Video Game General

[anthony]

I don't mean to interrupt the current discussion, just posting this here to keep myself accountable. Entering next stage of actually doing stuff now.

[ssa]

I think modern Paradox games border on not being strategy games at all ... Paradox games present the simulation in such a way that it's easy to play the game without knowing what's really going on.

Something like Civilization IV doesn't need a "narrative path" in the form of focus trees because it's status as a game is secured by its core mechanics. The player's decisions revolve around tradeoffs whose consequences are easy to understand (e.g. building a temple means you won't get your next military unit for another six turns), because they were designed from the start to create a game-like experience. In contrast, Paradox titles have their roots in an attempt to simulate historical reality, which means that extraneous Visual Novel-esque elements are grafted on top of the simulation in order to make it more enjoyable as a game.

On the whole, the awkward compromises produced by trying to make a game out of a simulation instead of having a clear vision of what the player's experience is supposed to be as the foundation, leads to Paradox's real-time map games not being good examples of game design in my opinion. The addition of important mechanics through modular DLC further contributes to the disjointed character of these games.

I'd argue Paradox has managed to screw themselves from both sides. It's a company of B-tier writers trying to create what essentially amounts to visual novels, tying themselves down to a simulation-based format they don't properly understand nor have the skill to develop. The simulations feel like a hollow afterthought exactly because they're not designed as the main focus of game interaction. Then there's also the issue of Clausewitz being the grand "strategy" equivalent to the Creation Engine- an antiquated, essentially single-threaded spreadsheet parser forced to contend with far more information than it was ever meant to. The simulation can never be too detailed, lest you get Stellaris' late-game issues on steroids, nor is it reliably leveraged as part of the games. As software, it's an unholy amalgamation.

CK3 is a notable recent exception, where someone on the team had the 3 neurons required to integrate the sim's central focus into the visual novel, with Vic3 being its spiritually void counterpart- an economic simulation cut down in almost every way to make it run smoothly, which in the end results in an almost deterministic linear progression where the only meaningful player action is to fuck the economy up.

I've been thinking about this side of strategy, which you've correctly pointed barely qualifies as such currently, but my main point was that its continued existence and financial success proves that players do want a chill, non-competitive experience where strategy is one tool in an arsenal for creating something cool, and where you don't need to micro hundreds of brain-dead units as a matter of course. All of this could be shifted back into an RTS, and is the most promising avenue for evolving the genre outside the domain that AoE2, SC2, and CoH2 have already perfected. Smarter units, larger unit counts, and satisfying base/empire building, tied together into a cohesive game.

posting this here to keep myself accountable

There's definitely a video in there somewhere between all of your essay-quality posts.

[Mladorossi88]

@Pylon Valkyria Chronicles is a good JRPG, if you haven't played it already.

[anthony]

I am uneducated simpleton when it comes to JRPG's. Grew up solely on Western kino from the late 90's and early 2000's. Would welcome any recommendations you care to share.

I said I'd write about a little about JRPGs here, just remembered again now. Let's see.

If you really want to appreciate JRPGs I wouldn't say it's necessary to play anything extremely old, or any of the even older western works that inspired them. Before the first real JRPGs there were western games like the Wizardry series, which did get played in Japan. Nothing too essential in any of that, it's stuff you'd already intuit just by looking around. The forms of "HP", "Mana", rolling dice, critical hits, this all came from western "RPG" conventions. Tabletop to early PC dungeon crawlers which largely function on the same adapted rules.

The early JRPGs, even the ones with famous names, are probably not really worth playing beyond understanding this. If you want to see how they handle that's something. Final Fantasy 1, Phantasy Star, these games are perfectly playable. I even almost finished Phantasy Star, but they are games which undeniably were bumping up against limitations at least as much as they were working with them. So no real recommendations here. Go looking yourself if you're really curious.

But I would say already by the Super Nintendo they had enough power, skill, and historic convention to lean upon that JRPGs were an established art-form which could define itself by deliberate choices rather than the limits of what they could plausibly do, and from here onwards I can start giving recommendations for things that are still interesting even now. Great examples of work which are defined by and contribute to this ongoing tradition of work.

Final Fantasy 6, even if you don't play the whole thing, or much of it, just look at this intro and look at how much ambition is on display. This is 1994. By here the simple rules are little sprite people, little video game music tracks, constant "battles" which run on old RPG logic of turns, HP, Mana, different "attacks", items, you travel around "towns" following a line of tasks and story beats (mostly delivered via characters speaking to you in text) on a quest to stop a wizard or something. Final Fantasy's parts are all very stock, this is a game that is shamelessly built on tradition. But look how much they get out of this premise.



"Story" is not confined to "dialogue" windows you get when you walk up to a townperson and push a button in their face. By this point we already have cutscenes. This game is built on the foundational logic of something like Wizardry, but the rest isn't incidental junk. It's not John Carmack's much-quoted "plot in porn". It's closer to, but not, the other way around. It would be most accurate to say that in these games they're obviously trying to make everything matter. The plot is as important here as it is in something like an anime. I've said before that JRPGs could be considered "multimedia anime", and while I wouldn't reject that now I'd say it doesn't go far enough.

Final Fantasy 6 exists for its "story", how it looks, how it sounds, but the "game" parts are not mere utilitarian vehicles for presenting these. They are another star of the show. The "RPG" battles are a tradition already by this point. They do still serve a function (giving the game length, an ongoing potential mental challenge, something to work at and optimise), but there's also the fact that someone familiar with the history of the use of this element will be able to appreciate how the developers have constantly worked it into and around the greater picture. This game deliberately embraces the logic and limitations of a "JRPG", which creates as many opportunities as it closes off, and allows for novel scenarios to emerge which couldn't otherwise.

Since nobody here is likely to play it let me just post an entire highlight sequence.



This whole sequence could be delivered fairly straight via a VN or an anime, but the tools and logic of a SNES JRPG allow (or cause) it to play out in such a unique and charming way. The beauty and surprise of an opera rendered on the SNES' sound capabilities, the humour in the artifice of the opera layered on top of the artifice of the JRPG, the absurdity of switching back and forth between maximum effort opera presentation and this extremely rigid and stiff JRPG battle form, for better or worse this is something that could only have happened in a SNES JRPG.

On one hand I want to show off how much these games do within their forms, on the other I want to show how hard they have tried to push it while still staying fundamentally the same. To demonstrate without saying a lot, here are two boss battle clips from Chrono Trigger, another great game on the same machine.





Look at them go. Cinematic moves, extremely novel and refined visual designs, real-time flow of actions, each encounter being a puzzle based on new logic for each "boss" (but still running on the same fundamental rules of the game). You can do a lot with this stuff.

(honourable mention I can't find concise footage on, by this point Fire Emblem was a solved formula and was presenting very ambitious anime style character driven war-epics on similar fundamentals of "JRPG Logic", only with multiple characters collaborating over the course of scenarios presented as "battles" rather than "fights" or something. So they get labelled "Strategy Games", which I don't believe means too much. They exist in this tradition of JRPGs, obviously.)

Next big jump 3D graphics. The games look a lot different from here, but there's a fundamental core that I believe is still intact even to today.



If you watch the FF6 intro then this I hope the continuity is clear. Again the idea is to go from a massive production value cinematic intro to a transition to gameplay. They show you the peak of what you can do and segue into you taking control in a way that tries to keep continuity clear. FF7 is a future game and there's minimal separation between the coolest parts and your own input-driven experience. Amazing cutscene to still pretty amazing 3D live-graphics. You have the same rigid fights as FF6, but now you're controlling a 3D guy who can both move around physically through this highly detailed world, and moves and animates like a person (or now especially, more like a little 3D doll) in fights like he's actually doing stuff and really hitting the other guy. Awesome.

This one I think it might be particularly good to play. At least the first act (all I've played honestly), the first 6-10 hours or so is said to be where the production values and ideas are most heavily weighted. This whole opening act is so dense with ideas they want to show off to you. Every different possible thing they could do within a JRPG. You're doing a lot, but the experience doesn't lose focus. It's quite linear, there's only so much you're doing at a time, but memes and stereotypes might have you thinking JRPGs were nothing but dungeons and line battles. Play or watch the first act of this game and look at how little time is actually devoted to that. FF7 could be said to almost be an adventure game for much of its runtime, as what you're doing is so contextual to what's happening. Your actions are still mostly fundamental, you move, talk to people, collect stuff, go to places, but there's always a novel spin keeping things feeling exciting and new. For example, this game has a CPR minigame that as far as I know you only perform once to rescue someone during a scene at a beach. That's very funny, that's very multimedia (put in a new original minigame to add novelty to one scene), but it still feels formal. These moments are always very simple, always feel like they take place within the same rules and logic of the greater game even when new rules and inputs are briefly introduced. This is hard to explain, maybe if someone else likes (or dislikes) this kind of thing they can weigh in.

All right let me move along. Final Fantasy continues to get prettier, the PS2 and then 3 allow for things to start looking increasingly pretty and detailed. But I believe that the Japanese wisely limit themselves to form, allowing them to create complete and vision-driven games while the west starts to unravel.

@Pylon Valkyria Chronicles is a good JRPG, if you haven't played it already.

Great example of what I mean. Most big and open strategy games piss me off because their logic eventually comes up against limits of what they could execute and I find myself thinking "that's bullshit" or "why can't I..?". Valkyria Chronicles is a game that takes a lot from JRPG convention, most importantly, the idea of binding itself to formal limits rather than trying to build a simulation of reality as far as possible before hitting a bust in their capabilities. The limits to the logic of VC's battles are very hard, perhaps somewhat arbitrary, strange, "video gamey" and gameable, but once you know the rather simple rules, you know exactly what you're getting. And they're perfectly happy with you messing with these rules. They have lots of weird intricate depth you don't have to mess with, but if you want to optimise that's a game in itself.

But the game isn't built for optimisation. Like a JRPG, it's a formal platform for an idiosyncratic vision. It's a WW2 anime, presented as a JRPG. It's "battles" are built largely around creating moments where soldiers have to make daring, heroic moves that will have some kind of decisive outcome, and little media elements like a quote (every character has their own VA, model, face, etc) and cut to them speaking before particular actions reinforce this character driven angle in a way that's alien to "strategy games", but feels very JRPG. Also, like the opera scene in FF6, there's a meta-element of artifice to VC. The game is presented as a book about historic events, so the game has a neat canvas filter over its picture to create a strange analogue feel to the visuals like you're looking at moving rough-printed photographs of anime people. And your menus between levels are book pages. The game is all about artifice and constrained presentation to show off a very high effort idea and narrative.

I don't love the game, but it does a lot of really interesting stuff. Great example of how embracing limits (strict artistic forms) doesn't actually close that many doors for what you can do. This game is a great success as a narrative "strategy game" compared to any western peer I can think of. The JRPG connection wasn't really talked about by many critics. Most tried to classify it as an Xcomvaniabornelike, which interests me a lot since I love X-Com (UFO, the original not the remake) so much.

They are similar in final form, but I believe this similarity is incidental. X-Com is a strategy game, Valkyria Chronicles is a JRPG. What does that mean? Simple. VC embraced limits which were largely set before its own production started, while X-Com tried to simulate reality as far as was practical. In practice both are fine approaches, but the up and downsides of each form came out in attempts at sequels.

Valkyria Chronicles got PSP sequels, which scaled down and simplified a touch but could otherwise cope with the strict and simple logic of the game just fine. Just couldn't render as much at once. Eventually there was a main console and PC sequel which could reuse the original's engine. No problem. Not much was changed, but why would it change? VC was always a work defined by deliberate decisions about where to draw lines and limits. So there wasn't much complaining about this (beyond the usual suspects). Point is, VC could successfully get sequels. The fact it didn't get a lot more I put down to the fact the writing is just kind of B-tier. Oh well.

But X-Com, my beloved X-Com. It got one sequel that was fine because it was new assets dropped into the same engine (terror from the deep, a water themed clone-game/asset-flip). And then all attempts at onwards and upwards sequels to this great strategy game failed. Why? I think it's obvious why. Strategy game is not a defined form. What does this mean? There is no agreed upon spot at which to stop building. This meant that all attempts at succeeding X-Com ran into the problem of chaotically overlapping systems and elements and mechanics which did not come together into any kind of cohesive experience and instead just sprawled outwards until they eventually hit a bust and had to scramble to pull it all together. From this process we got X-Com: Apocalypse, which made nobody happy and messed up the creator's career (along with some other misfortune). He tried to revive X-Com again via a spiritual successor Phoenix Point but this ran into the same problem. Not knowing where to draw a line, so instead working until a bust.

Two points to make from there.

One. X-Com got a highly successful successor which built itself around hard limits rather than simulating reality until a bust. The lack of tradition behind this settled upon form and the sterility of the game's general direction and style left me bored, but they made something that worked. In strategy games that's always refreshing (due to most games hitting the bust problem).

Two. X-Com eventually got open-sourced, opening it up to modders. People have built enormously successful and popular mods (several of which feel like new games at this point) on almost the exact same fundamental bones of the original game. The lesson to take from here is that Julian Gollop (the original creator) saw himself as the creator of an iterative step towards a superior emulation of reality, rather than an artist who had created a complete and sufficient form, fun exactly as it is. Which could then be iterated upon. He was undone by the dissatisfaction innate in the Strategy Game development process.

X-Com, was a brilliantly satisfying and complete feeling game. But I believe that this was largely a happy accident. Gollop stopped his work at a near perfect place apparently largely by chance. In this particular case he thought this was as far as he could go. But he didn't consider it an all together satisfactory place for a game to stop. To his credit he did do a fairly nice simple GBA game that was like a formal Fire Emblem/X-Com hybrid for the GBA and wanted to remake X-Com in 3D in the early 2000s, but it never came together as it should have. If enough people had the foresight, Gollop's original game would have just become a genre and tradition.

The game's currently running space-pirate, X-Files and 40k themed mods, if released as complete games in the late 90s or early 2000s, would probably all be beloved classics by now and have sold brilliantly in their own time. But that's not the world we live in. Still, better late than never.

Sorry. Where was I?

If you want to see JRPGs accelerating off in awesome directions while retaining the DNA of their Wizardry inspired ancestors, check out Resonance of Fate. My go-to recommendation for an advanced and interesting JRPG that has loads of new ideas but still feels like one. If you want a more stock JRPG recommendation from me, I don't really have many. I find these games more interesting conceptually than as things to actually sink long hours into. Just look at this.





Maybe this should have been two posts, but hopefully someone has fun reading this.

[Pylon]

{good post}

... hopefully someone has fun reading this.

Thanks for this. I found the clips you've shared quite enjoyable, despite having little prior knowledge or nostalgia for most of these games. FFVI and Chrono Trigger got PC ports, so I might as well check them out.

Can definitely agree on the idea that games are at their peak when each part is put in service of a cohesive aesthetic vision. Things fall apart when any piece of the how is put ahead of the what, something which your X-COM tangent touched upon. How "feature-creep" (though not quite, maybe it would be better to call it "feature-sprawl" or "feature-cacophony") leads to an insurmountable technical burden, all whilst failing to add anything but dissonance to the end result.

Worse yet are those games which don't make meaningful progression in any of their aspects at all, and instead find themselves retardedly imitating chunks of what they think made some past title "work". Thinking of all those "boomer-shooters" or nu-JRPGs (western). Though that's a different topic already covered, so I leave it for now.

[anthony]

{good post}

... hopefully someone has fun reading this.

Thanks for this. I found the clips you've shared quite enjoyable, despite having little prior knowledge or nostalgia for most of these games. FFVI and Chrono Trigger got PC ports, so I might as well check them out.

Can definitely agree on the idea that games are at their peak when each part is put in service of a cohesive aesthetic vision. Things fall apart when any piece of the how is put ahead of the what, something which your X-COM tangent touched upon. How "feature-creep" (though not quite, maybe it would be better to call it "feature-sprawl" or "feature-cacophony") leads to an insurmountable technical burden, all whilst failing to add anything but dissonance to the end result.

Worse yet are those games which don't make meaningful progression in any of their aspects at all, and instead find themselves retardedly imitating chunks of what they think made some past title "work". Thinking of all those "boomer-shooters" or nu-JRPGs (western). Though that's a different topic already covered, so I leave it for now.

Glad you appreciated it.

A lot of these old games have ports, and many are quite nice. But whenever you're not sure don't be afraid to emulate either. Emulation is very good now for most consoles up to the PS3. Very easy stuff, you can have it all accessible through one program per console (or one big program if you prefer that way), roms are easy to find, and emulators have their own features too. Might make an emulation thread soon. If nothing else lavranson and I can show off upscaled screenshots of old JRPGs.

Is for how and what, something I want to articulate (but it's hard), is how I think for a long time western games got by kind of incidentally on this point. As with X-Com, things can just kind of fall into place. But you can't rely on that. I've never seen anybody else put the history of video games this way, but it seems to me that bad artistic ideas (or a simple lack of them) were held in check in the west by sufficient tech-frontiers to keep things both lively and bound to workable scales. The frontiers of possibility were, dare I say, natural. In a sense. Western developers never really embraced form, but they still had it for a long time because of circumstance. While the Japanese all along were embracing limitations as interesting possibilities, and so did not fly off the rails and expand outward chasing technical possibility until their industry bust (god we need western gaming to bust so badly).

Much to talk about in all this. I wouldn't consider anything "covered" yet.

[Yumetaro]

The colour palette looks more like a SNES game (if it is in fact the original I'm seeing here)

Yes, that's the original graphics. To return back to Gimmick on a tangent there actually is a remaster that was made in 2020 by some start-up arcade company called exA-Arcadia. I found a full playthrough here:



I don't like it as much as the original, but I could never really justify why to myself beyond the a kind of /v/ soul vs. soulless meme. It wasn't until I was thinking about Exact Mix right after I read this that I came up with a more satisfying explanation:

Someone looking at what their machines can do, what people are doing, and trying to create the coolest, most maximalist thing possible, that's still just like what's expected of the time. The best Mariobornevanialike the NES could possibly handle.

In other words, the look and sound of the original Gimmick are defined by the limitations of the Famicom, so it doesn't make much sense to remaster it by simply taking all of its component pieces and increasing the fidelity on them. A version of Gimmick that exists on a machine with the power of an Xbox One X would be made from the ground up with those limitations in mind. But, that's not a realistic thing to ask of the dev team. I don't want to be harsh on the team that made this because I think they tried their best. They didn't/couldn't get Tomomi Sakai (probably the biggest misstep) on the project, but they did manage to get Kageyama to advise on the music. All of the art is very faithful to the cutesy anime look. There's new features and two separate settings in the options to change it back to original sound and visuals. They even added some new details that I like and the new cutscenes seem to use the originals as a loose template. I think the deviations from the original are good, but overall its problem is that even though it's the same game but 'looks and sounds nicer' the intent is much less big picture.



I think that a Gimmick remaster was a misguided idea, and for previously stated reasons can perhaps be used as a good explanation of why lots of remasters fail to displace their originals in general.

[GraphWalkWithMe]

Just played through the first level of the WarioLandlike Pizza Tower. Not having much fun yet. It makes a point to recreate, "IMPROVE" too much of the parts in the 2D Sonic games that I dislike: levels are designed so that you might GO FAST for 4 seconds before crashing into a wall you couldn't see, and so lose points (IOW only troonrunners have the mental endurance to get gud). The more interesting aspects of the game are in its sight and sound:


Is this "burgerpunk"?

The visuals take from the past in yet more emphasizing of, stretching 1991 Ren & Stimpy, Chuck-E-Cheeze-type cartoon exaggerations for ironic kitsch (just like they did). On the other hand, the music is 2014 MacDeMarcolike, himself openly a 1970's Soft Rock recreation act. An easy, "Politically Correct", "Softly Racist" Italian-caricaturing has been noted for sometime, and it's here in spades (safe humor). 

Pizza Tower; yet another willfully retrograde piece of media paraded by the press. Did anyone else play this game? At this point I'm giving it a C-, maybe minus two Frowny Faces.

[anthony]

Just played through the first level of the WarioLandlike Pizza Tower. Not having much fun yet. It makes a point to recreate, "IMPROVE" too much of the parts in the 2D Sonic games that I dislike: levels are designed so that you might GO FAST for 4 seconds before crashing into a wall you couldn't see, and so lose points (IOW only troonrunners have the mental endurance to get gud). The more interesting aspects of the game are in its sight and sound:


Is this "burgerpunk"?

The visuals take from the past in yet more emphasizing of, stretching 1991 Ren & Stimpy, Chuck-E-Cheeze-type cartoon exaggerations for ironic kitsch (just like they did). On the other hand, the music is 2014 MacDeMarcolike, himself openly a 1970's Soft Rock recreation act. An easy, "Politically Correct", "Softly Racist" Italian-caricaturing has been noted for sometime, and it's here in spades (safe humor). 

Pizza Tower; yet another willfully retrograde piece of media paraded by the press. Did anyone else play this game? At this point I'm giving it a C-, maybe minus two Frowny Faces.

I won't play this because it disgusts me. What is it with Amerifats and thinking that dripping cheese is the greatest imagery on Earth? Wario is a fat guy whose humour is in his "grossness", but I've never actually felt disgusted by him. While I actually feel that to the point of being completely put off in every American case.

Beyond that the style looks like something between Wario Land 4, Danny Antonucci, and Bob's Burgers, with less charm than each if you ask me. Feels like a guy attempting to synthesise soul by throwing stuff at a board. Maybe I'm overly hard on it just because I find the imagery so off-putting.

[Guest]

I did not play Pizza tower as it failed the Art test. It was further sunk by the fact that all the wrong people were talking about it.

Regarding the multimedia within FF7, Kitase and Nomura have said that they wanted to make FF7 as a game that contained all sorts of games (something along these lines anyway.) For someone looking for a JRPG introduction, FF7, FF8, and FF10 are probably the best from that era.

For more modern games, the Trails of Cold Steel games are what I recommend. Just remember to play these games at their own pace...and without neuroticism. Guide-faggotry will deracinate the experience.

[cats]

Has anybody taken a look at the Steam Awards?





It's not surprising, but is remarkable just how bad all of these are (except, perhaps, Lethal Company, although I wouldn't really call that game great). It's also notable just how much this list takes from the Mandalore-4mexican complex's taste. With exception to Starfield and Last of Us, all of these games would make it into a 4chan Guatemalan's 3x3.

[anthony]

Has anybody taken a look at the Steam Awards?

It's not surprising, but is remarkable just how bad all of these are (except, perhaps, Lethal Company, although I wouldn't really call that game great). It's also notable just how much this list takes from the Mandalore-4mexican complex's taste. With exception to Starfield and Last of Us, all of these games would make it into a 4chan Guatemalan's 3x3.

I find the terms used the most offensive part. They don't mean anything, like all gamerspicbabble, but people place such absurd weight on them. "Game of the Year". "Story rich", "innovative gameplay", all of these things are retarded spicfodder made out of decades old recycled parts.

[anthony]

Placing this video here so I can find it in the future.

This guy is a strong example of a type. He's a knight. A warrior for a cause. He's also not that smart despite exposure to a lot of somewhat correct ideas. He's the same with politics as he is with video games. He's just kind of babbling in a paranoid and angry fashion towards all things that feel left. I mean he does somewhat hate the right people. But he can't explain why he should or shouldn't. What I call a knight, Moldbug would call a hobbit.

He'll take any received idea to wrong places if he tries to articulate anything about them himself because his understanding is only incidental. SJWs bad. Yes. Then he just kind of sticks on some vaguely right feeling reasons someone threw out in a /v/ thread ten years ago and that's the history of 21st century pop art. SJWs stopped believing in gameplay. Pedo elites created rock and roll so that they could have sex with 17 year old children. etc.

I left a rather pointed comment under here, then he replied, then I left a couple more. This exchange might be enlightening to some observers. Hopefully it's not over yet and I can get him to reply again. But like the last guy he seems to prefer a pithy playing off of my comments with as few words as possible.

[Guest]

I mean he does somewhat hate the right people. But he can't explain why he should or shouldn't. What I call a knight, Moldbug would call a hobbit.

Take a look at his Starfield video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yao9otUIs1s.

This guy somehow talks for 20 minutes about how Starfield is bad because of its game engine and because of SJW propaganda. It reminds me of a higher level version of that video where a black girl is trying to order a sandwich while Floyd rioters are looting and fighting in the background. There's a kind of disorientation that occurs when someone's cause-and-effect perceptive ability has broken down. The black girl in that video couldn't comprehend why she wasn't able to order a sandwich. The social convention of ordering is totally widgetized in her mind; it should function the same as a vending machine. "Is the vending machine broken?" Hobbits like the ones making these videos are experiencing the same issue but at a less embarrassing intellectual level than blacks might. 

Bethesda games are good->I purchased their game and clicked 'play' on steam->Why am I not getting dopamine?

They just can't overcome their expectations being wrong so they feel there must be some long form explanation for 'what just happened'.

[Guest]

I realize my above post really didn't explore the ideas I was getting at. Most people would rightly identify abstract thinking as being a part of intelligence. But part of intelligence is also de-abstracting or returning an abstract concept back to its parts to work with it. What happens with this type of person Anthony describes is that they are exposed to some correct idea, but they can't work with the underlying systems that make up the idea resulting in these paranoid video rants.

Expanding on my previous post, imagine a deeply uncurious or simple person using a vending machine. The machine is an entirely black box to them and there are two buttons they can choose. One is cola and one is juice. This person presses the cola button but the machine serves them juice. How would they respond? They can't conceive of the parts of the machine so they can't even posit a guess on what went wrong. None of the exploratory questions occur to them: was it loaded incorrectly? are the buttons labeled wrong? did an electrical or mechanical part fail? All they know is that they've been deceived. And if they've been deceived then someone or something did the deceiving. 

Returning back to the video game topic, a person like this Ptolemy figure is expecting the 'video game industry' to serve him something but the result is unexpected. He can neither build his own abstract ideas nor break down things like 'SJW propaganda' into its components. This results in these weird rant videos where unlike ideas are being mapped together. He can only see a video game like Starfield, or some AAA movie game, as a collection of its parts because nobody has abstracted them for him. But the ideas he's working with are already abstracted and he can't seem to describe any aspect of what 'SJW propaganda' actually is or why it would result in a bad video game rather than a good one. That results in these sorts of mappings
Political concept #1 -> Starfield game component #1, #2, #3
Political concept #2 -> Starfield game component #4, #5, #6...

Which is bizarre because he isn't comparing component to component or concept to concept. Nearly all of these 'gamergate discourse' videos suffer from this. An actually interesting video might explore how the safe HR-speak language pioneered by SJWs, which is just one specific component, negatively impacts the narrative of Starfield because the game takes place in a dangerous space frontier unsuitable for PC language. In such a video, 'pronouns' would be just one evidence of that. Instead, we get a 20 min rant about how, apparently, the jews called up Todd Howard and made him turn his own game into zogslop.

Everything I mentioned above is broadly applicable to 'conspiracy' obsessed types in general even outside the video game topic.

[anthony]

Black box is the word. Sometimes we get good things. Sometimes we get bad things. And we have some meme words you're supposed to use to divine answers.



Look at the name.

[Virtue]

GOTY 2023 for Sir Synthetic Man, knight of the Order Gamergate, is RE4 remake.

[Guest]

Gameplay-maximalism is simply the expression of the small wishing to be large. The same people will go against esports etc. because they cannot compete. Developers are not helping matters by going along with this sort of thing. Recently I tried Granblue Fantasy Relink's demo. It was billed as a JRPG. The reality is that it is a "gameplay-game" with a vague gesture at a JRPG story glued to the side. You press square and then you press triangle. You dodge sometimes. You have to play in co-op to beat the "quests" (these are just boss fights that you are teleported to while being given a vignette about some monster beforehand) for the best results. The equipment you may use has no character whatsoever. Would you like to equip Combo Booster III? Or Attack III? A grim proposition for a JRPG.
But it's not a JRPG at all. The game is built around repeating quests over and over again with co-op people. A menu and then a fight. Do this one hundred times. Do it in 3 minutes or less. Kill enemies with barrels for extra points. It's ridiculous. Why would the developers put this sort of thing into what they call a JRPG?
You might try to enjoy the story mode, drinking it in. But then you are hit with a lack of some material or other and you will need to do a "quest" to get it. Do you want more? Repeat the quest. I digress.
There will be no good discussion until there is segregation in the larger scope of things. And similarly, degeneration will occur on a broader scope, while exceptions will still reach far above, making strong works of art. Luckily those exceptions exist in a fairly decent quantity at the moment. Otherwise things would be very grim for video games.

[Guest]

I recalled the RTS conversation here. This video displays a new type of RTS, despite many protests that some will have against the overall format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGPO_vvY-4A

[anthony]

I recalled the RTS conversation here. This video displays a new type of RTS, despite many protests that some will have against the overall format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGPO_vvY-4A

This looks more "JRPG". Plenty go far further into "strategy" than this. What's that one xbox 360 game...

The Last Remnant. Had to look that up. Also earlier today was thinking about Japanese hybrid strategy games like Bladestorm and Kessen. I see nothing radically new here.





Also, for looking, youtube sends me this:



Let's see the stunning and brave future of the rtsvaniabornelite community.

1. The Snowpiercer but not on a train guys have made the same game again.

2. Stormgate, as already covered in this thread.

3. Stronghold but a Theyarebillionsvaniabornelite. I saw goblins punch a castle keep down. Not an encouraging start. Also obnoxious unity-indie visual style.

4. Age of Mythology Fernmake...

5. Tempest Rising, a C&Cbornevanialite. It just looks like command and conquer with weird not quite starcraft controls and handling. Weird cheap but expensive Unrealmaxxed visuals. I just think it looks weird and pointless.

6. Outpost Infinity Siege: This one looks like a novel idea at least, just more of the indie syndrome of a probably never refined formless feature creep that'll just do okay for years on end and never quite become what anybody wants it to be. maybe I'm wrong. Building stuff is at least a way better premise and focus than more C&C.

7. Dust Front: Boring. C&C with ROBOTS AND DRONES (why?) and the not-tyrannids.

8. Homeworld 3: I could never get excited for these. Good on them still being alive I suppose, and making a game that doesn't look meaningfully better than the 25 year old ones for presumably 50x the cost.

9. Sins of a Solar Empire 2: Even this beardfat admits that this looks like a "remake". Which is to say, 15 years later and they made the same game, probably with all potential for doing more stuff lost to the power requirements of fern rendering.

10. The Last Train: It looks like FTL but you're that train full of Czechs at the end of WW1. Fine I suppose. I don't like real time "squad tactics" or whatever this is meant to be.

Is the future bright? Does a single one of these interest anybody?