“the most amazing game in the world with incredible gameplay”
What? You think that’s like spotting a unicorn or something?
I can point to several games that at the time of their release matched that description.
Maybe reconsider the use of absolutes, then?
It’s hysterical, hmmm?
The quality of a game is related to how complex it is. Imagine if almost all games were as pixelated as games from 20 years ago. That’s what it’s like to play with only some dimensions being well developed and other dimensions being flat or out-of-focus.
The well-developed dimensions happen to work for you. Doesn’t mean the full objective quality of most games are quite as impressive as it seems to you.
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I look at it more like a mathematical equation, to be honest. It either works or it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with complexity (Portal is simple, Civilization is complex), or graphics (Nethack vs. GTA V), or avatars (Minecraft for the first few years), or even content (Saint’s Row IV is ridiculous and lazy but still fun). It has to do with interactivity, paced rewards, and dopamine, with some adrenaline thrown in. You can achieve that with a chess board or you can fail to achieve that with a 100 million dollar budget.
Do you even hear yourself?
You are being do incredibly rude and dismissive; “silly”? Really? Thats the best thing you could go with right now?
Why not: “Why aren’t there more female characters if 47% of gamers are women?” or “why are men so resistant and dismissive about women’s feedback on games?” but “Silly”? Seriously?
And people wonder why women just don’t talk about gaming…
@chgoliz this popped up on my tumblr awhile back, and now is making the round on twitter, and I think its apt, no?
But whatever, the wings/game is good, who cares what the avatars/servers look like, right?
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And this is where I step out. Have fun storming the castle.
And I’m the silly one! LOL
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Umm. you might have read the this in
as referring to the hypothetical game you posited , when I’m actually referring to your response to this:
Once more, with feeling!
Just think of all the conditions needed for this to be true. You’ll then have “parted the veil” as it were and stepped out of the world of privilege.
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Whaaaaat?
OK, aside from the fact that your examples make no sense. (Portal is simple? In what fucking world? It was written in a state-of-the-art FPS engine and rendering the views through the portals is incredibly resource intensive and difficult engineering. The gameplay isn’t the most complex in terms of inputs or outputs but it does require a fair degree of lateral thinking. And note that Valve cared enough about what you think is “silly” to make the protagonist female even though they could have left it completely ambiguous.)
Aside from that, you look at all the millions of gamers out there arguing vehemently about whether particular games are amazing or shitty and you conclude that whether or not a game is good is an objective characteristic of the game? And you go on to conclude that, despite the lion’s share of effort and money on AAA games going into look and feel (especially graphics, see why Portal is not “simple” above), aesthetics (like whether or not people like yourself are represented in the game world) are irrelevant to whether or not someone should play, let alone enjoy, a game?
That’s just stupid. There are aspects of quality that can be analyzed objectively, but preference is always subjective. You may not understand someone else’s preferences, but then again why would you? Their preferences are not identical to your own, probably as a result of each human being having a unique life history and therefore a unique set of formative experiences.
The problem here is not that some people have preferences that are objectively “silly” or “stupid”, but that you feel that you are so close to the center of the universe that you can declaim on the relevance of other people’s aesthetic preferences.
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Dude… that is the most beautiful sentance I’ve read in a long time. Thank you.
Side note: the “silly” argument I never got. It doesn’t make logical sense. Either its “silly” - ie: inconsequential and does not matter, so therefore it doesn’t matter what the gender of the protagonist is, therefore there is no reason for the hero to be male, either, and therefore should be genderless or the gender be up to the user… which is obviously NOT the case for so many games… so that means the gender is NOT silly or NOT inconsequential and the gender of the protagonist IS important. So which is it? Is it “silly” or is it actually important? Can’t have it both ways boys! (obviously #notallboys hush).
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You confuse the complexity of the engine with the complexity of the game itself. Portal is a simple game. There are very few options for the player other than to move forward in a linear series. There are a very few actions the player can perform (jump and gun functions). The gameplay that emerges comes from that very simple setup.
It’s not hard to find if not completely objective examples, but massively successful examples of what I am talking about, just look at the top of the metacritic charts. The vast majority of those games are inarguably high quality. Half Life II. Civilization III. GTA V. Skyrim. All broke new ground in some aspect of gaming.
I’m pretty sure ‘these days’ is a condition for the rest of the statement. I can certainly understand why someone might read it as “I will never again…”, but I don’t need to be lectured on the use of “absolutes” when I didn’t use them.
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This is actually on you. You didn’t specify whether you were talking about one or both.
Arguably.
Here’s an equivalent false argument:
Conway’s Game of Life has only a few simple rules. Each game element only has two discrete states. The gameplay that emerges comes from that simple setup.
Therefore, Conway’s Game of Life is a simple game? Given that you can build an effing Universal Turing Machine in GoL, it’s clearly not.
It is impossible to fine objective examples, because again: preferences aren’t and cannot be objective.
Successful? Fine. You know what else is successful? Survivor. Donald Trump. The Kardashians. Success is not proof of quality.
Metacritic scores are absolutely objective and we know this because…how again? Because they’re numeric? So are ratings for Survivor, The Apprentice, and Meet the Kardashians.
Sure, they all broke new ground. That doesn’t mean any of them are objectively good.
For example, I can’t get into GTA games. They suck. They’re boring. They have a bunch of half-assed grindy mechanics and shitty stories.
Skyrim and all other Bethesda games? The writing is incredibly shitty, usually boxing your character into asking the dumbest possible questions and saying the dumbest possible stuff – even if that simply doesn’t make sense for your character. They’re inevitably super buggy,usually in game-breaking ways to the point that they’re pretty much unplayable without the support of an unpaid modding community.
(Actually, I’m having trouble thinking of any ways in which Skyrim broke any ground whatsoever. The fighting mechanics are notoriously simple and unsatisfying. The world map is nearly unusable because they wanted to make it cute. It’s big but that’s about it. Well, that’s not true – the sound design is breathtaking. But that’s exactly the sort of thing you seem to want to dismiss as “silly” and tangential to the quality of the game.)
Actually, I’m not so sure Civ III was particularly groundbreaking either. I would describe Civ II as groundbreaking, not as sure about III. At any rate, there’s obviously millions of “tru gamers” who think the whole civ series is a boring bunch of games for a boring bunch of nerds. The Civ series is quality for what they are, but what they are doesn’t have universal appeal.
Hence, the subjectivity of preferences.
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And in case there’s any doubt, despite the TES and newer Fallout games’ myriad flaws, I love them to fucking death.
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So, regardless of our differences of taste. opinion and definition, your point of all that is that none of those games are good enough to overcome the fact that they may not allow for female avatars? Are you serious?
Can you point out even one place where I made that specific argument?
If not, why would you accuse me of doing so?
I might ask you the same thing. How does your “summary” of my argument above pass even the remotest resemblance to it?
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A discussion about girl’s opinions where 25% of the comments are from one person invalidating women’s opinions and calling them “silly.”
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It’s not hard to find if not completely objective examples, but massively successful examples of what I am talking about, just look at the top of the metacritic charts. The vast majority of those games are inarguably high quality. Half Life II. Civilization III. GTA V. Skyrim. All broke new ground in some aspect of gaming.
Let’s get back to this. You said these games are inarguably high quality. I presented arguments that actually, GTA V and Skyrim are not very high quality in many important respects. Do you want to retract the “inarguably” part and concede that they are high quality in your opinion?
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Mod note: Personal bickering tastes like pineapple. It’s pretty sweet but high in acid. It’s killing me. Stop.
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The bulk of the game you do, although there are segments where you play as a different character who is female. It’s not really comparable to RPGs like Dragon Age/Elder Scrolls/Fallout though, as the series is defined by using a pre-rolled character. Anyway, yes. Personally, given the chance (either by the ability to choose pre-set characters or generate your own), I’ll always choose the female one. I’ve thought about it and I’m not certain why. I think it comes down to:
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so rarely given this chance;
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with good developers & writers, they’re aware of this fact and it’s generally more fun. With bad devs & writers (so, the bulk of them), they’ll often give the female option the “feminine” powers (see Borderlands 2, magical healing as opposed to lethal aggression) which are also fresher to play with;
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as a straight white guy, I’m oddly a little tired of playing the stories of other straight white guys. GTA San Andreas had a far more interesting story than GTA IV, and I can’t think of any other possible comparisons I can make because Jesus Christ there probably aren’t any;
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aesthetics - I’m a little over bald space marines, having had few other options since Doom
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seeing as publishers are so risk averse, the few games that are released with female are invariably more interesting as they have to be. Beyond Good & Evil, Remember Me, WET (which was trashy & stupid but fun trashy and stupid)
So yes, fully agree with Ashley Burch’s statements, and I’ll echo @caryroys’ recommendation of HAWP (and also add her performance in the 15 minute TF2 movie Expiration Date)
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