>>26495
At some point one of you will have to have an actual opinion, rather than just roleplaying as some kind of pseudo-Marxist Statler and Waldorf.

>>26496

These two were mine, feel free to dissect them:

>>26472>>26473

I just find the way you are responding towards t'otherlad to be unnecessarily condescending. It's fine to disagree with somebody but you're displaying exactly the behaviours that entrench division by refusing to actually engage with people who might be closer to your views than you think.

>>26475

I stopped caring about non-gaming interpretations of 'games as art' a long time ago.
The best "arty" games don't need validation from some nebulous greater media community. Outer Wilds is one of the most memorable media experiences I've ever had and couldn't be replicated in another medium.
Same with that first playthrough of Portal, which adds a whole experiential level to what amounts to a classic sci-fi short story.
Those two are standouts as they don't just turn the experience into an interactive, cutscene filled movie. You have to figure it all out yourself.

>>26494

how dare you refer to me as two six four eight nine that's not a name I have chosen and you must respect that choice when attempting to talk about me or to me.

>>26498

The funny thing is that I think most actual artists couldn't give a shit about whether their medium gets described as art or not, because that's not the point of creating it. To me the whole discussion around games as art really just smacks of a need for validation from journos who would rather see themselves as highbrow critics than lowbrow pundits.

Games that I would call legitimately masterful works of art, whether by accident or design, include the original Dooms, Wipeout 3: Special Edition, Minecraft, and Pokemon. I won't explain my reasoning in full but it's not uncoincidental those are all games I have huge nostalgia for. They evoke a great deal of feeling from me. What else is art about.

Pic related, the single most important work of art of our age.

>>26500
These things are always dressed in a thick air of pretention.

Art as a term seems to by definition be something "the masses are too unsophisticated to enjoy" being popular and mass consumable at the time seems to actually detract from being 'real art'. Thomas Kinkade probably sold a few hundred thousand pictures. the art world snuffed him. if the people are buying it, why should we care what the high brows actually think?

The games are art crowd has rarely aligned with what most people who buy games like. It is typically a bunch of English majors reapplying their rules to a different medium. And the same way English lit very rarely discusses if the work is actually any good or why it is actually good. The criticism is more concern with seeing things through the political lenses that corrupt that subject. Tetris might be truly universally enjoyable and elegant in it's simplicity but is irrelevant because it defies their criteria for criticism it can't be art (although I'm sure because they know that name historically they would make an exception, insert whatever other puzzle game you like in it's place instead). I think it was better when games were critiqued closer to cars like they were back in the 90s at least then the craft and experience was acknowledged.

>>26501
I beat two indie games this year, which would fall in the possibly pretentious category.

Gone Home I enjoyed the writing, the gameplay was very bare bones and uninteresting though. When it came out it was being fellated for being this amazing watershed game, but it's got no challenge, or skill, or strategy, or excitement. I'm glad I played it, but there is no way it should have got the attention it did.

Venba is the other, which is basically a visual novel about being first and second gen Indian immigrants in Canada. There is maybe a total of 15 minutes of gameplay, but it's like dumbed down Cooking Mama and much less engaging. Again, I liked the writing, I think it's a cool story to tell, but it could have been told just as well in a graphic novel. It got a 79 on Metacritic, 5.6 user score, and a 2.5 on my spreadsheet.

Journalists try to push this sort of stuff as the proof that games are art, but these are games that could easily not have been games and worked as well or better. Compare it to, as otherlad said, Minecraft, or Hi-Fi Rush for a modern game, things that would not work well, or even at all, in any other medium.

>>26502

I think eventually we will start to see a distinction between games that are properly games in the conventional sense, and those that are less games and more a form of interactive storytelling.

Then again, I tried to actually define "game" and realised it's a very hard thing to narrow down. I started out trying describing it in terms of having a goal or challenge to overcome, but not all games do. I think the broadest definition I can think of is whether there's a fail state or not, ie death or bad ending etc, essentially any form of "game over" screen that makes you start again. I suppose there's edge cases like a few simulators that don't even have that, but still, it's the closest thing I can come up with.

Never mind are games art, are games even games? Bro.

>>26503

We do have the term "walking simulator" to describe artsy games without very much game involved. Unsurprisingly, it has become tied in with idpol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator

>>26505

A lot of walking simulators are still games, though. I was thinking of mentioning it but stuff like The Stanley Parable is definitely a game, even if all you do is wander around, there's still the gameplay loop of trying to get it to show you different things, there's still a fail state (even if that fail state is just one of the many various possible outcomes). Walking similator is sort of a loose slang term like saying Souls-like or Doom-clone back in the day.

Not sure where the idpol comes in, other than it's probably to be expected from the type of wanky middle class degree haver who's likely to make that sort of game.

>>26502

>It got a 79 on Metacritic, 5.6 user score, and a 2.5 on my spreadsheet.

I forgot to say- Tell us more about this spreadsheet.

>>26506
Here's 2023. I've been doing it since 2021. Only games I have finished, and it doesn't matter what year they're released in, only the year I play them in. Substantial DLC I class as a separate experience. Gold, silver, bronze are the top 3 games I played that year. Red is worst game played that year. Since 2021 to present I have finished 104 games/DLCs. I have played countless more but I only feel it fair to rate games I have finished.

>>26507
>knothole island
Oh daddy!

>>26508
It would have been better if it did involve dog cock fucking an arse. Instead it was shit and based around a seasonal change gimmick. Having played all three Fables, I can safely say the best they've ever been is mediocre.

>>26507

I was going to say this is brilliant, but then I saw... Max Payne, only a 4? Laaaaad.

In fairness I haven't played it in years and years, but I would have imagined it holds up. Remedy are famous for their weirdness these days but it was all there already in Max Payne 1 and 2.

>>26509
If there's one thing we need woke for, it's legal knotting in videogames. They apparently got away with it by using bears, but the fight must go on!

>>26510
The gameplay was very punishing in a non-fun way, and the final "boss" was frustrating and I needed to look up a walkthrough. I thought the story and aesthetic were amazing.

>>26512
Here's 21 and 22 for anyone interested.

>>26513
Actually Wonderlands should be red, not Assassin's Creed. I forgot I awarded a 0.

>>26511

Bear is such a weird choice of animal for them to slip soft bestiality in with too. Who wanted to fuck a bear? Not "bear" in gay lingo, not even in a buff bara furry anthro way, but an actual BEAR.

Incidentally some of the most unrestrained prejudice I've faced over being a furry has been from ostensibly "woke" people so. Ehh. Definitely part of the reason I don't buy it. They don't want the wierdo yiff people in their little club, which is fine, I wouldn't either. But you can't say you're all about tolerance and inclusivity and so on if you're going to be like that, it's just hypocrisy.

>>26515

>>26515
>Who wanted to fuck a bear?
As it turned out, lots of people who didn't know they wanted to fuck a bear.

Concord is dead.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3zw5w7l3o

I read about half the thread, so apologies if anyone's already said this - but Concord didn't fail because of wokeness.

It failed because it's 8 years too late, is generic as fuck, was made to chase the hero shooter fad rather than with any sort of passion or pre-existing vision, and nothing sets it apart.

That said, it's fucking funny that the pronouns appear so prominently and when loading in - like that's just posturing, it's useless information outside of the biographies. Yes, the stuff about the wokeness didn't help, but it would have failed anyway.


Watch some gameplay videos. It's actually just got nothing going for it.

>>26549
Obviously such a big budget title isn't even going to recoup the server fees with 660 players, but there are multiplayer games I still frequent that sustain with a tenth of that. It's a pity that it's been put out to pasture, because I'm sure some folk were loving it.

Anyway, Stop Killing Games.

>>26549
The thing I find funniest is that last night I was looking at Secret Level, the upcoming big budget animated anthology series from the people who did Love Death + Robots. Each episode is based on a different video game world, so there's God of War, WH40K Space Marine 2, Pac-Man, etc. But then there's a Concord episode.

The hubris to get a megabudget, semi-mainstream production team to make a multimillion dollar episode based on a game, that was announced only 4 months ago with zero hype, that got a peak of 2k players in the free open beta, that's not at all entered the cultural zeitgeist except for people shitting on it. It's astounding.

One of the features touted for Concord was that every season there'd be a new cinematic released. I can't work out if Sony had too much or too little faith in the game. If they were so sure of it, why release it with only 4 months of marketing (albeit quite heavy marketing). If they had doubts, why did they try push the characters and world and lore as if they're Overwatch-tier.

I think this might be the biggest mainstream mega budget blunder I've ever seen.

>>26553

It's very difficult to turn around a big-budget project. By the time anyone realises that you're working on a pile of cack, you're already committed to a development timetable and a marketing schedule. A huge amount of money and effort has already gone into it before you have anything resembling a playable beta.

Releasing a pile of crap is humiliating, but it's plausibly a better option than risking an expensive detour into development hell. I feel for the people involved, because nobody ever sets out to make a shit game. All credit to CDPR for turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a properly good game - it must have been a complete nightmare.

>>26549

The anti woke whiners won! Look at this innocent game company having to bend over to the demands of neckbeards on YouTube!

>>26554
I was thinking, maybe a bit generously, this could be a Final Fantasy XIV situation. Take it offline because it's fundamentally flawed. Bring it back in a few months/a year or two. FFXIV was panned at launch, they shut it down, and rebuilt it as a 2.0 fixed version and now it's massive. As you say, CDPR had refunds and hate when CP2077 first came out, now it's considered a very good game after lots of work.

But then to talk down my optimism, CP2077 had years of hype backing it up, and goodwill from The Witcher 3. Concord had 4 months of no hype, from an untested studio, in a market which is overcrowded as is. It would be a big risk to try and save a sinking ship, that's already tainted as one of the biggest gaming blunders ever. Not even factoring in the neckbeards on YouTube!

>>26554
>nobody ever sets out to make a shit game

Yes they do. The mobile game sector isn't pure AIDS by accident.

I start my ill advised Games Design course next week, meaning I have access to textbooks and journals.

This is the earliest volume of Games and Culture I could access, the article published in December 2008. There's another article in the same edition, about girls making games for girls. The stuff in articles 16 years ago is the same as today more or less. Where were the anti-woke in 2008?

>>26561

2008 would be round about the time I dropped out of a sociology course because of being made to read absolute gobbledegook bollocks nonsense like this for most of the year. This is the post-modernist waffle otherlad was on about, what they are actually saying is quite simple, but spun out so far as to render it almost entirely meaningless outside the context of roundabout wanking with your fellow self important academics.

>>26561

>The stuff in articles 16 years ago is the same as today more or less. Where were the anti-woke in 2008?

Anti-woke emerged when that stuff started leaking out of academia and entering the mainstream of culture.

>One scene with Abby stands out in this regard. In brief, there is a sex scene between Abby and her ex-boyfriend, one that I would characterise as bordering on violent (although consenting). This scene was met with derision and disgust by many players, who lamented online that they did not want to view a sex scene with a ‘shemale’ – the prevalence of the term ‘sodom-’ in review bombings of TLOU2 being evidence of this (Tomaselli & Cantone, 2021, p. 12). The scene, and the details within it did seem out of place to me – the level of nudity, the way that Abby’s breasts were visible, seemed unnecessarily revealing. I wonder if the game developers placed such emphasis to a) point out that women can have a more ‘masculine’ body type and still be heterosexual, b) communicate to the players that Abby is, indeed, biologically female, or c) ‘verify’ her status as a woman through having sex with a man. I could find little commentary on this topic, other than a post that unpacks how the scene adds depth to Abby and her ex-boyfriend’s characters and narrative.

I'm finding this journal very interesting overall. Some stuff is written for games that nobody in the world gives a fuck about. Some stuff is very pretentious. There's some genuinely decent sounding stuff too. I can be an even more pretentious cunt too if I try hard enough.

>>26561
Huh, I'd never thought about it like that.
keep it coming lad.

>Speaking of proportions, it’s hard not to notice that many of the female characters have been given a physiological upgrade, like the bodacious Taki, who appears to have been reimagined with the gravity-defying Itagaki-san physics from ‘Dead or Alive Xtreme 2’ in mind. Cassandra is a bit more reserved in the bosom department, but hey, she fights in her undies, so we’ll cut her some slack. (Lynch, 2008, p. 20)

>‘Huh? Was that a flash of a pink thong I glimpsed beneath that stern swordmistress’s black skirt? Let me try to make her skirt fly up again, just to make sure.’ And suddenly, your opponent is more fixated on your expertly crafted character’s undies than on beating you to a pulp, and you’ve got an edge in battle (Dun, 2008, p. 90)

>Special attention has been given to the physics impact of unsupported bosoms jiggling and flopping with each leap, slash, and thrust! (Smith, 2008b, p. 22)

Some quotes from 2008 gaming magazines, highlighted in this study. Published a few months after Gamergate so very timely, even mentions GG and Anita in the paper! Not a bad article though, not as bad as the abstract suggests it to be.

>>26567

>using the theory of hegemonic masculinity

Sounds very objective and unbiased.

I thought this might as well going here, seeing as this is essentially now the general "them wokies hurr!" thread.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7PA_kshZh0

This film is probably going to make a lot of people very angry because it very precisely shows them up for the charlatans they are. It's only a shame it's made by people who are themselves expressly conservative, because that makes it too easy to dismiss and discredit. I don't want the right to tell these grifters to fuck off, I want the left to do it.

Anyway the funny part causing drama at the moment is they got Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, in a Brass Eye style sting interview, where she has to give a black crew member money on the spot cash as "reparations". Her response is telling.

https://www.robindiangelo.com/about-that-film/

>>26579

Equally telling that the website "debunkingAmIracist.com" is pure ad hominem.

https://debunkingamiracist.com/

>>26580

All too easy to do, because as far as I can tell, this Matt Walsh character is something of a bellend. But a bellend can still be right about things now and again I suppose.

>>26579

It's fantastic that this film perfectly vindicates all your beliefs. Did you get into a pre-release screening or something? It's not out yet and hasn't been leaked.

>>26582

>is probably going to

Read, wokelad.

The trailer more than likely shows the best bits anyway, and I doubt I will be arsed to watch the full thing. I am predicting the reaction it will get.

>>26583
>This film is probably going to make a lot of people very angry because it very precisely shows them up for the charlatans they are.
Did you mean to add a second "probably" in that sentence?

>>26581
He wasn't particularly right with "What Is A Woman?" so I don't see why anyone would think he'd be right with this one either.

>>26585

He's right by virtue of the fact that the kind of anti-racism activists he's targeting here absolutely are grifters, he was wrong about the trans one because they're not. Well, some of them are, but not nearly to the same extent as the race lot.

Stuck clock innit.

(Source: 5 minutes scanning the wikipedia article. I hadn't even heard of this cunt until today, so you don't get the idea I am some kind of biased supporter.)

>>26587

The thing about 'trans arguments' is that they were never really argument in the semantics sense to begin with. All trans arguments are begging the question because they know the conclusion, people who are Trans will say anything and everything to reach the conclusion trans is fine and normal, because ultimately everything else of how they get there is actually irrelevant to them as long as they get there.

There are arguments put forward for transitioning that the premises are actually completely contradictory with other ones yet both will be adopted because really it was never about if those arguments were accurate in the first place.

The real argument always is 'should it matter what someone chooses to do with themselves.'

>>26590

>The real argument always is 'should it matter what someone chooses to do with themselves.'

You can generally tell the ones who are grifters in the trans/LGBT spheres because they will vehemently deny this line of reasoning. They have their own agenda to push for whatever reason, their arguments about trans rights are not actually about trans rights but pushing whatever that agenda is. I'm largely referring to the TERF lot by that- to them it's just a scapegoat they can use to boost the declining relevance of their own ideology. But there's just not nearly so much money in that as there has been in race grifting over the last few years.

It's funny how we had a pretty big scandal over here in this country over the charity War Hero Major Tom set up and paid herself a fortune from. People who were outraged by that ought to have a look at what the founders of BLM did with the money.

I got the new Dragon Age, but I don't think I'm engaging in good faith.

The vitiligo slider and the top surgery scar toggles are quite prominent in the character creator, which is fine. But also it's kind of weird that those niche disorders get their own section. You can't meaningfully change eye shape, and hair and skin colour options are surprisingly limited. I think more people would get enjoyment out of green skin or neon pink hair, over lopped off tits scars. There is a body scar category, but top surgery scars are their own category.

If there wasn't this discourse online, would I have even noticed these features? Why am I having issues with an extra option being available? Maybe I'm a chud.

>>26632

Seems cynical to me, frankly.

I can't help see it as a bit of a hypocrisy that when a game makes you play as an ugly lass they're all up in arms because you're a chud if you don't want to play as an ugly lass, but at the same time it's vital to make these features to enable more people to feel included. That's fair enough, but they contradict each other. Which one is it, are you supposed to suck it up and play as a character you don't like, or do you have a right to expect games have characters that represent you?

I for one certainly feel anthropomorphic foxes with big thick cocks are under-represented in modern videogames.

[Simpsons Grandpa "it'll happen to you too" meme but about being a chud]

>>26632
I think the word you're looking for is "performative". I've always felt this way about asking people for their preferred gender pronouns. For a tiny number of people, that question is very important. And you don't want to single them out by only asking them, so let's ask everyone. But imagine if I asked every single person I ever met how many legs they have, just on the off-chance I might meet someone with a wooden leg. It's the right thing to do, in theory, but it's just not practical in any way.

>>26632
Vitiligo is a funny one to me because in visual media ofcourse it had to be the only clearly visible disability (or whatever it's considered). Couldn't well have a person in an powered fucking wheelchair, dribbling with impacted food stuck to the roof of their gaping mouth, right? I've worked with that dude and he was pretty cool but hewas a mentally handicapped flid - literally.

Why do we need representation in games, anyway? What is it with the need for self-inserts? You don't see it in films. Even oldschool RPGs had you play a character, even the ones you scratched up on a character sheet had defining characters in their choice of voice and what was expected of them in the setting/story.

/shittake