Posts

Roger Ebert Comments on Video Games

In a not terribly notable blog post but one that's so hilariously worded that it still trolls people to this day, Roger Ebert proclaimed that videogames would not be art in our lifetimes, if ever. He also claimed that people trying to debate him on this had made him weary and that he was going to make no attempt to defend his opinion, which makes people even more salty when they read it. Years after his death, lets poke at his corpse and analyze what exactly he had to say about video games as a medium. Before anything else, here is the post. To give you a brief rundown, Roger Ebert recently watched a TED talk from someone who...

Social Media Paradigm

There are many posts on small web blogs that are about Twitter and how bad it is, because so many bloggers were formerly on the biggest blogging site, Twitter, and they have strong opinions about it. This is not one of those posts. I do not use Twitter, but I am interested in dissecting things like the jackass neutral third party that I am, so I'll be looking through what social media is today and asking the question of what it'll be tomorrow, looking through history and trends to land on the obvious conclusion that Tiktok is the next big thing. Okay let's start with what I consider the 'beginning' of Internet social shit and then gradually make our way...

Story vs Experience

You know I've been thinking through some of my older posts talking about videogames and story and what not, I realize I focus a lot on something that really isn't the most important thing ever in hindsight which is how "videogames tell story". That's great and all, but not all videogames really have a story and I'm basically saying that they should. It might sound silly to say that videogames can't have a story, but a lot of mediums don't necessarily tell stories, like painting, music, dance... they tell experiences. Emotions. I'll keep this short since I've already talked about it a bit but really stuff like this is important to think about for game development. A story implies something...

Ludonarrative Dissonance Followup

A followup to a post on Ludonarrative Dissonance, where I talked about the concept and two games in particular that suffered heavily from its issues. I pointed out those two in particular because they were so heavily talked about as new paradigms for videogames as a whole, when they were really cheap trash stuck so far in the past that it was unbelivable anyone would praise them without having recieved financial compensation for doing so. However, I am considering that this is a much wider issue than I previously let on. One thing you have to realize about the issue is that, like, a lot of games have it. An overwhelming majority of the games out there. It's largely...

Thoughts on the Steam Deck

I don't have a Steam Deck and I'm probably not going to buy one any time soon, but the concept of it is very interesting to me. Being a fan of the Vita, to me the Steam Deck seems like a spiritual successor and one that's much more designed around the things I liked about the Vita rather than being horribly shitty and locked down without hacking. It's also facing a real uphill battle by the contradictory nature of its existence. The Steam Deck is Valve's next big attempt to try and put Steam into the living room. There's a big casual market out there that like consoles, notably in places like Japan, and Steam has always been at a...