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Heh. It's sort of odd to read reactions to this by people who are completely outside the game industry. This isn't sarcasm. This is a parody. Every line is on

Heh. It's sort of odd to read reactions to this by people who are completely outside the game industry. This isn't sarcasm. This is a parody. Every line is one that game designers who advocate for games about social dynamics have heard in response. That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation. The "Gorytron" reference refers to "Erasmatron", a computer system that tried to model story more abstractly than interactive fiction games. It's basically just one long in-joke for those of us who are tired of the sheer quantity of games easily reducible to violent conflict resolutions.

cwyers 12y ago
"That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation." I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas? Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with. So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue. At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.) When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.
- saraid216 12y ago
  It's worth noting that Chris Crawford was working on this problem long before DOOM came out, and he did not succeed. He gets referenced in the OA for a reason: He denounced the hack-and-slash genre in the 80s. The Dragon Speech happened in 1992.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    The fact that he didn't succeed rather undercuts the parody here, though, doesn't it?
    - saraid216 12y ago
      Not really. As noted in the parody, Gorytron was something Crawford himself admitted was a failure, not a font which gave birth to a new genre of gaming. His failure is part of the parody.
- SAI_Peregrinus 12y ago
  Some games manage to do both, and do it well. The Borderlands 2 Tiny Tina DLC is a perfect example. It's a gung-ho adventure with explosions and dragons and guns and blood and death! It's also the touching story of a mentally-ill thirteen year old girl dealing with the murder of her adoptive father, after having had to deal with the deaths of her natural parents in a Goebbels-like experiment. It's about the rules of morality, and about how people break the rules in desperate circumstances, often to their own detriment. It's not a friendly, fun social discussion, but it is a social discussion, and it's very well done. It manages to use the spectacle as a tool to tell a heartbreaking story, and is all the more impressive due to the contrast with the rest of the series.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    What kind of gameplay covers the "touching story"? Who do you play? How do you interact with others, mechanically? Do you have any real say in the outcome of the story? I mean, if you had cited Deus Ex or Witcher, you might have something, but... what you described doesn't sound like anything more than a slightly non-linear book to read.

cwyers 12y ago

"That modeling a gunshot or a sword stroke is much easier than trying to capture the nuance of a conversation." I think that's really kind of true, though. If you look at the kinds of movies we export successfully, spectacle sells overseas a lot better than movies about conversation. Is it because mass audiences are dumb? I don't think so. Are the Chinese less sophisticated than us? No. So why is "Transformers Age of Extinction" a cash rake outside of the U.S., with 78% of its box office take coming from foreign markets, while something like "The Fault In Our Stars" only gets 19% of its money from overseas? Because spectacle is easy, and more importantly, spectacle needs very little translation. A giant truck robot riding an even gianter dinosaur robot and wielding a giant sword speaks for itself. Movies about human interaction require a lot more translation. You need subtitles for all the text, and a good translation is difficult -- for one, film is a visual medium, and having to read subtitles distracts your visual attention more than being able to hear the dialogue and understand it. And even if you understand the words, that's not the same as understanding the context -- subtle nuances of wordplay can be lost in translation, and translation doesn't help with allusions to things that audiences may not be familiar with. So what does that have to do with video games? Well, video games have always been rather limited in what they can convey. Early videogames especially, and since the author mentions Doom in passing, let's focus on Doom's level of technical sophistication. So much of what makes for conversation wasn't possible with Doom's level of technology. Forget anything but text -- Doom's audio was limited to a bunch of nearly-MIDI files and a handful of WAV files for sound effects. We didn't have MP3s yet, bandwidth and storage were both in short supply, and text to speech was rather eerie and easily identifiable as synthetic. You couldn't have inflection or tone to your dialogue. At the same time, facial expression, body language -- all of those things are very difficult to convey in graphics that were 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. (They're also difficult to convey on modern high-res polygons; there's a reason we have the term uncanny valley.) When Doom came out, I have absolutely no doubt it was easier to meaningfully convey violence against creatures from hell on Mars than it was to convey social interaction between people in the medium of video games. And in a lot of ways, I think that's still true.

saraid216 12y ago
It's worth noting that Chris Crawford was working on this problem long before DOOM came out, and he did not succeed. He gets referenced in the OA for a reason: He denounced the hack-and-slash genre in the 80s. The Dragon Speech happened in 1992.
- cwyers 12y ago
  The fact that he didn't succeed rather undercuts the parody here, though, doesn't it?
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Not really. As noted in the parody, Gorytron was something Crawford himself admitted was a failure, not a font which gave birth to a new genre of gaming. His failure is part of the parody.
SAI_Peregrinus 12y ago
Some games manage to do both, and do it well. The Borderlands 2 Tiny Tina DLC is a perfect example. It's a gung-ho adventure with explosions and dragons and guns and blood and death! It's also the touching story of a mentally-ill thirteen year old girl dealing with the murder of her adoptive father, after having had to deal with the deaths of her natural parents in a Goebbels-like experiment. It's about the rules of morality, and about how people break the rules in desperate circumstances, often to their own detriment. It's not a friendly, fun social discussion, but it is a social discussion, and it's very well done. It manages to use the spectacle as a tool to tell a heartbreaking story, and is all the more impressive due to the contrast with the rest of the series.
- saraid216 12y ago
  What kind of gameplay covers the "touching story"? Who do you play? How do you interact with others, mechanically? Do you have any real say in the outcome of the story? I mean, if you had cited Deus Ex or Witcher, you might have something, but... what you described doesn't sound like anything more than a slightly non-linear book to read.