than a year old in the future will probably mostly be broken weirdos who belong to internet personality cults (subscribe to my youtube channel by the way) whose selections will become increasingly status conscious and neurotic. These outliers will get more discerning, but taste will not get better.

You may see what I'm describing already, I think video games are going to become like movies, and the only people conscious of the past will be oldfags nobody respects just unthinkingly fond of the fodder of their own youth (which probably is better, but they aren't discerning or thoughtful on this), and trannies, who will just pick random garbage from this and that point to decorate themselves in like their thrift store pickup cottage grandmacore outfits.

Think of how major forum enemy He/Himzel (Hazel) talks about anything, that's the future of taste. There's your future canon maker, for the 1% of people who care to at least sort of posture towards caring about the history of anything.

Something interesting I've seen people notice too is the rise of Xbox Game Pass/PS Plus and how that's essentially trying to shift the streaming service business model to gaming. While cloud gaming totally flopped, turns out downloading entire games to your hard drive funded by Microsoft/Sony is a smash hit. It's one of the things I've seen critiqued the most by more diehard gamers, especially "preservationists" who fear that nobody will be able to play a shitty game pass game in 5 years when it's pulled from the service. This is something that has happened with delisted games, online store shutdowns for old consoles, and most notably stuff like HBO Max controversially pulling completed/canceled shows from the service. I'm curious how well it'll work out over the next few years given it completely died off for movie streaming when fragmentation and high interest rates made it less appealing, and don't get me started on the ZOGslop of shit like Netflix's Castlevania.

While you could argue how disposable modern gaming is with this move, it also is going to cause something else. There can't be a canon anymore when the days of the launch party are now replaced by everyone in their own world, playing the games they feel like playing that were free on Game Pass. It's going to be like legally sanctioned piracy, you're not going to have the same normie gamer canon when you're playing some random game on Game Pass or the GameStop used bin. There's also the rise of ROMs and emulators, even if most people using emulators use them to run the same Pokemon ROMs or similar.

As for which older games people care about, it will depend on their gameplay and artistic merit and whatever is "trendy". Few random people will care about some old text adventure or early computer RPG (unless it's an easter egg in Call of Duty like Zork I was in BO1), but a Super Nintendo game never released in America will gain a cult following with a fan translation. There's also the trannies picking up random garbage from the past to decorate themselves aspect as well. Case in point, there is a Twitter bot that posts screenshots from games written for an obscure Japanese computer, and some Tumblr blogs made this aesthetic trendy to a niche circle of gamers. Nevermind the fact that looking many of these games up on mobygames gives you pornographic scenes or that VNs are a notoriously gameplay free genre. But these blogs were enough of an influence to lead to said games receiving fan translations. There's also not much of an interest in FMV games and certain other genres that died out/became uncool except among the aftermentioned ironic quirky trannies (who would even play a kids game to be quirky).

On the flipside, there's also some hidden gems in the libraries of these old platforms and that's what I've seen happen on gaming communities. There are people who increasingly refuse to play modern games just because of how literally everything is literal ZOGslop to the point that even streamers are taking the piss out of it. The Saints Row reboot that flopped so horribly that the game studio was closed down by the owner comes to mind.



Hence; with nearly every game including obscure games for computers that were never released outside Japan available at your fingertips, there can't even be much of a canon anymore because just like with streaming services and movies, no two people will be consuming the same product anymore.