Campaign Creations

Writing in game sucks probably because no one view it as art, developers don't, writers don't, movie directors don't, only dedicated gamers seems to view it as so.

This is a shame, games are the best medium to portray a story because it combines the power of writing, sounds and graphics into something that gives the player control. There is nothing more immersive and powerful than games, but no one seems to get that...

It's like games are the holy pants of god, just happened to crash down on planet Earth. Instead of using it to become gods ourselves, we stupid cavemens used them as lofty hats instead... Oh humanity...

Wibod:
I see, you were throwing Falchion's logic back in his face. Would I be correct in guessing that you do not agree with his implied premise on what constitutes "writing"? If so, then:

Falchion wrote:And Darksiders doesn't count as writing because it's more of a comic book than an actual game. And you and I both know it.

A book isn't writing?

I think we may need to step back and define what "writing" means if this is an actual argument you wanna make.

______________________________________________

Hunter_Killers:

Hercanic wrote:Every generation of games has had its share of terrible writing, along with a few gems scattered about, and every generation henceforth will follow.

Hunter_Killers wrote:It's really not even just "today". Writing has almost always been terrible

I think we’re basically agreeing here. "Today" was in reference to Falchion and Mark:

mark_009_vn wrote:Writing in general is awful nowadays.

Falchion wrote:No, the writing in gaming world these days is virtually non-existant.

Hunter_Killers wrote:Writing has almost always been terrible and gamers keep passing it off as "it's a game" or start calling everyone entitled. I find it amusing how fast everyone is to call someone entitled because they want more than the bare minimum for the core game.

In my experiences of reading online comments about various games, I've seen my share of diatribe that I'd classify as entitlement, but unfortunately this word has also become a cop-out and used as an indiscriminate weapon of verbal shaming.

For an example of what I'd call entitlement, a fan of Dragon Age 2 wrote a lengthy letter about how "gays only represent a small percentage of the population", so therefore he, being a part of the "straight male majority", was entitled to the majority of the romance options in the game. Bioware drafted this excellent response.

Hunter_Killers wrote:Same goes for the Piracy/DRM witch hunt, they want their game regardless if it has computer destroying rootkits included free of charge. I won't be surprised if Ubisoft is the next to fall.

I definitely hate subversive DRM. We all vote with our dollar, so why support the bakery that poisons its cakes? The cake sure looks good, and I might not even know it has been tainted if I don't stay current in community news, so this is how the bakery can get by.

Platforms like Steam, however, I can get on board with because it is upfront, respectful of me as a consumer, and offers significant compensatory benefits that are a direct result of being online, such as not needing to lug around a massive binder of CDs to install my games, effortless patching, easy grouping with friends, offline option, etc. This is markedly different from, say, Diablo III, because my singleplayer experience is never affected by unrelated internet lag.

I love Stardock's stance on DRM. They basically state that pirates don't represent lost sales, so why punish your actual customers?

Hunter_Killers wrote:The entire industry is heading in the direction to repeat history, games are getting extremely disposable.

I doubt we'll ever see the same total drop of 97% in sales across the entire industry. Online distribution removes the limited physical shelf-space in stores that contributed to the first crash. The industry was also in its infancy back then, barely having explored its potential. Nowadays, we are much more aware of its capabilities to elicit emotion and captivate our imaginations.

With Facebook and the Wii, we've also broadened our market coverage by a significant degree. Young or old, man or woman, parent or child, there is more and more for everyone. This is extremely important for our industry's long-term viability, that it have something for everyone. It is what marks the difference between the inception of film and comic books. You need only to contrast comic books in western culture with manga in Japanese culture to see the importance of having content for diverse interests.

What we will likely see is certain sectors of our industry sag while others blossom, leading to an overall consistent health of game sales. Such recessions will, in actuality, be opportunities for the innovative to grab success, in much the same way that Nintendo rose to prominence after the 1983 video game crash.

Hunter_Killers wrote:Majority of the developers are getting less and less about making a game that is designed to be enjoyed for years

Yes, there is an audience that values mastery, such as eSports, that should not be ignored. There is also an audience that values exploration, craving new experiences, and for them they'd rather hop across many disposable games that don't demand a monopoly on their time. WarioWare is a microcosmic example of this.

Hunter_Killers wrote:and more about how much you can gouge your players for and then go F2P because "it's where the market is going HURR HURR!" -Every MMO that went F2P ever. Like it excuses them for the suicidal decisions they made beforehand. Sort of like catering to players that just want to unlock everything and quit, never to be seen again.

On gouging: We're seeing abuses by opportunists like Zynga, who will likely burn-out a fair percentage of the Facebook crowd with their manipulative design practices.

MMOs are a tricky subject. I do think the widespread transition to F2P that companies have been practicing has affected my perception of the value of buying any MMO. Why buy TERA, for instance, if I think it'll go F2P? Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, might be okay for me to invest in because I can look to Guild Wars 1 and see it has still never gone F2P. However, Arena.NET is more the exception, and the Premium-to-F2P cycle is feeding its own necessity. As customers lose trust in their initial payment maintaining its worth, they shy away from joining premium MMOs, and so those MMOs have no choice but to go F2P to stay afloat, thereby contributing to the very problem the company faced.

Now we're seeing what appear to be pre-planned transitions, as if the premium phase is some sort of monetary booster for the company. The problem with experimenting with the market like this is that people have memories.

______________________________________________

IskatuMesk and Archangel:
My post was directed at the mindset Falchion and Mark put forth.

Nostalgia isn't as strong of a factor for everyone, which is why I prefaced my comment. Try my point under this light: As kids, what's a cliché? Everything is new, and as we age we are exposed to less and less new experiences. We begin to value works that surprise us.

Archangel: Of course execution matters, I never discounted it. Talent vs. Hack is beyond the scope of my point, and could easily take several pages of text to address. We'd be getting into defining good vs. not good, and I was not trying to make that distinction in my post.

Facebook doesn't count as gaming. As far as I'm concerned, the rise of garbage like facebook is the deathcry of gaming. There is no turning back, now. A crash is inevitable.

The crash will be a good thing, too. It will happen when the majority, if not all, big name publishers die. Steadily their stocks are decreasing and the industry is becoming more and more volatile. Gradually investors are turning away, and the big hives are exploding (THQ) spreading all of the little lerds to weigh down and eventually suffocate equally incompetent third parties. Money is bleeding out of the industry except for those "games" you describe. If all of the fecal refuse that is casuals forever vanish into the soulless maw of mobile phones and fecebook, that's the best outcome that could ever happen. There is utterly no redeeming quality to the psychology warfare business model of casual design except the slow and certain destruction of a decaying industry.

It may take another 10-20 years, but some day it will snap. Maybe not 97%, but enough to make a difference. I don't think it will snap entirely by lack of sales, either, I think it will snap because the costs of making games will continue to escalate and become less and less sustainable. Can you possibly believe sc2 took 100 million dollars to make? That is an insane amount of money, and for what amounts to a barely functional, ancient engine with hideous design flaws and incompetence across the board. These enormously wasteful ventures rely on unsteady market brandname dominance which decays with every year.

Hercanic wrote:

Hercanic wrote:Every generation of games has had its share of terrible writing, along with a few gems scattered about, and every generation henceforth will follow.

Hunter_Killers wrote:It's really not even just "today". Writing has almost always been terrible

I think we’re basically agreeing here. "Today" was in reference to Falchion and Mark:

mark_009_vn wrote:Writing in general is awful nowadays.

Falchion wrote:No, the writing in gaming world these days is virtually non-existant.

Hunter_Killers wrote:Writing has almost always been terrible and gamers keep passing it off as "it's a game" or start calling everyone entitled. I find it amusing how fast everyone is to call someone entitled because they want more than the bare minimum for the core game.

In my experiences of reading online comments about various games, I've seen my share of diatribe that I'd classify as entitlement, but unfortunately this word has also become a cop-out and used as an indiscriminate weapon of verbal shaming.

For an example of what I'd call entitlement, a fan of Dragon Age 2 wrote a lengthy letter about how "gays only represent a small percentage of the population", so therefore he, being a part of the "straight male majority", was entitled to the majority of the romance options in the game. Bioware drafted this excellent response.

The way Dragon Age 2 and Bioware as a company treats gays is downright offensive. The reason many people were mad as fuck over Anders was that if you were playing a male Hawk and broing it up, eventually Anders would come on to you. You had the choice to either have sex with him or not, and if you didn't he hated your guts, with no option to be his friend again. This is the only character that this type of interaction occurs with as well. This was a complete 180 on who the character of Anders was shown to be in Awakening, even taking Justice into account.

And then Bioware made Steve "don't be my anchor" Cortez in ME3 and retconned Kaidan into being bisexual via traumatic brain injury. Which is a shame because ME2 had great characterization and I think it's one of the few games that has a good character driven narrative.

Also that reply by David Gaider is hilarious. He's pretty much incapable of viewing his own writing with any sort of critical eye.
http://beefjack.com/news/dragon-age-lea ... itys-sake/
Because being unable to see multiple meanings in your writing is most definitely not the sign of a talented writer, especially in a case like this. He also fucking panders like no tomorrow.

IskatuMesk wrote:100 million dollars

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2948 ... illion.php

Google.

Hercanic wrote:Archangel: Of course execution matters, I never discounted it. Talent vs. Hack is beyond the scope of my point, and could easily take several pages of text to address. We'd be getting into defining good vs. not good, and I was not trying to make that distinction in my post.

Then I have absolutely no idea what your point would be, other than to aim fingers at individuals and call them curmudgeons, which is always fun to do and I can't hate on it.

I will say, if explaining the difference between Talent and Hack could easily take you several pages to address, you might want to invest in a course on brevity.

As to the doomsayers here: when the world stops inventing cool ways to blow the shit up out of something, then video games will die. Until then, quit with the horseshit and get over the fact that video games are on the rise. They're kicking the ever-loving shit out of my own industry AND mouth raping it at the same time. Writing has been gone for a while from the mainstream game, because the mainstream game is an FPS and there are only so many Shakespearean reasons to give a player a gun and throw them into a mosh pit. People don't need stories, when they're busy masturbating to virtual custom grips and +8% accuracy "firing pins" and butt-pounding the ego out of the 5th grader on the other end of their press Y for iron sights. Nobody gives a shit about story anymore. The Beta Fucking Retardus frat-house that made Halo the undeserved shit-on-all-things-decent monumental success it has been rubbing in our faces from the tip of its Benjamin-flavored penis, should have told you that more than a decade ago.

And the writing in StarCraft 1 was solid. Brood War, not so much. But that's what everybody remembers, so, you know, fuck it.

Archangel wrote:As to the doomsayers here: when the world stops inventing cool ways to blow the shit up out of something, then video games will die. Until then, quit with the horseshit and get over the fact that video games are on the rise.

No, they're not. The fact that people expect AAA titles, and said AAA titles are costing millions upon millions of dollars is extremely problematic, and perhaps more so if said AAA titles don't deliver the revenue expected.

The actual problem is people are forgetting that they're trying to make/play a truly good game.

RazorclawX wrote:

Archangel wrote:As to the doomsayers here: when the world stops inventing cool ways to blow the shit up out of something, then video games will die. Until then, quit with the horseshit and get over the fact that video games are on the rise.

No, they're not. The fact that people expect AAA titles, and said AAA titles are costing millions upon millions of dollars is extremely problematic, and perhaps more so if said AAA titles don't deliver the revenue expected.

wrong.

Black Ops is the exception, not the norm.

Archangel wrote:Nobody gives a shit about story anymore.

The sad truth driving this carnival of crassness. As for CoD, the FPS genre has had utterly zero innovation since Perfect Dark/quake 3, so it's no real surprise it's basically monopolized by two generic brand names. How long do you suspect releasing the same diarrhea with another number on it will keep it going?

Pr0nogo wrote:Black Ops is the exception, not the norm.

You have it backwards. Black Ops IS the norm. Halo IS the norm. Appeasing the lowest common denominator IS the norm. Video Games used to be niche. We were nerds, geeks, rejects of society and our home was the Video Game industry. The moment playing games became socially acceptable, we lost ownership of the field. Take your ball and go home, or deal with it.

IskatuMesk wrote:

Archangel wrote:Nobody gives a shit about story anymore.

How long do you suspect releasing the same diarrhea with another number on it will keep it going?

Great fucking question. Ask John Madden.

Archangel wrote:

IskatuMesk wrote:

Archangel wrote:Nobody gives a shit about story anymore.

How long do you suspect releasing the same diarrhea with another number on it will keep it going?

Great fucking question. Ask John Madden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9HZL5FSrjQ

Archangel wrote:Then I have absolutely no idea what your point would be, other than to aim fingers at individuals and call them curmudgeons, which is always fun to do and I can't hate on it.

"[Games] were way better back in the day when I was too young to critically analyze them. Now that I'm older, everything I see today looks like shit compared to my rosy memories."

Archangel wrote:I will say, if explaining the difference between Talent and Hack could easily take you several pages to address, you might want to invest in a course on brevity.

People have written entire books dedicated to effective writing. Then you tack on directing. These are not things I was trying to address in my post, nor are they something I want to spend my time to address right now.

Sorry, but if I don't limit my scope, I will end up either defending too broad of a position (I've already staked out a large swath of territory with nostalgia and random game industry observations) or having to ignore replies for the sake of my personal life.

For a little brevity: Yes, there is technically good and technically bad writing, effective and poor storytelling techniques, expert and amateur execution, clear and confusing directing, etc etc. We can break things down, analyze them, but when it comes to our immediate, personal gut-reaction, it tends to be colored by our past experiences, what we have and have not seen before.

You're into horror films, right? Not my area of expertise, but let's play in your field. Sit down any uninitiated child in front of the lamest, most boring and predictable horror flick. They don't know that the couple having sex is about to die. They don't know running upstairs is a death-sentence. They don't know that running will soon end in tripping, either on a branch outside or some ill-chosen high-heels. They don't know the killer is the boyfriend/butler/whatever. In other words, they have not been exposed to the tropes and clichés of the horror genre. The blood is fake, the acting is atrocious, and the plot is laughable. You will dismiss the film. The child will be scared. Eliciting fear is one of the main emotional goals of a horror movie, right? So there you have it, the film did its job. For one of you. Why is that?

This difference in experiences (and the expectations derived thereof) is part of why some people will enjoy something while others will revile it. Too many internet arguments have been had over "X is great!" / "No, X is shit!", never accounting for the "Nostalgia Effect" that subtly influences us all. It can impact one's perspective in a positive direction ("Oh, this brings me back!" = euphoria from familiar memories, such as reliving a treasured fantasy) or a negative direction ("Oh, I've seen this before, and it's not as good this time." = boredom and disproportionate comparison to inflated memories), and not having those past experiences will likewise shift one's perspective in a positive direction ("Oh, this is new!" = brain fully engaged, nerves exposed) or a negative direction ("Huh? I don't get it / I can't relate to this." = even something as universally regarded as Shakespeare's work loses its full impact with dated references and archaic language).

Bah, I've written more than I set out to do. Have I at least made my main point clear to you? It's a complicated subject, the human mind, but then again nothing is ever truly simple, no matter how badly our primitive monkey brain wants it to be, with its feeble attempts at labels and categories that never quite seem to fit. This is why your jab at me taking a course in brevity is innately shortsighted. I can't paint a black-and-white picture for you without doing a disservice to reality itself. So yes, a few pages is what I'd need, but if you insist: Mr. Hack is a butcher, Dr. Talent is a surgeon, but they both cut from Nature and their experiences, the difference being the degree to which those pieces are recognizable, the depth of thought put behind their choices, the communicability of those thoughts, and the emotional and rational impact those thoughts have on its audience.

Archangel wrote:You have it backwards. Black Ops IS the norm. Halo IS the norm. Appeasing the lowest common denominator IS the norm.

It's the exception for it to make as much money as Black Ops does.

Hercanic wrote:People have written entire books dedicated to effective writing. Then you tack on directing. These are not things I was trying to address in my post, nor are they something I want to spend my time to address right now.

People have written entire books because nobody wants to pay $17.95 for a 5000 word essay. And unless you're telling me you are Joseph Campbell, nobody's going to your book. So if you can't deliver the cliff notes of The Hero with a Thousand Faces without using every word in the entire manuscript, you have a problem.

Pr0nogo wrote:

Archangel wrote:You have it backwards. Black Ops IS the norm. Halo IS the norm. Appeasing the lowest common denominator IS the norm.

It's the exception for it to make as much money as Black Ops does.

Maybe I'm confused. I was under the impression we were talking about the death of video games. Video games are not going to die, was my point. Even if Black Ops is all that is left of the entire industry, it's still a video game and it's still there and it only means that it will be making exponentially more money than we're talking about now. So unless you're talking about indie games fizzling out (which they won't, thanks to Steam), I completely at a loss for what you guys are talking about now. I'll bow out, because the whole "Somebody is wrong on the internet" isn't fun anymore.