Posts
Ludonarrative Dissonance
"Ludonarrative" is pretentious for "Gameplay and story" and dissonance means the two don't really match together. Like I could be slaughtering people by the thousands and then all of the sudden the videogame tries to make me feel bad about it, and then I just continue slaughtering things by the thousands. Or perhaps you're playing someone who is portrayed as a righteous hero completely unironically but then the gameplay usually involves you being rewarded for taking as much morally dubious action as possible. Apparently talk around this term started sometime with Bioshock, where criticism was raised around the mission-based and incredibly linear nature of the game (you are told to go here, do thing, then told once again to go...
Game Motive vs. Story Motive
A bit of a followup to my last post, which was a little schizophrenic in hindsight but I think I got the point across in some way. The plot of Mario games are usually pretty simple, you want to go save someone from Bowser so you jump across a lot of things to do that. The thing is, I don't really care about Mario's problems because Mario is a fictional character who lives in a fantasy land filled with nonsensical bullshit. How exactly does a game reconcile the differences between what I care about and what Mario cares about? I use Mario because the story there is easy to understand, but really you can apply this to just about...
The Game Is Fun
"The game, is fun. The game, is a battle. If the game is not fun, why bother?" These are the words Reggie said around E3 2017, and in an era where bad time wasting movie games were starting to kick off Reggie singlehandedly handwaved the entire movement with that quote and the moviegames crowd has never came up with a proper response to it since. Now on the verge of bad triple A trash bombing left and right from forgetting the core fundamentals of 'fun', we have to ask ourselves why he was so right and what it tells us about games. The reason I bring this up is because many people think 'fun' is a buzzword, not important. It...
Accessibility Gone Wrong
Accessibility has been a pretty commonly brought up topic in the world of vidyerjames relatively recently, with some big names attempting to implement more and more features to make their games more accessible to wider audiences. This is generally speaking a good thing, but alongside these attempts to make games more accessible to a variety of audiences came a lot of really stupid shit getting shoved in under the guise of 'accessibility', and that's the stuff we're going to be talking about today. First I'm gonna bring up what I see accessibility as. I imagine this could be a controversial thing to describe, but I'll give it my best shot. What accessibility really is Say you have a girl named...
Yellow Paint Problems
Many game devs, most notably Capcom with their recent remakes, have made pretty baffling decisions around the artistic direction of their games. On certain objects of importance or in areas of importance, yellow paint gets smeared on something to indicate that you can interact with it, or to give an important hint. In these otherwise very realistic looking games, it begs the question of who puts the yellow paint there (the developers), what his purpose is (being an obnoxious guide), or how it got there to begin with (hastily done last minute texture editing). I saw some image about the dreaded yellow paint in videogames and got reminded that I have strong opinions about the yellow paint. There also remains...