TwilightVulpine @ TwilightVulpine @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

If you define fun by "having a blast" then we are talking about the same thing. Why wouldn't a game be valid if it's about delivering a message above moment to moment action? Strip the message away and obviously it's lesser for it. Because it's not a message plus an entirely separate mechanical system, it's about what everything means in context. Rather than focusing on making flashy combos, it's more interesting to ponder over what is it supposed to represent and what is actually happening.

It's a little funny though that I did consider Spec Ops as another example, and that I have seen people judging it the same way that you are doing to Hellblade, that it was a mediocre military FPS, but many rebutted that even its lackluster gameplay is supposed to contribute the commentary. In the same way you praise of Spec Ops, I don't think Hellblade is nearly as bad in that aspect as you say, As an action game it is serviceable, but the action is not the point.

If you argue for serious games but only in the context of the gamification of business and education, you are still glossing over a whole multitude of media that is more about exploring ideas than moment-to-moment thrills, something other media have in plenty, and something which games have incredible potential for. You are thinking of typical games solely in terms of pop culture. There is a lot more to a medium than pop culture and strictly functional tools, and you are making that to be a massive abyss where nothing has worth.

We definitely disagree on the latter. It was harrowing, but the way it handled its themes was fascinating and the gaming culture would be lesser without it.

We don't expect all books and movies to be "fun", why should games all be? We can see other forms of engagement and value in other media.

I don't even know where you got that from. What I'm saying is that there is plenty of reason to keep talking about it.

We still aren't though.

This sort of response shows that even some people who care a lot about games, think little of them. Like they are all inconsequential playthings.

Can you imagine anyone saying "it's a book" to try to say that they don't matter?

And also US puts out enough propaganda about their role in wars that enough grown-ass adults have very idealized views about them.

As Reggie from Nintendo once said, “If it isn’t fun, why bother.”

I haven't played enough to make a judgment about COD in particular, but like you said, this is from Nintendo, a company whose main franchise is a game for kids about a funny little man stomping evil turtles in a fantasy world. It doesn't even have the trappings of something that you can take seriously and use to inform your real life. Nobody would mistake it for anything close to a realistic historical account, unlike COD.

Is Schindler's List fun?

There is more to media and art than whether its fun. Art can be engaging and intriguing without being "fun". I wouldn't call Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice "fun" per se, but it's definitely a good game.

I don't think this is a conversation we can have once ten years ago and forget about it, as long as the franchise is still going.

A lot of teenagers with poor history education probably never did.

What a ridiculous society we live in that someone can be so rich that they get to threaten people with a gun and don't get arrested. What an unhinged asshole he is.

As far as gaming engines go, Unreal Engine already does this. Not dismissing your point, it is concerning if rent seeking spreads among artistic tools, but this is not a Unity invention.

This photography analogy is getting more tiresome the more it is repeated. It reduces the extensive work and techniques that photographers do to "using a tool", ignoring we also have tools like photocopiers whose mechanical results are not considered separate artworks, while also trying to pass the act of iterating prompts and selecting results as something much more involved than it actually is. Like many people pointed out already, what is being described is the role of a commissioner or employer. Is Bob Iger an artist because he picked what works are suitable for release? I don't think so.

Even if you can't fully predict how a work will turn out, you still have control over your artistic processes in a way that the AI user is lacking. Even AI engineers often struggle to figure out what makes their models make the decisions that they do.

But don't forget that this is a question that exists in both philosophical and practical aspects. Philosophically "what is art" is a very nebulous thing to pin down. Practically, if AI users are allowed to copyright their output, they can use it for "plagiarism laundering" so to speak, by ripping off artists' entire collections, training AI on it, and then selling works that are clearly based on those other artists' even if non-identical. This is not something current copyright accounts for, but current copyright was made for a world with printing presses and photocopiers, not one with AI.

Buying drugs with Bitcoin is more of a legitimate use than NFTs at least

The issue is that "good" varies a lot from person to person. I like survival crafting games with an incremental tree of improvements more than boss rushes so for me it's good from the start.

Makes perfect sense to me. In Japan one of the most reverred gods is Inari, the god of rice.

'cuz people need to eat.

Bigots really want to pretend that some teenager discovering that they are gay or trans is a result of some massive conspiracy rather than, you know, they just being gay or trans.

They call it "grooming" when LGBT people simple exist in society where people might notice them, and they want to make such a scandal that people don't even think what is the opposite of that which they want.

It's not uncommon in general emulation to need tweaks for different games, and they already figured those out. If they can get their old games running on Xbox One, One X, Series S and Series X it means they can consistently keep them working across multiple different configurations. At this point, they are perfectly capable of handling a full PC release of these titles if they wanted to. You are getting too caught up in particularities that just don't change the conclusion.

It's not like they'd release a standalone all-purpose emulator. More likely they'd bundle the games with setups that are already tweaked for those particular games. Just as they would need to for Nintendo games. Even Nintendo itself had to do that. The initially flawed Ocarina of Time Switch Online release comes to mind.

It still makes more sense to assume that if Microsoft is not interested in doing it for their own games, there is no reason to assume they would do it for any others.

I'm getting a bit tired of repeating myself. You are responding to a comment that is directed to that particular point.

Microsoft has already figured out how to run older XBox games on PC. As far as the technology goes, XBox One and Series S/X are not compatible with the previous XBoxes, they are PCs in every aspect but branding and closedness. All those games they offer retrocompatibility could be made available on PC. They could put Rare Replay on PC anytime they want. They don't do it because they don't care to do it.

It does not matter that Nintendo emulators are perfect.

They have a working Original Xbox emulator.

They have a working XBox 360 emulator.

They have titles that are entirely owned by them to release, and they only do that on console.

Releasing Nintendo games would be "extremely more likely"? Given that whatever obstacle here is not technical, then the existence of publicly released Nintendo emulators don't change the matter one bit. Meanwhile the licensing complexities only add further obstacles.

That's exactly what Microsoft accuses Sony of doing, and rightly so. But Microsoft using that as an excuse for their acquisition binge is a smartass move, both companies need to quit with their anti-competitive moves.