but he did had physical rewards in all three of his kickstarters, starting at 75$:
(you can see one there)QW kickstarter said:
(he posted one on twitter)Geneforge remaster kickstarter said:
QW 2 kickstarter said:
-
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Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread
- Thread starter Humanity has risen!
- Start date
but he did had physical rewards in all three of his kickstarters, starting at 75$:
Tyranicon
A Memory of Eternity
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The goal of all good writing summed up in one sentence.
Of course, the hard part's having a game be engaging, not only through gameplay (or sometimes, in spite of) but also through the writing.
There's so very few good examples of what is universally agreed upon to be good writing in a game, but plenty of franchises that have clearly used characters, worldbuilding, quest concepts, player choices, etc to punch above their weight.
roll-a-die
Magister
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I think the issue there is conveyance.
Analyzing a couple of the original short stories found in the original anthology "Conan", which is a collection of stories republished from the original magazine articles.
Hyborean Age, basically a setting info dump. Explaining the names of nations, places and peoples. As well as describing the change over from the Thurian age to the Hyborian age.
The Thing in the Crypt is basically a short story about a fetch quest, starting with a raid, Conan being enslaved again by the targets of that raid, escaping, being chased by wolves, finding the entrance to a crypt, lighting a fire inside that awakens a mummy inside that he fights.
Contrast that to a fighters guild quest line story from something like Oblivion, specifically at the point where you go to Modryn Oreyn. If you break down the beats. And not the conveyance, the details, they are very similar plotlines.
I'm not going to belabor this point, but contrast the weakly written quests of Oblivions, with the plot of the average Conan story, and just examine the beats and structure of them. Instead of the conveyance of those beats. And you'll find they are very similar breakdowns.
So in essence they are trying, but failing qualitatively, either through lack of flair, or lack of conveyance to provide a suitable equating of the plots they are seeking to emulate. At it's core, it is the style, and the prose, the elements of conveyance that are lacking when comparing Howard, Carter and Camp's short stories that were elemental in the creation of the fantasy genera in the modern world to something that fails with it's writing such as Oblivion.
This x10000. Games like Grimrock, EoB, SSI, etc. have just the *right* amount of writing. Just to state a point and get the imagination going, then off you go doing the interesting stuff like exploring the dungeons and engaging in tactical combat (okay, not in the realtime dungeon crawlers...) If I want to read, I go and read some good sci-fi/fantasy instead.
Having said that, the writing in Age of Decadence is stellar, and quite good in the first Witcher game. So it's actually possible to do interesting writing in an RPG, but it's just rare.
Another good example is Gothic and ELEX. No info dumps, no walking encylopedias, just believable in-game dialogue. The audio logs and diary notes in ELEX don't feel forced either, they're kinda optional and teach you more about the backstory in bite-sized chunks.
roll-a-die
Magister
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Balance is key. I can't stand the writing in things like Disco Elysium, because if I wanted to read a communists manifesto I'd go find one by Marx and Engles. Balance is key. And a lot of these people forget a key rule of writing in my eyes, show don't tell. If your game has complex lore, with complicated past, hint at it, and show it, don't smack your big writing dick down and tell us the whole history of the universe.
To contrast 2 modern game examples.
Bad(But not the worst) modern example of writing: Disco Elysium, the amount of times the game interrupts gameplay flow to smack me in the face telling me something that's happening to the character, rather than showing just the effects of it. "I'm a super star right?" "You've unlocked the SUPERSTAR COP ROUTE." it feels bad to read through from a literary standpoint, and because the game itself is relatively low budget, and made by inexperienced devs, it feels bad to play. It's like the devs jerked constantly from showing writing to telling writing, and couldn't pick a mode to settle on.
A good(But not great) modern game example: Genshin Impact for all it's Gacha and Chinese developed flaws, has a colossally complex lore behind it with tons of speculation and allusions to other systems of the thought, religion outside the game, and creative interpretations of its own world. And there are people who can examine rooms and buildings in certain places to try and get a better feel for the lore and stories. There are telling moments, but they are relatively few, and mostly are there to explain concepts that gweilo might not understand. There's characters who we know come from areas that were destroyed a centuries span or so of years ago, but know scant little about those areas, because they are building it up, and showing us the plot. Not telling it to us through boring exposition.
Vogel uses text to show, but ultimately ends up doing a lot of telling anyway in recent years. From quest descriptions "subtly" hinting at alternate paths that are obvious if you just let the player explore and pay attention, to area descriptions vividly telling you what might have happened there, rather than describing the elements of the scene and showing you so you can figure it out with that thing in your head. That said, he is competent in his writing typically. And doesn't tend to waver in his style like Disco Elysium does.
Glop_dweller
Prophet
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This is sad.
Well... with Baldur's Gate [series], the developers acquiesced, and put the lore into optional books; read it or don't. What I'd like though is for the developers to salt the books & scrolls of an RPG with useful hints, tactics, and (perhaps even impossible) secrets that don't get auto-added to the PC/Party's journal when clicked on, but rather they can only be learned of if they are actually read by the player.
Well... with Baldur's Gate [series], the developers acquiesced, and put the lore into optional books; read it or don't. What I'd like though is for the developers to salt the books & scrolls of an RPG with useful hints, tactics, and (perhaps even impossible) secrets that don't get auto-added to the PC/Party's journal when clicked on, but rather they can only be learned of if they are actually read by the player.
Last edited:
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https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/can-we-even-put-human-stories-in
Can We Even Put Human Stories in Video Games Anyway?
Sure, video games are art, but can they be ART art?
A really good, polished game that tries something different? Oooh! Let’s dig into this!
My family just finished playing the hit co-op game It Takes Two. It's a two-player-only adventure through the mysteries of the human heart. I played it with my wife, and our teenager who was on hand to help us out when the game got too hard.
It's a very fun game with very unusual writing, and it's extremely and deservedly popular. A good topic for thoughtful criticism. Or at least making cheap jokes.
(Also, since I wrote this, it won Game of the Year from a popular infomercial.)
We enjoyed It Takes Two immensely. We loved the gameplay, we loved the visuals, and we loved loathing and mocking its characters.
It Takes Two is unique because, under all the flash and platforming, it’s about a family working through its problems. That is a unique and ambitious stretch for video game storytelling, so it deserves a good look.
Putting human stories in video games is a hard problem worth looking at. There are two big traps here: 1. The medium just makes it really hard. 2. Once you try to say anything complex about humanity, the Internet will scream at you, and it’s hard to ignore that.
Let me hash through all of this, and then I’ll get back to It Takes Two.
How video games usually depict family: Gray, endless depression. For an industry based on fun, we sure are a warehouse full of wet blankets.
There Is No Family In Video Games
Video games are art.
At least, that's what they keep telling me.
Interestingly, for an art form with a lot of storytelling, video games almost never touch on real human issues. In vidya, a real human moment usually sounds like, "See that slime monster in the corner? Stab it with a sword. Also, I AM ANGRY!"
Art, since the Ancient Greeks/Forever, has always heavily dealt with the workings of the basic building block of human civilization, the family. The difficult business of husbands and wives, parents and children.
I've been trying to think of other games about the functioning of a family, and I'm not coming up with a lot.
The Last of Us found love and joy in the darkest of settings. In The Last of Us 2, Ellie strangles this giraffe to death in order to feel an emotion.
A Few Examples
The touching relationship between Ellie and her father-substitute Joel in The Last of Us was very good. Then, in the next game, it devolved into a nihilistic bloodbath, about a quarter as profound as it thought it was. (Apparently, violent, unending revenge is bad.) What a sad waste, in a game that sure got forgotten quickly.)
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons has, well, sons, and a father, and a dead mom. The sons go on an adventure. But it's just pretty standard puzzle-solving and troll-dodging. None of the people in it ever become fully 3 dimensional.
There was a depressing and largely forgotten 2013 indie game called The Novelist, about a depressing husband, wife, and child. You made decisions for them to try to save them from utter despair.
However, every decision you made for this family was zero-sum: You could never make anyone happy without making someone else miserable. In any family, one person had to be utterly crushed so the others could survive. Life doesn't work that way.
Then there was Dragon Age 2. Your character, Hawke, has to carry around his or her family. The game is mostly awkward wizard-stabbing and RPG business, but at one point your mom gets turned into a zombie, which is awesome. Not really human business, though.
You can have a family in The Sims. However, those people aren't really people. They're bundles of status bars, improved by the purchase of mountains of consumer goods. And sure, you can have a kid. However, your Sims child will inevitably die from starvation, drown in a swimming pool, or get forever lost in the serial killer maze you build in the basement.
Yikes. Mother’s Day is going to be soooper awkward this year.
It's Hard to Make Video Game People Into People
In all fairness, trying to tell human stories in video games is REALLY HARD. You can’t put the nuance of human relationships in gameplay, and telling story through cutscenes kind of sucks.
To really be effective as art about people and people-business, the characters need a chance to express themselves as people. This happens through dialogue and self-expression, and through seeing the people confronted with difficult situations and making choices.
Most games don't have room for this. When you want to get to the puzzle-solvy and the zappy-zappy, there's no time for idle chit chat. Gamers will forgive you for having a story as long as you let them ignore it.
But with It Takes Two, it really wants you to know this family. Their past, their habits, their wants, their problems, and how they try to resolve them. That makes it really interesting and unusual.
It Doesn't Help That the World Is Dumb
To create art about actual humans, to try to touch the feelings of actual humans, requires sincerity. Sincerity, in case you have not heard, is cringe.
Also, whatever work you create, whatever expression you take straight out of your heart and share with the world, will immediately be picked to pieces by the world's worst media. There is an endless hoard of instantly replaceable critics who will deliberately misinterpret your work in order to say outrageous things and farm hate clicks.
(Another good recent example of an ambitious developer being ridiculously and excessively hassled is here.)
You might say creators should just ignore this. That's easy for you to say. Some artists have really thick skins. (I do.) Many don't. You're just going to lose writers to the hate, and some of those writers will be good, and the game industry needs all the good writers it can get.
(There's nothing that can be done about this, alas, not as long as it works. But it's important to note it happens.)
Parenting in The Sims. (OK, honestly, this is pretty funny.)
For Example, Look At It Takes Two
It's a game about a couple with a small child. They're on the edge of divorce but their child does not want this and makes the parents try to reconcile.
It you went to, like, actual humans with this idea, it would be pretty non-controversial. Divorce can't always be avoided, but it's good to try to reconcile especially if kids are involved. You really have to make sure your troubles can't be overcome. If they can be, and you still get divorced, you are unnecessarily hurting your children and blowing up a perfectly good life.
Yet I was able to find no shortage of click-farmers who were angered by the very premise of the game. Showing a couple trying to stay together was deemed offensive.
Here is one typical quote: "Hopefully, It Takes Two takes that next step into taking a realistic approach to depicting divorce." (In an article that began with how devastated the writer was by his own parents' divorce.) Wow! I look forward to his next piece, "The Grinch Was Right! Screw the Whos!"
I mean, this is weird, right? There's kind of a raw nerve sensitivity and reflexive anger and defensiveness to these pieces I find kind of unnerving. Sometimes, damaged relationships are saved. Happens all the time! I hope that these articles are just cynical grabs for click-pennies, because, if they are genuine expressions of opinion, serious bummer.
These are the people who are criticizing you.
If You Want To Make Art Today, Filter Your Inputs
Note that all the worst feedback are negative. What all these critics are doing is acting as art-cops. “You shouldn’t do this!” “You can’t do this!” It’s hard to create and so, so easy to forbid and tear down. That’s why they do it.
This is why I recommend that artists avoid reading criticism as much as possible, especially today.
When you open your head to all the madness of the world, you won't get much of value. You'll get a million different voices, and most of them want to psych you out and scare you out of making work.
This applies when you're just writing a goofy game where you stab demons with robots. It goes double when you're trying to make something honest and heartfelt.
If you write about divorce, you're going to be poking a million raw nerves everywhere. So write what you want. Write what feels true to you. But do so, as much as possible, in silence.
"But You're Going To Criticize the Game! Doesn't That Make You a Hypocrite? Huh? HUH!?"
People should discuss and criticize works of art. Of course they should. I'm about to do it. Everyone will shout about your work. Most of those opinions will be dumb (as we have seen above). I think artists should try to hide from this flood of madness and only get feedback from a small, curated number of trusted voices.
So I'm not a hypocrite for talking. I just don't think the makers of the game should read what I say. I hope they don't! They've released the game. They're done. They're out of the picture. What they think now doesn't matter. Now it’s just between us and their work. They should forget us and go make their next thing.
So That's My Advice For Today
If you want to make art, make it. Tell your story, the unique product of your unique brain, and share it with the world. Ignore anger merchants. Ignore complainers. Ignore (God help us all) sensitivity readers.
OK, that was me clearing my throat. In a couple days, I’ll put out a bunch of opinions on It Takes Two, which you should play now.
The actual review comes in a couple days. In the meantime, we wrote a game called Queen’s Wish that has a lot of family stuff in it. It’s pretty good. Also, free blog subscriptions!
Has he even played his own game?
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V_K
Arcane
This post is so fucking American. Can't think of any other place in the world where people are so obsessed with family stuff.
Maybe substack requires a minimum length before allowing an article to be posted.
Though I think it says more than that
Tyranicon
A Memory of Eternity
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- Oct 7, 2019
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- 7,790
Yeah, I have a tendency to exaggerate. Despite Vogel being significantly older than I am, I find we share the same views on a lot of things. Mostly a frustration at the lack of good games (especially in writing) in recent years, the path that the industry took (away from being an art medium and into a money factory churning out garbage), and the plight of creators in the age of a fickle internet where everybody's opinions carry the same weight (it shouldn't, only prestigious opinions matter).
More and more, as Vogel comes to the close of his career, I feel like he's trying to drop tidbits of wisdom for us younger devs. And maybe airing some of his own frustrations too.
fantadomat
Arcane
Vogel is so fucking outdated,even more than capitalism. He is literally an old libtard man screeching at the clouds....sad.
gaussgunner
Arcane
These are the people who are criticizing you.
If You Want To Make Art Today, Filter Your Inputs
Note that all the worst feedback are negative. What all these critics are doing is acting as art-cops. “You shouldn’t do this!” “You can’t do this!” It’s hard to create and so, so easy to forbid and tear down. That’s why they do it.
*NOT all. Ultra-positive sycophants are the worst.
Anyway, if I didn't know better, I'd interpret the above as a sign that Jeff was finally waking up to the hazards of SJWs in game development and game journalism. But he's probably just butthurt that someone called him gay on the internet.
Zeriel
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2012
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- 13,965
These are the people who are criticizing you.
If You Want To Make Art Today, Filter Your Inputs
Note that all the worst feedback are negative. What all these critics are doing is acting as art-cops. “You shouldn’t do this!” “You can’t do this!” It’s hard to create and so, so easy to forbid and tear down. That’s why they do it.
*NOT all. Ultra-positive sycophants are the worst.
Anyway, if I didn't know better, I'd interpret the above as a sign that Jeff was finally waking up to the hazards of SJWs in game development and game journalism. But he's probably just butthurt that someone called him gay on the internet.
He probably means people (read: his customers) criticizing him rightly for his laziness. He has written entire blogposts about the time he got buttmad over the Codex calling him old and sleepy, and if anything he seems to pine away for lack of journalistic coverage, if he was covered by IGN I think he'd love it...
gaussgunner
Arcane
hahaha, Sleepy Jeff
GentlemanCthulhu
Liturgist
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- 1,479
Video games aren't art. *Maybe* They are a medium through which some other forms of art can been experienced. That's what I think. Moreover, the games industry itself sure as shit doesn't treat games art. They are strictly product.
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Here's Jeff's review of It Takes Two: https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/it-takes-two-of-the-worst-people
They are art, but they have to embrace interactivity and gameplay as core elements of their artform in order to mature.
Thief is art, for example.
Art is supposed to communicate a desire or emotion. Roger Ebert stated that video games could never be art in the way that the cinema is, and the AAA community kind of proved his point when they elevated cinematic video games as examples of art. Casuals go crazy over a game like the Last of Us because of the cinematography and voice acting. So what they are praising is a movie embedded in a video game. Turn-based games emulate board games and tactical tabletop games, so at best they emulate the art of war.
However, sometimes when I play a game I do get a strong sense of pathos and that's when I do believe a video game steps into the realm of being art. I am on the tail end of Dark Souls 3 (after playing through Demon Souls and the prior two Dark Souls games) and I get a feeling of dread that has little to do with any of the movie cinematics of the game or any of the dialogue. It's just this crushing sense of decline and decay that permeates through the game and begins to have an emotional effect, which is helped by its lack of details of the overall plot and veil of mystery. It's a feeling of nihilism that keeps with you even after you put the controller down and walk away.
I wouldn't consider a game like Mass Effect the same sort of art, since it relies heavily on the medium of cinema versus the gameplay aspects that make it a video game. But the Souls series would be art, in my own humble opinion, since the feelings and ideas it conveys is incorporated into everything from its visual design to its core gameplay loop. As you play you wonder why your character is even fighting so hard with everything so decayed around him. What does it matter if the cycle of fire and dark is unending and humanity cursed? Why not submit to the entropy? And then when you go to bed you can't help but dwell on the human condition and things like the inevitable heat death of the universe.
However, sometimes when I play a game I do get a strong sense of pathos and that's when I do believe a video game steps into the realm of being art. I am on the tail end of Dark Souls 3 (after playing through Demon Souls and the prior two Dark Souls games) and I get a feeling of dread that has little to do with any of the movie cinematics of the game or any of the dialogue. It's just this crushing sense of decline and decay that permeates through the game and begins to have an emotional effect, which is helped by its lack of details of the overall plot and veil of mystery. It's a feeling of nihilism that keeps with you even after you put the controller down and walk away.
I wouldn't consider a game like Mass Effect the same sort of art, since it relies heavily on the medium of cinema versus the gameplay aspects that make it a video game. But the Souls series would be art, in my own humble opinion, since the feelings and ideas it conveys is incorporated into everything from its visual design to its core gameplay loop. As you play you wonder why your character is even fighting so hard with everything so decayed around him. What does it matter if the cycle of fire and dark is unending and humanity cursed? Why not submit to the entropy? And then when you go to bed you can't help but dwell on the human condition and things like the inevitable heat death of the universe.
Trans-Financial-Man
Arcane
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- Feb 20, 2018
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- 1,006
[/QUOTE]
I agree with a liquid 90% of the blog. But this one here grinds my gears.
I am a firm believer that Art is not precious. It can and SHOULD be criticized. The problem is there are just too many devs who think their shit doesn't stink. Too often, devs and hell many other creatives create this strawman gestalt of an impossible to please audience. It's a brilliant way to deflect your own failings. It's not that there is an evil internet that inherently hates complexity. It's that devs think their rubbish is complex when it isn't. Especially compared to other art. What we are seeing in gaming is these pretentious and fart sniffing 20 hour long movies disguised as games. They have mediocre scripts. And they miss the entire point of games which is that PLAYER INTERACTION trumps storytelling every time. RPGs are a great example of this in motion. The best RPGs have some form of player agency. Whether it be through stat allocation and build development, choice and consequence within a story.
"It's art, it isn't meant to be good"
or the even more aggravating
"you're just too stupid to understand it"
It was up until 20 years ago the deflection of pretentious makers of Art House films. Films with a man walking a dog for 5 hours in a single take. That were seen by 5 people including the Director's dog and Nan. People would say,
"Mate, you just filmed your dog for five hours that's not deep."
Only to be met with
"Um.. actually, It's art. You're just too stupid to understand complexity."
You can absolutely deal with complex themes but you have to give them a nuance beyond
"I want to showcase how much smarter I am than you plebs"
Pathologic 1 and 2 both do a great job of tackling complex themes in a way that's still diagetic to a FUCKING VIDEO GAME YOU CAN ACTUALLY PLAY! There are characters with differing and conflicting perspectives on the plague. And it's up to you the player to figure out what to do. As opposed to ponderous cutscenes that tell you in no uncertain terms you should feel sad and think the same way the devs do.
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