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

[Drathnoxis]

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 Witness is definitely up there as far as pretentious games go.

 

[Worgen]

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.

That was one of the stupidest things that the chans tried to make a thing. Especially since more conservative voices literally dialog tree on things.

 

[Abomination]

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.

This is the exact reason I do not replay any Telltale games. So obsessed with being an interactive Netflix series that they forget one of the primary advantages of being a Netflix serial - being able to skip intros and recaps.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

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.

My impression of the game is that the "inspirational" quotes are supposed to be infuriating, not enlightening (and therefore not pretentious).

 

[EvilRoy]

Duke Nukem Forever its a handjob to everything a 13 year old boy thinks is manly.

B-but it has a remote control car section! I thought it was quite a sweet idea that when he isn't slamming back beers between bench pressing and getting fellatio from twins, Duke spends his time constructing small monster trucks and creating little tracks for them to drive around.

He stole that from Lo Wang.

He did, but if you owned a small monitor then that was the worst part of the original iteration. My brother and I puzzled for hours over what the hell we were supposed to be seeing in the security monitor. There was no need for them to take a shit visual and make it even more shit and then expect a person to look at it and understand.

My entry goes to DMC where the lead programmer modeled Dante after himself. That's such a wanky thing to do, and I can see no justification beyond unearned vanity.

People mentioned Witness a couple times, which was definitely had some wank to it, but honestly I would take Braid first. Good game, interesting commentary on different perspectives, got weird when it came to what I thought to be a half-baked commentary on war/bombs/etc. Admittedly Blow went on record saying that the meaning of the game belongs just as much to the player and the creator which makes a bit of the wankyness forgivable in that it might be part of my own brain creating unformed thoughts, but I dunno. If you're gonna make a game like that and stay vague don't fuckin add war connotations - that shits a hard enough conversation as it is, and as much as I believe the players contribution has a real meaning as far as the interpretation of a game that kind of shit deserves an actual statement or no statement at all.

 

[Dalisclock]

My impression of the game is that the "inspirational" quotes are supposed to be infuriating, not enlightening (and therefore not pretentious).

Well, in that case, Mission Accomplished I guess.

People mentioned Witness a couple times, which was definitely had some wank to it, but honestly I would take Braid first. Good game, interesting commentary on different perspectives, got weird when it came to what I thought to be a half-baked commentary on war/bombs/etc. Admittedly Blow went on record saying that the meaning of the game belongs just as much to the player and the creator which makes a bit of the wankyness forgivable in that it might be part of my own brain creating unformed thoughts, but I dunno. If you're gonna make a game like that and stay vague don't fuckin add war connotations - that shits a hard enough conversation as it is, and as much as I believe the players contribution has a real meaning as far as the interpretation of a game that kind of shit deserves an actual statement or no statement at all.

I haven't played Braid for a while, if IIRC, the only way to even see the war stuff is you had to go deep into it and either do a lot of optional objectives(You aren't getting all the stars without spending a lot of extra time to do so) or find a lot of hidden bits you'd be unlikely to just stumble across in normal play. Otherwise, the average player is more likely to see this symbolic story that ends with "Oh, you were the bad guy all along" twist. Which I guess is pretentious in it's own right but the atomic bomb thing feels more like easter egg type thing then a real deep meaning.