Beyond: Two Souls vs. The Stanley Parable

[Proverbial Jon]

The biggest question is which of these two games is a bigger piece of pretentious crap?

I'd say Beyond Two Souls.

For something to be pretentious it has to be making a deliberate effort to be such, as defined by the official definition of the word. You can't be pretentious by accident.

The Stanley Parable is very aware of what it is and makes no attempt to be anything different. It doesn't try to impress or dazzle anyone with spectacle. It simply makes a series of observations and the level of enjoyment taken from it is dependant on the player.

Beyond: Two Souls, on the other hand, wants so much to be a movie that it treats the player like a malignant growth. It shuns any form of input by blatantly ignoring the action and continuing the story it wants to tell you. It wants us to be blown away by it's revolutionary storytelling. Apparently this is what all games wish they could be like. Yeah, this is a pretentious game.

 

[Rachith Sridhar]

The biggest question is which of these two games is a bigger piece of pretentious crap?

I'd say Beyond Two Souls.

For something to be pretentious it has to be making a deliberate effort to be such, as defined by the official definition of the word. You can't be pretentious by accident.

The Stanley Parable is very aware of what it is and makes no attempt to be anything different. It doesn't try to impress or dazzle anyone with spectacle. It simply makes a series of observations and the level of enjoyment taken from it is dependant on the player.

Beyond: Two Souls, on the other hand, wants so much to be a movie that it treats the player like a malignant growth. It shuns any form of input by blatantly ignoring the action and continuing the story it wants to tell you. It wants us to be blown away by it's revolutionary storytelling. Apparently this is what all games wish they could be like. Yeah, this is a pretentious game.

Pretentious means trying to overstate the importance of something. It may or may not be an accident.
B:TS overstates the importance of a purely narrative driven game and thus is pretentious. Meanwhile The Stanley Parable is a narrative game about the problems of narrative in games. Its aim is to highlight the problems in gaming narrative and player agency and does so without overstating it. Thus as a work of art, it is far more superior than whatever nonsense David Cage tries to cook up...

 

[Azrael the Cat]

In brief, then, the games are hardly worth comparing, because while The Stanley Parable is actually a player-controlled branching narrative, Beyond: Two Souls merely puts on an illusion of one.

I take issue with this. While I will admit I have played neither of these games I have two main gripes about this statement.

First, you can have the illusion of a player-controlled branching narrative and still have a good game. Telltale's The Walking Dead is an excellent example. Seriously, all you can change in that game is some minor dialog and the order in which people die. Yet it still kicks people in the feels and has them drooling for more (me included, YAY CLEM!!!).

Second, I would argue that there are no real player-controlled branching narrative games. All the choices you can make in any game have already been thought of and made a part of the game. So you, as the player, are simply following a set path the devs have laid out for you. Giving you the illusion of freedom.

Original Deux Ex (and games made by Warren Spector from 1995-2002) disagrees with you.

Rarely done these days, but a lot of focus in those games was on the idea of emergent gameplay. Sure, the actual plot might branch depending on what the designer predicted, but by ensuring that you never HAVE to kill someone to proceed, you could combine abilities and the enemy AI in unanticipated ways. Spector commented that he knew they'd got it right in Deux Ex when he was watching a playthrough years after the game came out, and seeing the player do things they'd never imagined, yet had made possible using emergent mechanics.

 

[Sarge034]

Original Deux Ex (and games made by Warren Spector from 1995-2002) disagrees with you.

Rarely done these days, but a lot of focus in those games was on the idea of emergent gameplay. Sure, the actual plot might branch depending on what the designer predicted, but by ensuring that you never HAVE to kill someone to proceed, you could combine abilities and the enemy AI in unanticipated ways. Spector commented that he knew they'd got it right in Deux Ex when he was watching a playthrough years after the game came out, and seeing the player do things they'd never imagined, yet had made possible using emergent mechanics.

First, I'll start of by saying that there is a lot of discussion to be had about the various aspects of emergent gameplay, and I have no intentions to hit them all in this post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_gameplay

Second, it might seem like I'm being short with you but I'm just trying to address every point you have brought up. So with that, let's begin...

>"Sure, the actual plot might branch depending on what the designer predicted" - predetermined paths, illusion of choice.

>"but by ensuring that you never HAVE to kill someone to proceed," - predetermined play style, illusion of choice.

>"you could combine abilities and the enemy AI in unanticipated ways." - False, if this was true the game would not know what to do in those situations, illusion of choice. (expanded upon further below)

>"Spector commented that he knew they'd got it right in Deux Ex when he was watching a playthrough years after the game came out, and seeing the player do things they'd never imagined, yet had made possible using emergent mechanics."

This one is gonna take some talking. So as with the point above this is a false notion. They did technically imagine all possible play styles because they coded how all the abilities and the enemy AI would all work together. Now perhaps they didn't say "you can only do it this way" but instead said, "these are the rules that you have to follow in our playground". It is still a limitation of player choice to what the dev(s) said were acceptable actions in that playground. It is by this limitation of choice that I maintain there is no actual player agency in games, but rather an illusion of player agency and choice. If there was true player agency and choice you could do something the dev(s) never intended you to do. For example in Deus Ex, you could say, "Fuck this shit. I'm going to find a bar, get drunk, find a hooker, rent a motel room, and enjoy myself for the rest of my life." In games like GTA these actions are allowed and as such must be considered an illusion of choice. However, in games like CoD, Deus Ex, Splinter Cell, ect., ect., these actions are not allowed and would then be considered actual player agency. In my mind the only way to attain true player agency would be having an AI simultaneously coding the game and reacting to the player's input.

It simply comes down to how you view player agency. If I can think of something in a game I can't do then I say the game does not truly have player agency.