Comment by jjhfarmer
8 hours ago
The first game I thought of upon reading the title of the article was 'Shadow of the Colossus'. There's a particular boss about half-way through the game who resides in a small secluded garden and the process of defeating them involves tricking them in to ramming over columns etc. until they are trapped.
I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article describes, with the realisation that those beasts never did anything to me and I was essentially going out of my way to trick and slaughter them.
No other game has invoked that feeling in me since. It's a very special game. It remains one of my favourites and a stellar example of what the medium can achieve.
Shadow of the Colossus came out around the zeitgeist of when people really started earnestly debating if videogames were art. After that game there was no more debate.
Yes, it confirmed that the key was conveying a complex and intentional artistic vision through the gameplay. If a game is effective, but removing the gameplay makes it ineffective, then, as a game, it's art.
Ikaruga and Journey should be mentioned in the same conversation. More recently, Undertale and Death Stranding, pick up similar conceptual throughlines ("choice" and "connection", respectively), albeit in less elegant ways, owing to their expanded scope.
Ikaruga mentioned! Don’t even get me started, that game consumed my life for nearly 2 years when it came out for the GameCube. The emptiness I got when I finally achieved a 1CC only to quickly fill that hole with an obsession with scoring afterward… that is a feeling that has only been achieved by a number of games I can count on one hand.
Funny enough, I enjoy Death Stranding for many of the same reasons that I enjoy arcade-style games: routing, resource management, and failure that feels meaningful, as well as the satisfaction of successfully executing a plan. The story is pretty cool too, but the gameplay is what I really like.
To me, these reflections upon my aggressive and violent behavior in a game are much more impactful than games that put me into dilemma situations, where you are already presented with a nicely arranged moral problem in the moment.
These are two distinct techniques and I feel the latter almost always failed to impress me much, while the first one is where I feel caught, even shocked by myself and the cold-bloodiness to (virtually) follow any suggestion to kill.
The Uncharted games are weird like this. They get lauded for their storyline, yet Drake is out their killing hordes of guys for what ? Some treasure ?
I believe that exact framing of Uncharted is the origin of the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the character’s motivations and morals are in contrast to the extreme violence they are committing because of the nature of it being a video game.
Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it.
EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of Bioshock, but Uncharted was later held up as a strong example of this. And it’s more generally about the contrast between narrative and gameplay mechanics.
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I thought about this playing Just Cause 2. So I go to this island, blow up all of their oil, gas, and power infrastructure, killing hordes of security guards who are just locals working the few jobs available to them.
When I tried to play SotC, I got too distracted exploring the world to actually go after the bosses. Should blow the dust off it and try again one of these days.
Long ago in the previous century, it was D&D that provided this scenario. DMs would offer us scenarios where "killing all the orcs" was detailed into "including the women and children in the cave", just to see how we'd react.
Are orcs as bad as zombies? They are supposedly born LE, and could not (then) be reasonably expected to change. But killing an orc innocent?
The first game I thought of when reading the article was Shadow of the Colossus, mostly because the article opens with a screenshot of the game and talks about it in detail.
I appreciate the honesty of recognizing that you commented without reading the article, but could you not? Your experience could have added so much more had you placed it in context with the rest of the article.