Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2016 12:16:02 GMT -5
We disagree.
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Post by Weasel on Jun 9, 2016 12:17:55 GMT -5
So, again, no, complaining that a walking simulator has no traditional gameplay is not a valid criticism. Standing up for that is standing up for shitty, shoddy journalism, where the reviewer is merely stating their genre preferences and not analyzing the actual game at hand. Maybe it's not "gameplay" in the sense that we're used to. There are no win/loss cases, no "mechanics" to dictate how our experience works. The gameplay, the overarching task, is to look, observe, search, and uncover. There is no completion percentage because that isn't important to the game. The game cannot tell you whether the things you uncover are important, because what is or is not important to find is entirely the domain of the player. But compare Gone Home to, say, Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Firewatch, which are games with similar ideas in terms of finding things, but they allow the game to keep track of things that the player might not think are important, like Firewatch's radio conversations, or Ethan Carter's story pages. These two games feel "gamier" than Gone Home did, for what time I put into that one, and I feel they are better for it.
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Post by Scylla on Jun 9, 2016 12:23:58 GMT -5
You know, for someone who is repeatedly stating their mind in this topic, you're not doing much for your argument when, as soon as your analogies are challenged and other analogies are presented, all you can respond with is "I said my piece." and "We disagree." You are more than welcome to explain how you think my analogies don't work, but the fact that you don't even try makes me feel like you do see the logic in what I'm saying, can't come up with a rebuttal, and are trying to cover up that fact.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2016 12:24:07 GMT -5
Also, let's try to keep some perspective here. Writing reviews of video games is not journalism.
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Post by Scylla on Jun 9, 2016 12:28:08 GMT -5
Also, let's try to keep some perspective here. Writing reviews of video games is not journalism. So when I write an article for a magazine, it's not journalism? Let's check with Merriam-Webster: "the activity or job of collecting, writing, and editing news stories for newspapers, magazines, television, or radio" We're entering the realm of straw man arguments now.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2016 12:29:20 GMT -5
You know, for someone who is repeatedly stating their mind in this topic, you're not doing much for your argument when, as soon as your analogies are challenged and other analogies are presented, all you can respond with is "I said my piece." and "We disagree." You are more than welcome to explain how you think my analogies don't work, but the fact that you don't even try makes me feel like you do see the logic in what I'm saying, can't come up with a rebuttal, and are trying to cover up that fact. From my perspective, the fact that someone says something you don't agree with but you keep coming back at them aggressively means you're looking for an excuse to have a fight. I've said exactly what my position is multiple times, you've said exactly what your position is multiple times. What is going to be gained by reiterating those same points over and over again? You're not changing my mind and I'm not changing yours. I'm not getting upset over it, but you certainly seem to be. I'd be fine with talking about it more if you weren't so worked up over it.
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Post by Weasel on Jun 9, 2016 12:29:59 GMT -5
....Okay, uh, did either of you have any further discussion about the game? Because I don't look forward to watching the two of you pick each others' posts apart today.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2016 12:30:19 GMT -5
Also, let's try to keep some perspective here. Writing reviews of video games is not journalism. So when I write an article for a magazine, it's not journalism? Let's check with Merriam-Webster: "the activity or job of collecting, writing, and editing news stories for newspapers, magazines, television, or radio" We're entering the realm of straw man arguments now. An article for a magazine is different from a review of a product. A review is not news.
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Post by Scylla on Jun 9, 2016 12:49:56 GMT -5
A discussion board is for discussion. Sometimes people disagree. And then they debate. This is Message Boards 101. My posts have been in reply to yours, so if you want to complain about people "reiterating their points over and over", look at yourself for doing so first. The fact that you see my posts as aggressive and indicative of me being upset and worked up is just silly, and I'm not gonna fall for that gaslighting.
When I said an article for a magazine, I obviously was implying a review. Reviews are articles. Everybody knows that opinion pieces fall within the realm of journalism. Chances are your local news has a commentary segment. And even opinion pieces has a degree of news to them. The "news" of a game review is in saying "Hey, this game is out, and this is what it's like." You can't write a review that immediately launches into "This game sucks/is great". You have to establish a good bit of background and facts before you can say if it does what it does well.
ANYWAY, if Weasel is tired of this, I'll stop here, since I don't want to see this locked. I wanted this discussion to be about story-focused games and the criticism they get for being story-focused, which is relevant to Gone Home, but all the deflection has taken it in pointless directions.
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Post by Maciej Miszczyk on Jun 9, 2016 13:22:57 GMT -5
being story-focused isn't the same as being a walking sim though. again, I'm not saying this as a knock against GH because I enjoyed it but you can have both mechanical depth and story focus. games as systems/challenge/entertainment are not mutually exclusive with games as experience/story/art.
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Post by Snarboo on Jun 9, 2016 17:13:07 GMT -5
A "walking simulator", by definition, has minimal gameplay. Complaining about the lack of gameplay is akin to saying "I want this to be in an entirely different genre". For an applicable comparison to RPGs, it'd be like reviewing an RPG and saying you don't want it to have any battles or dungeons or stat growth. I don't think it's unfair to ask for an RPG without battles or dungeons, just as its not unfair to ask for a first person game without shooting. Sports RPGs by definition do not have battles or dungeon crawling, but are still a subset of the genre. Stat growth is debatable, but a large part of RPGs is playing a role. Stats simply show progression, so it's not impossible for an RPG to exist that doesn't cater to genre norms. I'm pretty sure there are social RPGs, and many tabletop players go long bouts without fighting anything, if they fight anything at all. This isn't even touching upon how poorly most RPGs handle combat with things like excessive grinding and random battles, things that have remained simply because they are things that RPGs "do". In any case, when people say a walking simulator "isn't a game" or is "devoid of gameplay", what they mean is that they player doesn't have meaningful interaction with the game world. A lot of walking simulators straddle the line between adventure games and early FMV games/interactive toys. Some have even less interaction than Cookie Clicker! I can easily understand the criticism in those cases, and it's not a reviewers job necessarily to nod and say "this walking sim has walking and thus lives up to its promise, 10/10".
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Post by Malev on Jun 9, 2016 20:31:28 GMT -5
In any case, when people say a walking simulator "isn't a game" or is "devoid of gameplay", what they mean is that they player doesn't have meaningful interaction with the game world. A lot of walking simulators straddle the line between adventure games and early FMV games/interactive toys. That's a pretty accurate statement. RLM mentioned how some movies are more akin to taking a "darkroom" tour/ride where you witness a string of events and move on. Yahtzee mentioned that sort of Walking Simulator in his video on Everyone's Gone to the Rapture as (to paraphrase) reading a novel with the pages strewn out from the wind. Considering that some of these sort of titles have only one maybe two ways that it ends means that there's little reason to re-experience the game later on.
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Post by dskzero on Jun 10, 2016 12:55:17 GMT -5
In any case, when people say a walking simulator "isn't a game" or is "devoid of gameplay", what they mean is that they player doesn't have meaningful interaction with the game world. A lot of walking simulators straddle the line between adventure games and early FMV games/interactive toys. That's a pretty accurate statement. RLM mentioned how some movies are more akin to taking a "darkroom" tour/ride where you witness a string of events and move on. Yahtzee mentioned that sort of Walking Simulator in his video on Everyone's Gone to the Rapture as (to paraphrase) reading a novel with the pages strewn out from the wind. Considering that some of these sort of titles have only one maybe two ways that it ends means that there's little reason to re-experience the game later on. And then I will always mention The Stanley Parable. Gone Home was a mediocre experiment, but it was okay as an experience. I thought it was ridiculously overpriced as well and the whole fanfare around it made me think it was some sort of revolutionary thing that would make me rethink my gaming experience. Instead, I got two hours walking around a house with an incredibly amount of copies of the same book (clever, ain't it? Didn't we see this in Amnesia as well?) reading a teenager's diary. It wasn't particulary entertaining. I remember playing that same afternoon Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and trying to figure out why would someone prefer GH to AMFP. I figured, in the end, that I wasn't really the target audience for this game. It was a nice walk, I guess. The entire thing is well acted. But it's pretty unsatisfactory.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2016 15:44:49 GMT -5
Oddly enough, Gone Home is free this month on PS4 for PS+ users.
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Post by GamerL on Jun 10, 2016 16:19:35 GMT -5
Remember there was going to be a Wii U port?
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