Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

"That is my problem here that I'm trying to solve. Everything you say about Tetris is valid. But to me, the problem is that the main memerizing attribute of tetris is the same as it is in go or chess or baseball or poker - the rules of the game, the play, as it were."

is sorta what I was goofily trying to get at in the other butisitart thread. all conventionally recognized artforms require certain skillsets to create, but not necessarily to uhh consume. I was actually thinking about this a lot this week when i was trying to explain to a friend why football was appealing (besides all the bitchin violence hayull yeah). It can be thrilling, as a technical exercise, to see good teams carrying out well-executed strategies in a machine-like fashion, and it's also exciting (and more common) to see the crucial mistakes that are made, and the drama that is produced by it. i kinda don't remember what my point is now, i'm even more not-lucid than usual tonight cuz i've been taking hella ambien. i guess games are interesting in this respect because in many cases the skills required for different kinds of games are avatars for skills you might WISH you had: this meticulously constructed game world permits you to do amazing things which don't even exist in the real world, or physically demanding things that only certain, special people have the capacity to develop the skill for. well. actually now that i've given this 30 seconds thought i realize it's bullshit. what skillz do ppl who play DDR or katamari damacy secretly yearn to have??? lol@me.

"I really think that's something nobody called Ebert out on that they maybe should have, games don't actually give a shit about player choice at the end of the day! It's mostly illusory!"

the funniest parts of eg. final fantasy vii are where they attempt to give you some control over the storyline and present you with options like:

what would you like?
.... 1,000,000 gil
.... aids

and then even if you choose aids they're like, 'okay here's a million gil lol!' and then give you whatever they want you to have.

1. The choice to win or lose, according to the rules and laws of the simulation (including the run-on-rails narratives of RPGs).

2. The choice of how you do it and what kind of fun you can have in the process- in a limited simulation, most of these involve self-imposed handicapping of some sort (beating somebody at chess without ever picking up your queen) but in some of the best games you can win lots of different ways and there can be re-discovery of the fun in playing by doing stuff that may not be the most linear of paths from A to B but doesn't add a lot of extra risk or difficulty (Doug Flutie drop-kicking the extra point).

Choice category number 1 is ME being too reductionist, -20 points.
Choice category number 2 is me finally figuring out what Casuistry was talking about.

So there's where a simulation can be talked about as an art of giving you a fun and expressive experience besides just containing nice noises and pretty lights or having well-coded I/O and collision detection; a simulation constructed in such a way that the illusory choice of win/lose is supplanted by the very real choice of "win/lose via elegant sniper fire OR napalm fastballs conjured from the ether OR a combination of these plus a sexy bitch with an axe"

And at the end of the day this still proves Ebert wrong. Except inasmuch as I agree with him, I think, that video games are still not very mature, but they're getting there.

and then even if you choose aids they're like, 'okay here's a million gil lol!' and then give you whatever they want you to have.

is the funniest thing i've read in a long time.

ok wait there's tetris slash wtf

link!

http://www.bash.org/?745147

:)

http://i.imgur.com/PN3c5JS.jpg

God, I want to play that. I actually considered spending 300+ dollars just to play that game, but then I looked in my wallet.