Jimquisition: Lazy, Boring, Ordinary, Art Games
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I apologize if this has already been said, as I don't have the time to read all of the comments, but this is the first time I've disagreed with Jim, although it is only partial disagreement.
I agree that games have to utilize their interactive nature. They have to let you be a part of them. However, I think Dear Esther does this and does it well. The problem with it, in my estimation, is that it simply wont appeal to a lot of people. If you go in WANTING to be pulled into the world, TRYING to be pulled in, the story works. If you are the kind of person who goes in to see IF it will pull you in, it probably wont. There is little it does to pull you into the story, but once you are in it the story is fascinating. I don't think it is even that deep, but it is a story that is different for everyone.
Dear Esther utilizes a semi-random story, where the framework is the same, but the actual bits of narration change each time you play (selecting from a list of possible lines). The story is very, very vague, and the fact that the details are different for everyone means that everyone has their own interpretation. The game is essentially a puzzle game, but you don't interact with the environment, you interact with the story, trying to piece together disparate narrative threads to reach a conclusion as to what is going on. This makes the story so much more personal, because YOU figured out what's going on, the game didn't tell you.
Dear Esther really wouldn't work as a short-film or novel, as you suggested, because if it just told you the story it would be boring. The fact that it is a game lets the story be non-linear and it also slows the pace. The vague details don't make for a very meaty story, so just expressing it straight out would lose the pacing and immersion.
Now I realize that it isn't perfect, and I agree that it needs to let you interact with the environment a bit more. What I think would work perfectly for this style of 'interactive story' is Amnesia:The Dark Descent's click-drag physics. They let you interact with the environment in a fairly natural, immersive way. This is why I think it is awesome that Dear Esther devs TheChineseRoom are making a game under Amnesia devs Frictional Games. They will get to use the immersive Amnesia interaction system along with their talent for storytelling. I don't think Dear Esther is perfect but I love it for its uniqueness. It is the only game I've ever played that has a story that is simultaneously so linear and yet so personal. I do think that many games are guilty of just having you walk through a story so that they seem deep and arty though. Limbo almost fell into this trap, but the puzzles and atmosphere were enough to pull it through IMO. Every Day the Same Dream on the other hand, was fucking boring. I know that is was partially supposed to be to make its point, but just because you wanted your game to be boring and repetitious doesn't stop it from being, well, shit.
One game (well, mod really) actually made use of this lack of interactivity. The Stanley Parable is a Half-Life mod in which the entire point is the lack of control. I don't want to say too much more for fear of spoiling, but it is fantastic and you should definitely play it (it only takes about an hour or so to see all of the endings.) A lot of people say that these art games Jim speaks of ARE interactive because you walk around and take it at your own pace, its just that the interactivity isn't combat-based (hmm yes, go back to your 'shooty' games, plebian.) This argument is BS in my opinion because while walking around freely is technically interactivity, it is boring interactivity, and usually contributes nothing to the work in question. Dear Esther uses it to slow the pacing and to add to the atmosphere and immersion by letting you walk around and take in the scenery at your own pace.
In the end, I think you are right Jim, but I think Dear Esther is better than you give it credit for, even if it isn't the best.I don't mind the problems because it was an experiment. It has no interactivity in the environment because it was designed to see if a game could be held up by narrative ALONE. I think it succeeded, but I can easily see how someone who doesn't actually TRY to get pulled in like I did may have found it face-meltingly boring. It is similar to how some people (like me) find Amnesia terrifying while others think it is dumb. If you don't actively immerse yourself in it, the game's subtle dread-inducing tactics will have no effect on you and the actual scares will be made far less scary. Whatever, to each his own I guess, I just wanted to voice another point of view.
Oh and uh, sorry for the wall of text, I tend to do that a lot =/
I agree that games have to utilize their interactive nature. They have to let you be a part of them. However, I think Dear Esther does this and does it well. The problem with it, in my estimation, is that it simply wont appeal to a lot of people. If you go in WANTING to be pulled into the world, TRYING to be pulled in, the story works. If you are the kind of person who goes in to see IF it will pull you in, it probably wont. There is little it does to pull you into the story, but once you are in it the story is fascinating. I don't think it is even that deep, but it is a story that is different for everyone.
Dear Esther utilizes a semi-random story, where the framework is the same, but the actual bits of narration change each time you play (selecting from a list of possible lines). The story is very, very vague, and the fact that the details are different for everyone means that everyone has their own interpretation. The game is essentially a puzzle game, but you don't interact with the environment, you interact with the story, trying to piece together disparate narrative threads to reach a conclusion as to what is going on. This makes the story so much more personal, because YOU figured out what's going on, the game didn't tell you.
Dear Esther really wouldn't work as a short-film or novel, as you suggested, because if it just told you the story it would be boring. The fact that it is a game lets the story be non-linear and it also slows the pace. The vague details don't make for a very meaty story, so just expressing it straight out would lose the pacing and immersion.
Now I realize that it isn't perfect, and I agree that it needs to let you interact with the environment a bit more. What I think would work perfectly for this style of 'interactive story' is Amnesia:The Dark Descent's click-drag physics. They let you interact with the environment in a fairly natural, immersive way. This is why I think it is awesome that Dear Esther devs TheChineseRoom are making a game under Amnesia devs Frictional Games. They will get to use the immersive Amnesia interaction system along with their talent for storytelling. I don't think Dear Esther is perfect but I love it for its uniqueness. It is the only game I've ever played that has a story that is simultaneously so linear and yet so personal. I do think that many games are guilty of just having you walk through a story so that they seem deep and arty though. Limbo almost fell into this trap, but the puzzles and atmosphere were enough to pull it through IMO. Every Day the Same Dream on the other hand, was fucking boring. I know that is was partially supposed to be to make its point, but just because you wanted your game to be boring and repetitious doesn't stop it from being, well, shit.
One game (well, mod really) actually made use of this lack of interactivity. The Stanley Parable is a Half-Life mod in which the entire point is the lack of control. I don't want to say too much more for fear of spoiling, but it is fantastic and you should definitely play it (it only takes about an hour or so to see all of the endings.) A lot of people say that these art games Jim speaks of ARE interactive because you walk around and take it at your own pace, its just that the interactivity isn't combat-based (hmm yes, go back to your 'shooty' games, plebian.) This argument is BS in my opinion because while walking around freely is technically interactivity, it is boring interactivity, and usually contributes nothing to the work in question. Dear Esther uses it to slow the pacing and to add to the atmosphere and immersion by letting you walk around and take in the scenery at your own pace.
In the end, I think you are right Jim, but I think Dear Esther is better than you give it credit for, even if it isn't the best.I don't mind the problems because it was an experiment. It has no interactivity in the environment because it was designed to see if a game could be held up by narrative ALONE. I think it succeeded, but I can easily see how someone who doesn't actually TRY to get pulled in like I did may have found it face-meltingly boring. It is similar to how some people (like me) find Amnesia terrifying while others think it is dumb. If you don't actively immerse yourself in it, the game's subtle dread-inducing tactics will have no effect on you and the actual scares will be made far less scary. Whatever, to each his own I guess, I just wanted to voice another point of view.
Oh and uh, sorry for the wall of text, I tend to do that a lot =/
Really, I think there are a bunch of what I consider to be "symbiotic delusions" we accept in the world. I think of it like two people on the internet lying to each other about their qualifications -- each knows the other is full of it, but they also know they're misrepresenting themselves... so neither calls the other out on it, because they don't want to be called out, too. Each allows the other to continue the lie so that they can enjoy the same courtesy.him over there said:
The folks pushing the "next wave" art get to feed on the attention of the folks pretending to "get it," and the folks pretending to "get it" get to feel like the intellectual elite. As long as both sides agree not to tell on each other, they both get to look down their noses at all those "idiots" on the outside.
There's no way to stop this kind of thing from happening. All you can do is avoid participating in their little exchange.
This is more or less how I feel. By most definitions of the word "game," Dear Esther is not one. It's an interactive experience with the intent on telling a story. No, it doesn't leverage a lot of the tools we've learned about creating video games as interactive experiences, but I don't think it needs to. Not every novelist needs to be, say, James Joyce, and experiment with the structure of telling a linear story; and similarly, not every interactive story needs to experiment with a common, working structure. In either cases (of novels or interactive stories), it does't make it any less "art" or even any less "original," just less "evolutionary." If every type of art medium had a rule where every piece had to be evolutionary, they'd probably evolve faster, but at the cost of having a lot more "misses" instead of "hits." It's good to have a balance of both in the world.Adam Jensen said:
Well, that last part wasn't really trying to make a specific point. I was mainly referencing Jim's mention of boring, dusty museums. Linked to the previous paragraph you could say I'm illustrating how both activities can be entertaining and neither is wrong, despite fundamentally different approaches to active participation. The reference to art was kind of incidental.him over there said:
You're right. Jim is criticizing these games for being called 'games'. Which just strikes me as shallow and narrow-minded. His assertion that they call themselves Art Games or even the existence of this designation as a genre is weird too. Who said that Henceforth It Shall Be So? Video game itself is just a term that presently has a very broad meaning, as developers experiment with the tools available to them. Jim directly insults these games because he finds them lacking in qualities he associates with games he enjoys. I'm not sure how else you could interpret "pretentious load of shit" or "stale; mundane; fucking sheep-leading (lol); non-interactive pap" other than Jim thinking they are bad but maybe I misunderstood.
If you found Dear Esther boring or inscrutable that is a totally valid reaction. Heaps of art is. But Jim saying that it is 'doing it wrong' is pompous and and a wee bit elitist. I completely disagree that Dear Esther would have been the same experience if viewed passively as a film. In a film the experience would have been crafted for me down to the last detail. I would have been unable to stop and examine the vistas or details which interested me or experience the narrative (such as it was) at the pace I set. The information, poems and story elements would have been entirely predetermined and the experience identical to everyone else's. 'Was it entertaining or successful in what it was trying to do' is not the same discussion as 'it failed because it didn't have X and all games must have X'.
I agree with Jim. I actually enjoyed Dear Esther and The Path, but it does feel like their "arty" aesthetic and premises are being used to excuse the fact that players are barely playing a game.
At least the themes and art are good enough in those games to succeed in distracting me from the flaw. Katawa Shoujo, by contrast, utterly failed to do the same. It's art, writing and story telling were far too clumsy to get away with the fact that all the player can do is make an arbitrary decision every 20 minutes or so.
At least the themes and art are good enough in those games to succeed in distracting me from the flaw. Katawa Shoujo, by contrast, utterly failed to do the same. It's art, writing and story telling were far too clumsy to get away with the fact that all the player can do is make an arbitrary decision every 20 minutes or so.
...Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3...
SUPER INTELLIGENT ZING THAT NO ONE ELSE COULD HAVE THOUGHT OF! PLEASE WATCH AS I DO AN EROTIC DANCE SO THAT MY SUPERIORITY IS TOTALLY APPARENT.
Only Jim can defend a point I agree with so poorly he almost makes me change my mind. It's true that there are plenty of games who think calling themselves 'art' is a get-out-of-engaging-gameplay card, but the examples cited are horrible. Saying that Every Day the Same Dream is a game in which 'you watch story happen around you' makes me think you haven't actually played it. (Or didn't play it through the end, imagining that because it was an Art Game it didn't actually have any objective and you were only supposed to repeatedly go to work. Which I must say is an understandable reaction.)
As for Dear Esther, I agree that it's the kind of self-affirming artsy fartsy thing that doesn't actually push the medium forward, but keep in mind that the game that just came out is a graphical update of a 2008 mod. The art game/indie scene rocketed forward in those four years, and while pretentious games are still coming out and thinking they're the utmost form of human expression, back when it actually came out Dear Esther was breaking ground. You say Dear Esther doesn't bring anything new, and yet Journey does; but they both do the same thing, only in different amounts. Anything new will need some bad tries until it settles in a way that actually works, and comparing a game to one four years its senior - and which probably took some lessons from it to heart - is just mean. (It wouldn't be so if it was a review, as the game actually came out on Steam just now, but this video is meant to look at it from a perspective of gaming as a medium; it's the difference between talking about the bad translation of a Dostoevsky book on its Amazon reviews and on a master's thesis on Russian literature.)
Perhaps it's because those "visual books" are marketed as games. If you are prepared to describe it as a game, than it deserves to be held up to the standards used to judge games.piscian said:
The first three had no story, just lots of settings and exciting action sequences. They, along with Medal of Honour, brought something radically different from Half Life and Doom, providing a more streamlined and faster paced FPS. They did it well, and so can be excused for a lot. By COD3, they realised that they needed something different from WWII - something more - so they went with a totally different period, tone and story. Modern Warfare is very different for that reason. Black Ops is totally out there; a stand alone with a world of its own. So really, there is a lot of innovation, experimentation, story telling, and variation in COD games. People who tend to say "they're all the same" are like old people describing anime: "They're all big eyes and shouting; they're all basically the same thing". They're basing their argument on superficial observations. It would be ignorant to suggest Call of Duty 2 is the same as Call of Duty: Black Ops.
I enjoy sunsets and parks, but those would make really boring games. I think that is Bob's point. Hence why he said he'd rather read a bed time story, than be sold one in game form.
I found looking at the back ground and strange notes on the walls in Dear Esther better then 25 hours of meaningless explosions from Battlefield and modern war. Knowing what game was about before hand helped put me in a different state of mind. And that is what Jim failed to do, you can't play Skyrim like you do Team fortress 2. You have to change your expectations to fit what you are playing. I didn't mind the lack of things to do, but when I found things alone the way that I would always take with me. Medical supplies, etc, it didn't make any sense to me. Was I listening to a story, Living a story, or writing the story? A puzzle or two would have been a nice to break up the long session, maybe something from the writing on the walls. Or more freedom to explore, like the group of ships at one point. The game barred you from going inside and checking them out. I would love a large detailed world ready for me to look at every plant and rock.
A little hard on Dear Esther wasn't he? I mean granted it's not really an engaging "game" but it's an interesting way to deliver narrative. The minimal player interaction (moving and looking) draws you in just that much more than if you read a similar story as piece of writing, or watched a film composed of nice scenery with some narration. The disadvantage though, is that while I sometimes feel like re-reading short stories, I would never want to replay Dear Esther. Walking around just takes too damn long.
I enjoyed Dear Esther, a statement I feel neither a need to defend nor to proselytize. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and that's just fine; I'm just glad there is a space within the market for games of the type.
I do think there are things it could have done better, though. Something like Half-Life 2, with its speechless main character, partly shows a way: pay attention to what the player is paying attention to. I understand there are some randomized elements in Dear Esther, some variations for multiple play-throughs, but I confess I haven't yet felt compelled to give it another two hours in the hope of finding those withheld bits of narrative any more than I feel compelled (rather than cheated) to find the 117th hidden golden ring in game X to get the "real ending". One of the things that sets aside the games I really feel worth my time these days is that they feel like they're conforming to the way I play, rather than constantly punishing me or re-routing me for not playing the way the short-sighted designer envisioned. I think a game like Dear Esther certainly could deliver that experience. But we're not there yet.
I do think there are things it could have done better, though. Something like Half-Life 2, with its speechless main character, partly shows a way: pay attention to what the player is paying attention to. I understand there are some randomized elements in Dear Esther, some variations for multiple play-throughs, but I confess I haven't yet felt compelled to give it another two hours in the hope of finding those withheld bits of narrative any more than I feel compelled (rather than cheated) to find the 117th hidden golden ring in game X to get the "real ending". One of the things that sets aside the games I really feel worth my time these days is that they feel like they're conforming to the way I play, rather than constantly punishing me or re-routing me for not playing the way the short-sighted designer envisioned. I think a game like Dear Esther certainly could deliver that experience. But we're not there yet.
I actually liked "Every Day the Same Dream". I don't think it's worth playing twice, but I do like it.
(there is sort of a way to "win")
(there is sort of a way to "win")
After I read your review of Journey on destructoid, I knew this episode was coming.
I showed your review to all of my friends to show how the guy who consistently bashes art games loves Journey and you should go play it.
I showed your review to all of my friends to show how the guy who consistently bashes art games loves Journey and you should go play it.
Shadow of the Colossus. That's What I consider an art game done right. Beautiful world with a great story and message, but still revolving around your quest and the unique and engaging puzzle/boss fights make it one of my most favorite 'Arty Game'.
In a way your right, but in a way your amazingly wrong.
With many games of artistic vein the message is important element. Just as much as combat and mechanics. The bubble thats referenced is like conveying the message of helplessness and being out of control over ones fate. Look how well that worked for a game like Amnesia TDD
I grant you that many art games fail, and its because of the failure to balance the message along with the other traditional gaming elements, much like the visually repeatedly pointed out "The Path". But to imply an art game is a failure because it keeps the player in a bubble of sorts is like to suggest that a game like Myst and or Riven was a shit art game, because its premise is built around the same thing. The narrative dominating the interactivity and rendering the player frustrated at limitations they do not think should be there.
Its not that you miss the point,cause you clearly get it. Its that your choosing to ignore the points relevance and assign your own level of validity. When you make that choice, then make a video about it, your engaged in a little sheep leading of your own.
With many games of artistic vein the message is important element. Just as much as combat and mechanics. The bubble thats referenced is like conveying the message of helplessness and being out of control over ones fate. Look how well that worked for a game like Amnesia TDD
I grant you that many art games fail, and its because of the failure to balance the message along with the other traditional gaming elements, much like the visually repeatedly pointed out "The Path". But to imply an art game is a failure because it keeps the player in a bubble of sorts is like to suggest that a game like Myst and or Riven was a shit art game, because its premise is built around the same thing. The narrative dominating the interactivity and rendering the player frustrated at limitations they do not think should be there.
Its not that you miss the point,cause you clearly get it. Its that your choosing to ignore the points relevance and assign your own level of validity. When you make that choice, then make a video about it, your engaged in a little sheep leading of your own.