8 ms·
The game designer playing through his own psyche
- pvg 2y agohttps://archive.is/NuEsS https://archive.is/NuEsS
- jadbox 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amiga386 2y agoThat chap is a marketing genius. Articles ostensibly about him are effectively a promotional tour for his new game (available in all good stores prices $xx.xx) If you're thinking of buying the game, though, read its reviews: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299460/Wanderstop/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299460/Wanderstop/ And remember... it is a cosy game. That's what you'll be playing. If you like cosy games, then it's a good cosy game with an interesting Wredenesque storyline running through it. If you don't like cosy games, you won't like this game. It's not a deconstruction of cosy games. It is a cosy game.
- qoez 2y agoThe new yorker wasn't tricked into marketing his game, they make marketing articles like this all the time. I feel like 9 times out of 10 when I see an article on HN it's some barely disguised ad for a book masked as a human interest story. (PG has a blog post about this.)
- Centigonal 2y agohttps://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- damnitpeter 2y agoIt's fascinating to see how far the pendulum has swung since those days. Maybe there is no place for honest writing anymore, as he described it, in the blogs of that era, which suffered the same issues of PR and monetization.
- the_gipsy 2y ago> At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times. I wonder if this holds true.
- astrange 2y agoIt is true, but sometimes in an evil way; the NYT literally has a policy that all stories about tech companies must be negative, and the politics section presents everything as the fault of whoever the editors are personally mad at that day. But the details are correct.
- 11101010001100 2y agoI somehow doubt that this is read as much as it is posted on HN.
- malectro 2y agoMost of the book criticism they do summarizes to the point where I don’t feel the need to buy anything so I’m not sure it’s personally working as an ad for me.
- fragmede 2y agoSome people want the gory details. Every non-fiction book can be summarized as (wo)man v something, but in doing so, you lose the plot. So while you may be satisfied with the summary (and you're not alone!), knowing that it's out there is more important for people to buy than the summarization.
- Animats 2y agoIt's so New Yorker. They're partial to angst-heavy stories. If "retired fighter with a tea shop" interests you, try the "Legends and Lattes" stories.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ajkjk 2y agoBetting it's not him but his publisher. There is a massive industry dedicated to this sort of guerrilla marketing these days. If a company of a certain size is putting out a press release they will coordinate to have seemingly-unrelated articles show up in various news sources (think New Yorker but also, like, ArsTechnica, or even the HN frontpage.) Even though the articles aren't technically ads, they get the name out there so it's on people's minds, making them more susceptible to hearing about/engaging with the news. I've seen this happen internally at my last employer, but have the impression that it's standard operating procedure in corporate marketing these days. It is quite gross and I'd like to see it banned wholesale (or at least the relationship should be mandatorily disclosed). But... we would need to believe as a country in regulating ourselves to do that.
- edavison1 2y agoThe idea that arts criticism is somehow 'guerilla marketing' is such a deeply cynical, HN brain take. Of course the people who make things want to get the word out about what they're doing. But The New Yorker doesn't collude with PR agencies to promote things. It's news when people make new things; that's literally the whole idea in coverage of the arts. Is it really your position that when a movie, game or book is reviewed in The New Yorker it's because some PR person told them to? Chris Bryd is a well-respected games journalist, not some industry shill. He's probably wanted to write about this topic for years, and the forthcoming game is part of what makes the profile newsworthy right now. Anyway if you believe arts criticism is 'quite gross' and want it banned, what does that world look like? Should people who make things not be allowed to tell publications about it? Will there be a cone of silence around new games?
- ajkjk 2y agoYou misunderstand. I'm not being cynical: it really actually does work this way. I'm describing a thing that I have seen happen from the inside. Paul Graham wrote about it here: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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- VyseofArcadia 2y agoI recognize that I have been pretty fortunate in life, but I've never been "overnight success, will never actually need to work again" fortunate. I struggle to sympathize with "I got everything I ever wanted, and now I'm depressed". That framing for the article does not exactly have me chomping at the bit to play his newest game.
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- mckirk 2y agoI think depending on what you've built your identity around, suddenly being free of having to strive for anything can be pretty daunting. "Having everything we need, indefinitely" is certainly not something we were prepared for by evolution, and the questions that arise when you are at that point and still need to structure your life around something don't really have easy answers, I believe. So it might actually be a pretty good sign that you struggle to sympathize with this, because the alternative might be that you understand it all too well.
- pferde 2y agoI can't imagine how anyone could even achieve such state. There will always be that skill I do not yet have, that book I haven't read yet, that hobby I haven't tried yet, that place I haven't yet traveled to, etc. etc. Maybe if I get to have an active life of 300 years, I could maybe imagine starting to get closer to "having everything I need".
- kdfjgbdfkjgb 2y agowants vs needs
- pferde 2y agoNo, all of those are needs. Some of them are merely a bit higher on the Maslow's hierarchy.
- mouse_ 2y agoHe should go back to making half life 2 mods.
- SeanAnderson 2y agoIf you haven't experienced The Beginner's Guide - I highly recommend. It's one of my favorite experiences. I look forward to playing through his new game, even if it's a bit different! I'm fully aligned with the goal of trying to convey your sense of self through artistic creations and think he's in a league of his own in his attempts to do so.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoWould you still recommend it to someone who didn't like Stanley Parable? I must admit I found his prior game to be extremely boring and pretentious, but I'm willing to have an open mind about the new one if it's different.
- dartos 2y agoI’d say the beginner’s guide is more pretentious, but it’s not as funny. I still really liked it, though.
- JansjoFromIkea 2y agoI'm not too keen on the Stanley Parable and enjoyed the Beginners Guide. It's definitely something that could be called pretentious but I feel like it's a lot more interesting with how it does it. There's less of a fixation on humour too which is a plus for me because The Stanley Parable's humour grated on me a lot of the time. It's a walking simulator though, if you're not into those kind of things in general then you're probably not gonna be into it.
- BalinKing 2y agoFWIW I strongly disliked The Beginner's Guide—I wasn't a huge fan of the Stanley Parable either, but The Beginner's Guide was significantly less enjoyable even so. I know the game gets a lot of positive reviews, but if you're on the fence already, I'd strongly caution you against blindly trusting the reviews. There's definitely an element of personal taste, though—I tend to really dislike media that I find overly philosophizing (i.e. when I feel like the authors' arguments are too confident, or otherwise discourage the audience from thinking themselves about the arguments or conclusions). That is to say, I might be precisely the wrong target audience for this sort of game :-P
- adamrezich 2y agoThe Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable Demo, and The Beginner's Guide were all “merely” Source mod “walking simulators”, but each of these games had a degree of precision in how they executed their vision that made them feel like very high-quality products, each in their own way. Yes, the nature of these games is such that there's very few “moving parts” that require coordination to provide a cohesive experience—it's mostly just the standard Source first-person character controller and interactable objects you can press +use on, with a narrator narrating the story—but each of these games felt solid to play, with the intentionally minimal “gameplay” getting out of the way of the intended narrative experiences these games sought to provide. I wanted to like Wanderstop on its own terms, but once I got out of the portion of the game that's accessible in the demo, I found myself honestly really underwhelmed by the game's presentation. The intended narrative gravitas of the first dialogue with the first NPC that comes to visit was ruined because one of those little penguin dudes happened to be walking by near her feet, so she kept glancing down at it during the dialogue sequence in a hilariously immersion-breaking way. The guidebook you're given is a series of flat textures, with no animation for turning pages or anything like that whatsoever. The opening “cutscene” is presented as a series of still images like a motion comic, and a couple of the “animations” within them looked amateurishly terrible. I'll try it out again sometime soon because I (want to believe I) still like Wreden's writing, but my initial experience with the game wasn't the best it could be by a longshot.
- exodust 2y agoNever understood the appeal of stanley parable or beginners guide. After the initial fun wears off, the constant abuse and sarcasm from the narrator is abrasive and noisy. Not as clever as they're hoping. The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration. The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous. Not to be all negative, for walking simulators with no interaction but nice dreamy atmosphere, try Liminalcore. Relaxing and calming, great on an ultrawide OLED. Lots of vast shadow areas. Huge scale architecture. Bump the FOV setting up a little from default. No cheap gimmicks, just a restrained dream world with subtle hint of something lurking in the shadows. In terms of artistic walking games, this is one of the good ones. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3107900/Liminalcore/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3107900/Liminalcore/
- hcs 2y ago> The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration. > The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous. I wonder if you played The Beginner's Guide to the end? Not that it necessarily would have changed your mind, maybe the conclusion didn't strike you as it did me (even seeing it coming).
- gs17 2y agoNot him, but I did play it to the end, and it didn't "strike me". By the end, I was finding it more of a chore than a story I could enjoy, although I was a bit annoyed from thinking it would be more interactive (I remember some article I saw about it talking about how it explored the story through a series of games, but the final product doesn't really have any actual games).
- chias 2y agoI personally absolutely loved the Stanley Parable demo and then the game. For me, the magic was a constant sense of disbelief that the game would let me do that. Like early on, I managed to clip out of the window and found myself outside... only for the narrator to berate me about it. I spent most of the game in a competition with the game itself, where I would try to outsmart it, and it would (almost always) turn around and have planned for that contingency already. I had hours and hours of downright glee playing it. The remastered version didn't really hit for me though. It had a huge amount of new content, but I wasn't there for the content. I don't think it could create the same magic, because I had had a few years to digest the experience. I understood the game, and so the game could not create the same "there's no way that X will happen" kind of moments because of course it would, that was the whole point of the game.
- Trasmatta 2y agoShout out to The Stanley Parable Deluxe Edition. Even if you played the original, you should play this. Without giving spoilers, it's basically an entire sequel, not just a Remaster.
- IggleSniggle 2y agoFrankly, the demo isn't really a demo, it's a prequel. You might enjoy the demo if it's been awhile since you've played
- Trasmatta 2y agoYes! The Demo, the original game, and the Deluxe Edition could almost be considered a trilogy of games.
- tombert 2y agoSecond this, Ultra Deluxe is a worthwhile purchase. It gives you enough new content to more or less triple the size of the original game. But play either game any way you can; if you're a fan of Douglas Adams novels, you'll feel right at home.
- blobbers 2y agoWhy doesn’t hackernews just link directly to the archive? I’m guessing 99% of readers don’t have the paywalled version. It’s super annoying.
- scoofy 2y agoI think many people, myself included, would argue that that's immoral. The fact that you don't want to pay for access to The New Yorker is fine, but it doesn't mean that we should facilitate your desire to not pay, and that we've effectively normalized ignoring even reasonable copyright rules is a real problem for the industry (we can argue about the merits all we like, but pretending we shouldn't have to pay for an article with little public interest, published this week, is pretty absurd). We can look at aggregators like HN as a way to curate who you should be giving your money to, or we can use them to facilitate infringement, making publishers rely on sketchier and sketchier methods to stay afloat.
- sysrestartusr 2y agostart paying for your news. you won't regret it. three decades of free news leave you hanging bored and annoyed and misunderstanding humanity. if you want to stay tethered to this reality, commit to the pot. it's recursive and cumulative. otherwise you are left to research from free sources which leave you in 'directed' narratives, divergent and polarizing, devouring your fallacies while feeding off your bias. free beer is never a better of the available choices.
- tartoran 2y agoI agree we should pay but, I'm on the other side not paying because it's very hard to commit to so many subscription things. Back in the day I'd buy a bunch of magazines and would have subscription for tops 3 when I was really into the publication. Nowadays almost everything seems to want to be a subscription service and comes with some shady practices that really scared me away and assume I'm not a rare case either.
- sysrestartusr 2y ago
- SamBam 2y agoCan either game be played on a modern Mac? Steam says it's only for 32-bit Macs.
- drudolph914 2y agoI've had this problem with a few older games that came out in the 2010s. The easy thing to do is to run it with a tool like crossover, or run the game through Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. I recommend just using crossover's 2 week free trial if this is the only game you're having trouble with Crossover - https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAqqVsgvqVaAAXH7ZZjRwL-iYSMWiX&gclid=Cj0KCQjwhYS_BhD2ARIsAJTMMQb_9J64pf74i0-ddo9JVcBMDRUyA_S7MA0j19whU_fY2hrHStbTj8EaAjxGEALw_wcB#mac?id=ad https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?gad_source=1&gbraid=0A...
- dismalaf 2y agoMacs don't have compatibility libraries? Containers? That sort of thing?
- AndriyKunitsyn 2y agoThey have VMs :D
- naikrovek 2y agoHaha that’s funny. No, they don’t. Just like Microsoft’s obsession with backwards compatibility, Apple is obsessed with changing things constantly.
- heavymetalpoizn 2y ago[dead]