h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

At last! A voice of sanity.

I think I'm in the middle of the spectrum for computer game appreciation. I play them from time to time, and enjoy it, but I could go months without playing any and I wouldn't miss it.

Are they a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Hmmm, maybe neither. They are just a Thing. Some are good, some are crap, but neither will give you shangri la or turn you destitute.

I suspect though that being a relatively new innovation, they get a lot of stick for all the same reasons my granny's father disapproved of her going to moving pictures: Young people shouldn't be cooped up inside, or that they are an immoral influence, or that they are an unproductive way to spend time.

Well, unless you're designing and making them, I suppose they are fairly unproductive - but that's the whole point of 'leisure' as opposed to work.

> Whether you realise it or not, you instinctively understand things like depth of focus and the implications of its use, framing, musical cues or the lack of them, the three-act structure, and many tropes.<

Yeah I know a smattering after 3 years at Goldsmiths and making a fair few small shorts myself...plus my best friend composes music scores for films amongst other things.

So I have a bit of a clue of the technical side.

It always amuses me when silent films are called silent. Music is incredibly important in film...much more than usually given credit for in affecting mood and our perception of situations.

But I'd like to see some essays done on a good computer game scenario...such as we did at school for English Lit..

But something that annoys me..is this always hidden assumption of a 'win' and the way the player is always going up levels...anything else is failure. It's a bit simplistic.

Where is your touching Sydney Carton character waiting at the foot of the guillotine with, 'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.'?


Are there games with twists and turns and complexities..that have sad or tragic endings?..and say you slipped back down to level 0 or whatever...and you'd say, "Wow that was an awesome game...the best"...(Or is really always going to be just versions of snakes and ladders? ).

"Are there games with twists and turns and complexities..that have sad or tragic endings?"

Yup. And games where you get to be the bad guy, or even completely morally ambiguous. There have long since been games where the choices you make affect which of however many endings you get. Now, thanks to advances in AI and randomisation programming, there are even games that technically never end.

>>Are there games with twists and turns and complexities..that have sad or tragic endings?<<

Here be spoilers...




In Dragon Age 2 there are multiple endings where, although you survive, things look pretty grim for everyone else. One of the things that really impressed me about that game was the building sensation of a world increasingly going to . I'm told (I've not finished it myself) Mass Effect 2 ends with a really horrible choice. Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives you a choice of endings, at least one of which is pretty disastrous.

That's just the games I've played recently, I'm sure there are more examples out there.

Fallout: New Vegas is good for that... on my first play through, even though I played a 'good' character, and tried to help as many people as I could a couple of well-intentioned but bad decisions meant that people still got screwed over.

And because inevitably someone will complain that computer games are shallow... two words: Elder Scrolls.

Effers:

"Yeah I know a smattering after 3 years at Goldsmiths and making a fair few small shorts myself[blah blah blah]"

I didn't mean you personally. I meant EVERYONE. Whether they know it or not, everyone knows about depth of focus, and framing, and forms expectations based on the length of shots. It's not just up-themself film students who "get" this, otherwise the movie industry wouldn't work at all and all films would have to be subtitled. As it is, people who don't have three years at Goldsmiths "get" a track in/zoom out like the one in Jaws perfectly well. They just don't know (or care, or need to) what it's called or how to do one.

"something that annoys me..is this always hidden assumption of a 'win' and the way the player is always going up levels...anything else is failure. It's a bit simplistic"

Something that annoys me is when someone demonstrates, even flaunts, an almost complete lack of any functional knowledge of a medium, constructs a straw man analysis of its failings based entirely on their ignorance, then criticises the entire medium for the deficiencies they imagine it has.

"Are there games with twists and turns and complexities..that have sad or tragic endings?"

I'm now considering apologising for calling you ignorant because this is SUCH a stupid question I'm starting to think you're just trolling.

Why is that such a stupid question, Hoo? Are you really so up your own fundament now that you must assume every utterance that does not fit in with your world view is either trolling or a declaration of idiocy?

You know he can't long resist falling back into his usual groove.

It doesn't occur to him that I say stuff to open up discussion...and know I might be quite wide of the mark...but it gives space for others to come in and show me where I'm uninformed and teach me some stuff. HI just did that in a really good way.

He doesn't know how to dance...and never will.

And he's someone who never gives others space...probably doesn't even know what I mean by that.

Oh well...c'est la vie.

And for all those people listing RPGs as games with depth, let me come back at you with something you might not expect: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. While for most people (myself included) the majority of the point of owning that game is to play short, near-plotless skirmishes against other humans online, the one-player campaign is really astonishingly good. It has a proper plot where you play several different characters, characters you come to care about, varied pacing (there are parts where you run and gun through a hailstorm of bullets and flak, and others where you're required to sneak about quietly slotting people with silenced weapons), and superb setpieces.

In particular, there's a startling affecting piece about halfway through where, as a US Army Ranger you're required to fly into a middle eastern town and rescue the injured pilot of a crashed aircraft who's pinned down by local gunfire. What makes it stick in the memory five or six years after it came out is the way it subverts expectations - if you do the mission wrong - take too much damage etc. - you die, so far, so normal. If you do the mission right - fight your way in, get to the pilot, take out the snipers, pick her up, slog your way back to your chopper taking fire, manage to get her on board and get on yourself as it takes off, and as the music dramatically swells, you take a last look back at the town as you fly away... and as you watch, the town is destroyed by a tactical nuclear weapon... and your chopper crashes. And you survive the crash, just. And now there's no music. Just the throb of your heartbeat, and the wind. And the screen is tinged orange, and all about you is dust - fallout - and guttering flames. And if you move the controller, you find you can crawl out of the wreckage. So you crawl. But there's nowhere to crawl to. No mission objectives. Nothing to do. But you crawl, for a few minutes. Then you die.

It's like a kick in the guts.

And this is in a First Person Shooter! The genre of brainless gun porn! Admittedly, moments like these are few and far between in games - but they're few and far between in films, too.

One other game that sticks in my mind as being a particularly good example is "Manhunt". It's a stealth game - the fundamental mechanic is "sneak about in the shadows avoiding trouble, and kill when you get the chance". There are many, many such games, but none has been so successful at creating an atmosphere of oppressive discomfort, bordering on actual fear. The nearest I can come to it is to say playing it is a *bit* like watching "Eraserhead", a movie I've never managed to watch all the way through as the oppressiveness was done so well I had to stop watching. I really must try watching it again... in daylight, I think.

"gives space for others to come in and show me where I'm uninformed and teach me some stuff"

Yeah, turns out asking a question for that reason is a pretty intelligent thing to do... but ho hum, there will always be those for whom the answer is obvious therefore the question is stupid.

As for depth in FPS games: yes, there is rather a lot of it these days. The distinct lack of success that Duke Nukem Forever had shows that the days of mindless gun porn are getting ever more distant. I played Doom the other day, and I was bored less, I wanted *plot* and *characters* not "shoot until you finish the level, repeat."

"Why is that such a stupid question, Hoo?"

It's 2012, not 1982. Lone teenagers do not, any longer, knock up games in their bedrooms and sell them by mail order through magazine adverts. Video games make more money than movies, have casts of hundreds that include actual movie and rock stars, crews of thousands and budgets of millions.

Asking if *any* of these productions have anything as complex or high-falutin as an actual "plot" seems to me either incredibly naive and ignorant or deliberately provocative (which it transpires is the case, although now the provocateur is, true to form, whining about the fact they've been successful).

>> It doesn't occur to him that I say stuff to open up discussion...and know I might be quite wide of the mark...but it gives space for others to come in and show me where I'm uninformed and teach me some stuff.

In fairness, Effers, it can be hard to tell when you are saying something

1) because it's your passionate belief
2) because it's what you think today, but tomorrow might be different
3) because you are being playful or ironic or are joking
4) to open up discussion, etc
5) all of the above

Your tone is the indistinguishable in those very different circumstances.

Ben

Turns out some people don't know stuff about stuff. Asking a question to learn about stuff is not stupid. My mother wouldn't know whether computer games have complex plots, but that doesn't make her stupid.

The motorcar has been around for over 100 years, but I couldn't tell you what an alternator does. Would my asking about that make me ignorant or provocative? No. Merely trying to expand my knowledge of something I currently do not have knowledge of.

I frequently don't know about things that don't fall within my usual sphere of knowledge. I couldn't tell you anything about the Kinect for example, I'm not even sure off the top of my head whether it's an XBox or PS3 thing. Does this lack of knowledge make me ignorant or stupid? No. It just means I don't know about something that I thus far have had no reason to know about.

That it's 2012 is entirely irrelevant, if someone does not regularly play computer games they will not be aware what a lot of modern games are like.

Really, you've just chosen a lengthy way of saying 'yes' to the second question I asked.

Why do I find the image of Hoo crawling out of wreckage
in a deadly nuclear wasteland so emotionally satisfying?

Not necessarily a rhetorical question. But responses only
please from those who have read my entry A80449680 or
at least taken a course in filmic narratives.


~jwf~

Well, Hoo, you've educated me, in the way of these games, in your inimitable fashion but signally failed to get me in the least interested.

Meself, I prefer to spend some time in real life and some with my own imagination ... what's more, I'm now wondering why the hell I'm still reading this escapist twaddle.

So there.

ha!

And in fairness I never have this problem in real life...it's normal mode for interesting conversation with people I get on with. I have a great time with anhaga because he's fully cognisant of that language. Really Mrs Zen its completely normal for creative people.

~ jwf ~ talks that language...zoomer to a degree....Gif never has a problem...Dogster the same.

And seriously are you ever expecting people to want to join this site who get bored to tears with the black and white hammering approach to everything...

Why don't you put a sign up somewhere?

Oh and the day I see you ever dare to criticise Hoo here will be a special day indeed.

I love it when he gets all self righteous about provocation, considering the vicious tone of so many of his posts...the relentless sneering at other people's stupidity...and oh ...See when others have a problem they check in a civilised polite way..kind of lubricates things. Asking questions is nothing to be ashamed of...that was drummed into me at school. Never be afraid to look stupid in your quest to be educated.

The thing is *you* can't tell. Plenty can. It's the nature of language and culture..and how it is for different people. I'm a bit of an exception here. Amongst my friends in real life...I'm the norm.

>>Meself, I prefer to spend some time in real life and some with my own imagination ... what's more, I'm now wondering why the hell I'm still reading this escapist twaddle<<

It's not an either/or thing though: you can enjoy your games and still do other, RL things as well. Some games require imagination to be funny appreciated, some games require creativity or strategy.

Trying to avoid spoilers for those who care, but....

There's a sci-fi computer role-playing game in which the main character's ship from one game gets blown up and crash lands. In the sequel, there's some downloadable content (that was free when I bought it) that involves a mission to visit the crash site, put up a memorial, and collect the dog tags of the dead (no bodies are visible). The various bits of the ship are scattered around, still recognisable and entirely familiar from the first game. Walking up to different recognisable sections triggers a flashback cut sequence to the first game, featuring the 'dead' characters and other scenes from the first game.

No shooting, no enemies, no puzzles. Just quiet, a beautifully-rendered ice planet location with snow falling (I think), bits of wrecked ship, and the sun glinting on dog tags. It's a glorified treasure hunt, and a lovely nostalgia trip for those who played the first game.