faetal on 15/2/2012 at 22:39
It's not jumping off of a bridge though, it's people paying $10 for something they enjoy.
Besides, bungee jumping is pretty popular..
june gloom on 15/2/2012 at 22:58
Well you're correct in that there's no accounting for taste; the market is what the market is. I still say it's a ripoff to charge $10 for a non-interactive multimedia experience that was originally free. If the guy who remade this wanted money out of this so bad he should have slapped a Paypal link up for donations. He would've recouped the $55k almost as quickly -- if not faster -- because people will throw their money at anything these days if they think it'll make them feel good.
And when I said jumping off a bridge, I didn't mean bungie jumping ;)
jay pettitt on 16/2/2012 at 00:55
Quote Posted by demagogue
The only thing I have to knock on Dear Esther is that it doesn't really deliver on what it's getting credit for. It's not like the modern lit revolution in the interwar period with the lost generation, where Hemingway, Faulkner & Joyce were rewriting the rules of literature and knew exactly the kind of revolution they were leading... or the Surrealists in interwar Paris or the Abstract Impressionists in postwar NYC. It's still something of a gimmick, maybe pointing in that kind of direction but it's not really articulating what that direction is or even what it's trying to do itself, so it's getting more credit than it's actually delivering on.
It may well not be a literary masterpiece, but I think it’s properly worthwhile. And really quite easy on the eye now too. But yeah, it’d be nice to think that it’s baby steps with better things to come down the road.
The appeal for me isn’t the(?) story, rather the way it plays with your head to illicit emotions and a narrative. I’m fascinated by that stuff - I like the fact that I'm not much more than a fancy Ape who's mushy brain you can prod with a stick. That it achieves that through probability and random events (and Esther 2.0 randomises rather more than the narration) just makes me like it all the more.
I do think Pinchbeck has at least some idea what he’s doing though. He’s written about it often enough; leveraging psychology in games.
Quote:
Contrary to ZB though, I think it's not demanding
enough on the player if it really wants to be at that level, not like a good Faulkner or Joyce novel was.
Do you mean not sand-boxy enough as a piece of level design? Not sufficiently confident in it’s ability to command the player to jump through hoops by suggestion alone?
Quote:
I don't even think I'm entirely disagreeing with you, since your whole original point was something like, these people are dumb because they're spending money for a glorified audio book and the graphics upgrade they're paying for doesn't even add all that much to it, since the base non-game "game" is still the same. Well my theory at least gives you a reason why they seem to be acting in exactly the way you're talking about, otherwise it really is sort of irrational.
Plainly bod A is going to have to wonder whether 10 bucks is worth a punt. And if, like me, bod A has already played the freebie then they’ll have to take that into account. I did.
Don't tell anyone, but I've got a pretty low opinion of video games. They're not like books or films where you can recommend them to other grown ups, because they're little more than embarrassingly awful vehicles for extracting pocket money from teenagers. But I don't see why that should be the case. I parted with some cash because I'm interested to see what happens if I shove Esther in front of some poor unfortunates who know me.
I think it's okay if you don't like Esther. But it's not embarrassing. I don't think so anyway.
That said, I was pleasantly surprised how successful it was at sucking me back in and making me question (virtual) reality all over again. I wasn’t expecting that.
ZylonBane on 16/2/2012 at 01:12
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
The appeal for me isn’t the(?) story, rather the way it plays with your head to illicit emotions and a narrative.
As opposed to approved emotions?
demagogue on 16/2/2012 at 04:26
@jay, I think you're misreading what I meant a bit, but what I wrote was open to being misread so I can't blame you.
Quote:
I do think Pinchbeck has at least some idea what he's doing though. He's written about it often enough; leveraging psychology in games.
I know about what he's written, that's what I was actually thinking about. I meant in global terms. He's definitely been thinking & writing about what he was doing in local terms, very consciously, storytelling & interaction techniques, better immersion, better at tapping into emotions. I just meant he wasn't thinking about the larger point of it in the grand scheme of things, like influential artistic movements of the past did... Like for the Surrealists, it's not just that using art as a medium to express automated thought or dreams was more emotional or immersive, but that it liberated people from the channels that conscious thought filters pure thought through, or whatever. The desire to liberate came first, then that told them what techniques to develop to do that. Or for Faulkner, it's not just that he was developing stream-of-cns & inner-speech techniques to get you into the minds of the characters and their setting more authentically, but he was laying bare the entire moral collapse of the American south, and he needed those techniques to not let readers weasel out of his indictments or what that society & its people were really like at their core.
What's the larger point of good FP-IF techniques? Is it that players have to take some responsibility in the story or are complicit, or is it just a vehicle for farce the way it's being developed because players will always want to flaunt the given story and reject what's being pushed on them? Since I think these techniques are pointing in some kind of larger direction -- I'm not sure myself what it is -- I'd like to see more attention paid to questions like that. Edit: Like I personally think these things should be more interactive, but that's because I think the whole medium doesn't do its job unless it is, but that begs the question again of what's the point. Talking about the emotional or immersion impact of different techniques isn't getting to that question, and that's what I want to read about & see games developing.
Quote:
Do you mean not sand-boxy enough as a piece of level design? Not sufficiently confident in it's ability to command the player to jump through hoops by suggestion alone?
By "more demanding" I mean in the way Faulkner and Joyce novels are, like I said. One, it means you don't cut corners from what needs to be said and brunt the full punch of it just to cater to lazy readers/players that don't want to invest thought to follow it. (That said, the author shouldn't be adding unnecessary detail just to fluff around. If they want their words to punch, they should get straight to the point and start punching.) But two, it also means not letting the player off the hook about what's going on in the story, again like Faulkner indicting the moral decay of the South. He wasn't going to let readers get away from that by focusing on his cute little literary tricks and pretending it's just an interesting & entertaining novel. That's demanding more from a reader.
Quote:
I think it's okay if you don't like Esther. But it's not embarrassing. I don't think so anyway.
I liked it for what it was and didn't think it was embarrassing at all. It's a great & productive step in the right direction, and better at developing the genre & techniques than other games that aren't trying. And good ideas can come from any walk of life, so it's an important data point whatever it did. The part you're quoting was my response to ZB, though, which was using the language of his point to make its own point. But anyway, it was talking about ZB's own opinion on it (or my interpretation) and what I thought was the probable opinion of most people buying the upgrade, both of which are nothing like my own opinion. Honestly I was just trying to figure out objectively why people would want to buy the upgrade. (And saying "I'm not even disagreeing" is like saying I don't see the objective world much differently than he was, totally aside from my own opinion.)
But my personal thoughts on what's good & lacking in it I gave above. I don't think the typical player of this cares about this stuff developing into an artistic movement or cultural force or anything like that. The author & the audience I think are both still pretty solidly in the "this is entertainment" camp. Nothing bad about that. I just think if you're going to go down the artfag road at all, you gotta go the whole way down it like past artistic movements did and admit you're not doing this for entertainment anymore but to liberate or bring people to some new kind of awareness or something. Part of that is taking most of your cues from the art side rather than the game side; this should be about artists using games, not gamers trying art ... Well ideally they'd be fluent in both worlds. This might strike more of a chord here if I were posting in an art forum rather than a gaming forum, heh. But what the hell... I wanted to get out my thoughts about what I think of this whole enterprise, and this just gives me an occasion to do it with a specific game.
Sulphur on 16/2/2012 at 05:19
Quote Posted by demagogue
The only thing I have to knock on Dear Esther is that it doesn't really deliver on what it's getting credit for. It's not like the modern lit revolution in the interwar period with the lost generation, where Hemingway, Faulkner & Joyce were rewriting the rules of literature and knew exactly the kind of revolution they were leading... or the Surrealists in interwar Paris or the Abstract Impressionists in postwar NYC. It's still something of a gimmick, maybe pointing in that kind of direction but it's not really articulating what that direction is or even what it's trying to do itself, so it's getting more credit than it's actually delivering on. Contrary to ZB though, I think it's not demanding
enough on the player if it really wants to be at that level, not like a good Faulkner or Joyce novel was.
I do think your expectations are orthogonal to the medium. Literature was responding to the times, but literature had already spent a good couple of millenia evolving, so the syntax and the format were well-known and well-explored quantities, ready to be deconstructed and reconfigured at will. We're not quite there yet.
A better parallel would be that of film -- and perhaps we haven't had our Fellini or our Bergman or... Godard (er) yet when it comes to games. But it's a young medium, and we're still playing with the grammar to see which rules bend and which ones break.
The charge of forwarding the medium past entertainment and into the space where a game can Say Something about the nature of experience arguably never lay with Dear Esther - it's a poster-child for the argument over the un- or anti-game, and the level of discourse piling up over whether you can 'play' it is unnecessary and detracts from what DE does: namely, it's a fixed, linear story that uses the immersivity of 3D gameworlds to sink you into its narrative.
Basically, it could have been a book, or a work of short fiction that described the broken and trammelled paths of its Hebridean setting in verbose detail along with its narration; what it's done here is swapped the text and the leveraging of the reader's imagination for an interactive painting.
If we're looking at cultural significance, the standard bearer would be the IF revolution of the late 90's that used A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity as their inspiration - two pieces of IF which were arguably the first sorts of 'games' that weren't just about entertainment. We have Plotkin's So Far and Shade, which are as opaque and mysterious as Fellini crossed with Myst; we have Rematch and Aisle, which explored what restricting an open-ended medium to a single 'turn' could achieve; we have Galatea, which attempted to unshackle IF from the limits of normal NPC interaction and singular, linear narration; we have Cadre's Photopia, which is pretty much Dear Esther without the visuals: cursory input married to a well-written story; and there's his 9:05, of course, which is a joke game that plays with player expectations, but still important in how it achieves this.
Most of these were written before the current wave of indie 'artfag pretentiousness' swept over the medium, but they're following the shape and form of what those bedroom IF authors achieved when they started exploring the boundaries of it. There are going to be more parallels - there already have been with Facade and Dinner Date and Radiator et al., and there are also the more radical and self-reliant ones that subvert convention and explore the nature of it like Pathologic - the sort of game which, really, more people ought to be trying to make.
Anyway, that was a massive digression: to sum it up, Dear Esther is what happens if you reduce the grammar and syntax of a game to a single verb. It's an imposed restriction. It's not meant to be Faulkner or Joyce, because they weren't imposing limits on the literary firmament so much as breaking free of previously imposed ones. These are two equally valid, yet completely opposed, experimental directions.
jay pettitt on 16/2/2012 at 06:05
I'm sure there's something in all of that.
I think, and I could be wrong, that Esther is much more about the mechanics. It straps you to an island shaped chair and performs a series of stim / response experiments on you in an order that apes narrative structure. Any appearance of substance or artistic merit is entirely illusory. That intrigues me in a first principles sort of way. Esther is establishing a language.
Using those first principles as a vocabulary to tell a story that's worth telling for its own sake is perhaps for another day. But Esther shows that it's both possible and a tantalising prospect.
Quote Posted by "ZB"
As opposed to...
blah. 'Solicit.'
june gloom on 16/2/2012 at 07:29
With the benefit of subtitles I was able to play through the whole thing and...
...
The subtitles really do bring to light how horrible and pretentious this all is. I can't believe they wanted $10 for what's essentially pretty pictures and terrible prose. Apparently some people think that if you take away any semblance of gameplay and make the story depressing (or rather, basically have the game go "are you sad yet? are you? are you? are you?") that constitutes a new paradigm or something.
Inline Image:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20111013after.gifjune gloom on 16/2/2012 at 07:34
: okay so
: pretentious opening
: opening shot is of the coast while you listen to blah de blah
: BUT OH LOOK IF YOU MOVE THE MOUSE YOU REALIZE THAT'S YOU LOOKING DOWNT HE COAST AND NOT A CUTSCENE
: walk into an abandoned lighthouse. not really much here. music keeps playing and it's all a bunch of sad piano bullshit.
: okay so it says "when you were born blah blah birthmark, you cried to fill a vacuum, i like that so i tried to manufacture vacuums for you even though we didn't meet until after your birthmark was gone by age 6" HUHHH?
: oh here come the fucking sad trumpets.
: oh here's some sort of symbol drawn in the sand, one of those conch-shell type things where it's like a spiral made out of triangles or something
: or quarter circles i suppose
: MYSTERIOUS.
: and now a non-sequitur about yogurt.
: and now some guy named donnely who was apparently too lazy to explore the island
: "he stood on the mount and wondered how to descend. but then, he didn't have my reasons."
: that's... that's like
: so fucking
: deep
: man
: and now some long diatribe about how when there was disease on the island or whatever or someone had died they cut lines into the cliff face so people on the mainland or passing boats would know to send help. uh huh. "my lines are a signal to stay away. this pestilence is not simply of the flesh." hurrr
: blah blah people on this island are godforsaken blah blah
: oh look, TITLE DROP!
: blah blah kidney stone in shape of lot's wife staring over her shoulder at the motorway, blah blah fatalistic calm
: some crazy person with glow in the dark paint went nuts on a cave wall. how nice.
: oh here comes the piano again
: PLINK PLONK PLINK PLONK
: blah blah fingernails falling off like pockets full of change, i feel empty blah blah
: oh and the film-school violins of course
: man this thing just gets further and further up its own ass with each passing moment
: TITLE DROP, TAKE A DRINK
: PLINK PLONK PLINK PLONK
: i am walking through a ruined shipping container. this must be symbolic. of what, i could care less.
: "there must be a hole in the bottom of the boat. how else could new hermits have arrived?" LOL WUT
: more piano music. i'm surprised they haven't been blasting the SAD TRUMPETS more often. i feel cheated.
: footnote says donnely has syphilis and is going nuts, and therefore is not to be trusted, but i've been to the island and i see the same thing as him hurrrrr wtf does that even mean
: to call the island "half-imagined"
: "i fell and broke my leg, so i'm going to use these drugs and get high"
: he calls it "staying lucid for my final ascent" though
: OH AND LOOK WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS
: I JUMP DOWN A HOLE AND SLIP AND FALL
: WOW, FORESHADOWING
: man
: someone keeps taking this glow in the dark paint and drawing like
: circuitry
: chemical structures
: nerve cells
: [word censored by TTLG's filter, it starts with 'goat']
: oh wow, another hole! do you jump in and fucking break your other leg you asshole yes / no
: > YES
: these caves look fantastic. they're also way too fucking bright. it's like daylight up in this shit.
: "if the caves are my guts, perhaps this is where the kidney stones are formed"
: wtf
: man this is really pretty though. i wish actual games looked this good.
: not a fan of the SAD TRUMPETS though
: but we've been over this
: i'm trying to figure out what is the point of the symbols on the cave walls, like nerves and chemical structures and shit
: and i'm little by little realizing they're just there to be mysterious.
: "headlights are reflected in your retinas, moonlit in the shadow of the crematorium chimney"
: okayyy
: wow. the tunnel is COVERED in glow in the dark paint symbols.
: WHAT COULD IT ALL MEAN?
: probably "i wear a cape"
: OH LOOK ANOTHER FUCKING HOLE
: AND WHEN I JUMP IN
: I'M ON SOME SORT OF HIGHWAY ONLY IT'S ~*UNDERWATER*~
: and there's like a car with its headlights on
: let's go see wtf that could possibly mean
: oh would you look at that
: there's two cars
: they both look like they've been here for years, but their headlights and brakelights are on, amazing!!!
: the whole thing looks like a country road, only totally submerged. even the highway sign has like fucking plants climbing up it.
: end scene, back in the cave
: i can't get over how fucking BRITISH this all is.
: some more nonsense about donnelly
: too pretentious to copy down entirely
: blah blah stole some ash and took it home and i'd spend hours staring at it
: "in time we'll all be worn down into granules, washed into the sea and dispersed"
: okay
: oh look, some medical equipment surrounded by candles! DEEP.
: more candles! surrounding junked car parts!
: and of course plenty of sad piano
: "there were chemical diagrams on the walls in the waiting room blah blah they seem appropriate considering your body is shutting down, i cram diazepram like i once crammed for studies"
: BRILLIANT
: more graffiti on the walls
: "LIGHT... FROM HEAVEN SHONE AROUND HIM..."
: uh oh
: i ran out of the candle trail!
: WHERE WILL I GO NEXT?!?!?!
: OH THIS IS BRILL
: blah blah i wrote a bunch of letters but never mailed them, i laid them out on the beach and made them into boats and sent them out onto the water and watched them sink"
: okay buddy
: "oh and the letters are you,e sther"
: i'm crying on the inside.
: oh look at this! a nest of eggs surrounded by candles, and more of that glow in the dark paint graffiti reading
: "on a sudden a light from heaven shone around him and he fell to the ground"
: okay!
: so i didn't have any place else to go so i walked down a ramp into the water
: WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP COME BACK
: now i'm on the beach again. okay
: oh there we go, some stairs
: i keep seeing this radio tower. i wonder if it actually has any meaning or if it's just there to be mysterious and "i wear a cape"ey
: "i've begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom, i will fly to the moon in it"
: bunch more graffiti that means nothing
: blah blah "just as donnely became his syphilis i have become this island"
: LAWL
: 21 pieces of antilock breaks, 21 species of gull on the island, 21 something or other, IT CANNOT BE A COINCIDENCE
: this is what the game is saying to me:
: "are you sad yet? are you? are you?"
: TITLE DROPPPPPP
: oh and look at that
: "my wife died in a car crash. this island represents my depression. i'm going to jump off a radio tower."
: well. that was fun.
: in a fucking boring, pretentious, not at all fun way.
Renzatic on 16/2/2012 at 08:02
Thanks for the big recommendation, Deth. I was on the fence beforehand, but after reading halfway through your big writeup, I'm definitely buying it now. :thumb:
