Does every game have to be so deep in complexity, though? What if I'm not in the mood for intricate stories, super-deep gameplay, or pinpoint precision? What if I simply want to have a fun, streamlined FPS experience?
Sometimes I'm just in the mood to watch something like Initial D. However, you will never catch me saying Initial D is good.
If something is enjoyable, and is satisfying when you want something like that, can't you call it good entertainment?
Because seemingly unlike most people in the world I have the ability to ignore my personal feelings when I critique something. I personally really like Initial D, but I know that the character designs are awful, the animation is awful, the story is trite and formulaic. I also recognize that the vast majority of people in the world will really hate Initial D. Yes, everything is subjective, but if you can't see that Initial D is shite, then you need your head examined.
Likewise, if I watch a movie like Citizen Kane, do I enjoy it? Yeah, I enjoy it, but not even half as much as I enjoy something like Star Wars or The Matrix. So is Star Wars a better movie? Hell no! If I watch Citizen Kane the superior craftsmanship and cinematography is so blatantly obvious, there is no question that it is a vastly superior work. Enjoyability is not the only metric by which to measure something. This is especially true since not all works of art have the intent of creating joy.
Just this past holiday weekend I beat two video games, Alan Wake and Metroid: Other M. There were many times of enjoyment while playing both of them, but they were both really bad games. The inability of most people to separate their personal feelings from critical evaluation is the primary cause of every argument in this forum about what's good and what is bad.
I'm not talking about something being a good movie, or good TV series. I'm talking about something being good entertainment. Why the hell should I need to separate my personal feelings when critical evaluation is something I'm concerned about not one bit? Entertainment is completely, utterly subjective. If it does the job of entertaining you, it is good entertainment.
If it does the job of entertaining you, it is good entertainment.
Console FPS games can be good entertainment.
For anything you find, there is someone in the world who is entertained by it. That clump of dirt on the ground? That really entertains some little kid. Does that mean dirt is good entertainment? If you are personally entertained by something, then I'm glad for you, but it really isn't any basis for discussion. It's like, OK, Luke enjoys X, nothing more to say about that.
Take for example a discussion of what is a better board game, Puerto Rico or Agricola. If we bring personal taste into it, the discussion looks like this.
Scott: I had more fun playing Puerto Rico, it's better. Rym: I had more fun playing Agricola, it's better.
...
Now if we can ignore our personal feelings we can have a valuable discussion on the matter.
Scott: Puerto Rico is better because the only factor of randomness is the order of plantations. They are a shared resource, so they do not create any unfair asymmetry. The cards in Agricola are a huge asymmetric luck factor that really hurt the game. Rym: The cards in Agricola, however, are not powerful enough, and are all balanced, so as to not greatly give any player an advantage due to luck. At the same time, they vastly increase the replay value. Also, the varying order the different tasks appear in each game also greatly contributes to the replayability of Agricola.
You see, there is no accounting for taste. It's not something you can discuss. It's just something you share, and then that's that. If someone's favorite movie is Land Before Time 5, you can't question them. There's really no point in even saying such a thing on a forum which is a platform for discussions, since it's something that can't be discussed or debated in any way.
The only way to have a discussion about something subjective is to forget your personal feelings and evaluate the qualities of that thing.
At the very least, people need to learn to explain why they like/dislike something. Most people just seem to pull the Apple Jacks argument whenever this question arises. Lastly, people need to not take personal offense when someone argues that something they like is shit. If you say you like a game, and I say it sucks, and take it as a personal attack, that's just stupid. Well, unless you are the one who made the game, then yeah, it's a personal attack. But just because you like something that sucks doesn't say anything about you as a person any more than me liking Initial D says about me.
The limitations of a controller force developers to decide what is important in their game, and require them to work around these roadblocks
I have to wonder, does this argument also apply to the Wii or the Kinect? Like the limitations of the Kintect for the racing game they have so you cant control how fast the car goes, and you only control the steering. That's working around the limitations of the controller correct?
I saw a video of a guy who sat on his couch and got 3rd place in the kinect racing game, he just sat there and did nothing. Pretty impressive way to work around those limitations of the controller.
The limitations of a controller force developers to decide what is important in their game, and require them to work around these roadblocks
I have to wonder, does this argument also apply to the Wii or the Kinect? Like the limitations of the Kintect for the racing game they have so you cant control how fast the car goes, and you only control the steering. That's working around the limitations of the controller correct?
I saw a video of a guy who sat on his couch and got 3rd place in the kinect racing game, he just sat there and did nothing. Pretty impressive way to work around those limitations of the controller.
A prefect example of how decreasing the precision of the input mechanism can make a game that is usually a test of skill, a racing game, into something that's not much of a game at all.
The only way to have a discussion about something subjective is to forget your personal feelings and evaluate the qualities of that thing.
You see, this is something I completely disagree with!
I can have a really good discussion about Goldeneye on the N64, and only talk about how great it was for me to make friends with other students at university. I can talk about how I completed every level on every difficulty, except for the hardest setting on the satellite dish level. Someone else had a go, and beat that level trivially, and that was the last one I needed to unlock all the extra levels and characters in the multiplayer mode. So I never did complete that level! This has stuck with me since then, as even though I feel like I completed the game 100%, the truth is I was probably never good enough to beat it. You could say "You have to forget about your personal feelings" but in doing so I couldn't bring in the in-cartridge gave saving function.
No. I'm not going to discard personal feelings. This is part of life, and life itself is interesting enough to discuss on a forum, and in life in general, without trying to find the elusive objective qualities of certain things. I CAN only evaluate objective qualities, and have just done so when purchasing a new camera body from Amazon. But reducing entertainment down to those aspects isn't interesting to me, nor do I find it that useful or entertaining.
In my book review podcast, I DO talk about objective qualities, but the majority of my reviews are taken up by me talking about thematic elements, and how they resonate with me personally. At the end of the review, I give a star rating, but I always say this is purely subjective, and are influenced by things like if I've read the book before, or if I had higher expectations.
Now, I could say that this is the best way to do a review. But guess what? I'm not going to! That would be an objective claim about entertainment. Instead I'll just say that my last episode has been downloaded over four thousand times, so that I'm guessing many other people find subjective reviews entertaining. As it goes, my podcast, with discussions about subjective, personal feelings, is "good".
I don't "forget" about personal feelings, I separate them. I prefer reviews that do both, individually.
On the Initial D example, I would never suggest someone else watch it because it's good. I believe it's NOT a good show. If I recommend it, it would be to someone I think would like it, with the specific warning that "this is not a good show" attached.
Most console FPSs are fun for many people, but not for me, and I can articulate why. They also fall into a different category of game altogether in many cases due to fundamental design differences. Tribes and Halo compete superficially, in that they're both first person, and you shoot in them, but by many standards they do not actually compete: they are in two different classes of games.
On the Initial D example, I would never suggest someone else watch it because it's good. I believe it's NOT a good show. If I recommend it, it would be to someone I think would like it, with the specific warning that "this is not a good show" attached.
So if we wanted, we can have a discussion about why you liked it enough to recommend it, right?
I'm not sure why Scott thinks there's no value in this.
On the Initial D example, I would never suggest someone else watch it because it's good. I believe it's NOT a good show. If I recommend it, it would be to someone I think would like it, with the specific warning that "this is not a good show" attached.
So if we wanted, we can have a discussion about why you liked it enough to recommend it, right?
I'm not sure why Scott thinks there's no value in this.
Try discussing why you liked something without starting to actually critique it in the way I want you to.
Try discussing why you liked something without starting to actually critique it in the way I want you to
I don't understand what you mean by this.
Should I try to do something that I do easily, all the time? Sure, but then I don't need to try, I just "do". Are you trying to make me prove your point for you? If so, you are going to fail. There IS value in discussing subjective elements in terms of entertainment. The VALUE this brings is MORE ENTERTAINMENT. If entertainment is what is valued most, discarding elements that increase chances of more entertainment is objectively BAD.
Nice cherry picking. There are plenty of tense, white-knuckle moments in games of COD that I have played. Just because a game isn't flashing pretty lights in your face all the time and revved up to ludicrous speed does not make it inherently better.
Nice cherry picking. There are plenty of tense, white-knuckle moments in games of COD that I have played. Just because a game isn't flashing pretty lights in your face all the time and revved up to ludicrous speed does not make it inherently better.
People value this because they're good at it. They're not good at something else, and see it as silly, useless, or boring, therefore it is "Objectively" worse. The biggest problem is that the various gaming communities spend so much time and intellect on being enormous cunts to each other instead of playing some fuckin' games. Some dude likes to play COD - So why do you need to spend hours faking a video of the best bits of quake next to a video of you sitting alone in a private, passworded lan game so you can make COD look boring?
Wouldn't you have had more fun if you'd have just said "Fuck it, some dudes play COD, whatever. I'm going to have some fun doing something I enjoy more, they can do their thing if they want, doesn't cause me a hassle."
I mean, Shit, Andrew Likes Mount and Blade, but you don't catch me making videos of dudes slowly re-loading their muskets and standing in rows, while I blow up EVERYTHING in Just Cause 2 and speeding up footage and making jump cuts to the bits where I did impressive things instead of dying over and over, or something. Nah, dude wants to play him some Mount and Blade, and I'm 100% cool with that, even if it's not really my thing. I even watch videos of him and his mates having a laugh in it from time to time, because they're usually funny or interesting to watch.
So, Scott doesn't like TF2, or COD, or any of that. He also never plays them, sensibly, if he doesn't like them. Yet he spends so many fucking calories hating on them and bragging about his own 5|_|p3r L337 5|<1LLz0rz, you gotta wonder - is he compensating for something? Covering? Does he have a bizarre need to be better than everyone, when these people are largely just ignoring him and having fun doing their own thing? It's not like if Scott made, say, a Mintyboost, I'd bother saying how shit and easy such a project is, and brag about how I built an entire car, by hand, from scratch, and it just won Bathurst. I just say "Hey, that's pretty cool man, you did some nice work, I like it. What are you thinking about for the next project?"
Also consider for both of these examples - I'm an enormous cunt. I'll jump on some poor bastard like Mario on a Goomba, and I'll be at it faster than Sonic after crushing up and snorting chaos emeralds, and even I wouldn't bother wasting the time and calories to carry on like this - and you gotta wonder, what the hell are you doing if even a self-admitted turbo arsehole is saying that the way you carry on is a bit beyond the pale and gives people strong cause to wonder about you.
People value this because they're good at it. They're not good at something else
First, why would you think that someone who is good at Quake is no good at the slower FPS? In my experience, the people who are good at the fast FPS are good at the slow ones, but not vice versa. A Quake master who plays CoD or some such will be an untouchable god, but a CoD player playing Quake won't even get a handful of frags.
So, Scott doesn't like TF2, or COD, or any of that. He also never plays them, sensibly, if he doesn't like them. Yet he spends so many fucking calories hating on them and bragging about his own 5|_|p3r L337 5|<1LLz0rz, you gotta wonder - is he compensating for something? Covering?</p>
There's nothing I'm compensating for. You seem to think I'm better than I am at the fast FPS and worse than I am at the slow ones. At a game like Quake Live I rarely if ever actually win. Mostly I come in the top 25% when I'm fully practiced, but that's about it. The same goes for the slow games like NS or Counter-Strike. I'm just slightly above average at all FPS.
When I complain about FPS it's for these reasons.
1) Stateful bullshit causing unfair competition, as in TF2. 2) Gamepads being inferior control mechanisms, as in Halo. 3) Games that are so slow and where aiming matters so little that they are RPGs, not FPS, as in Borderlands if it was competitive. 4) Ironsights and other effects added that detriment the gameplay in favor of feaux-realism.
If I was hating on all FPS that aren't super fast, why do I like Counter-Strike? It's a fair test of skill on the PC with no stateful bullshit. It's nearly as slow as CoD, but it is made of win.
The point of the video is that most FPS players nowadays have only ever really played CoD and such. They don't even know Quake. If they do, they never saw how it looks when it is played properly, because that would require them to play it a great deal and learn all the difficult techniques. You have to push a lot of buttons very precisely to go that fast, it's not the default speed. It's introducing people to a world that they never new existed.
Let's see. 1) That I give to you. I can live and play with it, but you got a point. 2) So every car race should be done with Formula 1 cars, because other cars are inferior? 3) Borderlands was an rpg, so complaining that it was an rpg is just silly. 4) Different gameplay mechanics are not automatically bad. Not even if your personal opinion is that they suck.
There's nothing I'm compensating for. You seem to think I'm better than I am at the fast FPS and worse than I am at the slow ones. At a game like Quake Live I rarely if ever actually win. Mostly I come in the top 25% when I'm fully practiced, but that's about it. The same goes for the slow games like NS or Counter-Strike. I'm just slightly above average at all FPS.
No, you got that wrong. I don't think Anything(as in, not one way or the other, not that I think you don't have them) of your skills in ANY speed or style of FPS, because I haven't seen them. I can't assess skill without seeing it, and while I do have your own proclamations to go on, I have good reasons not to trust such self-assessments of skill. I'll Take the piss, but I refuse to make any actual assessment without seeing them firsthand.
Let me put it this way - You've never seen me play an FPS, but would you truly believe my claim of barely-moderate skill without seeing it, would you think I'm useless, would you think I'm fuckin' amazing, or would you just hold your judgement till you saw it for yourself?
First, why would you think that someone who is good at Quake is no good at the slower FPS? In my experience, the people who are good at the fast FPS are good at the slow ones, but not vice versa. A Quake master who plays CoD or some such will be an untouchable god, but a CoD player playing Quake won't even get a handful of frags.
Evidence, please. Oh wait, You have literally none other than your own personal anecdotal evidence - which is worth less than nothing - and refuse to actually make any, so I'm afraid I'll have to dismiss your claim as completely baseless fantasy, but feel free to keep talkin'. Unless you want to hold other people to a standard you yourself do not wish to follow?
It's introducing people to a world that they never new existed.
Oh, you poor disadvantaged wizard, forced to put up with the Muggles.
2) So every car race should be done with Formula 1 cars, because other cars are inferior?
No. I'm saying every racing game should use a steering wheel and pedals.
No, you got that wrong. I don't think Anything(as in, not one way or the other, not that I think you don't have them) of your skills in ANY speed or style of FPS, because I haven't seen them.
That's a little contradictory since you were just suggesting I was compensating for something.
Oh, you poor disadvantaged wizard, forced to put up with the Muggles.
Trying to enlighten people is respectable, even when unsuccessful. Actively resisting enlightenment, now that is one of the top five problems in our society.
Just give up, guys. It's Scott's world, we just live in it. I mean, he has a podcast. How can we even hope to win an argument against such a foe?
I'm waiting for when Scott gets acknowledgement from a gaming company, developing or review-wise, that'll let him go off or give him the power necessary to make the super special awesome game or patch that'll blow people's minds.
Just give up, guys. It's Scott's world, we just live in it. I mean, he has a podcast. How can we even hope to win an argument against such a foe?
I'm waiting for when Scott gets acknowledgement from a gaming company, developing or review-wise, that'll let him go off or give him the power necessary to make the super special awesome game or patch that'll blow people's minds.
It will never happen because good games don't sell.
Comments
Likewise, if I watch a movie like Citizen Kane, do I enjoy it? Yeah, I enjoy it, but not even half as much as I enjoy something like Star Wars or The Matrix. So is Star Wars a better movie? Hell no! If I watch Citizen Kane the superior craftsmanship and cinematography is so blatantly obvious, there is no question that it is a vastly superior work. Enjoyability is not the only metric by which to measure something. This is especially true since not all works of art have the intent of creating joy.
Just this past holiday weekend I beat two video games, Alan Wake and Metroid: Other M. There were many times of enjoyment while playing both of them, but they were both really bad games. The inability of most people to separate their personal feelings from critical evaluation is the primary cause of every argument in this forum about what's good and what is bad.
Console FPS games can be good entertainment.
Take for example a discussion of what is a better board game, Puerto Rico or Agricola. If we bring personal taste into it, the discussion looks like this.
Scott: I had more fun playing Puerto Rico, it's better.
Rym: I had more fun playing Agricola, it's better.
...
Now if we can ignore our personal feelings we can have a valuable discussion on the matter.
Scott: Puerto Rico is better because the only factor of randomness is the order of plantations. They are a shared resource, so they do not create any unfair asymmetry. The cards in Agricola are a huge asymmetric luck factor that really hurt the game.
Rym: The cards in Agricola, however, are not powerful enough, and are all balanced, so as to not greatly give any player an advantage due to luck. At the same time, they vastly increase the replay value. Also, the varying order the different tasks appear in each game also greatly contributes to the replayability of Agricola.
You see, there is no accounting for taste. It's not something you can discuss. It's just something you share, and then that's that. If someone's favorite movie is Land Before Time 5, you can't question them. There's really no point in even saying such a thing on a forum which is a platform for discussions, since it's something that can't be discussed or debated in any way.
The only way to have a discussion about something subjective is to forget your personal feelings and evaluate the qualities of that thing.
At the very least, people need to learn to explain why they like/dislike something. Most people just seem to pull the Apple Jacks argument whenever this question arises. Lastly, people need to not take personal offense when someone argues that something they like is shit. If you say you like a game, and I say it sucks, and take it as a personal attack, that's just stupid. Well, unless you are the one who made the game, then yeah, it's a personal attack. But just because you like something that sucks doesn't say anything about you as a person any more than me liking Initial D says about me.
I saw a video of a guy who sat on his couch and got 3rd place in the kinect racing game, he just sat there and did nothing. Pretty impressive way to work around those limitations of the controller.
I can have a really good discussion about Goldeneye on the N64, and only talk about how great it was for me to make friends with other students at university. I can talk about how I completed every level on every difficulty, except for the hardest setting on the satellite dish level. Someone else had a go, and beat that level trivially, and that was the last one I needed to unlock all the extra levels and characters in the multiplayer mode. So I never did complete that level! This has stuck with me since then, as even though I feel like I completed the game 100%, the truth is I was probably never good enough to beat it. You could say "You have to forget about your personal feelings" but in doing so I couldn't bring in the in-cartridge gave saving function.
No. I'm not going to discard personal feelings. This is part of life, and life itself is interesting enough to discuss on a forum, and in life in general, without trying to find the elusive objective qualities of certain things. I CAN only evaluate objective qualities, and have just done so when purchasing a new camera body from Amazon. But reducing entertainment down to those aspects isn't interesting to me, nor do I find it that useful or entertaining.
In my book review podcast, I DO talk about objective qualities, but the majority of my reviews are taken up by me talking about thematic elements, and how they resonate with me personally. At the end of the review, I give a star rating, but I always say this is purely subjective, and are influenced by things like if I've read the book before, or if I had higher expectations.
Now, I could say that this is the best way to do a review. But guess what? I'm not going to! That would be an objective claim about entertainment. Instead I'll just say that my last episode has been downloaded over four thousand times, so that I'm guessing many other people find subjective reviews entertaining. As it goes, my podcast, with discussions about subjective, personal feelings, is "good".
On the Initial D example, I would never suggest someone else watch it because it's good. I believe it's NOT a good show. If I recommend it, it would be to someone I think would like it, with the specific warning that "this is not a good show" attached.
Most console FPSs are fun for many people, but not for me, and I can articulate why. They also fall into a different category of game altogether in many cases due to fundamental design differences. Tribes and Halo compete superficially, in that they're both first person, and you shoot in them, but by many standards they do not actually compete: they are in two different classes of games.
I'm not sure why Scott thinks there's no value in this.
Should I try to do something that I do easily, all the time? Sure, but then I don't need to try, I just "do". Are you trying to make me prove your point for you? If so, you are going to fail. There IS value in discussing subjective elements in terms of entertainment. The VALUE this brings is MORE ENTERTAINMENT. If entertainment is what is valued most, discarding elements that increase chances of more entertainment is objectively BAD.
People value this because they're good at it. They're not good at something else, and see it as silly, useless, or boring, therefore it is "Objectively" worse. The biggest problem is that the various gaming communities spend so much time and intellect on being enormous cunts to each other instead of playing some fuckin' games. Some dude likes to play COD - So why do you need to spend hours faking a video of the best bits of quake next to a video of you sitting alone in a private, passworded lan game so you can make COD look boring?
Wouldn't you have had more fun if you'd have just said "Fuck it, some dudes play COD, whatever. I'm going to have some fun doing something I enjoy more, they can do their thing if they want, doesn't cause me a hassle."
I mean, Shit, Andrew Likes Mount and Blade, but you don't catch me making videos of dudes slowly re-loading their muskets and standing in rows, while I blow up EVERYTHING in Just Cause 2 and speeding up footage and making jump cuts to the bits where I did impressive things instead of dying over and over, or something. Nah, dude wants to play him some Mount and Blade, and I'm 100% cool with that, even if it's not really my thing. I even watch videos of him and his mates having a laugh in it from time to time, because they're usually funny or interesting to watch.
So, Scott doesn't like TF2, or COD, or any of that. He also never plays them, sensibly, if he doesn't like them. Yet he spends so many fucking calories hating on them and bragging about his own 5|_|p3r L337 5|<1LLz0rz, you gotta wonder - is he compensating for something? Covering? Does he have a bizarre need to be better than everyone, when these people are largely just ignoring him and having fun doing their own thing? It's not like if Scott made, say, a Mintyboost, I'd bother saying how shit and easy such a project is, and brag about how I built an entire car, by hand, from scratch, and it just won Bathurst. I just say "Hey, that's pretty cool man, you did some nice work, I like it. What are you thinking about for the next project?"
Also consider for both of these examples - I'm an enormous cunt. I'll jump on some poor bastard like Mario on a Goomba, and I'll be at it faster than Sonic after crushing up and snorting chaos emeralds, and even I wouldn't bother wasting the time and calories to carry on like this - and you gotta wonder, what the hell are you doing if even a self-admitted turbo arsehole is saying that the way you carry on is a bit beyond the pale and gives people strong cause to wonder about you.
When I complain about FPS it's for these reasons.
1) Stateful bullshit causing unfair competition, as in TF2.
2) Gamepads being inferior control mechanisms, as in Halo.
3) Games that are so slow and where aiming matters so little that they are RPGs, not FPS, as in Borderlands if it was competitive.
4) Ironsights and other effects added that detriment the gameplay in favor of feaux-realism.
If I was hating on all FPS that aren't super fast, why do I like Counter-Strike? It's a fair test of skill on the PC with no stateful bullshit. It's nearly as slow as CoD, but it is made of win.
The point of the video is that most FPS players nowadays have only ever really played CoD and such. They don't even know Quake. If they do, they never saw how it looks when it is played properly, because that would require them to play it a great deal and learn all the difficult techniques. You have to push a lot of buttons very precisely to go that fast, it's not the default speed. It's introducing people to a world that they never new existed.
1) That I give to you. I can live and play with it, but you got a point.
2) So every car race should be done with Formula 1 cars, because other cars are inferior?
3) Borderlands was an rpg, so complaining that it was an rpg is just silly.
4) Different gameplay mechanics are not automatically bad. Not even if your personal opinion is that they suck.
Let me put it this way - You've never seen me play an FPS, but would you truly believe my claim of barely-moderate skill without seeing it, would you think I'm useless, would you think I'm fuckin' amazing, or would you just hold your judgement till you saw it for yourself? Evidence, please. Oh wait, You have literally none other than your own personal anecdotal evidence - which is worth less than nothing - and refuse to actually make any, so I'm afraid I'll have to dismiss your claim as completely baseless fantasy, but feel free to keep talkin'. Unless you want to hold other people to a standard you yourself do not wish to follow? Oh, you poor disadvantaged wizard, forced to put up with the Muggles.