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Comments
Something bothers me about the Game Overthinker. I know what it is, but I can't quite put words to it. Apart from when I just flat-out disagree with one of his vocal points, of course.
I like his Escape to the Movies and The Big Picture skits, but his biases on what a game constitute...-shudder-
^^Could it be that he depends on rationalizations too much even when he's clearly in the wrong?
In any case, I like the Game Overthinker if only because for all his other flaws he is smart and articulate though some videos have just had me ridiculously frustrated.
His defense of Other M is exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. I can't make it through either of those videos. And yeah, I watch him in the first place because he has some good things to say and expresses them well. At the same time, he does have a way of rationalising his own tastes, although his criticisms of the FPS genre (beyond the use of X-Box Live stereotypes) was pretty insightful. His best episode, I think, is "Continuum", which doesn't just use the work of 20th century intellectual giants as its foundation, but agrees with me hurrah.
But I don't know. The guy has over sixty videos, and as entertaining as many of them are, and as insightful as many of them are, there aren't a whole lot I really care about much. I guess the same could be said of Yahtzee, but I find that Extra Credits has me invested almost all the time, making many of the same points as the Overthinker with greater eloquence, calmer expression, better presentation and in much less time. Although I do appreciate how the Overthinker calls out elements of the gaming community straight-up, that's a two-way street and I can imagine some people feeling misrepresented by the basis of his counterarguments.
He's an intelligent guy, but I also think he's better at dealing with films and comics than he is at games. He never really tackles mechanical considerations, after all, and waitwaitwait I think I got it. He sees video games as a kind of fixed art form that should be considered in the same light as films and comics rather than something different entirely, and that becomes the basis for a lot of his stuff. For instance, in his video on the whole Mass Effect ending thing, he made a point that artwork doesn't accept contribution from its consumers -- and to that I say, "who says?", you know? Just like post-photography abstract artforms altered what was understood as "art", video games and other collaborative storytelling methods might do the same.
Or whatever. Criticising him is difficult because I agree with him and disagree with him on a lot of grounds, but he hasn't really had a mechanical discussion of video games yet. Although his take on the zombie thing is probably the best thus far, although it lacks the suggestion of an alternative.
I used to follow Extra Credits but I kinda lost interest.
Extra Credits did this thing where they covered a lot of the more juicy topics earlier in their run and have now moved into much more specific territory. I get what you mean; even though I still watch every episode, I pre-emptively get excited or disappointed based on what the subject matter is. The JRPG vs. WRPG multi-parter was good, as was the myth of the gun, the look into survival horror, ect., but there's no lack of episodes that are very narrow in scope. That's not so much a criticism as it is a recognition of what kind of audience will be most invested in the show.
I've yet to see why video games aren't a fixed art form similar to movies or comics. They're a finished product when you get them. Just because you push a few doesn't make you a contributor. You're just going along the lines that are pre-determined. Just in a slightly different way than you do in a book or movie.
That's not always true. See: Dwarf Fortress.
They don't have to be, theoretically speaking, though. The issue is more that game designers have not approached gaming as something that can be programed to be truly changing and evolutioning according to the game designer's narrative needs.
^Neither do films or novels, really, especially with the advent of the internet. However, I think that art needs to be deliberate on the part of the creator. Granted there can be more than one creator but as art is about communicating to an audience, the audience really can't be a creator.
Not of the world or game anyways. They can be a creator inside the world if the designers deigns it. Like in Minecraft.
Dwarf Fortress was mentioned before, but there are also games like Minecraft and Mount and Blade which, lacking any kind of concrete story structure except for serendipity, are almost nothing without players to validate those frameworks.
Even something like Mass Effect isn't as cut-and-paste as your average AAA RPG, though. The choices don't follow a branching structure, but something more like colourful rainbow swirls with a straight line moving through it. And the straight line has gaps, or becomes swirls at some points.
The thing about a game like Mass Effect is that there is no singular, monolithic storyline that is standard. So to some extent, yes, I consider it a collaborative effort. A player doesn't own the intellectual property that went into the creation of the game, but I would certainly argue that they own their own playthrough, and their playthrough is going to be different to their friends' playthroughs. There is ultimately no singular, linear narrative that can be said to be Mass Effect in its entirety, but instead a series of intersection storylines as experienced by a myriad of different players.
While films and literature can produce different experiences thanks to interpretation, that's just as true of games -- plus games have the in-built interactive features. Ultimately, everyone reads the same words in Harry Potter and every sees the same images in Jurassic Park, but not many other people will have made my exact choices throughout the Mass Effect series, or within The Witcher. Those games had variable legitimate outcomes and events influenced by player input, but they're not legitimised until they're used. They're all the creative result of the developers, but they're also a narrative result of the players, because the players had to come to a conclusion about which choice was the best from their own perspective and interpretation of events thus far.
A game that offers a choice is overtly asking for collaboration between itself and the audience, at least in my opinion. The statement here is not so much "the game is incomplete without an audience" (although that's as true as it is of any other media), but "the game is invalid without guidance". Great games like Ocarina of Time have proven that linear narratives work fine for games, but games like Mass Effect and The Witcher prove just as much that collaborative storytelling processes between developer and player are a worthwhile development.
The invitation isn't as overt as back when a bunch of PC games used to come with mod tools, but it's still there. 'Cause that's what games have over other mediums. Choose your own adventure books don't even come close, and anyway, they're eclipsed by non-linear adult-oriented literature which provides different input to games once again.
EDIT: Damnit, this was huge again. Sorry.
The Myth of the Gun was pretty good. But they did have a couple hickups at the begginning, like they criticized New Vegas for not havinga a first act when the game did what they said it didn't.
Still doesn't account for Dwarf Fortress.
Important question: how do you define "creator?"
>A game that offers a choice is overtly asking for collaboration between itself and the audience, at least in my opinion.
Nope. For the same reason it's not from Choose your own adventure novels. You have choice or choice b or choice c. You're not a part of the creative process. You just choose which one you follow.
^See those names in the credits at the end of a game?
Funny, but that doesn't really answer my question.
Using Dwarf Fortress as the example, the first thing that's done in the game is procedurally generating a fantasy setting with hundreds of years of history and thousands of inhabitants. The story is often quite good in spots (sometimes even problematically so; look up Cacame Awemedinade sometime for an example of a story event that broke the game because its results weren't accounted for in the programming, but happened anyway because the AI determined that that was what the characters would reasonably do). The player's actions then result in further changes to the history of this world.
So who's the creator? Is it the guy who wrote the code that procedurally generates the worlds, or the code itself? Or the player?
On the other hand, the audience can go and give suggestions to the author, such as what the creator would communicate or what he should do with X or Y plotline.
The credits also contain people who didn't work on creating the game itself, like PR folks, publishers, localisers, ect. And often, games become the legal property of their publishers rather than their actual developers, which means in fact that neither of us are technically correct by law.
As for choose-your-own-adventure novels, they're different because they don't contain nearly the amount of audience contribution, nor do they contain it on such a fine scale. For instance, a choice in a video game might take you on a different story branch, but it might instead alter a universal story event later -- or perhaps both. A choice in a game might change how another character interacts with you, or perhaps even their independent actions.
Games that include a diverse array of narrative choices are aiming to emulate the relationship between a games master and a player within a tabletop game. This is the essential role of the system, existing story and the choices found therein. A choose-your-own adventure-book isn't aiming for the same scenario because it doesn't include mechanics or the potential for that level of fine choice, literally being a series of branches that diverge and converge. But games can do that, plus they can change the shape of that line, its colour, its bumps and bruises, where it fades and where it clarifies.
There's a lot of reasons why choose-your-own-adventure books are largely marketed towards children while non-linear experiences like tabletop wargames, tabletop RPGs and some video games are marketed towards a more diverse array of demographics. This would be one of them.
That's not really interacting with the medium, though, or if it is, it requires breaking the fourth wall. In a game, you interact with and influence the experience without exiting the experience itself (which is itself another difference between games and choose-your-own-adventure books, which take you out of the experience as they instruct you to find specific pages).
Audiences can certainly influence and impact other forms of media, but I suppose above is the essential difference -- games ask you for your influence within the experience itself.
>For instance, a choice in a video game might take you on a different story branch, but it might instead alter a universal story event later -- or perhaps both. A choice in a game might change how another character interacts with you, or perhaps even their independent actions.
That's still not contributing. It's choosing from pre-determined parts of the program. You can't work around this. What you're doing is mix-and-matching bits of script from pre-determined choices. It isn't creativity. It's multiple choice.
Multiple choice depends on there being an inherently correct answer, which means that in context of video games, it's not considered choice at all -- instead, it's referred to as "calculation". A narrative choice in a game is certainly about problem-solving, but it doesn't have a basis in absolute fact, usually tying itself to some kind of moral choice.
So the goal of a narrative choice in a game is to solve a problem in a way that would achieve the best results by your own ideology or the ideology your in-game avatar. Ergo, unlike a choice in an exam or the kind of guessing-game or calculation choice in a choose-your-own-adventure book, choices in video games invite players to insert their own ideological position into the game. This has to be allowed within the limitations of the game itself, but here's how it essentially goes:
Unlike the technical nature of other choice-based activities, games endeavour to represent some kind immaterial, aetherial outcome based on the philosophy of the player. While it's true that games are technically limited by what the developers or modders can make a game express, I think it's obvious that the intent is to emulate the essential narrative experience of a tabletop RPG group.
If that's the case, then I wonder how much input developers want audiences to have in the experience of a game? The thing is that modern perceptions of intellectual ownership are tied to the capital than can be generated from creativity rather than actual intellectual justice, thus why many creators get screwed out of their intellectual property by guys with a lot of money already. From the architects of Superman, to countless musicians to the developers of Demon's Souls, plenty of artistic minds currently hold no legal ownership of concepts they created and developed on their own. Ergo, the ideological gap between creator and audience doesn't seem particularly rational to me, given that audiences aren't really interested in owning someone else's work if there's no fiscal advantage to it and creators have no reason to be defensive about ownership rights in the absence of a bigwig who's much more likely to steal it.
What I'm getting at here is that ownership of art is largely a result of capitalistic fiscal systems that tie one's creations to a dollar value. What is ultimately valued in our society isn't so much the artwork itself but the monetary value it represents. If one separates art from monetary value, then I hold that the ownership of art is irrelevant, as it's meant to be experienced for experience's sake. So I take a perspective on games that, for better or worse, is free of modern capitalistic trappings and interpretations of art as a commodity. In the ideal sense of the term, games should exist because they provide certain kinds of experiences, and that was certainly the case originally. I would argue that art, by definition, has to exceed concepts of personal ownership outside attribution. After all, none of the most successful artworks in history or the modern day are considered to be "owned" de facto; some people own original versions, but no-one is considered to own an artwork in and of itself. It's the capital that can be generated from art that gets in the way.
I wonder how small a human brain can get (accounting for additions in folds, more efficient wiring, etc.) before it is too small to maintain human intelligence and capabilities for memory throughout their whole life?
Technically, could remove most things to do with sensory data (so everything that isn't the frontal lobe or the core structures) and still have a being of essentially human intelligence, although not sensory capability.
^ Ok, how small could the human brain get without severely impacting intelligence, perception, or motor skills of the world (obviously any sensory organs changing size would affect perception but only the brain's size is being changed in this question)?
Motor skills and general intelligence are primarily to do with the frontal lobe. While other lobes also contribute to these things, they're primarily to do with sensory data. I'm not quite sure how small the brain could ultimately get while retaining most aspects of human functionality, but I daresay something more efficient could be smaller. For instance, while we use almost 100% of our brains overall, only a fraction of that is engaged while partaking of any particular task. Ergo, a smaller brain working at 100% efficiency all the time could work just as well in theory.
The downside would be that it would be inefficient when it comes to energy consumption. The brain takes a lot of power to function (ever felt tired after a lot of reading?), and a brain operating at peak load all the time? Whoever has that brain will have huge nutritional requirements. So while I can't tell you specifically how small the brain could get, as I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist or neuroscientist, I can tell you that it could be significantly smaller.
I suppose the best way to find out is to research which singular task takes up the most brain-space for it to be done to completion and well. This would give you the minimum size for a functional brain, because a brain operating under some theoretical 100% efficiency shouldn't need any more mass or space than what is required for its maximally taxing task. In reality, though, evolution isn't that efficient, which is why our brains are larger than they "need" to be in comparison to the aforementioned superbrain.
Played TOR with Crake for a few hours today. Finally off of Tython.
I'm a Jedi Consular, specced as a Shadow with an emphasis on DPS (No way I'm tanking when I can only wear Light Armour). Plus, you know, I have Qyzen.
When I finally get TOR I'm going as a Trooper.
If, I should say.
I'd encourage you to buy it, if only because it gives me yet more crap to do when I come up, but fucking hell, it costs eighty bucks.
But hey, I could always use a tank.
^^ Evolution is tied to context, only really caring about the efficient survivors. What we lack in hypothetical brain efficiency, we make up with our "lack" of nutritional needs. Like I said, a brain running at full power all the time is going to wear an organism out, so if the nutritional requirements outstrip the survival benefit, then you've got a species doomed to extinction, no matters its potential intellectual power.
Ergo, we're about as efficient as we can be, taking into consideration our physical needs and our nature as a social species. It helps to think about things in terms of abstract value; a bear's strength might be much more than ours, for instance, but the baseline abstract value of a human's strength multiplies with every human being in a tribe or what-have-you. Our capacity to communicate and co-operate, and our willingness to do so, are heavily underrated advantages by most.
^^My plan is to get it when I finish the HSC.
Maybe I save up and buy it day after my final exam.
So let's see, my after final exam things to do list is currently:
1. Go three days without pants
2. Play TOR
3. SLEEEEEEEEP
hey, wear pants, goddammit
I'm visiting before the HSC is over though. So that's no help