The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - ludonarrative dissonance begone

[Shadenuat]

"I call it the Citizen Kane of gaming," he says.

Great, now they all will just repeat that like parrots. Another Citizen Kane of gaming, yeah! Who's next in the line?

It's a really boring movie

.....wat.

 

[Cassidy]

 

[chestburster]

Don't see what Amnesia has to do with anything, since it actually has normal gameplay consisting of exploration, resource management, puzzle solving and stealth.

Did you even read that OP article?! It specifically mentioned Frictional Games.

Combine the large semi-open maps of Dear Esther (which is inspired by STALKER, according to the chief of ChineseBox studio), and the intuitive "interactivity" (I refuse to use "gameplay" as it's a stupid word of nebulous concept), and add in a good story, and you got a winner interactive experience game.

Don't know what people are getting butthurt about.

 

[Sunsetspawn]

This guy is really doing a bang-up job of dancing around that fact that he doesn't approve of violence in his games, because I really doubt that he has issues with story and gameplay not quite agreeing with one another, what with him being a game designer and all. Of all people, someone who MAKES games should understand that combat makes for a satisfying game mechanic, even when it isn't quite apropo to the narrative situation, no matter the genre. Also, he doesn't praise the games that actually get it right even with body-littered playthroughs, like Deus Ex. What he should be striving for is a game that successfully incorporates violence INTO the narrative in a realistic way...

Those are the strong opinions of born again game maker Adrian Chmielarz...

oh never mind

 

[felipepepe]

"I call it the Citizen Kane of gaming," he says. "It's a really boring movie that's incredibly important for movies. I'm not a big fan of Dear Esther as a game, as an experience, but to me, that's one of the most important games in the history of gaming.

/, would rage again. In fact I'm STILL raging.

Really, HOW?!!!!!

 

[Kane]

Adrian Chmielarz on How to maximize bullshit per sentence: Buzzwords and the exploitation of the gullible.

 

[tuluse]

Step 1: Identify the problem correctly. Ludonarrative dissonance. Cool, OK. Game mechanics and story in most games are at odds.

Step 2: Arrive at the conclusion that the only way to fix this issue is by removing gameplay.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT!!!

It's like the entire genre of pnc adventure games don't exist. Instead no, a game where you walk around and here a guy talk causes the epiphany, not say Loom where you become a super powerful mage, literally split the universe in 2, and have a kill count totaling... wait for it... 0. Or the Longest Journey where you cause I think 2 deaths (the witch and the monster thing), while saving the worlds. Neither one of these games were comedies like Monkey Island either. They're played straight and they work.

Ah well. The central point is correct. Perhaps after some flailing about these fuckers might get it and we'll get cool games with cool mechanics that aren't about shooting people. Cool mechanics as in "something else than a set of quick time events, random button presses and WASD movement, clicking "next" in dialogue-screens." Though part of me certainly feels like asking: "so... uh... maybe some games should just change their fucking narrative?"

I mean, look at the case material: Lara and Nathan are insane murdering lunatics... OK... But is this really ludonarrative dissonance? Their inspiration - fucking Indiana Jones - kills hordes of badguys. Yet his actions are never questioned. His writing is just adequate to fucking justify him doing that. Because he doesn't go "RUN YOU BASTARDS!!!" like Lara Croft while shoving grenade launchers up their ass. Because he is usually defending himself. How hard is this? Maybe everything isn't answered by applying the latest academic buzz-word, maybe writers just need to write better.

I bet Lara has a kill count in the latest game about 10x what Indy's is in all 3 movies combined. I'm not saying some good old fashioned shooting people to death is bad for the game, but why does there have to be hundreds of faceless mooks? Well I know the answer because it's easier than designing fun platforming puzzles, it's just depressing.

 

[tuluse]

"I call it the Citizen Kane of gaming," he says. "It's a really boring movie that's incredibly important for movies. I'm not a big fan of Dear Esther as a game, as an experience, but to me, that's one of the most important games in the history of gaming.

/, would rage again. In fact I'm STILL raging.

Really, HOW?!!!!!

And Mass Effect is the most important science fiction of our generation

 

[agentorange]

Someone should tell him modders already beat him to this little "revolution":
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-worry-of-newport
http://www.moddb.com/mods/triptych
http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-call-of-the-fireflies

And..you know...all those ahhhd-veen-tuurhhh games that people used to play.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Don't see what Amnesia has to do with anything, since it actually has normal gameplay consisting of exploration, resource management, puzzle solving and stealth.

Did you even read that OP article?! It specifically mentioned Frictional Games.

Combine the large semi-open maps of Dear Esther (which is inspired by STALKER, according to the chief of ChineseBox studio), and the intuitive "interactivity" (I refuse to use "gameplay" as it's a stupid word of nebulous concept), and add in a good story, and you got a winner interactive experience game.

Don't know what people are getting butthurt about.

Amnesia has little in common with the other games he brings up, and he doesn't talk about it specifically. Therefore, I assumed that what he meant when talking about Frictional, were all those clever blog posts Grip writes on a regular basis, where he promises awesome emotional engagement, but has yet to produce even a shadow of a game making use of his ideas. So yes, I have read Chmielarz's article, and clearly understood it much better than you.

You will have an open world "game", where you can walk around and click on things. Pardon us for not being excited about such a prospect. It's still the same retarded school of design, where you come up with a movie, and then struggle to add in the "game" bits, because you're too much of a talentless hack to make it in the actual movie industry.

 

[Grunker]

Step 1: Identify the problem correctly. Ludonarrative dissonance. Cool, OK. Game mechanics and story in most games are at odds.

Step 2: Arrive at the conclusion that the only way to fix this issue is by removing gameplay.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT!!!

It's like the entire genre of pnc adventure games don't exist. Instead no, a game where you walk around and here a guy talk causes the epiphany, not say Loom where you become a super powerful mage, literally split the universe in 2, and have a kill count totaling... wait for it... 0. Or the Longest Journey where you cause I think 2 deaths (the witch and the monster thing), while saving the worlds. Neither one of these games were comedies like Monkey Island either. They're played straight and they work.

Ah well. The central point is correct. Perhaps after some flailing about these fuckers might get it and we'll get cool games with cool mechanics that aren't about shooting people. Cool mechanics as in "something else than a set of quick time events, random button presses and WASD movement, clicking "next" in dialogue-screens." Though part of me certainly feels like asking: "so... uh... maybe some games should just change their fucking narrative?"

I mean, look at the case material: Lara and Nathan are insane murdering lunatics... OK... But is this really ludonarrative dissonance? Their inspiration - fucking Indiana Jones - kills hordes of badguys. Yet his actions are never questioned. His writing is just adequate to fucking justify him doing that. Because he doesn't go "RUN YOU BASTARDS!!!" like Lara Croft while shoving grenade launchers up their ass. Because he is usually defending himself. How hard is this? Maybe everything isn't answered by applying the latest academic buzz-word, maybe writers just need to write better.

I bet Lara has a kill count in the latest game about 10x what Indy's is in all 3 movies combined. I'm not saying some good old fashioned shooting people to death is bad for the game, but why does there have to be hundreds of faceless mooks? Well I know the answer because it's easier than designing fun platforming puzzles, it's just depressing.

Bro, whether you kill 50 people or 500 hardly matters in terms of your level of sociopathy. My argument is that Tomb Raider doesn't only suffer from ludonarrative dissonance (it certainly does, since you're a brilliant shot from second 1 of the game), but that it also suffers from bad writing ("RUN YOU BASTARDS!!! I'LL KILL YOU ALL!!!!"). It's stuff like the latter that's so silly and character-breaking it becomes problematic.

What I'm saying is: Sometimes the problem is simple. Sometimes you don't need to use long academic buzzwords to solve it. By focusing on the dissonace between mechanics and story in Tomb Raider which is certainly there, people side-step the larger issue that beyond a few bright moments, the game is simply horribly written.

 

[circ]

I think Lara was probably such a good shot because Rowe or whatever his name was had tutored her. But that's no excuse for the rest of the shit writing - my biggest peeve being the constant backtrack rescuing of people and other filler.

 

[Mangoose]

By focusing on the dissonace between mechanics and story in Tomb Raider which is certainly there, people side-step the larger issue that beyond a few bright moments, the game is simply horribly written.

True. And plus, matching mechanics to story isn't the only way to fix the dissonance. You can also write the story so that it matches the mechanics. Which, of course, requires good writing.

 

[Jick Magger]

. OK... But is this really ludonarrative dissonance? Their inspiration - fucking Indiana Jones - kills hordes of badguys. Yet his actions are never questioned. His writing is just adequate to fucking justify him doing that. Because he doesn't go "RUN YOU BASTARDS!!!" like Lara Croft while shoving grenade launchers up their ass. Because he is usually defending himself. How hard is this? Maybe everything isn't answered by applying the latest academic buzz-word, maybe writers just need to write better.

I bet Lara has a kill count in the latest game about 10x what Indy's is in all 3 movies combined. I'm not saying some good old fashioned shooting people to death is bad for the game, but why does there have to be hundreds of faceless mooks? Well I know the answer because it's easier than designing fun platforming puzzles, it's just depressing.

Plus I think that's only really a part of the problem, the second part being that they're peddling the image of Nathan Drake being a sort of wisecracking average-joe everyman (as opposed to Indiana Jones' image of a larger-than-life roguish adventurer), while the gameplay depicts him as being a hyper-competent navy seals grade killer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of weaponry (while Indie's usually limited to his whip, revolver, the occasional mp40, and plain-old luck).

Even when I did start to agree that it had some examples of Ludonarrative Dissonance, I still think it's a fairly weak case of it. Always thought Max Payne 3 was a far stronger example of it, with the Man on Fire inspired drunken wreck who stumbles through every scene like a fucking lumbering moron is constantly at odds with the finely-honed killing machine with pin-point accuracy who's capable of clearing entire rooms of people before you can say 'Address Unknown'.

 

[Lancehead]

True. And plus, matching mechanics to story isn't the only way to fix the dissonance. You can also write the story so that it matches the mechanics. Which, of course, requires good writing.

I prefer the first approach. That is, the mechanics of a game coming out of the game world being created. Because that forces the developer to think of the activities within the world that the pc could be doing and which of them make for compelling gameplay experience.

Writing the story to fit the mechanics can result in a mess because compelling gameplay mechanics can be borrowed from a whole host of stories/worlds, and sometimes from nowhere in particular.

 

[Grunker]

True. And plus, matching mechanics to story isn't the only way to fix the dissonance. You can also write the story so that it matches the mechanics. Which, of course, requires good writing.

I prefer the first approach. That is, the mechanics of a game coming out of the game world being created. Because that forces the developer to think of the activities within the world that the pc could be doing and which of them make for compelling gameplay experience.

Honestly, this might not sound very ambitious, but I don't think developers need to reinvent the wheel everytime they make a game. I'm fine with them using existing mechanics. For all its modern faults, the new Tomb Raider actually plays alright (though I think a Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time approach to the platforming would have made for an infinitely better game).

If the developer has some vision for correlating his world with a set of new mechanics, sure. But otherwise, writing a competent story to fit the mechanics seems the best bet for quality games.

 

[Hellraiser]

Stop posting Chmielarz's bullshit. We already knew he was retarded from the last two topics. He's probably doing it all for attention anyway.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Zero surprise, I had the "honor" of meeting this guy personally and he's a confirmed dumbfuck, potato codexers can also browse his fb account for added herp-a-derp.

 

[Lancehead]

True. And plus, matching mechanics to story isn't the only way to fix the dissonance. You can also write the story so that it matches the mechanics. Which, of course, requires good writing.

I prefer the first approach. That is, the mechanics of a game coming out of the game world being created. Because that forces the developer to think of the activities within the world that the pc could be doing and which of them make for compelling gameplay experience.

Honestly, this might not sound very ambitious, but I don't think developers need to reinvent the wheel everytime they make a game. I'm fine with them using existing mechanics. For all its modern faults, the new Tomb Raider actually plays alright (though I think a Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time approach to the platforming would have made for an infinitely better game).

If the developer has some vision for correlating his world with a set of new mechanics, sure. But otherwise, writing a competent story to fit the mechanics seems the best bet for quality games.

It depends on the genre too, I guess. An RPG can certainly benefit from a lot of attention paid to the game world, for example.



Also, I really dislike how they declare games as landmarks. I haven't played BioShock Infinite, so maybe it is after all the Citizen Kane moment of games. But how can anyone declare that now? Maybe 10 years into the future, if we look back on it and see all the genres, game design in general, and the industry-at-large it influenced, then perhaps there can be found a general agreement that the game was indeed the Citizen Kane moment.

 

[oscar]

Pathologic is probably 'this' done right (though a Western AAA company with 10x the budget probably wouldn't be able to come close to it).

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Look, I'm not alone and I'm not the first who has these problems. I've learned a lot from guys like Thomas Grip from Frictional Games, or even David Cage," who he says "is a genius".

Adrian Chmielarz made some nice adventure games and Gorky 17, Reflux. Now he wants to be in the indie-hipster panteon where people talk about the Important Things in his games. And of course a new type of gameplay, which is no gameplay at all (press W) . Even visual novels are more games than Dear Esther. But he needs some attention to sell his product, changing his target audience, so good luck to him.

 

[ohWOW]

Zero surprise, I had the "honor" of meeting this guy personally and he's a confirmed dumbfuck, potato codexers can also browse his fb account for added herp-a-derp.

WAS IT HIS OTHER HONOUR?

 

[dibens]

No game has ever sparked such a widespread debate about core game mechanics as BioShock Infinite did

No books have ever sparked such a widespread debate about core writing mechanics as pop-up books did.

 

[Chateaubryan]

Some articles really give me the urge to chase down their author, grab their shoulder, shove two fingers down my throat and let Mother Nature do its job.

 

[DeepOcean]

Another developer talking bullshit to get attention... Dear Esther being the Citizen Kane of the games, really? He is grasping at straws here. Hey, What was the last pretentious game released that the hipsters loved? Dear Esther... yeah, I'm going to compare it with a random classic movie to prove that us game developers are more than nerds and like serious discussions too... lack os self steem is a bitch.

This one says all:
To say Adrian Chmielarz changed his mind about games is a understatement. He had, he tells me, "an epiphany". Dear Esther started it, although when he first played the game "I wanted to kill myself", he recalls. "It was the most boring, pretentious 'game' I had ever played." Only through reading other people's reactions to the game did he begin to see the bigger picture. He admits "I was simply not ready" for the experience the first time around. "It was too weird," he says. "I didn't treat the game fairly." When he did treat the game fairly, however, he began to realise it was "something special". What he meant: It's a boring piece of shit, but alot of hipsters like it, so I'm going to say what is popular and people is going to talk about me.
Make alot of meaningless namedropping of hipster games, talk alot and says nothing = Profit!

Anyone who calls David Cage a genius deserve the douchebag title. I guess, this douchebag conveniently forgets that alot of games before 2005 had gameplay and weren't dudebro shooters/interactive movies so ludo narrative idiotic hipster term wasn't relevant. His solution: ludo narrative idiotic hipster term has to go, so I'm going to remove gameplay and make more interactive movies. You need to be a very special kind of person to think that is revolutionary stuff. I agree that exploring different forms of gameplay other than dudebro shooting would be healthy but by citing Dear Esther and David Cage he shows where his priorities are. God, how I'm raging right now!