Here's a "didn't read the article" reply if I ever saw one.
Games already attempt to fool you into thinking your choices have an influence on an ultimately static world via marketing or otherwise. "Each choice has consequences! Each decision means everything!" etc.
Things like Skyrim and Bioware games are evidence of this. You have "choices" that only affect the shallow avenues of game narrative but you do not play against systems that respond with actual consequences.
Yep. It's probably difficult for newer players to play against the system though, since much of the intrigue and game-playing is inexorably tied to in-game wealth and control.
Here's a "didn't read the article" reply if I ever saw one.
Next someone will come and tell us that games are better without graphics. And sound.
Actually, you can experience this new type of game below:
You are playing it right now.
I agree, but I also don't think a lot of people would play them without the characterization, even if the mechanics remained unchanged. I guess my thought was just that system-driven and character-driven gameplay are not mutually exclusive concepts, and fighting games are a good example to illustrate it.The way I see it, the characters are just a vehicle for the game systems.
Games already attempt to fool you into thinking your choices have an influence on an ultimately static world via marketing or otherwise. "Each choice has consequences! Each decision means everything!" etc.
Things like Skyrim and Bioware games are evidence of this. You have "choices" that only affect the shallow avenues of game narrative but you do not play against systems that respond with actual consequences.
Um, the whole crux of cultural criticism is that entertainment isn't just merely escapism or shallow "fun". There are meanings, influences and implications to be interpreted and debated, whether on a political level or otherwise.
You can certainly sit in the little kiddy pool of escapism if you want but Bogost's type of essay is not only important, it's necessary, just as Umberto Eco's work in cultural criticism is important to the study of film/fiction. Here's one I remember:
Next someone will come and tell us that games are better without graphics. And sound.
I certainly won't argue that we shouldn't be doing criticism, but I think it's ridiculous to insist that the "best" games fulfill the criteria of adding to the discourse on topic x. Games (and media) should be evaluated on how skillfully they achieve their chief goal, and if that goal is merely to entertain and they entertain superlatively, there's no reason why they should not be included in considerations of "best". What I'm chiefly objecting to, at the end of the day, is the notion that the ends of art are solely moral in content.
Such design for videogames will most likely always be a niche.
Less of a spectacle, harder to make the emergent gameplay appealing to a big playerbase.
Also, that protagonist bingo is horseshit
Interesting article. Though the author comes across a tad dismissive of social critics.
Admittedly I hadn't read to the very end when I made that post, which I'm doing now.I don't see it as dismissive. If you want dismissive, just read the comments of banned people in the most recent Anita thread. It's a reasoned criticism of identity politics. Because he's not wrong about the endgame (if I understand his reasoning): minority groups like myself are basically arguing for billionaires and the monied to sell our identities back to us in the form of character avatars or storylines that are meant to merely satisfy, placate us. We're ultimately playing the game they always win (capitalism) rather than trying to change the system in which the game is played.
No one's arguing for diversity in system and mechanics because, uh, we've always had that pretty much down pat.
in before people who only read the headline try to argue that bogost is advocating for doing away with all character driven interactive entertainment
Even in these games you were very often considered to be a character though.
You were the Mayor in Sim City and had advisors who spoke with you. Or the General in RTS games. Or God in God Games.
If you read a lot of stuff about the theory of play I think it's very commonly the case that you want to play as someone else and pretend to be them. part of the magic circle of a pick-up basketball game when you are kids is calling out which NBA star you are and then emulating their play.
I don't think these genres ever removed the human scale or the role play, they just changed the perspective. Now I am controlling a system in an abstracted way, but I am still a character that exists in this world.
Maybe the obsession with personal identification and representation in games is why identity politics has risen so forcefully and naively in their service online, while essentially failing to build upon prior theories and practices of social justice. And perhaps it is why some gamers have become so attached to their identity that they've been willing to burn down anything to defend it.
That is honestly one of the most far-fetched and ill-considered theories I have ever read that did not include UFOs or lizard men.
Summary: SimCity didn't end racism or cure cancer, but your favorite game sucks anyway, and that's why you're just a pawn of the fascist police state while I'm using my hardcore SimCity skills to Fight the Power by making browser games....commercialism run amok; climate change; wealth inequality; extortionate healthcare; unfunded schools; decaying infrastructure; automation and servitude. And yet, we persist, whether out of moralism or foolishness or youth, lining up for our proverbial enslavement. Well sign away anything, it would seem, so long as were still able to express ourselves with the makeshift tools we are rationed by the billionaires savvy enough to play the game of systems rather than the game of identities.
Only a crackpot would claim that SimCity could have saved us, or that games inspired by the systems simulation model could have overcome the overwhelming, ongoing success of stories and images that computers merely deliver via digital channels, rather than reformulating into systems made playable in software. But then, only a fool would fail to realize that we are the Sims now meandering aimlessly in the streets of the power brokers real-world cities. Not people with feelings and identities at all, but just user interface elements that indicate the state of the system, recast in euphemisms like the Sharing Economy, such that its operators might adjust their strategy accordingly. No measure of positive identification can save us from the fate of precarity, of automation, of privatization, of consolidation, of attention capture, of surveillance, of any of the other disruptions that cultivate our culture like bulldozers click through sim cities. To pursue an alternate future, wed have to change how the machine works, not just the faces of its operators.
So yes, I think we already have numerous, though tentative examples of these kinds of games; games that are both about the journey of an individual, but also about the big ideas of the culture (fictional or otherwise) in which that individual exists. I will admit that along a number of axes we have mostly done a fairly poor job of achieving the goals Bogost implies. Bogost wants us to truly understand and feel the consequential interdependency of large scale, richly interconnected, sensitive systems, and it is definitely true that accessing the sliders that move those systems by using the guns or swords of our embodied characters to shoot or stab them up or down a notch is a clumsy interface at best.
But I dont think we should bury the idea along with Maxis and throw our arms up in the air. I think there is a huge undeveloped space here for us to explore as designers, and a fruitful landscape of discovery here for players. I feel that if we make these sorts of games well, and continue to refine them, we can begin competing and innovating on the axis of how my embodied character influences the sliders.
I personally hope that we can evolve the play experience over time from one where you play the mercenary/assassin who tips the balance by killing the right people, to one where you play the spy with much finer grained control who murders rarely or not at all. Eventually, perhaps, we can play the diplomat, the senator or the lobbyist constantly challenged to overcome and manage her interactions with other players and characters in a dynamic, empathic exploration of these higher order cultural systems in a way that presents them as complicated - not because they are harder than shooting an AK-47 at a moving target through the jungle, but because humans are just really bad at them.
And maybe then, if these games are good, and we play them a lot, maybe well get better at them, and maybe well be empowered to confront these problems not as a bunch of sliders to be optimized, but as the messy interpersonal problems they are; mired in doubt and fear and weakness and frailty. Those sound like fucking spectacular games to me.
Very late to this party, was linked to Bogost's piece and then searched for a thread to see what had been discussed.
Systems exist as a niche, but they're a niche because the segment of the video game playing populace who genuinely enjoy fiddling with systems over everything else is minuscule.