Tempy wrote:

Brooks wrote:

Cerebus is a remarkably apposite shout, actually. Maybe go easy on rampant misogyny, but otherwise. (Though technically, the series total is hardly a romp.) Also I think if the 'war' bit is made subordinate to the 'explore' bit you're always onto more of a winner, at least for solo modes. Metroid has really done a number on my priorities over the ages.

Exploring and finding new and interesting vistas nearly always fills me with more 'emotion' than killing my thousandth goon. Aye, Cerebus isn't a romp but you see where I was coming from.

Meanwhile, I imagine Fez with CoD's budget.

I think semi-decipherable mysteries are generally a good thing for videogames, but as garnishes rather than the main course.

A realtime Mind Forever Voyaging would be one fuck of a coup. And it will never happen.

This is what drove Chris Crawford (more) bonkers I think - the crystallisation of development around spacial navigation, whereby there are only so many meaningful (i.e. intellectually engaging) things you can insert there, the big one being combat.

Could a piece of art be a game?

thread over then.

I know you didn't level it at me, but I responded. It's a debate, I can take it on the chin bro. Don't worry about it.

Ok, game/film crossover. The former can learn from the latter in lots of primarily visual ways but also games are GAMES. That is the main problem I have with it. I personally find they excell when they are discarding their cinema shackles.

This generation has been full of games making film imitations because we are getting to a point where a decent art team and the inherent fidelity in modern graphics allows us to tell stories and showcase spectacle in a way that is creeping up with what we'd expect from a blockbuster.

That doesn't mean it is the optimum path. Cutscenes for the most part need to be drowned in a ditch in my opinion. Something like Vanquish delivered lots of cutscene spectacle but it was at its lunatic best when you were playing the game and carving your own path, something no film will ever let you do.

My main problem with the whole shebang is that whilst it is ok for a one medium to borrow from another, each medium is unique and has certain elements within that are not replicable eslwhere. When they capitalise on these things, they nearly always exceed beyond those that take a mix.

I could never take Gordon Freeman seriously as a character because every time he met a fellow scientist he would inexplicably bash their head in with a crow-bar as soon as they started talking.

Personally, both from the perspective of creator and audience , I find games much closer to music rather than film as an art-form. It's about creating atmosphere, an enriching backdrop for the audience to project their own personal emotional responses onto.

Here's a thought:
Music, stories, pictures and games all appear in virtually every culture on the planet. They are things that seem to have emerged naturally. At some point over the years people decided that rather than just repeat what had been passed down from generation to generation they would explicitly create their own works and become musicians, writers and artists. But this never seemed to happen for games until very recently - people making them just for the love of making them. I wonder why that is?

Mouldywarp wrote:

I could never take Gordon Freeman seriously as a character because every time he met a fellow scientist he would inexplicably bash their head in with a crow-bar as soon as they started talking.

Hehehe... : P

Mouldywarp wrote:

Music, stories, pictures and games all appear in virtually every culture on the planet. They are things that seem to have emerged naturally. At some point over the years people decided that rather than just repeat what had been passed down from generation to generation they would explicitly create their own works and become musicians, writers and artists. But this never seemed to happen for games until very recently - people making them just for the love of making them. I wonder why that is?

Don't really know where this discussion is going now, but...

...That no different to film, when you think about it. And certain genres of music.

Architecture is also as old as fuck, and might actually be considered (this is airy) innate, but not everyone possesses the means to cultivate their own permanent plot of physical space... If you had a "greater availability of more easily learned tools" to build your houses/workplaces, then many more people would.

But fuck it... With this particular subject (the roots of entertainment) I'm talking about something that I don't quite understand, tbh. : )

I would like the chance to go back through a lot of the games I played and just enjoy wandering about in them. 
Battlefield 3, crysis 2, Unchartered 3 all have so much detail. I seem to spend my time running through them at high speed and never given the chance to stop and 'smell the flowers'.

Designers spend ages building up whole worlds to play in. It's a shame I see most of these worlds in a blur.

It is because all life desires to boogie

God I hate geeks! He goes on for 53 minutes?!

Going back to video game violence, I find it more difficult to justify these days not just because of the more realistic imagery but also because games are increasingly trying to contextualize it. The protagonist in Doom was killing things just because that was the aim of the game. It was akin to taking pieces on a chess board - a gaming construct rather than a real representation of violence that needed to be analysed in terms of morals. We've been speculating on The Last of Us, whether the violence will be more considered or if it will just be a shoot-the-bad-guys affair in a slightly different skin. If it's the latter, will any emotional punch be neutered or can we separate the meaningless "game violence" from the meaningful "narrative" violence?