A critique of some Leigh Alexander approved tripe about: “Can games exist without players?”
First off, here’s the original article, like hell I’m giving a cultural fascist like Leigh Alexander any clicks (read her Gamers Are Over article if you don’t believe me, she believes imposing her values on others without their consent is so righteous those who don’t like it need to acquiesce or be rendered impotent to stop her)
As always, original in italics, my comments in regular font:
This week, our partnership with Critical Distance brings us interviews with the developers behind Cibele and Uriel’s Chasm, as well as a meditation on games that aren’t meant to be played.
First up, Keith Stuart chatted with Nina Freeman about her recent game Cibele:
Has [Nina] ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”
For those who aren’t aware, Cibele is not a game, it’s a fairly short walking simulator on rails where you are almost completely observing the story and little more. As someone who has done a few kinetic visual novels, that’s fine, but all those never had pretensions about being games, they were stories in a visual novel format.
Me, It’s not my cup of tea, do not fault those that enjoy it, but the reason why hardly anyone in the “mainstream” game community finds it appealing is because they like games where you do have agency, the plot can be altered by the player, you can throw the plot off it’s rails. I don’t mind curling up with a good story, but don’t call it game, call it a story in visual novel format, especially if the actual gameplay is so marginal as to be nigh meaningless.
At Kill Screen, Chris Priestman interviewed alt games creator Dylan Barry about his newest project, Uriel’s Chasm 2:
Barry didn’t realize that bringing these games to Steam would seemingly offend so many people. He saw in their reaction a familiar “religious behaviour,” as if he had walked into their temple and smashed their stone commandments, which laid out what games were and how they should be… It was for aspects such as this, along with its esoteric narrative and peculiar challenges, that Uriel’s Chasm was labeled “bundleware”… But Barry wore this label as a badge of honor. This is exactly what he was going for. “My aim was to potentially change a person’s life with something made for mass bundling,” he tells me. “I wanted to play right into the pigeon hole I’d been put in, then feel around for the walls, the limitations of exactly what could be achieved in that dark place.”
Uriel’s Chasm 2 is Touhou with Christian themes, and even though I am a Christian, I’m personally am generally leery of games that wear their Christian themes on their sleeve, as most of them tend to suck (save possibly Bible Adventures, which was kinda fun on NES), usually because they hamfist the Christian themes so clumsily it turns off even the devout, and the reputation for this is so well known most players even those who want a game with open religious themes tend to shy away from games like this by default.
Barry’s error is same, his games are no different in execution, and while I admire wanting to spread the word, the format he chose was terrible for spreading the word, and as a fellow Christian and gamer, I wish him the best, but I advise he try a different format for organically working the Christian message into the core of the game, something more adventure or visual novel style would almost certainly be better.
Meanwhile, Ed Smith is worried about how children are presented as characters:
You encounter humanity in games not in people but through simpler, more tangible non-human vectors. You never speak to people, because people are complicated. Instead, you straightforwardly learn about people through architecture, diaries and robots, objects which can purport an essence of humanity but also be used to conveniently sidestep the pressures and expectations of writing and creating a believable human character.
My issue with this is simple: If your child characters suck, you need to be a better writer or have someone with better skill at writing them take the helm, not find a workaround for your lack of talent, at least in game where writing believable children is to be reasonably expected.
Not doing so is just dodging the problem instead of addressing it.
Games scholar Brendan Keogh imagines videogames without players:
Designed without a human player, the system would work perfectly, without hiccups, and much faster. While the computer can smash out thousands of decisions and act on them in a microsecond, the player has to drag their lumpy fleshy digits from one button to another and press it while also pushing on a thumbstick and thinking about what to do while also not being distracted by a barking dog or the afternoon sun glare on their television screen.
This defeats the whole point to gaming to begin with. It’s not even a game at this point, it’s an automatic program without human input.
It’s a nice mental exercise, but reality check, you are no longer describing a video game as meant to be enjoyed by humans.
And finally, this week comedian and critic Brock Wilbur looks inside himself to consider what it means to shoot virtual and real guns in the wake of the Paris attacks:
I don’t think that the video games or even the guns are bad — they’re nothing more or less than beautifully consumer products made for a predominantly male audience — just that they may no longer be good for me. I can’t be alone there. I can’t be the only one starting to suspect that if he’s not a survivor, he’s something awfully close. I can’t be the only one starting to behave accordingly.
Okay, it might be in bad taste to play a bloody FPS right after a terrorist assault, certainly sympathize with anyone who thinks being offered to play a round of Doom after watching a brutal gun murder would be tasteless in the extreme, but let’s not kid ourselves: virtual and real guns are different beasts, with the difference being the latter actually can cause harm.
Also, made for a predominantly male market…..holy shit I love that stupid canard, especially from idiots who think Sunset sold poorly because it was shit on by the soggy knee crowd, instead of being a pretentious art project that offered really boring gameplay that never really did anything interesting with it’s intriguing sounding backstory.
Even games marketed specifically “for girls” can be played by either gender, I know, guy gamer who avidly played the girl version of Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, loved it, knew girls who played the guy version, so excuse me while I laugh long and hard at the idiots who believe this crap with no irony.
follow Critical Distance on Twitter and consider pledging your support on Patreon
I’d rather not support idiocy, thanks.