Most self indulgent thing you've seen in a game?

[BrawlMan]

?You actually have a character who is initially basically a sjw caricature with how he hates all the nobles just for being nobles learn to see one of the noble people in your team as an individual and not as just a representation of the structure of their society.?

I guess SJW just means whatever people want it to mean, and apparently now it means ?person with simplistic opinion.?

Also, FYI, aristocratics being noble leaders who bring prosperity to the common folk is a heavily romanticized take on the idea of nobility, even when they?re depicted as the good ones. You rarely find it in real life, where historically any prosperity brought to a nation was very top heavy. There are exceptions of course, but do understand that JRPGs depicting a noble as enlightened and caring for the commoners is like depicting a samurai as a kind warrior, as opposed to someone who would slit your throat if you insulted them and would get off scott free for it.

It?s like George R.R. Martin said. ?And that?s another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you have the peasants and so forth. But they don?t? seem to realize what it actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage thrown at her. You know.?

Pretty much took the words right out of my mouth and added more details, than I have ever thought of adding. From what I'm hearing, it's just another anime cliche, story about class divide. Nothing exactly special. I don't know how Dreiko's descriptions one of the character counts as an sjw character type. Dreiko I know you don't like the typical "sjw", but you're really stretching it and looking for something that's not there. I think you're letting your dislike for them blind you.

As for Duke Nukem,I was always okay with the guy, but he so plain and boring compared to all the other fps protagonist to have come out in the following decades. Serious Sam, Grayson Hunt, Ion Maiden, Lo Wang (ironic now, because the old version was just a Asian caricature of Duke Nukem), Caleb, and and some ways, the recent characterization of BJ Blazkowicz.

 

[Erttheking]

Also, FYI, aristocratics being noble leaders who bring prosperity to the common folk is a heavily romanticized take on the idea of nobility, even when they?re depicted as the good ones.

Yes, but then if it's a fantasy world of your own devising, you can have a romanticized social system. If you are sticking trains and tanks into the Middle Ages, well, you can make it as grimdark as you like, but authors shouldn't pretend they are forced to due to realism.

This is true. Frankly I have no issue with people liking it, but I kind of got the feeling that Dreiko wasn?t talking about it as an isolated world with its own personal set of rules. Just the way he worded it.

 

[Schadrach]

An actress. She had a YouTube show named The Guild, was in a low budget musical by Joss Whedon named Dr. Horribles Singalong Blog and did some voice acting, among other things in Fallout New Vegas where she played Victoria.

I'm... not sure if she's been in anything lately

She played a side character named Poppy on The Magicians (who is basically a fun, quirky, dragon obsessed psychopath), a fantastic show with really depressing season finales. Like there's a buildup in the last couple of episodes each season that their leading to a successful conclusion and in the last half of every season finale things go horribly wrong in a big way. The most recent season finale ended with an ad for the suicide hotline. They actually succeeded at most of their goals for once too. It was probably the darkest to date, and it actually felt like a series finale but they'd been cleared for a 5th season before it was filmed.

 

[Hawki]

Lo Wang (ironic now, because the old version was just a Asian caricature of Duke Nukem),

I've only seen a bit of the Shadow Warrior games, but isn't he still a caricature?

 

[BrawlMan]

Lo Wang (ironic now, because the old version was just a Asian caricature of Duke Nukem),

I've only seen a bit of the Shadow Warrior games, but isn't he still a caricature?

It's mostly downplayed in the newer version. The older version was basically a mishmash of every Japanese and Chinese stereotype combined into one. Lo Wang was a perverted old man with a overly exaggerated stereotypical "Asian" accent. With all of the Engrish that comes with it. The newer version is way more politically correct by comparison. Just watch any YouTube video of both versions and you'll see what I mean.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

My answer: anything by Hideo Kojima. I love his work, but damn that man loves to blow himself. Other thoughts...

Duke Nukem.

Really? The game's satire. You could argue not very well made satire in the case of DNF, but it's still satire.

Are you going to argue Verhoeven's Starship Troopers movie is a full-throated endorsement of fascism, too? Actually, don't answer that.

This is obviously not handled well in the game and I think a part of the problem with the Vox is that the twist (that you are suddenly meeting alternate reality Vox who hates your guts) comes before the full implications of dimension hopping are revealed. Thus the Vox comes off as really weird ("I was just helping these guys! Why is Daisy suddenly an asshole?!") and once it is explained why in depth, the game, and player, is no longer concerned with the Vox, but with dimension hopping.

It was handled fine, people need to pay attention while they're playing the damn game. As if the mere existence of Columbia isn't enough, the game heavily foreshadows that alternate universes have wildly varying, nearly infinite, circumstances throughout the game. That's the entire point of the ludonarrative harmony behind Elizabeth's tear mechanics, and Booker's deaths and respawning absent Vita-Chambers. Everything you need to know to understand what's going on at that point has already been revealed; all that is required is the player add two and two which is apparently too much to ask nowadays.

 

[Sonmi]

The story was a mess for so many reasons. Once the timeline hopping begins you end up continuing to try doing a mission for people in a timeline you have no chance of ever returning to and nobody seems to realize this.

I recognised this as well. It struck me as a bit weird that Booker at least is so fine with just hopping across realities and leaving his own behind.

I think it technically could work from an in-universe perspective - like, if Booker 2 is killed after joining the Vox, but Booker 1 takes his place, then I guess in theory he'd still be in a position to repay his debts, and would take Booker 2's place in that reality, assuming that everything else is the same. But what I want to know is what Daisy 1 thought when "gee, that Booker guy never came back, wonder what happened." Or, on the subject of Daisy and the Vox, why the entire Vox Populi just instantly go from "hell yeah, Booker!" to "kill Booker, Daisy told us to!" Like, was there no-one among the Vox who stopped and asked why?

Like I said, the Vox are really mishandled. I'm not even sure why they're there per se apart from trying to make points about class warfare. Which would be fine, if the game wasn't also trying to cover numerous other themes as well.

If I recall correctly, Booker died a martyr for the cause in the new alternate universe, so the Vox there thinks he's an impostor posing as him. I recall thinking it was absolutely dumb too.

 

[CaitSeith]

How are SJWs relevant to anything you were talking about? Do you always feel the need to throw random insults at people you don't like no matter what the topic?

I noticed this too and had the same question. What do SJW have to do with anything? Does Tales of Cold Steel have some "Social Justice" Politics I didn't know about and somehow didn't become a controversy?

Nah! He is making reference to a failed meme which was pretty much renaming SJW as NPC. In certain way, his joke was relevant to the topic: it was very self-indulgent.

 

[CaitSeith]

The most self-indulgent thing is narrative driven games with cinematic/dialogs that you can't skip or fast-forward after watching the first time. Even Visual Novels understand that the audience wants to be able to skip what they have already read when replaying in a different route.

David Cage games are a pretty good example of this, because his games have different story routes to explore, but there is no good reason to not be able to fast-forward the dialog and sequences that have been already watched and don't need the player's input.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

?You actually have a character who is initially basically a sjw caricature with how he hates all the nobles just for being nobles learn to see one of the noble people in your team as an individual and not as just a representation of the structure of their society.?

I guess SJW just means whatever people want it to mean, and apparently now it means ?person with simplistic opinion.?

Also, FYI, aristocratics being noble leaders who bring prosperity to the common folk is a heavily romanticized take on the idea of nobility, even when they?re depicted as the good ones. You rarely find it in real life, where historically any prosperity brought to a nation was very top heavy. There are exceptions of course, but do understand that JRPGs depicting a noble as enlightened and caring for the commoners is like depicting a samurai as a kind warrior, as opposed to someone who would slit your throat if you insulted them and would get off scott free for it.

It?s like George R.R. Martin said. ?And that?s another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you have the peasants and so forth. But they don?t? seem to realize what it actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage thrown at her. You know.?

The thing that makes that character an SJW is that he's totalitarian and thinks in groups and doesn't see people as individuals, he's all like "you're a commoner, right? you're not a noble, right?" when introduced to people and expects this to matter when interacting with people. He sees the structure/group in place of the individual.

The great thing is that through interaction and character growth, he does begin to distinguish individuals from the nobles as being good people too, so he learns to stop being a totalitarian marxist bent on his class struggle and instead becomes a person who can have common ground with people irrespective of their class.


Oh and your description of nobles is pretty on point with what the game has, actually, it just also happens to have some of the more idealized ones but it does make a big deal about them and they are very very much not the norm. The setting of the first game in particular is that of a military academy (then war kinda breaks out) attended by both classes so the nobles there are not quite as free to exert their authority but there's a lot of cases where offending someone might be a capital offense when you're outside of the academy's grounds.

Also, FYI, aristocratics being noble leaders who bring prosperity to the common folk is a heavily romanticized take on the idea of nobility, even when they?re depicted as the good ones.

Yes, but then if it's a fantasy world of your own devising, you can have a romanticized social system. If you are sticking trains and tanks into the Middle Ages, well, you can make it as grimdark as you like, but authors shouldn't pretend they are forced to due to realism.

The world is that of a middle ages that just 50 years ago was thrust by technological advancements into the industrial age of the late 1800s (rough approximation) due to scientists figuring out how to use technology that was leftover by a civilization that went extinct a millennium ago so you have still a lot of people stuck in their middle ages cultural norms but being besieged by progress such as high speed trains and telephones and radio and so on. Some people embrace it, others stick their feet on the ground and resist, others just use it to gain power. It has that dynamic where you have medieval soldiers feeling useless when faced with literal magic tanks and thinking that all of their training was meaningless and so on. Oh and there's divine knights (Ancient Mechs gundam style) that appear eventually too. Can't forget those .

So yeah, not exactly realistic.

How are SJWs relevant to anything you were talking about? Do you always feel the need to throw random insults at people you don't like no matter what the topic?

I noticed this too and had the same question. What do SJW have to do with anything? Does Tales of Cold Steel have some "Social Justice" Politics I didn't know about and somehow didn't become a controversy?

Nah! He is making reference to a failed meme which was pretty much renaming SJW as NPC. In certain way, his joke was relevant to the topic: it was very self-indulgent.

If you read my top post, you'll see that it does actually deal with a lot of social justice issues. Though you are right that I was also referencing the meme. It was a dual layered joke.

But yeah, the main party in the game is the very first cross-class year of the military academy, an experiment in integration. I'd call a game about anti-segregation to be about social justice. God knows that world at least needs it.

 

[Erttheking]

The thing that makes that character an SJW is that he's totalitarian and thinks in groups and doesn't see people as individuals, he's all like "you're a commoner, right? you're not a noble, right?" when introduced to people and expects this to matter when interacting with people. He sees the structure/group in place of the individual.

The great thing is that through interaction and character growth, he does begin to distinguish individuals from the nobles as being good people too, so he learns to stop being a totalitarian marxist bent on his class struggle and instead becomes a person who can have common ground with people irrespective of their class.


Oh and your description of nobles is pretty on point with what the game has, actually, it just also happens to have some of the more idealized ones but it does make a big deal about them and they are very very much not the norm. The setting of the first game in particular is that of a military academy (then war kinda breaks out) attended by both classes so the nobles there are not quite as free to exert their authority but there's a lot of cases where offending someone might be a capital offense when you're outside of the academy's grounds.

SJWs are totalitarian now? Yeah, I'm gonna repeat what I said before. Apparently SJW means whatever people want it to mean now. And they see people as groups and not individuals? So everyone who sees the poor as just a mass of poor lazy people are SJWs now too?

Though I'm glad to hear the game doesn't buy into royally sucking off the nobility.

 

[Avnger]

My answer: anything by Hideo Kojima. I love his work, but damn that man loves to blow himself. Other thoughts...

Duke Nukem.

Really? The game's satire. You could argue not very well made satire in the case of DNF, but it's still satire.

Just fyi: "it's satire" isn't some magic phrase that turns a pile of shit into a stack of gold. If it smells like shit, looks like shit, feels like shit, and tastes like shit, its shit regardless of how many times you may say "it's just satire/sarcasm/a joke/etc."

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

The thing that makes that character an SJW is that he's totalitarian and thinks in groups and doesn't see people as individuals, he's all like "you're a commoner, right? you're not a noble, right?" when introduced to people and expects this to matter when interacting with people. He sees the structure/group in place of the individual.

The great thing is that through interaction and character growth, he does begin to distinguish individuals from the nobles as being good people too, so he learns to stop being a totalitarian marxist bent on his class struggle and instead becomes a person who can have common ground with people irrespective of their class.


Oh and your description of nobles is pretty on point with what the game has, actually, it just also happens to have some of the more idealized ones but it does make a big deal about them and they are very very much not the norm. The setting of the first game in particular is that of a military academy (then war kinda breaks out) attended by both classes so the nobles there are not quite as free to exert their authority but there's a lot of cases where offending someone might be a capital offense when you're outside of the academy's grounds.

SJWs are totalitarian now? Yeah, I'm gonna repeat what I said before. Apparently SJW means whatever people want it to mean now. And they see people as groups and not individuals? So everyone who sees the poor as just a mass of poor lazy people are SJWs now too?

Though I'm glad to hear the game doesn't buy into royally sucking off the nobility.

I've never heard anyone make that point with any degree of seriousness but if someone did do that then sure. They'd just be fighting for a different type of social justice, one where you don't steal the work of people unjustly just because you happen to be poor enough or what have you. Still, not seeing how people are individuals and treating them as mere "representatives of their group" is what sjws do.

And I did already mention that the game didn't become controversial exactly because it doesn't suck off anybody but rather showcased the issues and good points of all sides and teaches the characters (and in effect the player too) that the world is more nuanced than it initially appears to be. It shows that even those who are fighting against an oppressive social structure can also be corrupt themselves too and their just aspect in one area of society does not purify every other bad thing they also do that is just objectively bad.

 

[Dalisclock]

?You actually have a character who is initially basically a sjw caricature with how he hates all the nobles just for being nobles learn to see one of the noble people in your team as an individual and not as just a representation of the structure of their society.?

I guess SJW just means whatever people want it to mean, and apparently now it means ?person with simplistic opinion.?

Also, FYI, aristocratics being noble leaders who bring prosperity to the common folk is a heavily romanticized take on the idea of nobility, even when they?re depicted as the good ones. You rarely find it in real life, where historically any prosperity brought to a nation was very top heavy. There are exceptions of course, but do understand that JRPGs depicting a noble as enlightened and caring for the commoners is like depicting a samurai as a kind warrior, as opposed to someone who would slit your throat if you insulted them and would get off scott free for it.

It?s like George R.R. Martin said. ?And that?s another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you have the peasants and so forth. But they don?t? seem to realize what it actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage thrown at her. You know.?

The thing that makes that character an SJW is that he's totalitarian and thinks in groups and doesn't see people as individuals, he's all like "you're a commoner, right? you're not a noble, right?" when introduced to people and expects this to matter when interacting with people. He sees the structure/group in place of the individual.

The great thing is that through interaction and character growth, he does begin to distinguish individuals from the nobles as being good people too, so he learns to stop being a totalitarian marxist bent on his class struggle and instead becomes a person who can have common ground with people irrespective of their class.

I didn't realize this was a Social Justice thing as opposed to a "being a person" thing. You know, Tribalism or most other -isms where anyone from outside their group is an other and to be viewed with suspicion.

Though I can't imagine why a commoner who sees Nobles as decadent, corrupt and uncaring would have any reason to dislike them when he meets them.

Also, I've yet to be convinced SJW actually has a meaning other then "Someone whose opinions I don't like".

 

[Hawki]

If I recall correctly, Booker died a martyr for the cause in the new alternate universe, so the Vox there thinks he's an impostor posing as him. I recall thinking it was absolutely dumb too.

You recall correctly.

And again, I'll reiterate - I can actually understand why the Daisy of that universe wants Booker dead. What's harder to swallow is that the entirety of the Vox turns against Booker at the drop of the hat, especially since up to Daisy giving her kill order, they're all cheering for him.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

seeing as first options have been taken, am going to go for people who put their own kids in their work.
oh alright, sure...can't think of any specific examples to provide - what with limited exposure to the medium and barely focusing on what is consumed in any moment as it is - but I can feel it must have happened already, can feel it in my bones. which could be some paranoid schizophrenia creeping out from under the rug, or it could be an understanding of human tendencies while observing every other medium with a large enough pool of creative procreators unable to fight their basest desires to brandish their spoilt little shits in their own work as the bluntest method of declaring a newfound parental love to the world

ok, stories of actual tragedy (and inspiration I suppose) are no problem as they not only help us understand and empathise with others, sometimes allowing us to grow as human beings, but also work as pretty effective methods of therapy for the creative procreators themselves, providing a productive coping mechanism that can support further humans in unseen ways.
it's really just those that have no story to tell, like Kevin Sorbo's Let There be light, with solely insufferable displays of parental love/pride. as if it's not the natural default that stopped us dying out over thousands of years. it's not different from that guy who can't stop going on about how much he enjoys sex as if it's some grand unexpected revelation everyone else needs to know. don't proudly advertise your insignificant natural default, it's so boring and predictable...tell us if you hate your kids though! that's a different story. tell us if you got 'em locked up in the cellar feeding off sparse lumps of moss too! also, provide your approximate current location so we can pass it on to the authorities whilst you're there

 

[Erttheking]

The thing that makes that character an SJW is that he's totalitarian and thinks in groups and doesn't see people as individuals, he's all like "you're a commoner, right? you're not a noble, right?" when introduced to people and expects this to matter when interacting with people. He sees the structure/group in place of the individual.

The great thing is that through interaction and character growth, he does begin to distinguish individuals from the nobles as being good people too, so he learns to stop being a totalitarian marxist bent on his class struggle and instead becomes a person who can have common ground with people irrespective of their class.


Oh and your description of nobles is pretty on point with what the game has, actually, it just also happens to have some of the more idealized ones but it does make a big deal about them and they are very very much not the norm. The setting of the first game in particular is that of a military academy (then war kinda breaks out) attended by both classes so the nobles there are not quite as free to exert their authority but there's a lot of cases where offending someone might be a capital offense when you're outside of the academy's grounds.

SJWs are totalitarian now? Yeah, I'm gonna repeat what I said before. Apparently SJW means whatever people want it to mean now. And they see people as groups and not individuals? So everyone who sees the poor as just a mass of poor lazy people are SJWs now too?

Though I'm glad to hear the game doesn't buy into royally sucking off the nobility.

I've never heard anyone make that point with any degree of seriousness but if someone did do that then sure. They'd just be fighting for a different type of social justice, one where you don't steal the work of people unjustly just because you happen to be poor enough or what have you. Still, not seeing how people are individuals and treating them as mere "representatives of their group" is what sjws do.

And I did already mention that the game didn't become controversial exactly because it doesn't suck off anybody but rather showcased the issues and good points of all sides and teaches the characters (and in effect the player too) that the world is more nuanced than it initially appears to be. It shows that even those who are fighting against an oppressive social structure can also be corrupt themselves too and their just aspect in one area of society does not purify every other bad thing they also do that is just objectively bad.

You don?t listen to GOP talking points. Also. Thank you for confirming my suspicions that SJW is an utterly meaningless buzz term.

 

[CaitSeith]

My answer: anything by Hideo Kojima. I love his work, but damn that man loves to blow himself. Other thoughts...

Duke Nukem.

Really? The game's satire. You could argue not very well made satire in the case of DNF, but it's still satire.

Satires are self-indulgent by nature. A satire that isn't self-indulgent usually results as a carbon copy of the real thing.

 

[Dalisclock]

Not sure if this counts as self ingulgent or just pretenious, but I stumbled across "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" which is about a guy in a cauldron using a sledgehammer to drag himself up a mountain. Pretty much any time you fall, you fall right back to the start, all while the game creator is blabbing on and occasionally throwing inspirational quotes to you about failure and such. I haven't played it, but I've seen enough of it on youtube for it feel like the game creator is being a bit self indulgent and condescending in this.

 

[Batou667]

The Witness was my favourite game of 2018 - I'm not sure whether that's the year it released, but it was the best game I played that year. The one and only part of the experience that made me roll my eyes and become disengaged, though, were the audio logs, which are generally on the topic of Zen Buddhism. Maybe I didn't give it a proper chance, maybe it's the kind of content I would have been more receptive to in dead tree form (I hate the idea of audio books); but in an otherwise minimalist and unpretentious game it came across as a bit try-hard. There's one log that goes on, unskippable, for about 20 minutes IIRC - geez, put a sock in it, you damn hippie.

The content I found most smug and self congratulatory, though, was the developer commentary in Gone Home. I approached the game with an open mind and low expectations, and ended up being pleasantly entertained for a few hours by its gentle domestic drama. Not bad, I thought to myself, as the credits rolled. It's not some triple-A blockbuster, it's not some white-knuckle adrenaline rush or punishing button-mashing twitch game, it's a nice little interactive tableau to kill a few hours. For the sake of completionism I decided to do a playthrough finding each commentary node, and I honestly wish I hadn't as I emerged with a considerably less favourable opinion of the game. The development team, apparently, regard themselves as some kind of Indie gaming rock stars, their commentary is dripping with showboating bluster, the sound designers are all labouring under the mistaken belief that the crappy rock music cassettes you find in game are anything more than fleetingly interesting ambience, and so on. Honestly, I've listened to more grounded and humble commentary on genuine triple-A games and movies, and here we have this collection of Moaning Lesbian Sister Diary Collector: The Videogame programmers giving each other implied chest-bumps and high-fives like they're hot shit. Look, nerds, your little game just ain't all that.