Nameless Voice on 12/12/2015 at 00:38
What span of years do you describe as this "mindless age"?
zacharias on 12/12/2015 at 00:38
Quote Posted by GMDX Dev
It's only a trade off as you give the player more & more agency. Everyone experiences Dark Souls without too many differences (despite offering reasonable freedom), for example. Also, player agency is precisely the art Looking glass were trying to create, its what they have stressed time and time again, so what's to trade if that was their intention? Why is ultimate control over the experience a requirement to qualify?
Anyhow, movie makers and such don't have full control over how consumers experience their works either as the consumer's environment & interpretation of the work is not absolute. For every one movie critic that understands the movie's true intentions, there's a game journalist that played the game as the developers intended?
I fear you are just not precise enough with your quoting. You are talking about
reception of a work. I said artists had total control of the
form, traditionally. How the thing was made/put together. They never had total control of the reception of their work, that was largely left to the state/church/propaganda merchants to work out (and is another thread entirely..) Also, whilst there are automatic processes that an artist can set up to create a work, the artist is still in control of setting these parameters.
The central 'problem' of making a game seems to be 'how will the player interact with the world, and why?' (I'm willing to adjust this, but that seems a fair starting point). This is a fundamentally different problem than writing a piece of fiction or music which will be experienced in sequential order. The player experience and mechanics is the actual form of a game, just as as much as the architecture/world building. The developers can control world building and mechanics, but not player choice and reactions. Again, I submit that you
must have experienced this whilst beta testing your mod(?) That fundamentally alters main beats/high points/emotional climaxes and things you are trying to set up. They can't be controlled quite as precisely as in music/literature/film, I don't think.
LGS were mostly concerned with creating a compelling game experience. We are theorising after the fact here.
Also, I'm genuinely surprised to hear so many people say Deus Ex is their favourite game of all time. I must finish that game one day. I must confess I never rated it anywhere near as high as Thief/SS2. Always seemed a bit clunky to me.
Nameless Voice on 12/12/2015 at 00:42
It's certainly clunky. I initially almost didn't play it because it starts off really clunky and the first level, before you have any augmentations or the plot has really started, doesn't do a good job at hooking you into the game.
Pyrian on 12/12/2015 at 01:19
I replayed the first few sections of Deus Ex several times before I went on to finish the game. Each time I started over it was because I felt I'd wasted too many skill points. I kind of had that experience with System Shock 2 as well, but it was much later in the game. Finally maxing out strength and heavy weapons only to find the fusion cannon is quite spectacularly worthless, rather than the BFG I was hoping for...
System Shock 2 is definitely a tighter experience (and in most respects Thief is even more so), but Deus Ex just accomplishes so much more, IMO.
Yakoob on 12/12/2015 at 03:17
Regarding Deus EX / PS:T as literature: I think everyone is doing gaming a disservice by stripping the story from these games to analyze. The whole point of a game is that it is MORE than a story. Amazing writing is, imho, less important to how it ties together with the gameplay. See my response to GMDX quote below:
Quote Posted by GMDX Dev
It (and PS:T) proved that gaming can do literature, however more so than PS:T it proved it can do it magnificently in unison with everything else that defines a game.
Hmmm do you mean the game's writing by itself is literature-worthy OR that the game is at the level of accomplished literature? I disagree with the second version - yea the writing may be better than most games, BUT it doesnt fit the gaming medium, mainly to being way too verbose. Too much of the game felt like reading and interactive story moreso than playing. But if the game was meant to be an interactive story, then the shitty gameplay fails it as well. It kind of lands the awkward spot where each side holds the other back.
Quote Posted by faetal
[Deus Ex] is a great overall experience -
greater than the sum of its parts. In a way, I think games like it possibly become so great as much by luck as by design. Something
emergent that cam from a lot of talented people with good ideas all working on the same project. It grew from them in a way that may not have been 100% orchestrated, but just happened to fall in that way. It's a lot of why I think sequels and re-boots fail to achieve the same quality when they are trying to re-do the thing. Because suddenly, when trying to tap in to the same idea, something is lost by there being
too much intention.Hear Hear. Even though the different systems/mechanics may not be the best (such as the actual shooting, the useless swimming aug etc.) it's the sheer variation and combinations that make it great. As you point out, in DX you COULD come up with a unique solution that felt entirely your own. In Bioshock, comparatively, every solution feels it has been engineer for you to discovered (and playtested the shit out of).
I think the DX's (orr SS2's) imperfections and imbalanced a necessary component of truly emergent gameplay. If everything is perfectly smooth and balanced, it's rarely ever accidental or emergent.
Quote Posted by faetal
I genuinely and literally believe that the story extracted from Deus Ex is a very broad strokes and trope-laden medley of middle of the road cyberpunk and conspiracy fiction.
But isn't that half-intentional, though? It does feel like a silly pulp fiction punctured by occasional deeper meaning and theme, and I thought that was kinda the intention? It certainly fits with the pseudo-noir story/protagonist and cramming every imaginable conspiracy organization and trope together.
I don't think it was a pure accident or writer's immaturity. Especially given how it all FITS so well without many (any?) plot holes, unlike numerous modern movies and TV shows (LOST being one of the worst offenders, even if I did enjoy the show).
Dev_Anj on 12/12/2015 at 04:00
Froghawk and faetal, I think you put too much emphasis on innovation. I think innovation is overrated in art, and what's more important is in how art manages to grab someone's attention and feel fresh. Because if we were to judge media by innovation alone, all art would fail as art by itself is a derivative of real life when we come down to it, no matter how good or bad, ambitious or not it is. I also don't think high art is about having a message, I don't consider government run public service announcements to be high art. High art to me is things that inspire people beyond just entertaining them.
Your observation on game music being dependent on the atmosphere it's used in is true to an extent, but I definitely feel that game music can still be good on its own as I've listened to some game tracks where I've never played or watched the game in question and yet like the music.
Also I think you need to give more credit to Deus Ex's story. Indeed it can't compare directly to cyberpunk books, that's because it's written around the needs of player interactivity and so most of it is conversational dialogue or some short snippets of in game books. This further follows with the characters not being fleshed out; the intention here is to give some stand out attributes to the characters while still covering a large number of them, which again stems from the need to let the player interact with many people in the game world. Personally, I find the cheesy action film lines of Deus Ex a part of the charm, as often I think they work well to provide a light moment without breaking the overall atmosphere.
Of course Deus Ex could be improved, its writing wasn't perfect, there are some weird moments like how JC suddenly starts talking about differences in governance with a bartender. But I do think it's a great story and it uses the tools of storytelling available to it well enough. Also as Judith would say, trying to fiddle with someone's work simply because you think you know better is a dangerous route, no matter how qualified you may be.
Also I would like to see your claim put to the test. Mail Deus Ex's script to an acclaimed academic professor and let's see what he/she thinks.
Jason Moyer on 12/12/2015 at 04:24
I don't really understand the need to compare the writing in a videogame to a film or book since both of those are passive entertainment and a videogame isn't, or shouldn't be.
Personally, I think the game with the best writing was Pac-Man.
Yakoob on 12/12/2015 at 04:34
Quote Posted by Dev_Anj
Froghawk and faetal, I think you put too much emphasis on innovation. I think innovation is overrated in art, and what's more important is in how art manages to grab someone's attention and feel fresh. Because if we were to judge media by innovation alone, all art would fail as art by itself is a derivative of real life when we come down to it, no matter how good or bad, ambitious or not it is. I also don't think high art is about having a message, I don't consider government run public service announcements to be high art. High art to me is things that inspire people beyond just entertaining them.
Interestingly, I had a big debate with an artist friend of my recently about that. She stipulated that one of art's requirements (but not only) is that it must be innovative in the given time it is created; if it is derivative it's not really art. Initially I did not agree with her, but the implication made me reconsider and I think I see her point: if you're not striving for something new and instead repeating what is already there, can you really call yourself an artist?
But I agree with your point on Deus Ex writing, and said the same in my post right before yours - game writing should fill the game's needs, which are inherently different than those of a book or a movie. Hence why DX does such a good job even if the writing in an of itself may not be that great. It just meshes with the whole.
icemann on 12/12/2015 at 06:24
Don't forget that a game does not need a story / narrative, in-order to be great. Tetris. Bejeweled. Practically anything from the 70s - late 80s.
driver on 12/12/2015 at 06:40
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Interestingly, I had a big debate with an artist friend of my recently about that. She stipulated that one of art's requirements (but not only) is that it must be innovative in the given time it is created; if it is derivative it's not really art. Initially I did not agree with her, but the implication made me reconsider and I think I see her point: if you're not striving for something new and instead repeating what is already there, can you really call yourself an artist?
But by that definition, Michelangelo's David wouldn't be art because holy fuck how many goddamn statues were there around back then? Art doesn't have to be about innovation, refinement has its place too. Many artists recreate many of their works over and over again before they're happy with them.
I guess it also depends on your definition of 'artist'. You could consider forgers who copy great artists' work to be artists of a sort. The work they create isn't
the work of art, but the methods they use to create such detailed facsimiles could be described as an art. Personally speaking I'd define an artist as someone who is striving to perfect a creative skill, though others might say that it is someone who tries to create something new.
:edit:
Though thinking about it, you might even be able to drop the word 'creative' from my definition of artist. A complex mathematical equation or even a well designed plumbing system could be considered a work of art.
