Western video games fetishise technology, which runs contrary to stylisation.
Stylization sucks dick.
You should kill yourself. Even more than the average RPGcodex user should.
Look at the modern indie scene. Muh pixel art, muh roblox graphix etc.
These are idiots who can't surpass certain limits pretending to be playing with style and form. They aren't actually doing so in the vast majority of cases. They do these things because they're seen as easier and do terrible jobs within them. Even the most praised utilisations of these approaches in western gaming I mostly find upsettingly ugly. I hate how Stardew Valley looks, for example.
I think the guy who made this game actually
is trying. He's not cynical. But that might just make it sadder. His
passion project is just an ugly bloated clone of an ancient constantly iterated upon Japanese game with far more prominent western branding and marketing. A Japanese friend of mine expressed puzzlement at how he got away with such a direct copy of an existing game. My point is that this game does not look a certain way because of effective stylisation. It looks the way it does because of fetishisation. This guy is making to Harvest Moon what trannymaxxed 'Boomer Shooters' are to Doom.
This is a more interesting case. They're mostly just pointless in addition to hideous.
Japanese games are the same. Muh animu. I hate that shit with a burning passion.
The Japanese are working towards and within style. They're completely different.
At any rate, western developers didn't "fetishize" technology as such, they merely saw video games as a means to explore the possibilities of computing technology and what could be realized in terms of simulation or interaction
I would call that technology fetishisation.
(video games as a whole came into being BECAUSE of this culture in the first place).
Video games as toys and games on a computer sure. And that's all they'd have stayed if it were up to America.
This is in line with the "progressivist" credo of the modern west which is one form of the sattva principle i mentioned. Star Trek is a very "white" kinda of fantasy for instance. It's all related.
Star Trek is Jewish and stupid and ugly. Beyond the name of a tv show I recognise this is a meaningless addition to your post.
This is what made 90s PC gaming special, but it's now been obliterated by the introduction of multiplatform development, which means everything had to be dragged down the lowest common denominator, meaning consoles. In one swoop this obliterated every ounch of enthusiasm western developers had for the medium, since it basically destroyed the one thing that made them interested in gaming as a medium in the first place.
Yes, that is the fundamental problem. Americans have only ever really been interesting in video games by accident of creating tools, parts, systems, and possibilities, then being obliged to put them into a finished game once done. They make something, then make as much for it as they need to to be able to sell it as a "video game", then move on. This is the worst tendency in American gaming and the one that destroyed it. As you say, the impulse that drives a man to make cockroach AI does not translate well into making new works in established forms. You need to be an
artist for that. Not an autistic inventor.
And even among the players there is still a desire to return to that ideal. Look at the success of scams like Star Citizen. The reason so many people were easily duped into this thing
Marketing and stupidity.
is because this game promised to be a return to PC gaming as it used to be before consoles dragged the whole medium down and turned every game into a mere corporate product. People crave that experience PC games used to provide, that feel technology was moving forward and new frontiers in virtual simulation were being achieved.
Didn't this start as a post saying that tech fetishism isn't real?
Star Citizen promised that and people flocked to that shit like starving ravenous wolves.
They also flocked to 'The Day Before'.
I bet Star Citizen didn't actually start as a scam, it was purely a crime of opportunity.
True of most media which gets called scams. Making stuff is hard.
That's not realism. Quite the opposite in fact.
And who made it?
All console graphics are the farthest thing from realism you can find, with those bullshit vomit green or shit brown filters, shitty use of bloom and other post-processing effects, over use of retarded phoptographic or cinematographic techniques like vignetting, depth of field or motion blur that destroy any semblance of realism in the picture.
Yes, that's what's unrealistic about this screenshot of a sobbing lesbian supersoldier about to kill 700 people.
Western games haven't focused on realism or pushing technology ever since development shifted on consoles. The last "true" PC game in that respect was Crysis 1, and it's instructive if you compare that game to it's consolized sequel, which committed all the sins i just described. Visually, Crysis 2 was pure consoltarded diarrhea, and this is how western games have been made since. The last game i played that actually did realism in the way older PC games used to was Kingdom Come: Deliverance and it was just glorious.
This is such a tech fetishist perspective. Western games are disinterested in realism because we aren't putting the entirety of our civilisation's resources into completely unstylised polygonal maximalism.
I'm actually a pretty big Cevat Yarli fan for what his games are conceptually. I love FarCry1.
Nowadays "style" is just code word for "i suck at making good looking games".
And good means "like real". You have the same taste as a street shitting indian who spends 10k hours grinding SARS LIFELIKE EYE SKETCH I AM ARTIST NOW.
There's that roblox looking Battlefield clone that is being praised for having clear visuals among other things.
It doesn't. Its colour balance is god-awful. It's noisy and cluttered and generally has all of the problems of modern battlefield but with big goofy bodies that are easier to model.
The argument people make is that modern Battlefield games made it difficult to even see what to shoot because of the excessive use of post-processing effects.
I don't think anybody was really saying that. It's just a marketing pitch for Battlebit.
This is a retarded argument because the problem with modern Battlefied is not the "realism" but the consoltarded style of vomiting visual effects on the screen without the slightest concern for actual realism in the picture.
Is the problem readability or realism? Is the problem looking bad or realism? Something can look more realistic and worse.
And the solution to that problem is definitely not that of making games that look like mobile shit four year old kids play. This is your "stylization" at work:
This is not
my stylisation. Where was this game made?
It does. Because it is ugly and noisy.
I love a sense of groundedness in video games. That's why I can't stand western RPGs. All the abstraction and distance between what I'm doing and what's being represented. If you enjoy this kind of advanced intuitive feedback that characterises Thief and simulators you would probably greatly enjoy The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Animu = game disregarded.
You are a shallow technology fetishist and a shallow cultural chauvinist. You'll never appreciate anything nice. But the thing about not being able to appreciate something, is that if you were smart enough to realise why that's a problem, you wouldn't have the problem. So it's something you can never really have to mourn.
The appeal of a racing sim and the appeal of western RPGs overlapping is a strange thought to me. I'd characterise them almost as opposites in most ways.
It's correlated because both mediums are concerned with rapresenting reality.
RPGs are concerned with being RPGs. If they had not been created yet nobody interested in representing reality
realistically and
accurately would create them. They're a historic accident which people are fond of for what they are (and a lot of people for an idealised idea of what they are).
Racing sims or simulators in general go about it by attempting to provide the player with a realistic feedback. RPGs focus on abstraction and theory but ultimately it's still reality that is the focus.
The same could be said of non-interactive media by this point. Novels also represent reality.
There is most definitely a kind of antagonism between the two but in principle the goal is still the same. I remember Daniel Vavra got a lot of hate in the Codex when he started arguing the feedback principle of simulators was superior to the abstractions of older RPGs. That the only reason those abstractions even exist is because computing technology was too primitive in the past to provide a true simulation (also the fact RPGs started as table top games where abstraction was a necessity, unless you wanted to LARP like a dumbfuck). Whether you agree with him or not that discussion shows to what degree simulations and RPGs are interrelated.
Whether or not one agrees depends on "superior at what?" Since this is RPGcodex I imagine this thread went for 1000 pages with nobody asking that.
In this sense, generally speaking, the best RPG systems are the ones that provide a greater degree of complexity and strategic possibilities while still remaining close to reality.
Why?
Pillars of Eternity was universally panned for throwing any semblance of realism out of the window with Josh Sawyer thinking the abstraction in and of itself was the point, where as it never was.
Never played because it looks like every other RPG to me.
I lost track of western gaming when it became unserious and kiddie oriented, mostly when the feminized hipster crowd took over around the mid 2000s (feminization is the reason why western games lost their creativity BTW. Creativity is a masculine thing. The over socialized faggots that make games today have but a tiny fraction of the testosterone of the nerds of old).
Talk of "creativity" is never a meaningful contribution to a discussion of art.
There is no art without creativity.
What a meaningless statement.
If you believe otherwise you are just one of those try hard pseudo modern intellectuals who think they are being super sophisticated and "above it all" by entertaining the most cretinous ideas possible. Many such cases in this last century. It's how modern art came into being.
ha
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