slo said:
Might be stemming from the fact that most of the folks who adore walking sims have little to no experience with games and poor understanding of the medium. It's never Myst or something.
Um - I didn't hate my time with Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs or even Gone Home. I loved The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide, actually. Consider this, and look at my Steam account. Look at my Skyrim hours, my New Vegas and Borderlands 2 hours. Guns have their appeal, but I'm okay with dialing things back from time to time. If I can make that distinction, so can other people.
Plus, the Sims series is selling like crazy, all iterations combined. People clearly love that breed of game design - it's a whole lotta tools and zero explicit goals. Will you optimize Joe Average's career path or will you play the cruel god to your little people's pathetic digital lives? Maybe you're just going to re-enact an HGTV house makeover show or build giant McMansions for no reason whatsoever.
Nobody's the boss of you in a Sims game - and it's still a game. There's metrics, yeah, but nothing concrete to spur you onwards. No "Hey, player person! Do this!" moments.
slo said:
No they're not games, they have no gameplay.
As you say a few words later, who cares? Some people came out of Gone Home feeling enlightened about feminist issues as represented in the early years of the Third Wave, or considered it was a touching portrayal of certain problems LGBT representatives have to go through. If games are going to garner the widespread appeal they so need to finance their increasingly bloated budgets, artistic value is going to be something producers will need to examine in future. The average Call of Duty has the cultural value of a sack of potato chips, but projects that embrace less obvious avenues of approach have the potential to be discussed. Stuff like Neverending Nightmares, for instance, and the way it depicts schizophrenia.
Past a certain point, having actual gameplay becomes a moot point. Is the product interactive? Did it involve more than turning a page or watching a screen? Did you have some agency over the experience, even if that was limited to turning left when the game said you should go right? Eventually, that's what's going to define games in a broader sense - and not simply the presence or absence of hitboxes and statistics being dynamically tweaked under the hood.
slo said:
Same with walking sims, mark them properly and there will be less disappointment and less downvotes and less bad reviews.
Does that really matter? Let's imagine that a comics shop decides to round out its income sources by displaying art pieces from local creators. A comics lover walks in and reacts the way the Steam folks cry foul about walking sims. "What's all this art doing in my comics shop?! I came here for the latest Spider-Man print, I don't want to see that pretentious bullshit!"
The thing is, his comics are still there, on the same shelves and the same boxes. If the paintings or sculptures offend him that much, he can either leave and start buying comics elsewhere, or suck it up and understand that nothing's forcing him to look at the paintings. The really scathing reviews for walking sims are typically from people who actually paid for it so it shows up in their Steam library but have no real intention to play it. Wrap your head around that: they've burned money to have the right to ***** and moan.
That is, when they don't invade the game's Discussion Hub and start spewing misinformed comments left and right. Then some wiseacre comes up and says "Hey dude, where's the mouse icon next to your name?"
On Steam, if you don't have what you're actually bitching about, you have zero credibility. With all that in mind, labeling these games as "Stuff that Doesn't Contain Bang-Bangs and Pew-Pews and that Could Offend You if You're Insecure About People Liking Stuff You Don't Like" wouldn't amount to much.
slo said:
And come to think of it, walking sims ARE visual novels, just very poor ones, since they can't be of decent length or render any characters.
Visual Novels and walking sims don't have the same aspirations. VN's actually have a story to tell, and not much of a point to make. "Hatoful Boyfriend" isn't about anything grandiose or philosophical, it's about a school partially populated by sentient birds. One of the granddaddies of the genre, "Season of the Golden Witch", is about a cursed Japanese dynasty reuniting on a yearly basis to air out its grievances and fall apart in a cross between Shakespearean drama and a classic Whodunnit - spiced up with vaguely Gothic Lolita-esque visual elements.
The Stanley Parable doesn't have a story, it's trying to talk about player agency and how far it goes. Dear Esther's trying to talk about loss and grief moreso than to sketch out characters or a setting. I've already covered Gone Home, whereas more recent entries like The Witness are trying to come across as a really intellectual celebration of the human mind. I'll admit Jon Blow's latest is pretentious as fuck and that I hated it to bits, but I won't go so far as to say that people who fell for it are deluded or insane. To each their own.
slo said:
Setting wrong expectations is a pretty valid approach, and shit given to that is a pretty valid shit. Do I really need to elaborate?
Market "Waiting for Godot" as a murder mystery and you will receive shit for that. If that was your goal - con-fucking-grats.
Assuming you understand what walking sims are trying to get at, what other expectations would you maintain? If you know what The Witness is about but still expect, I don't know, guns and tangible characters or a progression system out of it, I'd have to say you're a bit off-mark.
Time will pass, people will accept that games are turning out to be a viable tool for narrative expression in a way that goes beyond basic Spunkgargleweewee (see Yahtzee), and those who don't will simply go their merry way. Or, you know, the more likely outcome of people enjoying both varieties of games at once will be understood as being commonplace.
I like my shooty bang-bangs or my slider-twiddling micromanagement sims. Just, y'know, not exclusively.
slo said:
And no, Dear Esther does not need a set of guns to be interesting. It won't help. Nothing will save Dear Ester, not even dinosaurs and jetpacks. It's that bad.
Aw, shucks. I actually gave the North Korea mod a shot - it replaces the game's narration with fat jokes about Kim Jong-Un and it adds random 2D sprites of Ken Jeong playing the guy that you can shoot down with a gun painted in blue and red stripes. Every time you squeeze the trigger, a kickass guitar solo plays and Randy Savage descends from the parting clouds. He gives you Slim Jim items you can use to turn the island's radio tower into a Ubisoft Radio Tower, complete with random mooks to kill.
It's a great mod.
