How do we get melodrama out of games?

Tobislu · 2012-05-26T05:19:54.494660+00:00

IMO videogames tend to tell stories best when they don't tell them at all. I'd advocate having less 'writers' involved if anything.

As examples of games which end up creating relatively moving + immersive experiences by not explicitly telling stories see Dark/Demon Souls, Journey, Shadow of the Colossus/ICO, most 16bit era action RPGs.

There's a story there clearly, and you feel that the world has depth/lore, but it's largely implied, and where possible it's embedded in play mechanics.

That sort of "in the gaps" story telling is what actually works in video games IMO. Video games have been trying to ape movies and/or pick-a-path adventure books to their own detriment (read a book, watch a movie, if you want serious narrative).

So no... I think what games need more of is imaginative world builders, directed with understated good taste, and focussing on what games do well (actual play).

As an example, a lot of games try and create emotional stakes, so that we care if a NPC dies or not, say. They try and do this with dialogue, voice acting, maybe a vague romance with our character, whatever. IMO that's a complete failure to understand what a game is good at.

If you want those sorts of emtional stakes, build them into the play mechanics - make me care when I die, make it a stomach turning horror with actual (gameplay) consequence. Don't try and copy the sort of emotional engagement I have with a character in a tv drama or a novel... it can be done, but it's just a waste of everyone's effort if it's coming at the expense of emotional engagement in the actual mechanics of the game.

railroad-redditor · 2012-05-25T12:14:34.588282+00:00

Yeah it's the police escort I find obnoxious. Like getting a local cop to agree with something makes it valid. Like if they disagreed you'd be wrong.

lolpancakeslol · 1 day

What lockon are we talking about? I think of Dark Souls as having an extreme lock on mechanic...being a half second late switching targets can get you killed... (although most things can get you killed in that game...)

railroad-redditor · 2 days

Although I don't see riding in an organised horde, in the interests of a tradition, with a police escort and the mayor, as a huge expression of independence and freedom.

railroad-redditor · 2 days

Why did they need a police escort? I don't understand any aspect of this.

Hundreds of people rode bikes to school every day where I grew up.

IAmAGecko · 5 days

Yes because google gives selective recommendations of films that are great but not well know, with little descriptions, and allows you to discuss them with people in this subreddit. Dickhead.

fairy_nuff · 6 days

Yeah the area of the political spectrum that ACT claims to represent holds a certain general appeal to me. But ACT's version always seemed to me to be weighted towards all the bits I can't stand, or just completely inconsistent shit - a creepy obsession with (emotive, non-evidence-based) law and order policy, and a seeming talent for zeroing in on the free-market arguments that hurt powerful/wealthy entrenched interests the least, and the poor the most.

Which always made it so that even when ACT was in the news for an idea I thought was worth talking about (for instance, I'm not knee-jerk opposed to charter schools), I'd find it very hard (well, impossible) to trust that the policy was driven by a desire for positive outcomes for people that need positive outcomes, and not just driven by cronyism/someone's business idea/right-wing spite/racism/trolling/some cato paper someone read once.

Seeing that guys like this are bankrolling the party, and that the party tolerated Banks as a candidate, just hyper-reinforces that lack of trust (already at 0).

TLDR; the fact ACT seems to be just a bunch of snotty resentful trolls undercuts any reasonable ideas they try and push.

fairy_nuff · 6 days

You guys probably need a new party then.

fairy_nuff · 6 days

Does John Banks represent the ACT party?

lowercase_capitalist · 6 days

What if I told you the show is crafted to make 70% of the viewers feel smart and superior, and then go on and on about how "terrible" the show is to generate more buzz and more viewers.

Going on about how terrible this show is, is like going on about how scary some crappy fairground ride was - it's supposed to be, and it wasn't really.

WTFisBehindYou · 7 days

Na you're way off. "Hipster" is a much more specific subculture than that, and it tends to be pretty free and loose with talking shit about race.

Here's some random examples, I assume... I doubt you'll find these to be a hive of "PC thoughtcontrol" or whatever...:

http://www.streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/?s=racism&search=Search

http://www.vice.com/tag/racism

WTFisBehindYou · 7 days

Sometimes it almost sounds like it means "not a dick".

ruoka · 10 days

What sort of fucked up link is that?

NotNietzsche · 11 days

There's a lot more to it than that though.

Here's a pretty decent and easy-to-digest recap of why what most people think about the Milgram obedience experiments is wrong.

SuicideBanana · 12 days

I called her a dizzy cunt. Actually, I told her: "nobody wants your fucking job, you dizzy cunt. That's why you've still got it."

You sound like a fucking cunt.

b0red · 13 days

Amaerikkka is a police state because police have powers to prevent people wandering around in the middle of busy streets, all hail the freedomflare loving paradise of turkey

http://www.ihd.org.tr/images/pdf/IHD_1999_2008_Comparative_Balance_Sheet.pdf

greyishpoweranger · 13 days

Why does the console crowd react differently to the same thing?

Not sure. If you can't run a server yourself on PC, then I'd be annoyed at having to pay anyone for running it. If you can't install your own server, and the publisher/developer isn't providing them for free, then that is requiring a paid subscription for multiplayer.

Sure, you can freeload off of other people paying for you. But the fact remains that an absolutely essential aspect of the game requires regular payment from the playing community.

People put up with that I guess because it's a great game and they don't have any other options. But it's pretty horrible, in my opinion.

And so the EA/DICE run servers matter IMO because they guaranteed that at the end of the day, everyone could avoid collectively paying for multiplayer on top of the AAA title price, in principle. If they close them down, then (like on PC, apparently) we're in a world where some poor sap has to pay for me to enjoy multiplayer.

greyishpoweranger · 13 days

I don't see what incentivizes them to add servers that they pay for themselves.

To be clear, I don't think they should add more free servers. But I think it's skeezy to take them away. You don't seem to think converting a free server to a paid one is 'taking it away'. I disagree.

The source of the difference is, I think, that you see the act of paying for a server as "I want to admin one of your EA/DICE servers". I'm thinking of it more as "I'd like a server too".

My expectation when I paid my $30 or whatever, is that they would be creating a new server for me. And that that is what I'm paying for - the bandwidth, memory and cycles they're having to add to their overall hosting setup. That would explain the cost. If you see it as paying to admin an existing server, then the idea that they're just slicing the same pie differently isn't so jarring. Although then I'd be querying the price.

It's more like providing 5 rooms of free accommodation, but 4 interior designers pay you for the privilege of decorating them. The people utilizing the room don't see any difference in cost.

To my mind the people playing the servers for free are like people you invited in to your room (note that all paid servers can have pw protection, for instance) after you rented it. The fact that people tend to let anyone come hangout in their rented rooms is no substitute for the guarantee of freely provided accommodation, as a matter of principle.

greyishpoweranger · 13 days

Why would EA grow their server space?

EA would grow their space if they were running out of servers. They said (originally) that they were switching free servers over to rented, because they were running out.

I think most people are saying that a company acting in good faith would maintain a baseline level of free servers, hosted at their own expense (since they aren't letting people actually run them themselves). And then the rented ones would be additional. That way when the community pays large sums of money to rent servers, they are adding to the pool of overall servers, rather than merely allowing EA to shut down free servers, and offload the cost of those (and then some) onto the community (or the part of the community that pays for servers).

I think that's a fair complaint - if anything they should be running more free servers, as if anything they're being subsidised by all the other people paying for hosting.

All I was saying though is that, at the scale we are talking about, you don't need to worry about "the physicial and digital space being limited for servers" or whatever their original statement was. Running a FPS multiplayer server is not especially intensive, there are hundreds of companies happy to make servers available, any time, 24/7.

If a company needs servers, they can get them. And from their point of view, it can be more or less "ethereal" - they don't need screw drivers, cords or rack space - just call someone up and get some dedicated servers. A serious server would eat many many instances of Battlefield for breakfast. Possingly their requirements aren't exactly like regular hosting, but I'm sure a company like EA could communicate what they need with any decent hosting company and have something up and running more or less straight away.

TLDR - I'm saying their claim that they don't have capacity for hosting player servers and all their original servers is bs or laziness.

The broader complaint is EA are just trying to shift a minor self imposed cost from themselves to their playerbase by replacing free servers with community funded ones, rather than adding community funded ones on top of free ones.

From the linked article:

DICE is not shutting down servers. If DICE-managed servers appear unavailable, it is because they have been rented and customized by players. DICE will continue to add servers and will reserve a percentage of servers for players who prefer to connect through DICE-hosted servers.

See that's exactly what people are annoyed about isn't it? If I provide 5 rooms of free accommodation for my customers, saying I'm providing just as much accommodation because I'm renting 4 of them out is dishonest.

microxerox · 14 days

What sort of a dick would pay for that?

Edit - Allow me to rephrase: Why would someone pay a subscription fee for non-functional game items? My word, it seems to me that to do such a thing would be height of cockishness. Regards, Spidermonk esquire.

greyishpoweranger · 14 days

30 USD an instance a month is plenty of money to grow their hosting if they wanted to, so this is a pretty weak explanation.

Servers ARE ethereal, for all intents and purposes - you can have more than you could ever possibly need, more or less instantly, without ever leaving your seat.

So if they decided it was a waste of their money to run their own servers, then fine.

But the argument that there is some sort of spatial limit on how many servers they could have, and that they'd reached that limit, is silly - even if these things are currently stuffed in some room in EA offices around the world (which I find unlikely), they could still use that ~$300USD a month per instance funding to expand, or put them on some external hosting. I'd imagine one top-shelf dedicated server could host a hell of a lot of BF3 games.

I'm willing to bet that if 500 new people signed up for paid servers tonight, they'd find a way to make that work pretty quick. They wouldn't shrug and say "we're out of physical space".

stereopump · 16 days

Yeah it's not like only microsoft does this sort of thing. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't call it out for what it is.

lieutenant_cthulhu · 16 days

Which one are you? The guy with the beard?

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