Video Game General

[Virtue]

Been noticing a few "Gamergate 2" personalities on youtube and twitter promote gacha games, particularly Nikke. Besides the obvious, what sort of appeal do you think gacha games have that make them successful?

Gambling. Casinos wherein you invest money, time, or both in exchange for things that are insipid—Gacha players, all tastelets. I believe this to be the primary appeal of Gacha games.

So playing gacha games is like gambling, a vice.

What makes people susceptible to vices, is despair, and there's nothing more than despair in this rotten world. This explains the consistent success of gacha games.

The gameparts, I believe are mostly interchangeable, there is a great overlap between different games' fandoms. It is either very simple (The case with Nikke—One can play it with one hand) or when it's not it just imitates already existing games, not innovative (The case with Genshin Impact—Shallow Zelda)

Now I will quote Anthony.

[Opportunityless people]They always have been prey of casinos, now they're prey of League of Legends and yeah maybe that costs less cash and you're less likely to end up in obscene debt but when you think of the amount of time you can just lose in here and how it's like a bunch of nervous strain over what is ultimately nothing— The Experience isn't really Redeemed by much of a social or aesthetic factor like my experience today[Tarkov] was with a friend. It's like a casino game where the financial element is mostly removed and does that really make it better? Well it's still sad to see people burning themselves we could say it's like the transition from smoking to vaping as far as gambling goes and do you think it's better that people vape than smoke? Maybe I'd prefer just living in a nice world where people don't do weird shit like that.

He speaks of League of Legends here, but doesn't this mostly apply to gacha games too? Maybe increase the financial investment a little, and decrease the pride investment, and yeah, you basically have a gacha game.

Is the experience of playing a gacha game, redeemed by a social or aesthetic factor?

So let's examine a gacha game, the one Teer brought up, Goddess of Victory: Nikke.
The game is developed by a korean company, and doesn't seem to have much social stuff going on besides being placed on a leaderboard according to your score, it is mostly anti-social.


The latter video reminds me of ecchi anime.
Nikke can be played with a single hand. Something to think about.
Okay, from what we have seen we can deduce that this Gacha game is pandering to a very particular audience, Horny Young Men.



Again, we haven't seen anything yet that would make us think that there is an aesthetic experience to be had here, everything seems to be contrived to make us erect. But we are not here to masturbate. So we can move on to the story now, the story of the game has a VN presentation. And the story seems boring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_of_Victory:_Nikke

I as a thoughtful man think that one ought to watch this video and indulge in his vices, rather than actually sinking time and money into something that is as shallow as Nikke.

[Guest]

Gambling doesn’t explain the gacha phenomenon. When you gamble, there is an expected payout. Players believe that if they’re good or lucky they’ll get more than they put in. Yes the game they choose needs to be one they like but gamblers really do believe they can make money doing it. Everyone who puts money into a gacha game understands they are buying digital content. The game studio does not trick you into thinking dollars will come back out. In gacha games and ‘competitive’ multiplayer games there is something that is analogous to gambling in the sense that you are sacrificing something (time) for a chance to receive something worth more to you than what you put in (excitement/fun). But the idea that that alone fully explains an extremely popular and lucrative game type is dumb. The pseudo-gambling of gacha simply acts as a way to introduce scarcity. MMOs do this through time alone via random drops but gacha does this via time and money. Scarcity is an important element for the three types that the games cater to which explain their popularity.
 
Tamagotchi/Nintendogs players
These are people who would’ve been stamp collectors in previous decades. But now, not only can they collect pointless things, they can also interact with them. Rotate the character models, play voicelines, watch cool animations, and even take care of them. The scarcity I mentioned earlier makes collecting the characters rewarding and the gameplay revolves around logging in to take care of your characters by feeding them various resources making them stronger.
 
Shonen simulator
What kind of game might someone play if they don’t actually like video games but they do like anime/manga? The answer is gacha. You get to build a team that ‘powers up’ with your investment of time/money. The developers routinely release new ‘story arcs’ where there is a new big baddie your team needs to defeat and a new world or zone you need to explore. This is done at a pace far faster than most MMOs can do. Usually every month or every few months they add this stuff. You might be surprised but there’s a ton of people who play Genshin this way. They login to complete the new ‘story arc’ and then stop and wait for the next installment.
 
Idle ‘gamers’
These are people who like the grind in MMOs and only the grind. Actually, the other elements in an MMO are troublesome because they require attention to properly learn a raid or dungeon or maybe you need to talk to other people to join a guild. Idle ‘gamers’ want to play cookie clicker without realizing they’re playing cookie clicker. The scarcity value created by time+money makes them think their idle time is going into something productive because their characters’ numbers went up.

[Teer]

Don't want to waste space in this thread talking too much about gacha even though I brought it up. Gacha, Loot boxes, CSGO skins, and casino slots are all the same in the sense that you put in money and time in exchange for something. Thats it, whether its titillation, more money, or aesthetics, it does not matter. It's suited for the monotonous and repetitive lives of the majority of Chinese and Koreans that play and create them. So that's why I wonder why a gacha game is being promoted in certain circles.



This was one of the first trailers I watched for Dragon Age Origins. A lone White man with flaming blue eyes fighting hordes of ork-like beasts, with a little trashy Marilyn Manson at the end. I wanted to play this solely because of the trailer. And when I did as a kid, I loved it. Looking back at this series, its no wonder it went the way it did. But you could ignore the gay stuff in Origins because the vast majority was explicitly straight and implicitly White. The main story wasn't particularly interesting, and the humor was always hit and miss, it had a charm. You could kill the gay elf, you could impregnate the witch. It was obsessed a little too much with sex, sure. But the characters were fine, the scenarios were interesting. I personally blame Origins more than Mass Effect for popularizing worthless "Banter" that has become so pervasive in Western games.
Between retcons and Bioware desperate to get rid of its audience, two bad sequels from this series came out. And with time, Bioware did get rid of its old audience and found a new one. They even got a Netflix series with gay niggers and brown elven dykes. 



I really do miss this game.

[anthony]

I was just posting elsewhere about the first Mass Effect game. Bioware's last release before Obama, I believe. It's such a clean, genuinely progressive vision of the future.





Blue. Sharp. Tasteful erring towards simplicity in all things. Relatively minimalist graphics. Looks more like a highly polished Xbox game than a 360 game.

By Mass Effect 2 everything is noise and weight and dirt and Brazil in space. The Obama factor.



Look at the image and listen to this. The character is completely flattened out into pointless garbage for idiots. Epic serious war in space. The cool 2000s white sleek futurism is dead and gone.

[Unformed Golem]

Listened to the Oriental Gun Fetishism video.

There's something else going on with guns in video games which has changed since Doom.  This is the appearance of the Operator.  The Operator supplanted the '80s action hero as the default badass with a gun.  The player in Doom is a movie action hero.  His guns are magic wands.  This translates quite intuitively into a video game because you're not actually handling a metal object weighing several pounds, you're just flicking your mouse around.  Arnold with the minigun in Terminator 2.  A lot of the "realism improvements" in this vein were really just ways to lean into this aesthetic -- macho shotgun-pumping and the like.

Around 2000 you saw designers trying to make guns more realistic.  Counter-Strike was the most popular an early example, although a more important one was Operation Flashpoint.  OFP (later ArmA) really does capture the feel of lugging your M16 around over the terrain to fire at some distant guys in your iron sights quite well.  Day of Defeat led to Red Orchestra.  These games tried to capture the feeling of being a "real soldier" -- this is the simulationist impulse that's pretty absent from Japanese games.  I think many of these games were also based on developers working off of their experience going to the range or shooting pumpkins on their friend's ranch.  This is not an experience that Japanese people have.

Post-2001 and ramping up through the Iraq War though you had the Operator, and even in the civilian world the 90s mall ninja evolved into the "practical shooting" enthusiast.   Competitors in organizations like IPSC (presumably with Bush-era government support) actually became minor public figures with TV shows.  And the thing is, these people really were capable of some pretty incredible stuff with their guns.

Here's an IPSC champion on a pistol range:


And here's Keanu Reeves:


I posted /neo/ because I wanted to make a certain point: he's an actor, this is a trade skill that can be trained with material + time, like fencing or welding.  You need to go through tens of thousands of rounds to get to this point.  It also a matter of routine for Operators -- special forces who do the most demanding direct action operations.  You'll notice that these people are no longer "lugging an M16 over the terrain".  Everything is automatic, everything flows.  It is this feeling that many modern Western shooting games are trying to capture.  The gun is still a physical object, but it should just be an extension of the shooter's/player's body.  It shouldn't feel like you're manipulating this separate object in your hands like you're trying to fix a lamp.

[Guest]

Been noticing a few "Gamergate 2" personalities on youtube and twitter promote gacha games, particularly Nikke. Besides the obvious, what sort of appeal do you think gacha games have that make them successful?

 suppose some look towards aesthetic appeal and the title "rpg"

[Guest]

Gacha = Good art and an interesting narrative structure along with short daily consumption that leads to much better digestion of said art and narrative. Also gachas have the best music in the industry at the moment, and it is not close. It is essentially the "new" JRPG in terms of something alien, fresh, and high quality that is completely divorced from the Western World.
I am not surprised to see the kneejerk responses towards it, because that it is exactly what happened with JRPGs when they first became popular. Now that JRPGs have been thoroughly dissolved aside from a few small exceptions, that ire goes to the new source of that energy. All things repeat.

[FrenziedFish]

Wanted to make a quick post here to send out a point that was made on of all places a Night Owls space a couple of weeks ago. I had attended and the topic moved to video games, I said that I mainly played "tactical shooters" like Squad and Escape From Tarkov, Nightmare Vision made a point that part of the success of these games was by facilitating (or being the product of) a sort of White Flight.

To expand on this point I think it's obvious that the mainstream shooter franchises, Call of Duty and Battlefield have suffered decline (regardless of your initial opinion on either) which was mostly noticed and voiced by White gamers. It'd also be somewhat safe to say that this decline was caused by, but not in necessarily pandering to, a browner demographic who gainied control and influence over the development and advertisement processes. These two tactical shooters I listed earlier do have majority or entirely White teams. What they do both suffer from though, which I believe is interesting, is a lack of direction in development and developers given to bouts of reflexive or pressured changes from their diverse in opinion but generally White playerbases. This is what ties it with the White Flight analogy I believe, there is definitively a shift from patronising the triple A western space towards more independent games but these suffer from a lack of confidence and direction beyond their concepts, they are afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase. These issues are mostly down to a lack of resources on the sides of developers or prospective developers, and overall a lack of games these diverse and generally maturing White gamers can play or are aware of.

[anthony]

Wanted to make a quick post here to send out a point that was made on of all places a Night Owls space a couple of weeks ago. I had attended and the topic moved to video games, I said that I mainly played "tactical shooters" like Squad and Escape From Tarkov, Nightmare Vision made a point that part of the success of these games was by facilitating (or being the product of) a sort of White Flight.

To expand on this point I think it's obvious that the mainstream shooter franchises, Call of Duty and Battlefield have suffered decline (regardless of your initial opinion on either) which was mostly noticed and voiced by White gamers. It'd also be somewhat safe to say that this decline was caused by, but not in necessarily pandering to, a browner demographic who gainied control and influence over the development and advertisement processes. These two tactical shooters I listed earlier do have majority or entirely White teams. What they do both suffer from though, which I believe is interesting, is a lack of direction in development and developers given to bouts of reflexive or pressured changes from their diverse in opinion but generally White playerbases. This is what ties it with the White Flight analogy I believe, there is definitively a shift from patronising the triple A western space towards more independent games but these suffer from a lack of confidence and direction beyond their concepts, they are afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase. These issues are mostly down to a lack of resources on the sides of developers or prospective developers, and overall a lack of games these diverse and generally maturing White gamers can play or are aware of.

There is definitely a browning going on. I just saw this recently.



But, Call of Duty was always fairly stupid. It used to be very "white". An interest in WW2 in the 2000s, edge, online focus when that's still a novel thing for most people. It was dumb all along in retrospect I believe, but dumb because everyone was dumb. This was a dumb, miserable era. What happened more specifically I think is that a decent number of whites grew out of that, while the games themselves stuck with their broad base. And with the higher element moving on the base grows both more influential and complacent. I imagine that there's a heavy overlap between the Call of Duty and Walking Dead fanbases now. When I think of them I think of obese excitable black people.

Call of Duty was naive, now it's dumb. This was not white flight. This was white growth. Growth which mainstream entertainment infrastructure refuses to embrace or support. I think you have this a bit backwards, and go to some odd places. "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream", what? "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase", I don't understand. How would they do so?

[FrenziedFish]

There is definitely a browning going on. I just saw this recently.



But, Call of Duty was always fairly stupid. It used to be very "white". An interest in WW2 in the 2000s, edge, online focus when that's still a novel thing for most people. It was dumb all along in retrospect I believe, but dumb because everyone was dumb. This was a dumb, miserable era. What happened more specifically I think is that a decent number of whites grew out of that, while the games themselves stuck with their broad base. And with the higher element moving on the base grows both more influential and complacent. I imagine that there's a heavy overlap between the Call of Duty and Walking Dead fanbases now. When I think of them I think of obese excitable black people.

Call of Duty was naive, now it's dumb. This was not white flight. This was white growth. Growth which mainstream entertainment infrastructure refuses to embrace or support. I think you have this a bit backwards, and go to some odd places. "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream", what? "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase", I don't understand. How would they do so?

I think this is a good response and refocusing of the idea: White Growth. I'd certainly say that the generations who have been more influenced by the internet have been able to grow while the boomers are at least creeping more slowly from Tucker on Fox to Tucker on X, he and Donald Trump did a lot to get them actually interacting with the internet and slightly challenging their cultural upbringing.

With the internet, with its general availability of information and association, people are given a lot of space to grow and discuss their tastes. What happened with mainstream gaming is that people commented on games via youtube, critiqued the mass-appeal turn of the 7th gen, then dismayed at the continuing pace of it with the 8th gen and then fragmented over Gamergate. Many were shown as unserious or duplicitous, battle lines and "alliances" formed as people were forced to confront a new wave of change more complex and hard to discuss than chest high walls, gray filters and "on-rails" experiences. Many people did grow from this, they did develop their taste over time spurred by their initial gamergate motivated value judgements of "I hate walking simulators"/"I hate dudebro games".

The 8th console generation was one, and now more noticeably with the 9th, where the majority (perceived or real) of gamers would be minorities.



I think it's safe to say that the western mainstream space is now lost for good output for varying reasons.

Now to discuss what I meant with my later observations.  

- "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream"

More so independent developers are, I feel, afraid to go too far with the scope and mechanics of their game, they don't want it to be punishing in terms of pure difficulty or complexity. They don't quite understand that they are drawing from a consumer-base/fanbase that are more willing/wanting for this and so still end up designing their games (or redesigning them) to be more "player-friendly", often making them bland or compromised in the process.

- "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase"

There's a lot of games in the space I'm describing that are either in early access (Star Citizen) or a form of live service (Escape From Tarkov) where keeping the playerbase on side is important for the further development and "realisation" of the project. To do this the developer does need to (or at the least feels they need to) keep the different sections of the playerbase happy with any change they end up making, compromising and often dumbing-down/softening the game, though not necessarily because the players want a dumbed-down game but because that's the product of these compromised changes.

For these issues to be dealt with there needs to be further white growth. People need to be more willing to seek out what already exists which conforms to or satisfies their tastes and start making what they want to play. I believe this seed/spark of white growth was with gamergate. There needs to be another, but different flashpoint in gaming, no sweet baby inc soma.

[anthony]

I think this is a good response and refocusing of the idea: White Growth. I'd certainly say that the generations who have been more influenced by the internet have been able to grow while the boomers are at least creeping more slowly from Tucker on Fox to Tucker on X, he and Donald Trump did a lot to get them actually interacting with the internet and slightly challenging their cultural upbringing.

With the internet, with its general availability of information and association, people are given a lot of space to grow and discuss their tastes. What happened with mainstream gaming is that people commented on games via youtube, critiqued the mass-appeal turn of the 7th gen, then dismayed at the continuing pace of it with the 8th gen and then fragmented over Gamergate. Many were shown as unserious or duplicitous, battle lines and "alliances" formed as people were forced to confront a new wave of change more complex and hard to discuss than chest high walls, gray filters and "on-rails" experiences. Many people did grow from this, they did develop their taste over time spurred by their initial gamergate motivated value judgements of "I hate walking simulators"/"I hate dudebro games".

The 8th console generation was one, and now more noticeably with the 9th, where the majority (perceived or real) of gamers would be minorities.



I think it's safe to say that the western mainstream space is now lost for good output for varying reasons.

Might just be worth repeating again here that I believe that very little good actually happened in the west, especially America, even before this. Generally around the edges, accidents, etc. Halo for example was poorly understood by everyone, most severely so by the white PC elitist old guard. There was never an artfag west. Just a mainstream mass of retards who at least were not yet actually Oaxacan, but spiritually may as well have been for the most part.

Now to discuss what I meant with my later observations.  

- "afraid to position themselves in opposition to the mainstream"

More so independent developers are, I feel, afraid to go too far with the scope and mechanics of their game, they don't want it to be punishing in terms of pure difficulty or complexity. They don't quite understand that they are drawing from a consumer-base/fanbase that are more willing/wanting for this and so still end up designing their games (or redesigning them) to be more "player-friendly", often making them bland or compromised in the process.

I don't follow new game too closely, but is this really happening? What are the independent shooters? I don't think anybody is dumb enough to try to make Call of Duty or Battlefield with less money, but I'm not really looking. I know there's Rising Storm 2 (their next game apparently went into production hell), Hell Let Loose (got bought out by some other people and had some trouble there, but seemed to play in its own distinct way), Enlisted, maybe a few others. I don't hear of casualisation being their problem. But again, I don't pay much attention. Squad and Tarkov are our stated examples so far, and they seem to be doing all right on all of this.

- "and they don't want to split up or alienate sections of their diversely opinionated playerbase"

There's a lot of games in the space I'm describing that are either in early access (Star Citizen) or a form of live service (Escape From Tarkov) where keeping the playerbase on side is important for the further development and "realisation" of the project. To do this the developer does need to (or at the least feels they need to) keep the different sections of the playerbase happy with any change they end up making, compromising and often dumbing-down/softening the game, though not necessarily because the players want a dumbed-down game but because that's the product of these compromised changes.

For these issues to be dealt with there needs to be further white growth. People need to be more willing to seek out what already exists which conforms to or satisfies their tastes and start making what they want to play. I believe this seed/spark of white growth was with gamergate. There needs to be another, but different flashpoint in gaming, no sweet baby inc soma.

Again, the thinking seems plausible but I don't really know if I see it. And again, I don't really care much for new western games so I'm not actually paying much attention. It could be for all I know. But in the case I know most about, Tarkov, the problem seems closer to the opposite. Nikita doesn't really give a fuck what players think or say day to day. He does not give a fuck about balance. He does not care if many people are having a miserable time. I can't think of a man genuinely less interested in compromise in gaming. He's not performative or obstinate about it. He just doesn't care.