Femmeworth
Banned
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LTTP: Spec Ops: The Line (I am Sick) [SPOILERS]
- Thread starter CoachKevin
- Start date
For anyone who wants to hear an ErikB level of ignorance about Spec Ops from a "professional gaming podcast" can listen here:
http://player.podtrac.com/player?bu...knews.com/extras/podcast/weekendconfirmed.xml
Discussion takes place between 1:02 and 1:04.
It's downright insulting to anyone who appreciated the narrative of Spec Ops: The Line.
http://player.podtrac.com/player?bu...knews.com/extras/podcast/weekendconfirmed.xml
Discussion takes place between 1:02 and 1:04.
It's downright insulting to anyone who appreciated the narrative of Spec Ops: The Line.
toastyToast
Member
I get the unreliable narrator angle, but from what I saw while I was there, a vast majority of the low level workforce was actually Indian
Some truth to it then?
Like the man said, you are going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.
It turns out I really do have a pathological fear of it becoming cool for video game makers to slag off gamers for playing their games, if only because I think it would be really easy to do. I am sitting around pretending to be a fighter pilot! Making someone doing that feel self concious about it is really fucking easy, so I want to be able to feel safe that the people making the games, at least, are sympathetic. And I really think I can see the germs of that idea in Spec Ops, so god help us all if it becomes a thing.
I wouldn't worry though. I am pretty sure I have more than done my part to shift copies of the game. :-/
UltimateIke
Member
"...I still see people tweeting about it, and I'm like 'What fucking game did you play?'"
Haha.
What's wrong with the game's name? Spec Ops has been a series since 1998. It predates the CoD series by five years, even more a game mode within the new games.
I'm insulted because they think we're forcing ourselves to see depth in the story that doesn't exist. (In direct comparison to the depth of Far Cry 3's narrative)
If anything this thread is the antithesis to that argument. I've expected better out of Garnett Lee and I'm supremely disappointed as I made damningly clear in the Weekend Confirmed OT.
Hell, I think there is depth. I just don't like where it is going.
I dunno. Just consider that Blizzard knows exactly how long you have spent playing WoW, and what they could do if they decided to be mean to you with that information!
The saddest thing about this is that I believe that you are more capable of a coherent discussion of Spec Ops: The Line than the Weekend Confirmed cast is, and they even played it.
UltimateIke
Member
That's the major point of course, but I have a hard time processing any point they're trying to make when the rest of their complaints are so asinine.
It's from Episode 145, released today.Is it the latest episode or another one? I can't seem to find it.
The thing to understand is that if it comes down to a choice between brain dead games and games that unironically comment on how much of my life I have spent pretending to be a fighter pilot and what that says about me, I will chose brain dead, without hesitation, every time.
Femmeworth
Banned
False dichotomy.
I did say if. Don't make me choose.
I don't think they're criticizing how much you play video games but the nature of how/why you play video games. We're kind of at the point where the art form is starting to question it's purpose and how it communicates with the player. Moving forward we're going to see a lot of games challenge the relationship between player/avatar in different ways. I think it might be a little jarring for you because you're not used to this type of narrative.
Just remember they're not criticizing you personally but the nature of the gaming industry.
This is the bullseye fact that completely destroys ErikB's entire conception of what the game is and why nearly every post he has made in this thread has been shit-posting.
Ahhh now I get it. 1:02 = 62:00. Whatever player I've got in this window here does it like this: 100:00 (minutes:seconds).
Fuck these guys. See people? The game wasn't being nearly overt enough with its themes apparently.
Any chance you could give us a breakdown of what they said?
Can't listen to it at the moment but wondering what the gist of the conversation is.
it's not really a choice you have to make, as it's the developer pointing the finger at themselves and the rest of the industry, not the players. Them simply use the player character to achieve the finger pointing.
The gaming industry that exists because people like me buy, and like buying their games?
Femmeworth
Banned
The thing is it does criticize the player to an extent too.
(on Far Cry 3)
Jeff Mattis: "Now I don't think they were nearly as sucessful as they wanted to be in creating that second layer. I think it's there if you want to look for it, but its really not as well developed as.... You can play the whole thing on a surface level and not ever try to look for deeper meaning because you're so into the Rambo archetype."
Garnett Lee: "Better or less... More or less developed than Spec Ops?"
Jeff: "Having not played Spec Ops. Oh wait, no, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry. The Line, not the mode from Black Ops II."
Third wheel: "Another reason why your game was named horribly."
Jeff: "Way better, I think."
Garnett: "I would not disagree. I think we all know that my opinion on Spec Ops: The Line was fairly sour."
Jeff: "Dude, and I'll tell you I mean Spec Ops is one of those games where I still see people tweeting about it and I'm like "What fucking game did you play?" Like that's my, Ohhhhh my god."
Garnett: "It's not what game did you play, it's "Did you really want to read into your game?"
Third wheel: "People wanted to be impressed by it."
Garnett: "We want to feel good about ourselves. We wanna feel like "Ya, our hobby, we love our hobby and our hobby needs something excellent for us to put out there..."
Third wheel: "Just go play Journey and Walking Dead."
Garnett: "Exactly."
Fucking rubbish, all of it.
It does but I think it's trying to snap the player out of his/her sense of complacency when it comes to mass slaughter. The game is basically trying to reprogram how players play shooters which is part of why it's brilliant. It lulls you into a sense of complacency then slowly starts breaking down all of the elements until you're left with the raw image of what you're really doing.
They basically sound like dinosaurs scared of anything that threatens their current nature of their existence. Sad thing is guys like that are kind of the gatekeepers of the industry, reason why theirs such shit journalism when it comes to video games.
Thank god for Polygon, Tom Bissell and anyone else trying to elevate the nature of discourse when it comes to this art form.
Art is only as good as it's critics.
So... trick you in to buying the game so it can tell you off for doing so, and charge you for the privilege?
It's not judging you it's just trying to show you the consequence of your actions.
The things you do have consequence, Spec ops simple chooses to show you what they are.
It doesn't necessarily criticise the player, I feel. I think it just asks questions of the player, and the answers might not necessarily be pleasing.
I'll be honest with you, if it comes to 'trickery', fucking Far Cry 3 can give me my god damn $50 back. I broke my self-imposed rule to buy it first-day for a relatively high price on PC and after a 3-5 hour fun-time it became a crushing misery of me desperately attempting to recapture what little sense of fun I had with that game in the first place wrapped up in self-important bullshit Alice-in-Wonderland dream nonsense and self-sabotaging game mechanics. What a crock of shit.
I'll be honest with you, if it comes to 'trickery', fucking Far Cry 3 can give me my god damn $50 back. I broke my self-imposed rule to buy it first-day for a relatively high price on PC and after a 3-5 hour fun-time it became a crushing misery of me desperately attempting to recapture what little sense of fun I had with that game in the first place wrapped up in self-important bullshit Alice-in-Wonderland dream nonsense and self-sabotaging game mechanics. What a crock of shit.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
Can someone spoil the FC3 story for me? The GB guys were also disappointed with it but they don't really bring it up on their podcasts.
You're kidnapped by pirates and find out you're the chosen one, destined to slaughter everyone on the island and a trained militia.
You saw what I said earlier in the thread about the Weekend Confirmed podcast, right?
So tell me why it is so important to you that games be an art form?
Not judging, just asking questions.
<cough>desperatesearchforvalidationforplayinggamesasagrownman<cough>
Yeah. I don't listen to WC, but that sounds like crap. I won't criticise without listening though, but I have no intention of doing so, so...
CambriaRising
Member
Also there are ancient beings who came before and its all part of a cycle that happens once every 500 years.
It's sad for video games that I'm not sure if you're joking or not.
CambriaRising
Member
Me neither.
Can't I be Walker? I liked being Walker.
With the Immortal power of their beards, complaining about how stealing won't be the same again.
That would have been pretty fucking awesome if it just ended up being part of the all-story too
they did have those temple wall carvings
toastyToast
Member
Something like that. The only thing the game really does is point out the things that you're doing are fucking terrible, whereas in say a COD campaign you're whisked off before taking in the ramifications of what you did. Still, you murder a bunch of people in both. Whether Konrad is real or not doesn't change the fact that you've committed genocide single handedly.
See, people who are desperate for games to be seen are art so they can tell themselves they are doing something meaningful by playing angry birds are no different from people who want to feel smart for pretending to shoot a whole bunch of dudes in the face.
We all look for validation in our own ways. Try not to step on other peoples in search of yours.
We all look for validation in our own ways. Try not to step on other peoples in search of yours.
I guess it's closer to a conception of context as opposed to necessarily bad player actions. As games approach realism in some areas I think they necessarily gain more... call it responsibility or effectiveness in others. Something like TF2, Gears or Binary Domain, for instance, is sufficiently disengaged from reality that it doesn't necessarily have any inherent messaging that is included just because of aesthetics or setting (though binary domain has something in there, but that's authorial intent as opposed to a consequence of aesthetics); but modern military shooters, I suppose, carry with it unspoken imputations just because of the context in which they are set.
But what if they were Nazis?
No. Spec Ops does something far worse. It suggests you are not doing either, but are instead stitting around pretending to do stuff, and that does not reflect well upon you.
The difference is how the game handles said action - COD tends to wave off the idea that you've just killed the population of a small town, whereas Spec Ops won't let you forget it at every turn. Sometimes sarcastically so.
So, If I check that within the fiction of the game the world will be made better by the population of said small town being dead ('they are all Nazis') people are okay with me pretending to shoot them?
They could all be unarmed aid workers and I wouldn't care if you were pretending to shoot them. Virtually shooting people is fun. Well-adjusted individuals regularly go apeshit on completely innocent folk in open-world games and we don't particularly care.
Spec Ops is not telling you that you are a bad person who wastes time on stupid games. And unless you can point me to media that do that kind of thing frequently, I don't think we're in danger of a flood of games that openly criticize players. It's a pretty trite message, kind of like Bioshock's "choice in video games is an illusion!" It can only get used so often.
Pop quiz, hotshot: Read the following passage from Tom Bissell's review of Spec Ops: The Line.
Does Tom Bissell believe that he, personally, is a bad person for playing Call of Duty?
rosaceadude2112
Member
This is just weird, the game isn't even fucking subtle.
The introduction of moral choice without those stupid dialogue trees pulled me through the game in one day. Something I haven't done in years.
What stuck with me was, at the time, I felt like my decisions were justified. In the heat of the moment I was left with no alternative; no choice. Yager really highlights the problem with information asymmetries. Would I have made the same decisions had everything been laid out before me in an overt manner? What if I had been given time to sit and think through the potential outcomes of my actions first?
The results of your actions don't really change the narrative. I guess you could say the game provides the illusion of choice. However, my actions sat with me through the rest of game. Slowly I felt as if I was turning into a monster. Something that is only reinforced through the gradual changes in character models and the increasingly violent dialogue.
As the game progressed I sought absolution from Adams, but I wasn't really sure why. Something felt wrong, but once again, in some twisted way, my actions felt justified. Yet when confronted at the end of the game, when everything is laid out, so that I realize how much of a monster I let Walker turn into, I still couldn't
.
I would seriously consider this as my GOTY contender despite the flawed mechanics because of how difficult it was to digest at times. Hopefully we will see more studios provide moral dilemmas in games in a less overt manner like Spec Ops.
Lastly, there was some excellent art direction in this game. Looking forward to what this studio has planned next.
What stuck with me was, at the time, I felt like my decisions were justified. In the heat of the moment I was left with no alternative; no choice. Yager really highlights the problem with information asymmetries. Would I have made the same decisions had everything been laid out before me in an overt manner? What if I had been given time to sit and think through the potential outcomes of my actions first?
The results of your actions don't really change the narrative. I guess you could say the game provides the illusion of choice. However, my actions sat with me through the rest of game. Slowly I felt as if I was turning into a monster. Something that is only reinforced through the gradual changes in character models and the increasingly violent dialogue.
As the game progressed I sought absolution from Adams, but I wasn't really sure why. Something felt wrong, but once again, in some twisted way, my actions felt justified. Yet when confronted at the end of the game, when everything is laid out, so that I realize how much of a monster I let Walker turn into, I still couldn't
commit suicide
I would seriously consider this as my GOTY contender despite the flawed mechanics because of how difficult it was to digest at times. Hopefully we will see more studios provide moral dilemmas in games in a less overt manner like Spec Ops.
Lastly, there was some excellent art direction in this game. Looking forward to what this studio has planned next.