On things like FF7 and how our perception has changed, I totally agree, though would you also see it that way if it was your first time playing it but right now ? Probably not. There would be the novelty factor. Don't forget that replaying something again and again makes that go away and the magic vanishes a little too. When the game is awesome it gets replaced by good old nostalgia.
But if you played it right now for the first time... You would see it differently. And differently from the first time you played it in the past too !
Not sure if i'm really clear in what i'm trying to say...
Well, it's unknowable
But I find the psychology of it genuinely fascinating.
There was a novelty factor at the time, because most jrpgs were presented in a certain way, about certain things, and this was bigger, grander, darker. I kind of felt, as a wee young lass,
finally, they are taking me seriously. Instead of princesses in castles, you had reactors, gone-wrong-science-experiments, corporations and environmentalism. So that was a huge novelty factor at the time, yes. Which wouldn't necessarily be so for a first play through now?
But while I'm aware I'm a different person (hopefully) to the one I was in my early teens, the game itself hasn't changed. So I was quite surprised how irritating and frustrating I found certain things, how impatient and grumpy I got at minor obstacles. It's uncomfortably jarring. It was also a nasty hit to personal pride that I had to look at a youtube video to get out of a room >.>
I'm not sure how I'd feel playing it for the first time now, really. Different, certainly, bestowed with the expectations of games I now have (as well as a different subject position in general). I can categorically say I would still have liked it, mind
Oh - which reminded me of something else. One of the things I'm getting out of it now, which I did
not get on my first playthrough, is a bigger emotional response (Not Aeris. Never liked her). I think some of that is nostalgia fuelled. It was a nostalgia binge that prompted my current playthrough (as well as these letters
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/03/the-final-fantasy-vii-letters-part-1-welcome-to-mi.html) as I was playing remixed songs from the soundtrack to my entirely unwilling and disinterested partner
(in a long car journey when he was driving and couldn't get out).
A particular song came on that reminded me of a certain scene, and excitedly I started to retell it from memory and then realised
to my distress and embarrassment, I was actually getting choked up and had all the sads. Which is both the power of music (done well) and, well, I don't like sad stories about dogs basically, even if they are anthropomorphic >.> (eyeball torture and sad dog stories are my kryptonite, it's probably not advisable to publicly declare your weakness on the interwebs, but oh well).
But that's a combination of music, sad dog story and nostalgia.
On the recent playthrough, though, there was only a small scene - a flashback with an npc character waiting for her husband to come back from the war. and it shows you her going each time hopefully to the train station, and each time being disappointed. eventually a severely injured woman with a young child comes out, the mother dies and the woman takes in the young child. The young child is a bit odd though, sweet but says weird uncharacteristic things. Talks about communing with the planet. Has moments of profundity. She basically asks the woman not to be sad, but that someone close to her has returned to the planet. The woman dismisses it, but not long after is officially informed that her husband died in battle.
Le gulp. Even writing that is making me a bit sad. Which is obviously very silly. It's just, well, heartbreaking. All that hope, each time, waiting for someone who is never coming back. It was done well, quietly, with little fanfare. Just some speech bubbles hanging in the air over the images while music played.
Probably subtle enough for me to miss entirely the first time. It can't have made much of impression first time around as I wasn't prepared for it. I had a vague recollection it happened story wise, but I doubt I cared, tbh. It wasn't a big fancy FMV or a particularly prominent plot point. My desensitized macho little self would've been tapping her fingers going, ok, yeah, that's where Aeris came from, blah blah, dead-husband-NPC-that-I-never-met, do I get to kill stuff now?
I think that combination though - of music and speech bubbles, can be really effective and powerful if done right. Kind of like silent movies, the music has to take on more of a character to convey a lot of tone - though there's a lot of exaggerated facial expressions (which FF7 can't really do, and in fairness, even with all the realistic graphics we have now, attempting to recreate realistic facial expressions is still largely uncanny valley).
A decent voice actor can convey tone very well, of course. But I wonder, now there's more of a move (and I'm not saying there shouldn't be!) to everything being voice acted, if the music plays less of a role now than maybe it did and sometimes the text music combination is more effective than voice acting in certain respects.
I think it was mostly technical issues, like memory issues (hard and graphics). You couldn't put much in terms of assets in your game so it was better to go through procedural generation to still make it big, at the expense of the uniqueness of every bit of levelbuild.
Mm.
The thing is though, I think because we did procedural generation due to technical issues which made things big at the expense of uniqueness, and we now have the technical ability to produce uniqueness, there's the idea we
should. But maybe that's an assumption on my part?
I'm not saying all games should be procedurally generated or anything like that (!) I'm just saying there are advantages to doing so in some cases that are perhaps overlooked because it's no longer the done thing.
Because we (sometimes) gain the uniqueness at the expense of other things. Case by case, ofc, depends on the game and the intention and what you are trying to evoke.
I think perhaps there's an idea (?) that we develop things along a linear line and, as the technology improves, we do things in a different way that is inherently and objectively better. I don't think that's true at all, though. I think things may have been
done due to technological reasons, but things go in and out of fashion. Due to the tech, market, demographic or whatever else.
...Like the idea of MMOs that
don't have levels or raids or a hotbar at the bottom for all your combat needs, or that they
can have real loss where people can kill you or steal your stuff (or your house, or your boat) when Ultima Online was doing that shit in 1997. I nearly had an apoplexy when I read that the Elder Scrolls Online would not be including the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood because "it's too difficult to implement in an MMO." BITCH, PLEASE. Vast, vast quantities of nerd rage eminating from me at the statement
an MMO is fucking tailor made for the killing and the thieving of other players, it would've been awesome in a nice tasty marinade of AWESOME SAUCE.
From what I heard about Gone Home though, it's hardly a puzzle game nor comparable to DotT.
It's not a puzzle game
(Though I would compare it to DotT, in that you just walk around and interact with objects).
Though an implied win state could be to find certain things out, and an implied fail state would be not doing so. Not overtly stated or overtly punished, but definitely an implied objective the game suggests to you.
Your narrative progress could also be halted by not finding certain things (like a secret door, etc). You'd have to be fairly unobservant not to, as Lyn says, it's not difficult, but it would be possible.
Oh, also, Miz - I intended this to be fairly broad in considering what makes up the concept of a game. I don't consider the best adventure game experience you ever had, and your reasoning why it was so, to necessarily be a derail. If anything it helps show what's important to us about them. I think that's useful to explore, especially if what's important about them has changed over time.
There are some tangentially related questions - is there a disparity between what games are and what they could be? How have they changed - how have our expectations changed? (we'll stay away from the 'who are they for' question if poss, as that ends up being controversial)
^ fits into that somewhere I think.
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Topic: What's in a Game? (Read 6451 times)