The Stupidest Word in Videogames

[christian]

What if you could skip Titanfall's embark and disembark cutscenes? Aren't these cutscenes important to the "gameplay"? Sometimes though, games will let you skip certain cutscenes like these. You see this most often in fighting games and beat 'em ups with their cancels.

[christian]

I'd like to see a video recording of the ideal game where "gameplay" is king, and "anything that isn't me playing the game" is skippable. And let that video record only the player's hands and controller while he's playing it. What would it look like? Non-stop button presses?

[christian]

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/WarrenSp ... 24/249470/

So what is it about Telltale’s work that makes it hard for me to say they’re games?

For starters, they basically have no mechanics (or when they do introduce simple mechanics — shooting while backing up stairs and such -- they seem out of place and unnecessary). There's no character progression to speak of. And there's no real player control of the minute-to-minute. That last point is key.

I.e. not enough "gameplay".

[christian]

Your Banned List Of Gaming Words - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08 ... ing-words/

Gameplay Oh, the behemoth of evil wording. It means absolutely nothing. And yet it’s somehow a word that major gaming sites will use as a scored category when judging a game. It’s the gaming equivalent of saying “moo-cow”, except without actually describing a cow. The closest it comes to defining anything is “how a game feels to play”, which is about as helpful a thing to tell someone as what a pair of trousers sounds like. Others try to understand it as “what you actually do in a game”, which would render it as the most superfluous word ever spoken. What you actually do in a game is not something that either warrants nor sensibly can be scored. “In this game you run down the corridors and shoot the robots – 7/10.” “In this game you build a base and fight the invading orc army – 4/10.” It is an awful, awful word, and it must never be uttered anywhere, by anyone, ever again. Entirely verboten.

[christian]

WTF is wrong with videogames? - http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/28/937082 ... es-excerpt

In this excerpt, Phil Owen sounds like he's starting to say the same thing I did in The Gameplay Curse, but then digs into these ridiculous details about how meaningful a sneeze can be in a movie, but how meaningless shivs and active reloads are in The Last of Us and Gears of War respectively. His marriage to the term 'gameplay' of course prevents him from seeing the issue clearly. And his nihilism seals the door forever.

I would struggle through the gameplay to get to the art. Most of the time I didn't enjoy the act of actually playing a game, at least not for long, but sometimes I liked the stories enough that I could convince myself it was worth it. The Last of Us is yet another game I get to say I'm playing for the story.

I have to laugh because The Last of Us actually is a lot of fun to play. Hardly a game I'd consider one has to suffer through. That is, unless you just don't care for action games with stealth elements. Not everybody does. But to then go and say a mechanic is meaningless because it doesn't contribute to the game's Wikipedia plot section is more than a little daft, don't you think? It's just a pretentious way of wearing your ignorance like some kind of badge of honor.

The lead designer on Gears was Cliff Bleszinski, or Cliffy B, and he often extols the virtue of "the thirty seconds of fun" that you repeat over and over for as long as the game lasts -- one of the more obnoxious concepts of mainstream game theory. In a shooter you're obviously going to have to reload your gun a whole lot, and so the active reload in Gears is a key part of that endless cycle. Even that doesn't give the active reload real meaning, as it's ultimately a concept created in a void, with the only concern being that it doesn't break other functional elements of the game.

What an outrageous claim.

In film, the text is a combination of the screenplay and the director's vision, expressed through what you see and hear when you watch it. In games, the text is compartmentalized, and the gameplay is a separate entity that rarely is trying to communicate anything at all.

In fact, the idea of gameplay as instituted by game developers seems more concerned with preventing you from participating in the art. If the gameplay is itself part of the art, then that's fine (and there are some games that you could argue are like that), but endless repetitive shooting or dungeon crawls rarely fit that bill. Instead, the gameplay is merely a substanceless activity that just exists. In other media, we would say that having a large and prominent, totally meaningless component constitutes bad art. In games, we say that's just how it's done. Maybe games are art and maybe they aren't, but if they are, nearly all of them are ineffective at being art.

Behold the scientist, surgically cutting out the "gameplay" from the game's corpse atop the operating table. What is its purpose? According to the scientist, it has none. Its existence is totally meaningless. Harmful even! Just a little cut, and all will be saved.

He leaves himself a little wiggle room with the vague "if the gameplay is itself part of the art" condition, but who has any idea what that could possibly mean? My thoughts are that he's referring to the "mechanics as metaphor" insanity, but there's no telling.

[christian]

He uses the word "meaningful" over and over and over and over again. He's really desperate to save the world through videogames.

[christian]

From the preface of WTF Is Wrong With Videogames:

I'm going to start by telling you how and why nearly all games are extremely ineffective at being art. Then we'll examine the culture problems that maintain that subpar status quo, both on the industry side and the press and community side. And we'll also discuss how the fucked up American idea of capitalism, especially that of the tech sector, drives all of it.

Surprise, surprise.

[christian]

Save me, change me, enlighten me, fix me, nurture me, protect me. That's what it all sounds like when they make such demands as Phil Owen does from their art. Demands which art cannot meet. This philosophy doesn't stop there, unfortunately. It also seeps into their politics, and as you can plainly see from above, they begin to make such demands from their governments as well.

This is the hopeless lot of the anti-Christian rebel, who makes himself and everyone around him miserable, because he refuses to seek salvation from God, yet still feeling a need for it, manufactures a new savior on his own terms, which cannot save, but is nonetheless the only thing to which he'll bow.

Psalm 36:9

For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.

[christian]

Adrian Chmielarz's review of WTF Is Wrong With Videogames - https://medium.com/@adrianchm/review-wt ... 15b3c19a71

Another review from Kindra Pring - http://techraptor.net/content/wtf-wrong ... es-nothing

[christian]

http://www.theastronauts.com/2012/11/wh ... tter-games

Here is five well known action-adventure games. BIOSHOCK. MODERN WARFARE 2. GRAND THEFT AUTO 3+. RED DEAD REDEMPTION. UNCHARTED 3.

Think about your favorite, most memorable moments from the single player part of each, then read below if I have managed to guess any of these moments.

…

Ready? Let’s see..

BIOSHOCK: First ten minutes. Entering Rapture.

MODERN WARFARE 2: No Russian. You take part in an airport massacre of hundreds of civilians.

GRAND THEFT AUTO 3+: Driving around, listening to the radio.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION: Riding into Mexico, accompanied by a moody song.

UNCHARTED 3: The desert section. Dehydrated, tired Drake walks in circles in the desert’s heat and cold for two days.

What do all these moments have in common?

They are game-free. They are gameplay-less.

That’s right. You heard me.

If we understand gameplay as something that a challenge is a crucial part of, then none of these moments features any gameplay. You just walk, or swim, or ride a horse, but that’s it. You cannot die. You don’t make choices that have any long term consequences. No skill is involved.

There is no gameplay.