Ah, fuck it

>You can think of these games as presenting "Frictionless" ideology, the way the Sims or something like that creates frictionless capitlist desire.
good point. very much so

>So frictionless in like Civ 5 is not having to create a slave class early game, or for starcraft you don't need to develop a complexly orchestrated economy with multiple levels jsut to move a rock from one place to another
yes. and so here is another thing: are games essentially priming us for the requirements of living in a world in which everything becomes in the final sense one wonderful mimetic smorgasbord of capital and mimesis? i think so. i think it's why games take over from cinema, and many other things. we virtualize in a feels > reals world

and it's why art is worth taking seriously again, because all of this stuff suggests trajectories about where we are headed in such a world, what we like, dislike, much else

i used to think it was all about politics. now i'm pretty sure art is the subject to think about. games &c have a lot to say about human desire, and desire is kind of a thing these days. popularity matters

i'll do one more game, just to provoke thoughts or w/ev. one of the most interesting games going on today: pic rel.

b/c i am fond of talking about nick land and acceleration, it would be hard to find a more excellent précis of the situation of late capitalism than pic rel. the dwarves of a dwarf fortress are as solidly bourgeois middle-class capitalists as they come, and the monsters that breach the walls are coming in from the Outside. is this is the omega point of capitalism? true, it's a fantasy story, and not a science fiction story, but i wonder sometimes if the points don't converge at the bottom in that sense.

the legacy of freudo-marxism teaches us that we live in a world of libidinal economy. landian fun draws some horrifying conclusions about the endgame of the unconscious: whether it's skynet or lovecraft, it's bad either way.

so games that basically explore the hijinx of capitalism - aesthetically more than politically - are fun to think about. of course you need good mechanics as well...

things to think about. some of this is going to go into a project of my own, hence the shitposting. but in general philosophy + vidya usually leads to interesting places

>Chairman Yang
Materialism is for brainlets. Yang is cucking himself and his people by only thinking of humanity as a collective of biological machines.
>Nier
Kinda played out anime-tier 'understanding' plot but it's got a really cool 'dying earth' setting which it actually handles really well with a lot of implied hard science behind the surface level crazy bullshit. I'm the last one to ever jerk off a game for something like 'tone' or 'aesthetics' but if one game deserves it it might be Nier. It looks pretty much exactly how I imagined parts of Vance's Dying Earth stories looked and has this great contrast between rustic country atmosphere and existential dread going for it. The soundtrack is absolutely excellent for a video game and the English dubbing is also spot-on, with the protagonist being the standout. So many of his lines could easily have sounded retarded but he makes it all work (he's pretty experienced, off the top of my head he's The Colonel in the newer dub of Akira and Carl in Serial Experiments Lain, also pretty sure he turns up in live-action movies sometimes).

It's got a few clever twists in the story and does a good job of playing off of the expectations of both its protagonist and you the player to make the story work. It's like what 'Spec Ops: The Line' was mercilessly felated by the media for, only done well.
>Dead Rising
I'm one of the biggest zombie fans you'll ever meet (I own City of the Living Dead on blu-ray, as well as most of Fulci's other stuff, and Romero's of course) and I think that Dead Rising is an all-time great piece of zombie-media. The cutscene direction and story are absolutely top-notch in that 'high-production values but distinctly not movie-like' way that most video games seem to have lost in recent years. It takes Romero's fun idea with the mall setting and takes the idea further by making American greed and excess a central theme in the story and has better characters and pacing than most story-driven games I've played. And that's not even getting into the gameplay, which is absolute lighting-in-a-bottle. The sequels could never get it down, the difficulty, variety, level design, the look, the sound, it was all just outstandingly done. Good thing for the recent Steam release or else one of the best action games ever made could have faded from memory.

Did you just watch 'The Pervert's Guide to Ideology' or something?

>i am learning to love mass culture again. feels good desu

that's nothing to be proud about

I'm glad you decided to stick around without the name. I am interested in the topic but really have to read all day.

>Materialism is for brainless.
i agree, but i find it a very seductive philosophy. and i like the tao muchly these days. it *is* true that one should not think of humanity as a collective of biological machines, but when one is in a state of despair, or grappling with acceleration, i have found it constructive to take the bull by the horns. that's more personal stuff i suppose. and the genius of that game was to present a vision of ideology that was complete enough to subscribe to without neatly dividing it into the Darkness and the Light ofc

>nier
that's an outstanding pitch. will have to look into that then. am listening to the soundtrack now per your recommendation & you're right. way way good. thx senpai

also
>merciless fellating
apparently too much of a good thing is possible

>dead rising
zombies matter. hugely. it was no accident that there was a crazy for zombie films for a while - still ongoing also, see walking dead & GoT. necromancy bothers us. it's 146% the horrors of consumption & libidinal economy imho.

also, george a romero died last month. i'm sure you knew this. the man was a visionary. what's the right way to celebrate the passing of an auteur? that auteur?

and also: how high up on your power rankings is red dead redemption for the zombie marshall? i feel like you have opinions about these things. i would like to hear them. tell me about zombie westerns if you would not mind

>Did you just watch 'The Pervert's Guide to Ideology' or something?
yesterday. scenes from. not for the first time. i like the ziz. i'm just a brain-damaged philosophy wonk with a stomach full of butterflies. it's what i do

>that's nothing to be proud about
my guy this shit is the coolest. pulp is great. fantasy is great. sf is great. vidya is great. philosophy is great. it's an embarrassment of riches. too darn interesting

aye. me too. i love this place too much. enjoy reading, check back in later, i have to get some stuff today done anyhow

lots to talk about tho. lots of cool stuff i think in vidya + philosophy. such as

>games have politics
but not in the way third-rate lit-crit would like it to be. not the good ones. i have Big Thoughts about this

>guise stop having fun I'm trying to argue over dusty old tomes with other greasy nerds about religion again!

or

>Veeky Forums
i want to talk about philosophy, ideology, criticism, hyperstition, capitalism & all the rest. the games are texts. things to think about. we're not talking about how to win on nightmare mode

>general
and i also didn't want to colonize the entire thing with my own fuckface opinions.

this thread was here to talk about games & ideology & whatever else. if people are into it, the thread will bloom and prosper, and the golden elixir will be produced, and there will be peace in the land. if they do not it will shrivel, and become a small thing, and dwell once again in the darkness, among mushrooms and mossy creatures and cave swine

ideology and science fiction. it's a thing. it happens. no need to put things in boxes. let's ask what did japan mean by this. maybe they know something we don't. you get the idea

btw games are for children

so, first -

>the average gamer is 35 years old
>In 2016, the industry sold over 24.5 billion games and generated more than $34.4 billion in revenue. Total game sales included purchases of digital content such as online subscriptions, downloadable content, mobile applications, and social networking games. Computer and video game companies provide jobs to more than 220,000 people in 50 states.

theesa.com/about-esa/industry-facts/

i would predict that those numbers continue to go up. everybody plays games now. everyone. and i'm not going to turn my nose up at these kinds of aesthetics

third, the age is a *neotenous* one. on the horizon: i predict *less* maturity. both good and bad. more coming off the grid. more much else.

third: the neetch.

fourth: wittgenstein on sillinesss.

fifth: games rules. art yo

sixth: come on brah

not so much feeling the need to defend Muh Gamer Culture - this would be very silly and cringingly embarrassing - but shit be art, yo. once upon a time cinema was in similar straits. let's talk about aesthetics, i think they're going places. i think they have a bright future

twelfth: i can't count
second: i need to edit more carefully

i feel dumb

Starcraft is for fags

mfw i see what kind of mental gymnastics videogames-loving manchildren have to go through to justify their sub-par medium

One of the really interesting things I noticed about games is that the people who, just a few years ago, were forwarding them as culturally significant have now abandoned ship to write identity politics crap. It's fucking amazing how even those who used to espouse games as texts don't really care about games anymore. They've really been exposed for the agenda they were pushing and I'm sure it's why 'serious' games blogs have deteriorated massively over the past few years.

Doesn't say anything about the fun factor but it's definitely something I've noticed.

>once upon a time cinema was in similar straits

Hate this argument. Cinema was made by adults and told stories about actual lives in countless ways, both entertaining and art-house.

Name me any prominent designers that are still making a living because all I can see is the industry getting increasingly stale with a fan-base that mirrors the depth and worth of comic book movies. Look at my post above to see what happened to the 'serious' critics who knew their days were numbered as video-game fans moved on, left college, and stopped taking shit so seriously.

I don't mind a good game every now and then but it's absolutely nothing like cinema. You might get an interesting game once every few years. Everything is simply Uncharted IV levels of vacuous entertainment (love the game but you have to call it like it is).

chris metzen seems to have a pretty good life. his beard is very silly but pulp seemed to have worked out well for him. in the meantime i work at a donut shop. i am full of envy and mystified by these things. i hope you understand that i am being partly facetious here but partly serious

you've got it backwards tho.

it's not about justifying a sub-par medium. first of all, games are outstandingly interesting and full of surprises. they are the artistic medium going on today, and mass culture is no joke.

i choose to put myself through mental gymnastics for reasons i can't even explain. the story is long and pointless and not really all that interesting. i just like philosophy. and i am hung up on art.

games tho: that's art. aesthetics and mechanics. icycalm was right about a lot of stuff. so was sid meier. so are lots of other guys.

so it's not about justifying a sub-par medium. try it this way: the medium is already wholly and not partially justified. when 20m koreans like playing starcraft, there's something going on there. when 20m guys in eastern europe like playing heroes 3, there's something going on there. when 20m japanese like playing DQ or FF games, there's something going on there. when 20m americans like playing madden
>&c

so we can talk about games more generally, or we can talk specifically about science fiction stuff...which is more my bag, b/c i am all about acceleration. again, not because i really want skynet to devour the sun. i'm more about thinking where that too comes from, wat do, & so on. and not in a revolutionary sense or a political one. more just looking at aesthetics in a feels > real world.

this, and also 1000% fucking this.

this is one of the things i actually like about games that to my mind are worth talking about: that by giving players choices, or allowing for multiple endings, or just having sufficiently intelligent designers, games can jump a sort of postmodern hurdle that may just come inscribed on narrative. you get choices how to end plots, and this isn't even to talk about a game like SMAC, where you can pick a faction you want to win. or much much else

politics *suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.* it really sucks. of course there can be redpilled games and those will find markets. and there can be games which come laden with dipshit idpol. these things keep me fucking awake at night.

but good art always finds a way through...

>muh pulp
This is your brain on capitslism/reddit

>games are outstandingly interesting and full of surprises

yet the list you've posted here: is filled with worthless, uninspired garbage

>Hate this argument
why tho? cinema is a medium, tastes come and go, directorial careers rise and fall. the concept of adulthood - *for better and for worse* - has been through the ringer and back again in the back end of the 20C. leading the world to the state that it is in today: which is to say, mimetic fucking disasterland.

>Name me any prominent designers that are still making a living because all I can see is the industry getting increasingly stale with a fan-base that mirrors the depth and worth of comic book movies.
kojima got the job done. i can't find a serious problem here. he did his thing and he left a pretty cool world behind him. brian reynolds made a stone-cold masterpiece and now he makes iPhone games or whatever. for me it's not always about making a consistent living either. sometimes it's just about making one wonderful piece of art. or even making one wonderful piece of spectacle that is infinitely interesting to think about.

>Look at my post above to see what happened to the 'serious' critics who knew their days were numbered as video-game fans moved on, left college, and stopped taking shit so seriously.
fwiw, i'm the guy who never moves on, and who always takes things more seriously than they need to be. it's what i do. i overthink things and i shitpost.

i like taking things seriously. sometimes lightly. politics i try to take more lightly these days, aesthetics moreso. it's a phase. again, just for what it's worth. but the infiltration of meme politics into every aspect of life sucks. as confirmed land-tard i think there are reasons for this. but i also want to get out from under the dark shadow of land as well. art, or thinking about art, is part of that process.

>I don't mind a good game every now and then but it's absolutely nothing like cinema.
true. cinema is cool. you need auteurs for it. but even when you don't have an auteur, and you have studio stuff, that's fine too.

look at ffxv. or the rest of the series. how it's evolved from high fantasy through steampunk to being...a fucking story about the 1% living in an underworld of death and dreams and whatever else. i mean they don't tell you about this, but i find that whole series' ongoing investigation of tech/magic/society enormously interesting. DQ has stayed the course, and things turned out well there. FF goes weird places. but as text? man there's some cool shit going on there. wowza

>Everything is simply Uncharted IV levels of vacuous entertainment (love the game but you have to call it like it is).
you do. you 100% do. and being a hysterical art-fan embiggening things that aren't there is also a bad scene. there's little difference beyond a certain horizon between being a critic and being a professional advertisement disguised as a critic. i like that third way. game criticism, maybe done right. but it would be a far cry from magazines.

(cont'd)

>this is your brain on capitalism/reddit
feels so good. so good. thinking about pulp indeed pulped my own brain. it is what it is now. extra pulpy. yum yum

but it had to happen. so that at least i would know the difference between retardedness and sanity. that difference: most of what i say is retardedness. which is why i say it, because otherwise, i would carry it around with me forever and give myself all kinds of silly ideas. better to vent that shit. otherwise you get crazy ideas

>worthless uninspired garbage
oh stop. SMAC is awesome. ff6 is awesome. ff7 is awesome. ff4 is awesome. tactics was awesome. starcraft is awesome also, although in different ways. xcom is awesome. lots of things are awesome. games are awesome. everything is fucking awesome. it's a universe of awesomeness in that sense. and this from a guy who does not even play that many games. i read, or used to read, a lot of philosophy. now i prefer to think about game art and meme accordingly. i says, there's gold in them hills. & this is hardly rocket surgery.

beyond earth was not awesome, true. it could have been but it was not. i still kind of like it but of course it was far far below its predecessor.

Holy fuck, what a waste of time. To everyone else: don't bother.

Anticipating your cont'd but I should say that while I respect your passion I don't really agree.

I think part of the reason might be my own taste - I like small, intricate narratives about life which literature and cinema offer but video-games do not. Video games consistently try to be very grand and I think that's where they falter because the characters are insipid and under-cooked by comparison. The project ends up feeling lifeless, full of fantastic imagery but very remote from how people act in the real world, except for whatever sweeping allegories are being made about, I dunno, the 99% or something. I think your FFXV point sums that up. It sounds ambitious but wafer-thin. Lovely and magical in a genre fiction kind of way but ultimately not something you'll reflect much on a few years from now.

Having a character narrate to the audience their feelings or having a camera linger on a character not doing much while at home isn't something video games would ever dare do right now. It has to be all action and that's my issue.

BUT there are some exceptions. Kentucky Route Zero is a game I constantly talk about to others. I also really liked INSIDE for the way it insisted on making its world abstract and difficult to fully comprehend. And also even Quadrilateral Cowboy, which is probably one of the few games that does insist on a characters first approach.

speak your mind. what was missing? we haven't even gotten the thing off the ground yet.

trust me. there is no end of hyperstitial memeing we can do here. absolutely none. but you have to talk about what you like and are interested in, not about what you don't like.

take this, for example. one of my favorite things to think about: death, the underworld, mineral wealth, and dreams. ffxv wants to get into that. i think that's pretty keen. but the bad guys don't win in the end. the good guys do. it's not the best ff game, but it is very much of its time. as the other ones were - high fantasy, then steampunk, then more steampunk, then...uh...things...and now this.

idk senpai. i think there's more going on there.

or go back to the pic in OP: factions, aestheticized politics, giant death machines, and war. and thinly veiled pornography there with kerrigan. good scene.

i mean if all that doesn't do it for you then i feel disappointed. plus there's zombie cowboys and fucking sexy female ninjas and the rest. that's a lot of fun.

see
and..uh...this.

>Video games consistently try to be very grand and I think that's where they falter because the characters are insipid and under-cooked by comparison. The project ends up feeling lifeless, full of fantastic imagery but very remote from how people act in the real world, except for whatever sweeping allegories are being made about, I dunno, the 99% or something. I think your FFXV point sums that up. It sounds ambitious but wafer-thin. Lovely and magical in a genre fiction kind of way but ultimately not something you'll reflect much on a few years from now.
this is basically irrefutable. i'm frankly glad you the made the point: it really is the kind of art that i like. i'm really not very sophisticated myself: i'm sentimental and i like cheese. i have good memories of cheese and i think that is why i like what i like. so in no way will i argue this point. you are right. i'm feeling Spectacle these days. i don't really know why
>well, other than because i am a pseud memer
>there is that

>Having a character narrate to the audience their feelings or having a camera linger on a character not doing much while at home isn't something video games would ever dare do right now. It has to be all action and that's my issue.
fair point. i think games will get there tho. but it will depend on what the crowd wants also. maybe they will mature. IIRC there's a beautiful scene in ff6 where terra crashes through into the underworld and her body just lies there for a moment. i think the directors knew what they were doing there. but i get what you mean.

games walk this line; when the player is *at once* actor, viewer, and cameraman it's a new thing, and narrative techniques have to adjust accordingly. it's an interesting development. even classical hollywood style took a few decades to work itself out from silent film. and then there was the age of sound, and CGI....

Mate, you sound really sincere so can I just say that it's fresh air for this board. Keep playing games if you love them. In fact, do it while you still can.

i'm a little bit unusual, perhaps. in my sincerity and fondness for art there is a minor whiff of desperation brought on by an excess of philosophy that busted up a few things that will take a while to repair. namely, the cynicism filters. those don't work anymore. one user even told me that he didn't like how sincere i sounded and for that reason he would never read my philosopher of choice. things you can't make up.

philosophy can be kind of a heartbreaker. i sought that out, like a goofball. i wanted to look into the darkest of the dark places and they turned out to be...uh...rather more dark than i had anticipated. so my thing is mos def not cynicism anymore. much more radical sincerity, steelmanning over strawmanning, and being a goofball. i like cool sagely conversation and nice art things. i was always into pulp stuff, even before nick land's wild ride.

i think sincerity is the deal. i genuinely do. DFW was right. i don't think cynicism really has a foothold anymore. of course, this isn't to say that the world as such is any more cool and friendly than before: indeed, it suggests a period of mass superstition, paranoia, mob craziness and much else. namely, *politics* - and politics sucks. feels > reals &c. so i try to temper my sincerity and such with sanity.

art's just so interesting sometimes.

anyways...thanks for contributing to the thread and for this kind thought. hope it percolates a good thought or two for you.

Art, desu.

this seems appropriate

youtube.com/watch?v=jWHV_Wi5cf4

i guess one question to ask is: is it better that we have games in which we can play out these fantasies in virtual worlds? or does this stuff in gratifying these desires only make us more and more dehumanized and alienated IRL? they're only going to become more hi-def and immersive as time passes and tech develops.

personally i think that there is a horizon beyond which you don't always need to quench a thirst for blood in video games. and Concerned Families of Gamers criticizing the violence in games should consider the NFL, or boxing, or the UFC, which are culturally sanctioned forms of excess spectacle that totally depends on violence and much else. hockey has been trying to figure out hockey fights for decades. it's just inscribed on the process. things which also aren't going away. violence and spectacle is a part of human life, sadly. as is pornography.

we know we are no angels. dat unconscious: heck of a place. my steam library says i have more hours logged in far cry 2 than any other game, and it's not close. rene girard would probably not approve of this. but he would not be mystified by it either.

just to follow up on this:

the difference between art and spectacle is essentially whether or not it can manage to get beyond the temptation to be ideology: pornography, or Brutality Simulator 2017, or whatever else. the interesting thing about games is that, unlike films, they require intelligence and more than passive consumption to play well or enjoy on their higher difficulty settings.

NB: i play games to win, not really to be challenged. i play games on *low* difficulty settings
>except one

because i like winning, and it is because most of the rest of my time is spent serving donuts. but there are good games worth playing and worth thinking about that aren't purely about gratifying the worst and basest desires we have.

pic rel was pure crack cocaine for me. i have very poor taste and i am a simpleton. but this was like putting on a crack-mask with needles that went right into your eyes. it's not even such a great game, it just transported me directly into wonderland. i don't play it anymore for that reason.

it's better when you have to think, i think, and your choices have consequences. civ is good like that. but that's also not a game to be looked at as a text. it's why i prefer the ff series, for these ongoing themes of environmentalism, technology, and so on. you can look at those plots in a sort of a literary way. or you can look at starcraft through a sort of freudian lens and ask how these factions managed to be balanced well enough to attract a mass audience.

whatever people are absorbing by the double-handful, year after year, 24/7, tells you something about the nature of human desire and its staging via technology. zizek himself will talk about how the camera not only tells us what we desire, but also *how* to desire it: it's voyeuristic like that.

virtuality & immersion bring voyeurism even closer to home, so that you don't even recognize it. you put on the FPS mask and you are in there. wait until we get the gyro-chairs and whatever else for our space-sims in the future. things that would make baudrillard shit a brick. pretty fascinating stuff.

You're playing the reboot wrong. I was able to get all of the achievements by blitzkrieging it. It was made for you to take risks.

>Cinema was made by adults and told stories about actual lives in countless ways, both entertaining and art-house.
This is false. Cinema had hundreds of years of trinkets, fairs and (more importantly) theaters to prepare the materials, producers and audiences required for it. It did not pop up one day telling mature stories.

Videogames had none of that. Their development has been abrupt and non-stop. Almost from beginning they have been singled out as children's products, because the socio-economic system that was required to produce their level of technology divided the family in a specific way. Animation has fallen into the same niche despite the fact that it has a way older story; it's not a coincidence that their audiences tend to overlap, even though they aren't the same groups.

But the fact remains that what "videogames" can be is so far removed from what "games" tend to be, that no matter how much one wants to gush about about montage and editing in kino, it's not even comparable to the jump from what came before to videogames. What gave cinema an edge, to begin with, had almost near to nothing to do with how "adult" it was, but with how it allowed to edit to edit and put together a work that was superior to what could be done live, because its pieces needn't be used more than what was required, from the angles they were required and so on. Therefore the magic of cinema, which doesn't stop at special effects.

mah man

>Therefore the magic of cinema, which doesn't stop at special effects.
would you mind continuing that thought? where you do think things are going next? what's intriguing/not intriguing to you about it?

on a related subject -

is there anyone in this thread who has read this and can talk about it w/r/t vidya and so on? i'm too busy wanking over my own thoughts & pulp fiction but i suspect that deleuze will probably have some face-meltingly interesting stuff to say about immersion & virtuality & so on.

any deleuzian vidya critics out there want to take a crack at making this all real simple for lazy types? it's not going to be me and i'm the OP. how relevant is cinema 2 for these discussions? the answer is probably going to be, very relevant indeed, but i don't feel like reading this atm

To me what's mesmerizing about cinema is that craftmanship is allowed to be ephimerous thanks to it. Now this is not to say you couldn't have something ephimerous and at the same time good outside of cinema, but the people who will be capable of enjoying it will be reduced. Film simply does away with that. The closest thing to it before it was the written word. The written word didn't immediately outmode oral tradition, but it changed society forever; look at religious scripture, and look at how religious denomination and what scripts are being used have been nearly 1/1 until recently.

Now if you have pen and paper or a camera, you basically already have a book or a film; you might not have a good one, but that's a different thing. The thing is anyone can do it, anywhere: a child can do it, a journalist can do it, an astronaut can do it. You can go film on New Zealand and Everyone will see Middle Earth. You can have Everyone see the Rolling Stones or what's inside JFK's head. You can have Everyone read the Bible. And you only need to do those things once. So outside of what you show, you can edit as much as you want for as long as you live, and you can make Shelley Duvall go insane by repeating the same take over and over. Videogames don't work like that at all and the technology they use is almost completely new, whereas writing and filming are almost only basic human functions + free reproduction and the selection that allows.

>The written word didn't immediately outmode oral tradition, but it changed society forever; look at religious scripture, and look at how religious denomination and what scripts are being used have been nearly 1/1 until recently.
yup. and with it the world of tyrannical literalism today, how much flex to interpret the text with. and all the fun of deconstruction. dem extremes.

>Now if you have pen and paper or a camera, you basically already have a book or a film; you might not have a good one, but that's a different thing. The thing is anyone can do it, anywhere: a child can do it, a journalist can do it, an astronaut can do it.
yes. ridiculous amounts of imagination. and of course there really aren't any limits any longer on this; once you can monetize attention on YouTube, you are basically obligated to make that which has not been made before b/c advertising is the new coal.

thinking Everyone will mess with your head. but it's also good for at least making you aware of the psychology of ideology &c.

> So outside of what you show, you can edit as much as you want for as long as you live, and you can make Shelley Duvall go insane by repeating the same take over and over.
stuff like this tho is fascinating. the fact that a director might voluntarily play games with actors - like de sica putting lit cigarettes in the kid's pocket to get a good take - are things that we will not see from vidya auteurs for a while. tho no doubt someday there will be whole new realms of virtual fun opened up once we can start playing with/against next-level AI & so on.

>Videogames don't work like that at all and the technology they use is almost completely new, whereas writing and filming are almost only basic human functions + free reproduction and the selection that allows.
yes. this also. games are going to go places that films do not. filmmaking may become, if it isn't already going there, possibly as antiquated as painting or sculpture. perhaps not tho.

the benjamin quote is a good one though.
>tfw you still have the parasitical dependence on ritual, muh monomyth

i mean i sometimes wonder if the modern over-the-shoulder camera position of GTA or MGS or recent Zelda games or whatever is not functionally equivalent at this point to the classical hollywood style. you can basically do anything you want with that perspective, and it has cribbed features from other games and genres - minimaps, inventories, rpg elements & so on - to make an experience that is more or less seamless and feels natural.

and it's insane how fast it has all gotten caught up. personally i think MMOs with long-term scripted storylines will be interesting at some point, sort of like a virtual game of survivor, but involving a cast of thousands and a story arc that unfolds over months. sort of WoW-derived in a way but i guess with a GoT-style plot going on that you can jump into or out of whenever, and in which the big roles might well be played by IRL actors and so on.

>i think MMOs with long-term scripted storylines will be interesting at some point, sort of like a virtual game of survivor, but involving a cast of thousands and a story arc that unfolds over months. sort of WoW-derived in a way but i guess with a GoT-style plot going on that you can jump into or out of whenever, and in which the big roles might well be played by IRL actors and so on.

I'm surprised that both you and me thought of the same idea; I'm currently in the process of creating a video game with a similar concept, albeit sized down appropriately in order to be manageable for a single auteur. If you wish to know more - throw your e-mail address my way and I'll make sure to keep you updated.

some ideas just kind of make sense. and this one does. there would just be too many options and possibilities for things to do with it, especially if it was on a subscription-based model that would allow you access to different areas & such. the mind boggles.

i mean it's basically just murder mystery dinner theatre cranked up to eleven, but still.

random ffxv pics because reasons. hot damn i do like this setting tho.

girardfag@gmail

>are things that we will not see from vidya auteurs for a while
Oh, rearry?

Who do you sink are ze actor in videogemu?

>filmmaking may become, if it isn't already going there, possibly as antiquated as painting or sculpture.
I think it already is. Perhaps not as a whole, but cinema as it's been has basically gone the way of the novel. For the worse, I might add.

But what advantages does film offer that things like CGI don't? We're talking real-time, 3D, lush, organic environments the likes of which you've never seen.

>i mean i sometimes wonder if the modern over-the-shoulder camera position of GTA or MGS or recent Zelda games or whatever is not functionally equivalent at this point to the classical hollywood style
I'm pretty interested in games with fixed camera angles. I still have to play REmake and I've heard it makes good use of them. Definitely something games should use more.

>personally i think MMOs with long-term scripted storylines will be interesting at some point, sort of like a virtual game of survivor, but involving a cast of thousands and a story arc that unfolds over months
Wourd you rike seeing Guillerumo Deru Toro in it?

>Oh, rearry?
see . kojima is a boss w/o question and vidya auteurdom means nothing if he isn't in the penthouse of it.

>Perhaps not as a whole, but cinema as it's been has basically gone the way of the novel. For the worse, I might add.
i agree. it's a fascinating phenomenon tho. new tech appears and us meatbags find new ways to virtualize. look at notch & minecraft: it's largely digital lego, but it was worth 2.4b or w/e to microsoft and that was probably a good investment.

>But what advantages does film offer that things like CGI don't? We're talking real-time, 3D, lush, organic environments the likes of which you've never seen.
i used to have this same argument with my derrida guy about film v theatre. the special effects you get from film are only even specialer in VR or whatever. but of course the more one skews Spectacle, the more one loses the appeal of human intimacy, the appeal of a you-had-to-be-there performance in some tiny theatre or whatever. an *instance,* for lack of a better word. or maybe that is the appropriate one.

>I'm pretty interested in games with fixed camera angles. I still have to play REmake and I've heard it makes good use of them. Definitely something games should use more.
i mean these are interesting questions for vidya aesthetics. silent film did a lot with the fixed camera. hollywood style is all about making the camera effectively seamless. what's interesting about virtual worlds is the effacing of any real difference between simulation and reality. the world of minecraft is completely plastic. dwarf fortress is what it is because the guy wants to simulate things to such a degree that it's almost comic, and that is part of the magic of that game. and even in GTA5 the appeal was in having a simulating apparatus so large that it could accurately simulate people not really doing anything. you could flash into someone's life and see them just standing there doing nothing. people thought this was interesting. which it is. an accurate depiction of nothingness, even boredom, is a kind of verisimilitude.

>Wourd you rike seeing Guillerumo Deru Toro in it?
sure, why not. if he wants to. if he has a story and a world he really wants to share.

i mean consider pic rel. he keeps adapting games into movies and they consistently suck. it's not *all* his fault. the phenomenon of *cheesiness* is subtle but very powerful. it means the magic of Spectacle isn't working on us: we aren't being seduced, because we know we are being seduced towards something that isn't there. kojima is awesome because he is at once a game guy and a movie guy. and more a movie guy, telling this awesome samurai-western-war film. boll seems to appreciate games, but the end product frequently seems to be even more thin than the original plot.

it was the same with BE. SMAC is the product of a lot of science fiction. BE is the product of games adapted from science fiction. like xerox copies degenerating over time.

(cont'd)

as i've indicated before, i've been trying to produce my own weird world of this stuff for some time. i used to think it would be easy to simulate stuff, to just make an enjoyable dark fantasy world where good guys defeat bad guys and so on. but thinking about fantasy and simulation eventually puts you in a room with baudrillard or lacan or whoever, and then it's through the looking glass into continental philosophy realm with you.

this is in fact another thing that i wanted to come up: the idea of games having *politics.* so icycalm divides game theory into aesthetics and mechanics, but his own theory of games occludes the idea of politics. for him, although i'm being somewhat uncharitable here, *power* is the deal. it's why he likes he what he likes. and it is a very consistent and compelling thesis. i find him wholly and not partially fascinating.

but i have been bewildered by ideology in a way that he isn't (which tells you how much of a fuckface i am). to me one of the things about games is how they are able to aestheticize politics without making a priori endorsements of fascism or anything else. giving players choices over

a) what happens in the story, what they do
b) the factions they choose to align themselves with, and
c) how that story ends

are ways in which game narratives can get around the ancient and soul-crushing question of What Did He Mean By This: that is, ideology. a world which presents ideologies in conflict, or in which the player/viewer becomes a part of the ideological experience, allows in a way for ideologies to speak themselves. which is maybe what a conscientious kind of writer would do. hence the admiration for SMAC: those competing factions were balanced, and they all had interesting to quotes to say.

starcraft even managed to make the zerg sympathetic, ffs. true, if you have a sexy babe like kerrigan leading the charge, it's usually easier. and it's kind of a quirk of blizzard that they can't manage to keep anything *really* evil for long. even the undead become sexy, and once a thing becomes sexy, it almost always winds up being a force for good. sexiness attracts.

i like looking at games as ideology simulators that don't become critique of ideology simulators. they salute the player's intelligence, and do not become *didactic:* And So The World Was Saved.

i could go on and on in this vein, but my hope is to emulate some of the stuff i admire about good directors in my own fiction, rather than complain about it infinitely w/r/t politics or elsewhere. it's just girardian stuff, ultimately: art signals a kind of understanding of desire as mimesis and transmits as such to the human sciences. said transmission i think is better when it is not Spectacle. or, if it is Spectacle, can own itself as such, and not try and be didactic on the side.

auteurs just have a certain vision they believe in enough to not need to *teach* you anything. if it's the truth, you can see it for yourself, w/o all the trimmings.

basically what i realize is that auteur theory just really matters. it really does.

but what i like about bazin and the idea of resistance to a preferred reading is how subtly different that is to a kind of third-rate lit-crit deconstructionist protocol. to simply flirt with the idea of deconstruction and say, well, hey, you know, What Did I Mean By This will set your teeth on edge. as it should. an infinitely relativistic universe sucks both philosophically *and aesthetically.* it lacks depth, and it keeps poor old j-pete awake long into the night and re-reading jung.

auteurs are auteurs because they know what they mean, what they like, and what they want to say. and their ideological ish gets worked out as something sharable and viewable, something that doesn't subtly impel you to want to join the communist party - or the alt-right, or whatever else. the hard thing about this is that auteurs probably have to resist the mercantile logic of studio production: that the studio wants to make big $$$ and will dilute the message accordingly. iirc even orson welles has to struggle with this stuff. and then there are guys like michael cimino or whoever who can strike gold and then be given the keys to the kingdom and make a flop afterwards.

for a more contemporary reference, consider chris roberts. star citizen is the auteur in the auteur's wet-dream par excellence. probably it will deliver, but...well, anyways. you get the idea.

so: more auteurs, then? just that? maybe just that. everything else just becomes, or was destined to be, degenerate paint-by-numbers trash. there's more room here to salute icycalm for being ahead of the curve on all of this as well. he understood what the deal was, and it's why he resisted modernism in games the way that he did. and it all makes sense...

but he is also *right there* in another interesting phenomenon, which was the difference between arcades and home consoles, which was subtly different from movies in theatres and watching movies at home...and now we have online gaming to talk about...and whether we critique games as players, or as spectators...and all the different forms of virtuality, which are different from being passive viewers in a cinema...and whether we play solo, or collectively, or...

there is just too much interesting shit to think about on planet meme sometimes. just too darn much.