Scribblenauts

[Callate]

Hmm. The man certainly thrives on popularity, doesn't he?

All right, so I've already been labelled an idiot. And doubly so, vis-a-vis the article, in that I'm fashioning a reply. One hopes Yahtzee has the perspective to recognize that such a broad brush inevitably paints him as well.

Still, uninformed plebeian that I am, I felt I needed to mention a couple of things.

No other medium does this. It'd be like reading a novel, and every few pages there's a crossword you can do, or there's a little short story booklet stapled to the page that says "YOU CAN READ THIS IF YOU WANT BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO! IT'S YOUR CHOICE!" And if you read that then it doesn't affect the story but the rest of the pages become slightly easier to turn.

Ever read Alan Moore? Many of his graphic novel collections pretty much do exactly this, right down to the crossword puzzle. Sometimes the results are galling (BAD Black Dossier! No treat!) but it has been done...

The real problem with "non-linear" games is that developers, and their whip-cracking bosses, really hate to create content that no one is going to see. Thus we have numerous instances of "You have to save the kingdom/your family member/the universe! Time is running out!... Of course, if you want to run an obstacle course and pick up some stars along the way, it'll keep." Occasionally you run across a game where dilly-dallying has real consequences (Fallout and Star Control 2 come to mind), but most "open-world" games have diversions that are just diversions and not meaningful branches from the main path. Maybe a "good ending" and a "bad ending". Ooh.

Q. Was this level designed by someone who is employed professionally as a games designer or in another relevant creative industry?

If no, fuck it.

Oh, come now, Yahtzee. Are you really suggesting that someone having had money thrown their way at some point is the best indicator of whether what they will produce is any good? You of all people should know better than that. Sturgeon's Law remains firmly in effect across the board, but just because someone chose to do something that would actually pay their bills rather than struggle up through the industry until they finally made that lucky connection and got noticed doesn't mean that they aren't capable of producing something creative and worthwhile. I'd certainly take something that had been designed by one of the better Half-Life 2 mod groups who have never made a cent off their work over something from a studio that's well-paid to, say, make video game spinoffs of Dreamworks Animation movies.

It sounds, from most accounts, like the problem with Scribblenauts is not so much that it pushes creativity as that it claims to push creativity, gives tools to enable creativity, and then doesn't actually reward creativity. For every "Wow, they thought of that!" There are three "I can't believe they didn't consider this"es. And for every creative solution that pays off, there will be three that cause you to fail. That, and that gamers generally being geared to win a game first and express creativity in it a distant second, if helicopters, ropes, and C'thulu do the trick, one's incentive to see if one can use a lawnmower and a giraffe to do the exact same thing is going to be significantly diminished.

 

[Carnagath]

This article was quite entertaining, from the point of view of a masochist at least. Creativity does not need you Mr. Yahtzee to narrowly define when it does and when it does not "count", it exists on its own terms and laughs at you for having the most bloated ego on the planet. And no, I am not an amateur level designer. I prefer writing, just like you do. I just don't ride such a high horse about it. Oh, and you might want to stop insulting your viewers. Not because they will stop watching you, because they won't, but because that is widely recognized as the last thing famous artists do right before they decide they're better off blowing their brains out. I don't know why, I just recognize the pattern.

 

[SilverKyo]

Let me start off by quickly saying anyone who feels offended by being called an idiot, gets mad at yahtzee calling his viewers and idiot, or thinks they aren't the idiot but agrees everyone else is, I have some news for you...YOU'RE ALL THE IDIOTS! If your head is so far gone up your own rectum that you can't take a step back and view your own flaws and admit you can occassionally make a mistake or do something stupid as any human can, then you are an idiot. If you are so far gone that you think yahtzee has personally come at you and insulted you instead of taking the the humor for just that, humor, than you are an idiot. If you feel offended by myself or yahtzee currently to the point of irrationality by being called an idiot by someone on the internet instead of taking a step back and learning to laugh at yourself, then you are still the idiot. Ironically, the only way to not be an idiot is to admit that you can be an idiot. Lovely paradox, isn't it?

Now that that's out of my system, I can get on topic. I'll start off stating that no truely sandbox game is fun...ever. It has the same amount of entertainment value that can be achieved by paper and some colored pencils. It's an editing tool with a couple things the developers thought would be fun to tinker with. Now before anyone gets mad, I'd like to point out the destinction between open world and sandbox. Open world is where you can go anywhere, do what you want, and is very similar to sandbox with some elements of it, but the game has a point and plot and things to do, not just leave you to your own devices to entertain youself, maybe give you a couple crosswords along the way. Open world is great, sandbox...not so much. It'd be like a book that had the pages numbered, chapters laid out, a cover page, about the author page, all the stuff you usually find in a great novel...but not the novel. Instead, it has a sticky note on the first page that says there is a pen tapped to the back cover and to have fun. I don't know about you but I find those games bore me to suicide; passing tears long before now. What Yahtzee said was instead of getting the book with attached pen, why not throw that out entirely and work through your own creative process your own way instead of in the confines of this "game". Now granted, some people will take that book and pen and create a truely wonderful and well inspired novel... others will draw dicks on every single page with "lol" everywhere inbetween. I don't want to have to go through the cock jokes to find the good bits of story, that's a trivial waste of time. I want to go to the established author who guarantees quality and a good read. If you are the shit encrusted diamond waiting just below the sewage, then I apologize, but if you picked your diamond out of the sewage you created it on and put it on a special shelf seprate from the shit where everyone else's unique gems are gathered and put on display, I would notice it and praise it.

Also, this non-linear comment everyone seems to have so much trouble with needs to try to wrap their heads around what Yahtzee is pointing out. A game can give you choices and various options, for you to go about the options in a different order and pick varrying moroal extremes, but the thing that never changes are the questions the game asks. Take a game like Mass Effect. You could plow through the story in five hours or spend forever going to every planet and doing every amount of optional work and side quests the developers ever created. Have a different class, make good or eveil choices, so on and so forth. But while all these choices mask the game as non-linear, it's still linear. You will always chase the same bad guy, fly the same ship, go through the same main quests, save the same universe. It will always have an overall encompassing story arc to mark the progression of linearity. Even if the developers had enough time on their hands and wanted to make a game so non-linear that they included a second story that you could pick between the two in very beginning that was entirely diffent from the original so there would be no linearity between the two at all, you just end up with a different game. For a game to be non-linear, it would have to be an entirely blank slate and leave you to your own ideas to make the game each and every time...a sandbox. Actually, even worse then a sandbox, because a sandbox is still sand in a box. It would have to be a blank screen and you build every part of the game from scratch each time, just for the element of non-linearity, and is it really worth the effort? A game can let you go from A to B, or you can go from A to 5 to 12 to 834 to chicken to whatever, but eventually every game will take you to B. The line can be longer or shorter and have varying colors and shades to it, but it is still a line that will end up with you going to B and continuing the game every single time.

Hope the extended metaphors weren't too much trouble. Have questions or think I'm full of myself? You might be right as I am self aware enough to know that I can be full of shit sometimes, but this is my opinion and I stand by it.

 

[IrrelevantTangent]

"I was wondering if you were going to review Halo 3: ODST."
- Jacob Probasco, via email

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha. Ha.

No.

Why?

Does he need a reason?

He probably dislikes it because he didn't exactly get showered with intelligent criticism or praise the last time he reviewed a Halo game, that, and I think he thinks it's a carbon copy of Halo 3.

This all just speculation, though. Very interesting article, by the way, OP/Yahtzee. Keep up the good work.

Halo! I have only ever played the original Halo, I got it for PC and it was, as Yahtzee said, meh! It was an FPS... about aliens and stuff. It didn't look great, the gameplay was hardly groundbreaking and the atmostphere and plot all seemed pretty tongue in cheek.

But recently I saw a clip of Halo 3 on YouTube and I was amazed. Absolutely amazed.

I could not believe that the second sequel to a game could be so successful, without changing a single thing! Same weapons, same graphics, same physics (like flailing arms while falling then suddenly landing in the exact same position every time), same gameplay and I know Halo 2 had the same plot so I woudln't be too surprised...

You might feel that way if you've been 'spoiled' by other PC FPSes like say, Deus Ex, or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (I'm not that familiar with that many PC FPSes, but you get my point), but please keep in mind that 360 owners can't exactly play PC games on their 360.

We get access to a certain number of games, presuming we only own a 360, and only out of that specific number of games are a small number of FPSes.

Halo was revolutionary because it was one of the best shooters the world had ever seen....on the Xbox. It wasn't as 'revolutionary' to PC gamers since they'd had substitutes before that IIRC, and they scoffed at the 'console tards' for 'overrating' it, as they do to this day.

 

[General Vagueness]

You know, after being called an idiot, posting in this topic is pretty much confirmation of it. I mean, when somebody beats you with a chair, you don't hand them a barstool made of broken beer bottles and napalm. Likewise, when somebody calls you an idiot, you don't comment again and give him or her more ammunition.

... Drat, I failed the test.

Yahtzee shouldn't review ODST. He should review the original game, Combat Evolved. Seems only fair. One doesn't start griping about how the Chrono series is crap by talking about Cross, does one? Or how Deus Ex is a garbage series because of Invisible War. You know, completely ignoring the game that made said series popular and critically acclaimed in the first place? Oh, wait, wait! What about only playing Deadly Shadows and saying that the Thief games are horrible based on that title alone? Or playing Silent Hill 4 and... You get the idea.

I've e-mailed him more than once saying I hope he will play (or has played) the previous two titles (and tells us) because many people think they're better and he said flat out that he didn't get the story in Halo 3 and it "might've been because [he didn't] play a Halo game before" that one especially given that "some arbitrary reason" remark and especially especially since he always uses the box art for the original Halo in talking about faults with series (which are probably actually faults with Halo 3).

Here is a hint Game developers; Letting Players create their own expeirence's is a cute idea, but a puppy is also cute as well. I wouldn't want to play with a puppy, and the puppy might bite me if I tried.

You don't want to play with a puppy? What kind of person are you?

 

[Sov.reign]

Good stuff as (almost) always but its getting a bit old and i dont give a shit if I say so

 

[RTR]

With Uncharted 2 now in stores (not sure if in Australia), I would like to see an Extra Punctuation on Cinemtatic Games. I know it's just wishful thinking, just like hoping Yahtzee replies to me evry time I post on one of his videos.

 

[dudeman0001]

Having a go at the comments option, interesting option for the man paid to write articles and produce videos heavily commented on.

Also I'd argue that I'm not an idiot, but having never played little big planet of scribblenauts I won't be able to prove it to you.

That being said quite a good little article and any dig at political correctness gets a tick in my books

If you're gonna say you're not an idiot, you should probably proof-read your comment.

 

[messy]

Having a go at the comments option, interesting option for the man paid to write articles and produce videos heavily commented on.

Also I'd argue that I'm not an idiot, but having never played little big planet of scribblenauts I won't be able to prove it to you.

That being said quite a good little article and any dig at political correctness gets a tick in my books

If you're gonna say you're not an idiot, you should probably proof-read your comment.

Ahh touche, however I was under the impression one comment wouldn't be enough for someone to form an accurate opinion about my character.

Ah well live and learn

 

[LovsBatl]

As some more open-minded people in this thread have stated:We are ALL idiots!(or atleast well over 90%) .. and we are idiots not because of our bad grammar,our sensitivity to insults or our gaming preferences.We are idiots through our MEDIOCRITY!We all would like to think we're special .. well we're not!We're not identical but not all that different either.

We all tend to take the safer roads,make the choices that others have made before us..the very reason why we read reviews:because we can't be bothered to risk wasting our time and money with games no one has heard of and might be bad.Well they might be good too.We're all afraid of opening Schrodinger's box for fear that we won't like what we find inside.Innovation requires taking chances and excellence requires innovation.Put these two toghether and you'll see that you,me and mostly everyone you know is in fact an idiot simply because they do not have the mentality to excell.

And our conservative minds make us look at new and radical ideeas with distrust.That's why i agree with Yahtzee when he says the gaming industry caters to us.Rather than seeking new desings they try to find a way to make the same old thing just a bit shinyer.And that's why if given full creative freedom we'll feel the urge to reproduce rather than reinvent.

I'd like to end by quoting a not particularly bright but somewhat inspired french person:
"C'est en faisant n'importe quoi qu'on devient n'importe qui"
(TL:By doing nothing out of the ordinary,you become ordinary)

 

[mattag08]

*Fanboy whine*
"But Yahtzee, Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin do the voiceovers for the main characters!"

If you don't understand why the Halo franchise has been piss poor from the beginning then you won't understand why he's not reviewing it. It's just too easy, espcially for Yahtzee...

 

[bushwhacker2k]

I haven't played Scribblenauts but I'll take Yahtzee's word for it.

Yahtzee has stated before that he doesn't rate games people ask/tell him to unless a massive amount of them ask for it (SSBB), so his condescending answer isn't surprising

I agree about the disturbing amount of idiots as well... I occasionally think about what useless people will do once smart people actually take over. I mean they're not good at anything and lacking intelligence so what will they do? Physical labor?

 

[Biscotti187]

no one thinks of themselves as an idiot

 

[atomicmrpelly]

You might want to stop insulting your viewers. Not because they will stop watching you, because they won't, but because that is widely recognized as the last thing famous artists do right before they decide they're better off blowing their brains out. I don't know why, I just recognize the pattern.

Oh man. Ice cold!

 

[MR T3D]

morons whom treat yahtzee as Jesus (died lol) seem to take this well enough, i sure he could fictionalize the act of making love to all his followers mum's and they'd enjoy it.
and he knows this, you fans ARE 'anoying, clingy dipshits...blah, blah, blah, buy a shirt'
not exact words.

I think the problem here is that he is simply playing hte wrong type of GAME.
There are three main schools of though for video games:
1. Narrative: theese ones are generally single-player focoused, and typicially have a plot to motivate a player to complete assorted challenges and/or overcome obosticles, and is rewarded with a narrative. Yahtzee enjoys some games in this catagory
2. Competitive/party: games from mario party to counter-strike, theese games are simply electronic games between varios human competitors, whom complete challenges against each other, with 'winning' as a reward.
3.Sandbox Games: theese are the equivilent of giving the player some tools in a electronic sandbox, and may be left up to their own devices. fun if you can make something up and have fun playing with this toy, not so much otherwise.

All three CAN be enjoyed, and enjoyment is the point of games (and life, but that's something you shouldn't learn yet...) but to call people whom enjoy the latter two idiots is simply immature, and genrally rather snooty/elitist (awarness of the immaturity of the preceeding statement renders some resistance to it) as though one whom enjoys their electronic sandbox is a pitiable child enjoying themself running around like their an airplane. [emo?]I do not pity a person able to enjoy them self in such a manner, i envy them. [/emo?]

As some more open-minded people in this thread have stated:We are ALL idiots!(or atleast well over 90%) .. and we are idiots not because of our bad grammar,our sensitivity to insults or our gaming preferences.We are idiots through our MEDIOCRITY!We all would like to think we're special .. well we're not!We're not identical but not all that different either.

We all tend to take the safer roads,make the choices that others have made before us..the very reason why we read reviews:because we can't be bothered to risk wasting our time and money with games no one has heard of and might be bad.Well they might be good too.We're all afraid of opening Schrodinger's box for fear that we won't like what we find inside.Innovation requires taking chances and excellence requires innovation.Put these two toghether and you'll see that you,me and mostly everyone you know is in fact an idiot simply because they do not have the mentality to excell.

And our conservative minds make us look at new and radical ideeas with distrust.That's why i agree with Yahtzee when he says the gaming industry caters to us.Rather than seeking new desings they try to find a way to make the same old thing just a bit shinyer.And that's why if given full creative freedom we'll feel the urge to reproduce rather than reinvent.

I'd like to end by quoting a not particularly bright but somewhat inspired french person:
"C'est en faisant n'importe quoi qu'on devient n'importe qui"
(TL:By doing nothing out of the ordinary,you become ordinary)

okay, in reply to your post; interesitng point, not going to disagree to you*, in fact, you make an intersting point.
However, i do feel i have the mentality to excell, my intrapersonal demon being motivation, but that is beside the point.
*however, pplease do not look at those whom say 'we are all idiots' as being open-minded, as per what i posteed above, i belive theese ones are almost the worst ones, themselves being brainwashed to accepting Yahtzee as a deity.
______________________________________________________________________________________________

SHAZAM!

 

[The Big Eye]

This thread seems to gradually but inexorably proving Yahtzee's point.

 

[bojac6]

I have to disagree with your view on open world games for two reasons. First, you assume that the point of a game is to tell a story. If that were true, then why not just write a book or movie? You use a different medium to deliver a different experience. True, no other medium encourages the viewer to distract themselves from the story to the extent that some games do, and equally true in many games in makes no narrative sense to stop doing the "main quest" in order to do some minor side mission. An obvious example of this is Oblivion. But why do people play Oblivion? Is it to delve into a poorly written story about demons starring Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean? Or was it to become a different person and live in a different world? I know I played it because I enjoyed immersing myself into the game and the major flaws I found with the game weren't that you could distract yourself from the main quest and destroy the pacing of the story, but that I couldn't get away from it enough, I couldn't grow crops, buy a shop, or check in with people I helped months later to see how I benefited their lives. You don't play these games for the same reason you watch a movie. You play these games for the same reason you play D&D, or doodle in your notebook, you play to immerse yourself in a world.

And my second point is that really good books do this as well. You mean to tell me that you never have let your mind wander while reading a book? That, for instance, when Tolkien makes a reference to a creature that never again appears in his work, you didn't try to imagine what it looks like because it would ruin the pacing of book? Or stopped to think what you would do if through into the world of 1984? Or, upon reading the description of a planet in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy said "I want to go to there" and then stopped reading for several minutes thinking about how wacky that place must be? Your point may work with movies, because the view has no control over the pacing like a reader of a book does. But I know I often will stop reading and say to myself "I wonder what happened to that guy." In my mind, that's a mark of great literature. Open world games give you the chance to find out. If a certain NPC really connects with you, you have the option to go back and find out how they have been affected. Now it is rare that games follow through on this, as the usual play is once the side quest is done, the character just says the same generic thing over and over. But that is starting to change.

I don't think games are about the story most of the time, they're about playing the game. If your game does driving particularly well, why not have side missions that are races? It's fun to play, gives the player more time in the game, and the game gets to show off a bright spot. Saying that a video game needs to follow the same narrative rules as a book or a film makes about as much sense as saying that books and films need to follow the same rules. A long fight scene between two characters in a movie might be entertaining, but if a book gave a blow by blow description of the same fight, it'd be awful and boring. Why make general statements about other media and say they have to apply to games?

And then to blame it on our culture of political correctness just reeks of pretension. Games give the player choice because that is the medium. It's all about letting the player do what they want inside the programmers' world, it's what makes games unique. What you seem to be describing is a whole game of quick time events. No player choice, pacing is perfect, no solving solutions to a puzzle, the only way it interacts with the player is making them press a button at the right time. There you have it, a linear story with the pacing and presentation of a movie, no player choice or "playing the game they want to play." Your fun is made for you by professional fun-designers. Even games like God Of War grow close to this, with puzzles that can only be solved one way, level design that forces the player to go through on a defined path, hell even the camera is locked into the shot the director wanted for each scene.

Now that I think about it, how do you reconcile this opinion with a hatred of Halo? When it comes to a linear story with preset pacing made by professional fun-designers, I have a problem coming up with a better example.

 

[Shady Shades]

While I?ve never been known for making intelligent decisions all the time, I?d say i'm not an idiot, but doing so would attract idiots, so I won't.

Personally I?d review ODST now and get it out of the way. That way people would stop asking me to do something I didn't want to do like when Yahtzee was continually demanded to review SSBB. Just a thought.

 

[Muphin_Mann]

Q. Was this level designed by someone who is employed professionally as a games designer or in another relevant creative industry?

If no, fuck it.

What other industries are relevant here?

And isnt this comment absurdly self serving? Like an American automaker specializing in trucks claiming that the only cars worth buying are made by American auto makers specializing in trucks.
Its really just shouting for attention. Now if Mr. Y wasnt a game designer and reviewer the comment might actually mean something since he wouldnt be speaking with anyhting to gain.

Its also important to note that when he made his first game he couldnt have at that time been a game designer beforehand. Which mean that whatever he made sucked, according to his own logic, by virtue of him not having alreay ymade it before he started working. Then if you apply general logic to that any other games he made that were similar would also suck regardless of him being professionaly involved in the gaming industry.