So MovieBob had some crap to say about that there Mass Effect 3 thingy...

[userwhoquitthesite]

if that's indicative of the series overall quality, bob never gets to complain about any else making a shitty product ever

 

[Kahunaburger]

Depends on the game. [http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zweb/shade/]

Also, your theory for stories in games doesn't really explain the extent to which games devote time and resources to story elements. This is the issue with this kind of reductive argument - by its very nature it oversimplifies.

But the example you provided is text based,

And?

it's not reliant on an external conflict because it can express internal turmoil where the character faces emotional stakes on a more personal level. Graphic games have a hard time expressing these sort of things because they essentially have to tell rather than than show.

Any game can do that, including ones that are visual media and not text media. There are plenty of works in visual media that involve internal conflict.

 

[irishda]

I call Bullshit, you are simplifying the story to obscene levels, here you go:

Schindlers list: One man, tries to save Jews from Nazis.
Citizen Kane: One man, as he tries to figure out what a dying man said.
Inception: One man, as he tries to indirectly give another an idea.
Enemy at the gates: One man, in his quest to kill germans during WW2.
Sixth Sense: One man, as he tries to help a little kid.
Memento: One man, as he tries to remember things.
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest: One man, as he tries to avoid prison and insults a nurse.
Forest Gump: One man, as he has a flashback.

I can go on like this all day.

Since you put simplify everything, you lose focus on how the story is told, and what happens in it, and the worst argument one can make about games is saying that they should always focus on the gameplay first, that would be like me claiming that a movie should only be about the actions of the characters because that's when things move, and claiming that they can't hold a candle to books, there have been several games I've played where the makers just wanted an interesting story, and didn't focus too much on the gameplay and it was great, there have also been plenty of games that took deep looks into their characters, and I'm not just talking about games like Silent hill 2, Rondo of Swords as well as valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume come to mind, even shitty games like Metroid Other M tried taking a further look into their characters, they did it badly, but so did many other authors, and I seriously don't know how you hold up Heavy Rain of all things, with its terrible story, idiotic characters, and massive plotholes as the only game on par with books and movies.

Captcha: best seller

Lol, you missed the point of the simplification though. I simplified it down to the protagonist and the conflict to show a rather shockingly unifying thread between all the stories in video games. It's one person either out to save the world or family, or they're out for revenge. Even your simplified examples show deviations from that formula.

But even in something as simple as character introspection, games can only spend a finite amount of time on this because it's just not fun for a lot of players to watch exposition. There's always the interactivity aspect, the gameplay elements, that competes with the story element for resources and player attention.

 

[Kahunaburger]

There's always the interactivity aspect, the gameplay elements, that competes with the story element for resources and player attention.

Depends on the game. [http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/crusader-kings-ii]

 

[irishda]

Depends on the game. [http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zweb/shade/]

Also, your theory for stories in games doesn't really explain the extent to which games devote time and resources to story elements. This is the issue with this kind of reductive argument - by its very nature it oversimplifies.

But the example you provided is text based,

And?

And you then proceed to list the reason why below.

it's not reliant on an external conflict because it can express internal turmoil where the character faces emotional stakes on a more personal level. Graphic games have a hard time expressing these sort of things because they essentially have to tell rather than than show.

Any game can do that, including ones that are visual media and not text media. There are plenty of works in visual media that involve internal conflict.

I'm confused why games are unable to do that in an effective manner, even though they should be able to. I believe it's a variety of reasons. Science says that there's facial details that our brains subconsciously register. That's why actors can convey without over-emphasis, while games are usually still relying on telling instead of showing, and digital characters are largely kept at four basic emotions: anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral. The uncanny valley probably comes into play as well as the limited talents of programmers at being able to relegate expression through the characters.

I think the limitations of the programmers is probably the biggest one. You'd need a programmer that understood the nuances of human facial features beyond just the standard expressions.

 

[Warachia]

I call Bullshit, you are simplifying the story to obscene levels, here you go:

Schindlers list: One man, tries to save Jews from Nazis.
Citizen Kane: One man, as he tries to figure out what a dying man said.
Inception: One man, as he tries to indirectly give another an idea.
Enemy at the gates: One man, in his quest to kill germans during WW2.
Sixth Sense: One man, as he tries to help a little kid.
Memento: One man, as he tries to remember things.
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest: One man, as he tries to avoid prison and insults a nurse.
Forest Gump: One man, as he has a flashback.

I can go on like this all day.

Since you put simplify everything, you lose focus on how the story is told, and what happens in it, and the worst argument one can make about games is saying that they should always focus on the gameplay first, that would be like me claiming that a movie should only be about the actions of the characters because that's when things move, and claiming that they can't hold a candle to books, there have been several games I've played where the makers just wanted an interesting story, and didn't focus too much on the gameplay and it was great, there have also been plenty of games that took deep looks into their characters, and I'm not just talking about games like Silent hill 2, Rondo of Swords as well as valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume come to mind, even shitty games like Metroid Other M tried taking a further look into their characters, they did it badly, but so did many other authors, and I seriously don't know how you hold up Heavy Rain of all things, with its terrible story, idiotic characters, and massive plotholes as the only game on par with books and movies.

Captcha: best seller

Lol, you missed the point of the simplification though. I simplified it down to the protagonist and the conflict to show a rather shockingly unifying thread between all the stories in video games. It's one person either out to save the world or family, or they're out for revenge. Even your simplified examples show deviations from that formula.

But even in something as simple as character introspection, games can only spend a finite amount of time on this because it's just not fun for a lot of players to watch exposition. There's always the interactivity aspect, the gameplay elements, that competes with the story element for resources and player attention.

I disagree, good games use the gameplay to enhance the story and character, for example, in Valkyrie profile, the battles, the scenery, all of it is used to enhance the story in ways a story normally couldn't be, we see characters discussing things on the field, themes that end up changing the main character (and not in a BS pick path A,B or C way) we see a character clearly doing bad things for a greater good, and the sadder part is when the character himself eventually stops seeing the need to help others and only increase his own power and again, the gameplay reflects that, making almost all maps unfairly hard, and taunting you, that you could easily blow through these if you just sacrifice a companion, but you know that when you start doing this, you will have to rely on sacrificing more and more as the game progresses, it goes from being a near necessity, to enjoying doing so because now you can slaughter all of your enemies with no difficulty, in essence, corrupting both the player, and the main character.

In Rondo of Swords the gameplay also reflects the main characters in ways you rarely find, there is a great scene where, in the not flowery and rainbows route, the main character and villain start talking if you end up squaring them off against each other, the main character tells the villain that they are envious that the villain's kingdom loves him, that he earned that as the main character was an imposter pretending to be a prince that he thought he would never live up to, also at this point in the game the villain is just trying to defend his home country from being taken over, and sees the only way to protect it is to sacrifice himself and his soldiers for what he sees as the greater good, several missions in this storyline aren't even fun, and not for gameplay reasons, it is where the character starts making morally gray decisions, and you don't want to have to do the things the game asks you to do, but at the same time, you understand that you need to do them in order to help the characters have a better chance of winning the war they were in.

Let's also not forget about Fire Emblem, the series where you can change character relationships through gameplay, you can't affect the main story, but you can have discussions among party members where they ask each other really interesting and sometimes in depth questions, as well as have great discussions, and this changes how the characters feel about one another, sometimes characters become good friends, other times they end up with each other.

In the end, all of these examples would have had far less of an impact if it wasn't for the gameplay helping them along.

 

[irishda]

No you didn't. Ever heard of cognitive bias?

This "One man has to kill all the gangsters to avenge his father" would have a reduction of the godfather in the same way that this "One man must stop someone from taking over the city (probably the world eventually) while a guy quotes Ayn Rand and references how gamers have to blindly do whatever the game tells them to do. " is a reduction of Bioshock.

What is the conflict of The Godfather?

 

[Kahunaburger]

Depends on the game. [http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zweb/shade/]

Also, your theory for stories in games doesn't really explain the extent to which games devote time and resources to story elements. This is the issue with this kind of reductive argument - by its very nature it oversimplifies.

But the example you provided is text based,

And?

And you then proceed to list the reason why below.

You didn't really provide a reason for moving the goalposts. The fact that games that use text are particularly effective at portraying internal conflict indicates that the broad category of games in fact includes sub-genres that can effectively portray internal conflict.

it's not reliant on an external conflict because it can express internal turmoil where the character faces emotional stakes on a more personal level. Graphic games have a hard time expressing these sort of things because they essentially have to tell rather than than show.

Any game can do that, including ones that are visual media and not text media. There are plenty of works in visual media that involve internal conflict.

I'm confused why games are unable to do that in an effective manner, even though they should be able to. I believe it's a variety of reasons. Science says that there's facial details that our brains subconsciously register. That's why actors can convey without over-emphasis, while games are usually still relying on telling instead of showing, and digital characters are largely kept at four basic emotions: anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral. The uncanny valley probably comes into play as well as the limited talents of programmers at being able to relegate expression through the characters.

I think the limitations of the programmers is probably the biggest one. You'd need a programmer that understood the nuances of human facial features beyond just the standard expressions.

Yeah, bad facial animations are definitely an issue. You can sort of get around this with 2-D sprites along the lines of how many JRPGs do it, but I don't think we're at the point where we can reliably do facial animations in 3-D.

 

[irishda]

snip

snip

snip

I suppose I'll just write an article on this instead and see if the Escapist will publish it. At least then we can argue in our own thread instead of hijacking others, and I'll get paid for it. Until then, congratulations all around good sirs or madams for reasonable discourse on the internet!

I feel like I should have a captioned picture for that...

 

[lunavixen]

I feel like I should just stop watching as soon as he said he hasn't played the games because if you haven't played or experienced the full journey, you have no idea how bad the ending is.

You can't comment on an issue on the internet properly if you haven't experienced it.

EDIT: Yeah he has no idea what he is going on about, saying by interacting with a medium, the story is of a worse quality than if you'd read it in a book/seen it in a film? Yeah. He is completely wrong.

EDIT2: He just called us all entitled. All gamers he called entitled. Being dissatisfied with a product =/= entitlement. Someone really needs to get this into thick idiot's skulls.

EDIT3: Bioware do owe the fans something. Their fans are their business. They have no fans = they sell no products. Bioware owe their livelihoods to fans, and the fans have been cheated out of a decent ending. Expect the next Bioware game to sell very poorly.

EDIT4: He needs to stop saying entitlement here. Gamers aren't entitled. They pay for their products. Maybe it's different for him and other critics cos they get free games/movies/etc. to review and stuff, but when you've spent £30 of your cash on a game, and it is overall shit, and you say it, you're not entitled.

EDIT5: I don't care if games are taken seriously. See Jimquisition on this. Most of the music I listen to (metalcore/hardcore/pop punk) isn't considered art by most people but I really don't give a shit. I like it, that's all that matters, I don't give a shit if some critic doesn't consider it art.

EDIT6: He just said we're entitled to ask for patches to fix "real problems". That is not entitlement. This dick has no idea what he's going on about.

hear hear, i couldn't have put it any better myself, this "Moviebob" guy is full of s**t, he can't be taken seriously because he hasn't played the games

 

[Darkcerb]

I find it mystifying that apparently people hold the escapist fella's up on some pedestal.

The discussion shouldn't have gone on this long he's talking about something he has no knowledge of.

Something quite a few game journalists have done while weighing in on the issue, it's amazing how many articles start with "I've only played ME1" or "I haven't played the game but...."

It's a couple of idiots who want to weigh in on this hot topic nothing more.

 

[irishda]

No you didn't. Ever heard of cognitive bias?

This "One man has to kill all the gangsters to avenge his father" would have a reduction of the godfather in the same way that this "One man must stop someone from taking over the city (probably the world eventually) while a guy quotes Ayn Rand and references how gamers have to blindly do whatever the game tells them to do. " is a reduction of Bioshock.

What is the conflict of The Godfather?

"It's a power play based on the very complicated inter-family politics of the Italian American Mob."

That's a summary of the plot, a result of the actions of the characters. What is the conflict?

(Also I didn't really wanna argue about the other games. I've only played MGS 4 and 3, but I know enough about the plots of 1 and 2. And Bioshock, I will admit, I only watched my friend play it awhile back so I had to dig up the plot on wikipedia. It said Atlas told him that Ryan had trapped his family, so maybe I misread. But we'll come back to Bioshock in a bit)

 

[Gnoekeos]

I feel like I should just stop watching as soon as he said he hasn't played the games because if you haven't played or experienced the full journey, you have no idea how bad the ending is.

You can't comment on an issue on the internet properly if you haven't experienced it.

EDIT: Yeah he has no idea what he is going on about, saying by interacting with a medium, the story is of a worse quality than if you'd read it in a book/seen it in a film? Yeah. He is completely wrong.

EDIT2: He just called us all entitled. All gamers he called entitled. Being dissatisfied with a product =/= entitlement. Someone really needs to get this into thick idiot's skulls.

EDIT3: Bioware do owe the fans something. Their fans are their business. They have no fans = they sell no products. Bioware owe their livelihoods to fans, and the fans have been cheated out of a decent ending. Expect the next Bioware game to sell very poorly.

EDIT4: He needs to stop saying entitlement here. Gamers aren't entitled. They pay for their products. Maybe it's different for him and other critics cos they get free games/movies/etc. to review and stuff, but when you've spent £30 of your cash on a game, and it is overall shit, and you say it, you're not entitled.

EDIT5: I don't care if games are taken seriously. See Jimquisition on this. Most of the music I listen to (metalcore/hardcore/pop punk) isn't considered art by most people but I really don't give a shit. I like it, that's all that matters, I don't give a shit if some critic doesn't consider it art.

EDIT6: He just said we're entitled to ask for patches to fix "real problems". That is not entitlement. This dick has no idea what he's going on about.

LOL I've got better things to do with my time than tell a Mass effect 3 fan something they don't want to hear (and wouldn't listen to since I'm not saying "I agree with you") but I will say though that you're exactly right about how you should treat bioware, you're dissatisfied with their product so you shouldn't buy anything else they make that's the proper way to respond to the situation not demanding they make you some high quality fan fiction. Also I don't really think he thinks all gamers feel "entitled" just the Mass Effect ones that seriously think they're part of the creative force that shaped the game. Also try to think of gaming being taken seriously as an art form as a sort of protection from the people who want to ban and censor it. If its art and people attack it that's much closer to discrimination and its harder for them to get away with it.

 

[OneTwoThreeBlast]

And almost everyone here wonders why Bob is calling this whole "movement" (by a very vocal minority, I might add) childish and entitlement-driven.

Regardless of how one feels about the ending, this whole thing is absolute madness. It's absurd. And it's amazing how many people make comments along the lines of "Bob is just a lonely loser" and "Bob is just mad he was bullied in school," etc., while at the same time trying to hold the moral high ground and claim that they should be respected and/or taken seriously.

At the very least, the people who are so up in arms about this should recognize that the tone of their responses are, in large part, what lead to (1) people not taking them seriously; (2) people calling them gamers who feel "entitled"; and (3) people looking at this movement and saying, "this is absurd."

 

[Darkcerb]

And almost everyone here wonders why Bob is calling this whole "movement" (by a very vocal minority, I might add) childish and entitlement-driven.

Regardless of how one feels about the ending, this whole thing is absolute madness. It's absurd. And it's amazing how many people make comments along the lines of "Bob is just a lonely loser" and "Bob is just mad he was bullied in school," etc., while at the same time trying to hold the moral high ground and claim that they should be respected and/or taken seriously.

At the very least, the people who are so up in arms about this should recognize that the tone of their responses are, in large part, what lead to (1) people not taking them seriously; (2) people calling them gamers who feel "entitled"; and (3) people looking at this movement and saying, "this is absurd."

That's an absurd argument to make, would they have said anything against him if he hadn't put his two cents in?

What's more absurd is people like you who find it so ridiculous that when people are called childish they respond in kind.

Frankly the majority of these game reviewer/critic/journalists whatever that have weighed in with enough bias to sink a ship should be treated like the children they're imitating. You can't take a side of an argument(and exclude all others views) justifying it by pointing at the extreme's of the other side.

 

[edgecult]

The thing is i had a really high opinion of bob until this, but it has just dropped consideribly he is being really stupid,

But i will say i do not want them to change the ending i would like them to pull some blow your mind shit like that the indoctrination theory is right and if you chose the red destroy option in the new dlc (I think it was said it was going to be free but i can't conform) your body is found and you fight the reapers of earth and activate the crucible or whatever but if you chose say the green synthesis (or whatever it was called) You serve the fucking reapers and use the reaper forces to destroy the crucible and the allied fleet, like that shit would blow everyones fucking minds

You know... that sounds pretty god damned amazing.. especially if it was playable.. Destroy has Shepard leading the charge against harbinger directly.. have all the people and fleets backing you. Real hero stuff.. (not enough or missing bigger names would lead to shepard being killed or just make the charge that much harder.. much like the upgrades and choices in 2) The basic hero's journey resolution. He fought off the temptations of the darkness and regained control to lead the ragtag rebels to a major victory over the big bad. (or of course.. fails and dies in the process.)

Although i think the blue control ending would be serving the reapers (control/being controlled) but that does leave green then the odd man out. Really sense their two respective headers fell into the same trick with different ideas Saren and IM both ended up "serveing".. Donno.. this is how I can see the last two working out at least in my head..

Control would have a tech evolved Shepard/harbinger mix (ASSUMEING DIRECT CONTROL) leading the counter attack against his old allies and friends (Darkspawn chronicles/evil end infamous2 style) you fight through London facing down the combined forces of marines krogan turians ect. eventually you board the main alliance ship and kill your remaining allies and either Anderson or Hacket, best part would be the inverse of the first where the more you collected before the ending makes this ending harder and harder. Be especially fun if you recollect your allies by turning them as you defeat them. Might even have the "bad end" be the good end of sorts where the final fight can end with shepherd taking back control (much like the turned big bads from the past games) and is given the choice to take his own way out. (and perhaps the galaxy rebuilds in spite of Shepard instead of because him in the last hours depending on how much work the player did along the way.)

Sense green is the middle of the road of the two.. (synthesis combining ends up tearing sheperds mind apart.. it's a stretch but I'm gonna run with it -shrug-) Have this ending brings him to his death.. Take over as the rest of the crew playing out their final hours without their leader. Liara presses on to hide time capsule.. Garrus and the primarch (and other turians) fight till the end. EDI defends joker and the crew after harbinger shoots down the Normandy. Vega and the Survivor (ash/kaiden) try to defend a wounded anderson. Tali.. hmm.. donno what to do with that one.. (not sure where to send the engineer sense her main connection to the ground forces is shepard at least Garrus has noteworthy friends on the ground.. could send her off with garrus if they have their romance in the end.. otherwise.. donno..) could even continue this ending with a few others like the me2 characters on the ground on their last stands. (grunt and wrex, jack, jacob, ect) Give a feeling of the hopelessness of the war without their "icon" leading them and pressing them foreward against the odds. (or even again the opposite succeeding without him without enough work. again the main people collected along the way making this easier or harder even impossible without.)