Worth Reading: 01/09/2014

I'm a little late to comment, but I just wanted to say I think you've summed up the situation nicely.

It's not that Gone Home is bad, but man, the games press is fawning over it a little hard just because it is more or less the first game to cover those topics that has higher production values and high graphical fidelity. Plenty of small developers, from Anna Anthropy to Zoe Quinn, have made similarly personal, small games that don't get nearly the same attention from the games press, except they might get a nomination or win for an IGF award if they're lucky (Cart Life, for example).

In the fall of 1992, a twentysomething college dropout and former juvenile offender named John Carmack was hard at work in Mesquite, Texas, on a new concept for a video game.

Such a classy way of introducing one of the legends of the industry.

Thank you for that mod review video, Patrick. At first I was thinking 'holy hell, 1 hour?! this dude is insane!' But that was really thoughtful and well put together. I might just have to re-install mount and blade and get that mod.

I thought Spelunky was a little outside your wheelhouse. Now I makes sense.

"Adults read series like Harry Potter and Twilight and The Hunger Games with unabashed glee. Comic book film adaptations have overtaken the cinema."

Wow, that is a pretty snotty quote.

@weaponboy: I honestly found it even weirder that a relevant audio recording just so happened to play in your head, giving some explanation as to what you were just looking at. Especially once you find out what these audio recordings were at the end of the game.

I wonder what the game would've been like if it didn't have these audio hints and you just read a long diary at the end.

That's half true, but you're leaving out the fact that the audio in Gone Home is unavoidable, completing each 'stage' of exploring the house triggers audio automatically. In Bioshock it's quite possible to miss a lot of interesting stuff in the audio logs if you weren't searching all over.

To be clear, I don't think audio logs are lazy storytelling, just saying that trying to skirt the line like Bioshock does (most are relatively obvious) can lead to people missing important stuff.

Glad that you're finally taking the plunge into Dark Souls.

I find Dark Souls to be the spiritual successor to Castlevania on the NES. Now hear me out. The original Castlevania required patience, learning the enemy routines, had a very punishing attack animation, and a place to explore with secrets.

But then again I find Fez to be a modern take on the original Zelda on the NES, where people had to fight and collaborate with people to find out how to get to the 8th dungeon or get through the graveyard. So what do I know?

No mention of AGDQ 2014?

I love Christmas Duck.

BioShock uses audio logs to tell backstory = developers are lazy and story-telling is bad

Indie game uses audio logs to tell backstory = important step for story-telling in video games.

>Tech Demo for Pillow Castle's First Person Puzzler

It seems many people are seeing the value in perspective lately.

• Perspective
• Scale
• Insignificant
• Kachina

So, I read that FPS article. Despite claiming in the opening paragraph that it's not just the first-person perspective and the violence that draws players in, the conclusion was that it in fact is the first-person perspective and the violence? OK, thanks.

@yummytreesap: I understand it this way - the ending isn't there to provide any sort of closure, so it doesn't really matter. Normally, you play games to get to the end, so even if you ignore the side stuff, you've seen everything the game has in stock. In something like The Binding of Isaac or Spelunky, you can finish the game a hundred times and not get the full experience, in fact, someone who has never gotten to the perceived ending could have discovered more about the game than someone who did.

How is Spelunky's ending not an ending in the traditional sense? It is said twice in this article and makes no sense to me either time. You play through the levels and beat the game, just like any game ever.

I got as far as the Bioshock line in Bogost's article. Saying something doesn't deserve the praise it received is literally the equivalent of saying "my opinion is right, and everyone else is wrong and too stupid to know it." I decided the rest wasn't worth reading after that.

that Rock Hard Cock is disappointingly long.

@defe: Yeah I've read about those bots before, ridiculous the effort people go through for free stuff. I was more curious how a code missing an alphanumeric get's put into Steam. Didn't make any sense to me without something to substitute. Punching in all the possibilities sounds like more trouble than just paying for it, Haha. Thanks for the run-down man.

Pillow Castle is exactly what I like to see in the games I play. I'm not sure if there has ever been a game like that but Pillow Castle gets my vote for creativity.

@patrickklepek, have you read Emily Short's recent piece on Gone Home? It's a very interesting criticism of the game too.

I thought Gone Home's story was fairly trite and not particularly well-told. Sam's diary entries brought to mind the young adult books on tape I used to listen to as a kid. I don't think most video game stories are very good, but it's weird to me that so many people seem to think Gone Home represents a massive step forward in video game storytelling. It's novel, but novelty and quality are very different things.

I'd read Bottle Rocket Hearts in a literature class right before playing the game, and that book hits upon the same themes dramatically better than Gone Home does. Gone Home felt too grasping, too self-consciously "important", to get me suspend disbelief. It's one of those games that I think people love more in theory than in practice.

Bogost more-or-less admits this (and its uncanny resemblance to young adult novels) but seems to like it anyway because of what it represents. That's fine, but again, novelty and quality shouldn't be mixed up. His use of wording like "an overdue contribution to the cause" and "the fact of the game's very existence becomes more important than its aesthetic ambitions" says to me that he's blurring those lines. A piece of art can strive to do something amazing and not really meet that goal. That's Bogost's problem with BioShock -- and I largely agree with him on that -- but I tend to see Gone Home in a similar light.

I think he's spot on about how weirdly low the games press's bar seems to be for game storytelling. A lot of the hyperbole written about Gone Home read to me as disingenuous -- people writing things they didn't really believe because they had a sense that Gone Home was an important game that important people liked, or at the very least that Gone Home was an important event that needed to be celebrated for the good of "the medium" (a term that's always a red flag to me). "The medium" is not going to be elevated by patronizing and fawning over every game that strives at greatness, especially when that's at the expense of criticizing faults.

When the same people think BioShock Infinite, GTA V (assuming it's like IV, since I haven't played V), and Gone Home are A+ games, how am I supposed to know when a game is truly special and not just "cinematic" or "important"? What score would they give a truly exceptional narrative-based game, and what adjectives would they use to describe it that they haven't already exhausted?

I should say that I agree with most of his piece, and it's one of the more interesting and grounded pieces of games criticism I've read in a long time. There was a level of serious thought and rigour there that is pretty rare.

That cock knows no fear. It's willing to grind on everyone and everything in order to finish.

Sonic Generations is awesome even when Sonic is a giant dick.

The idea is that there are shady internet robots that sweep for things that look like steam codes and enter them automatically, preventing the people who were supposed to get the codes from using them. People circumvent that by replacing part of the code with question marks. Generally they then say something along the lines of, "replace question marks with S." Since there's no such hint here, perhaps we're just meant to try A-Z and 0-9 until something works.

That being said, I'm sure all these codes have been used by now. I wouldn't bother with these.

How do you redeem steam codes with question marks in them? I've seen this a bunch of time now and have never been able to get a good response?

Holy shit, Katawa Shoujo being mentioned in a Giant Bomb article. Wow. That was my first Visual Novel which I played after Day9 and friends played it for Metadating and came away extremely positive. Sounds like the worst thing ever but actually is genuinely great. Really well written game with great characters. I decided it was my #3 game that year. It's on my games I love list. Loved it.

For me it also fell within my goal to always look for games that speak to me no matter the genre. That's different from Patrick's try new things because it doesn't mean trying old shit that didn't speak to me but instead looking for new spins on that old shit that's more accessible or more sensible. Like Heroes of the Storm. Or Diablo 3. Or Katawa Shoujo. What I'm basically saying is I recommend Patrick give it a go maybe. I quite liked it.

@patrickklepek

What are you doing in 2014?

Hopefully playing some actual games instead of collecting them.

And also finding something to do with my life.

First-person shooters are now responsible for billions of dollars in sales a year, and dominate the best-seller lists of current-generation gaming consoles.

The New Yorker article put this quote in (the link is broken in the original article, fixed link is here) which seems misleading. First-Person Shooters dominate the best-seller lists of current-generation consoles, so apparently the best way to demonstrate that is linking to the all-time game sales list for the PS3? First-Person Shooters sit 5th and 10th on that list (CoD: MW2 and Black Ops 2, respectively). I'm not sure what the author's base knowledge of games is, maybe she thinks GTA, Uncharted and The Last of Us are First-Person Shooters?

Are we still pretending that Gone Home is in anyway groundbreaking? Give me a break.