Folamh3
User ID: 1175
The term "incel" is generally hurled at three categories of men:
- Men who are sexually frustrated (the literal meaning of the term), who may resent women as a consequence
- Men who are not sexually frustrated, but harbour lingering resentment towards women owing to past periods in their life in which they were
- Men whose political opinions depart from progressive/woke orthodoxy in key ways, specifically with regard to gender politics
I know because I fit into the third category (certainly not the first, and I would like to think not the second), and have had the "incel" epithet hurled at me dozens of times.
Now, obviously it's ridiculous to assume that any man who departs from woke/progressive orthodoxy is either sexually frustrated or harbours a lingering resentment towards women as a group. I don't think I hold the opinions that I do because of resentment towards women. But I'm also not going to deny the existence of men who fit in category 2: they exist, I've interacted with them, I've spoken to them in person.
And what's more, even if these men only arrived at their opinions because of their lingering resentment towards women as a group, that doesn't in and of itself mean that their opinions are wrong, or their grievances lacking in merit - that would be a textbook example of Bulverism. Bob's underlying psychological motivation for believing in X has no bearing on whether or not X is true. I'm not required to deny the existence of resentful misogynistic men in order to make the case for why e.g. female underrepresentation in STEM is not the moral outrage many feminists seem to think it is.
Spin it back the other way around: it could be literally 100% true that Alice is only a socialist because she feels resentful of how unsuccessful she is, and that in and of itself wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not socialism is a preferable economic system to capitalism.
Folamh3
1d ago
The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.
I acknowledge that the phenomenon you're describing is real, but I wish we had separate terms for "men who resent women because they can't get laid" and "men who can get laid, but resent women because of lingering grievances brought about from earlier rejections".
My ex was a bespectacled 5' Chinese girl. We used to joke that if we had boys, best-case scenario they'd be just as tall as me and just as attractive as her; worst-case scenario, they'd be myopic, ginger Asian midgets. Can you imagine the bullying you'd get as a boy who's short, ginger and Asian?
Folamh3
1d ago
This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways.
I would substitute "fail" rather than "refuse". No man chooses to be 5'6".
Folamh3
3d ago
And is it really possible for an intelligent human to both understand a book like Crime and Punishment and read it and be emotionally indifferent to it?
Why not? There are lots of stories which I understand perfectly well but which leave me cold.
Folamh3
3d ago
What a triumph The Prestige is.
That and Memento are probably the only films of his I'd put in the W column without major qualifications.
Folamh3
4d ago
Last of Us,God of War + GOW Ragnarok, Warcraft 3, Witcher 3, Sekiro
Can't comment, not having played any of them for the reasons outlined in the last paragraph. Pretty much everyone tells me that Last of Us is great, annoying that it still hasn't received a PC port.
I don't know why you can't just take their word for it. In any other profession, when someone says "I got into this line of work because I'm good at it and it pays well", we generally take that at face value (surely no one believes that every doctor went to medical school because they "want to help people" - the ones volunteering for MSF, sure, but not a dermatologist in the Hamptons). Why, as a culture, are we married to this romantic ideal of the tortured artist, slitting his wrists over the typewriter in pursuit of his muse? Why do I have to believe that the artist sacrificed something of himself in order to produce his masterwork? My opinion of how entertaining a film Dirty Harry is isn't changed by the knowledge that Don Siegel only directed it for the money, and I don't see that my opinion should have changed.
I took the OP's question as one of asking "among the subset of games which tell linear narrative stories with plots, characters, dialogue etc., have these stories declined in quality over time?" I think that's a fundamentally different question to the question of whether games without such narratives have improved or declined in quality. In Frostpunk, there is no "narrative": the narrative is the player's experience in the game, enabled by the mechanics. It's the difference between a novel and a DnD campaign. Everyone intuitively understands that Frostpunk is trying to do something fundamentally different from what Call of Duty is trying to do, at a mechanical and experiential level - it's confusing that "success" in game design is invariably described in reference to how "fun" the game is, when this descriptor hides more than it illuminates.
And maybe this is part of the story: maybe at the start of the PS4 era, all the smart game designers in the indie space collectively realised that trying to use video games to tell stories the same way that books or films do was a lost cause, and focused instead on crafting organic, player-directed simulations with more intuitive interfaces and better production values compared to their 90s forebears. This would mean that the last ten years of AAA games still doing the lame "Hollywood action movie but you're the main character" thing isn't evidence that video games have lost their way or are on the verge of another crash: it just means that the lumbering AAA game studios haven't cottoned to the new hot trend, which is intentionally narrative-light organic player-directed simulations. If this were the case, it would be a fascinating narrative to describe the last decade and a half.
Folamh3
4d ago
but I don't believe him.
Then your hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
The first example to come to mind is Chinatown, widely considered Roman Polanski's best film, which he himself said that he took on as a commercial project only, as a favour to Jack Nicholson.
Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were paid by the line.
To quote TV Tropes (I've never read Pet Sematary but my understanding is that it's considered one of King's best novels):
Pet Sematary: While it was marketed as "the book so scary Stephen King didn't want to publish it," the real truth is that King wanted out of his Doubleday contract due to the publisher holding onto a huge backlog of his royalties. Doubleday refused to give the money back unless King delivered two more books. Having previously shelved the story for being too nihilistic for his liking, King threw the manuscript at them to settle half of the contract.
The Money, Dear Boy article includes the following examples:
- John Ford (6 Oscars, widely considered one of the greatest directors ever) 'repeatedly maintained over the years that moviemaking was just a way for him to make a living, which he stuck with because it paid well and he found it easy.'
- 'Don Siegel once said of his work "Most of my pictures, I'm sorry to say, are about nothing. Because I'm a whore. I work for money. It's the American way."'
- 'Anthony Burgess basically belched out A Clockwork Orange in a matter of weeks to pay off some debts. He regretted its glorification of violence and was annoyed by the way it overshadowed the rest of his work, causing quite a bit of Creator Backlash.' [I will grant that the film adaptation is more critically acclaimed than the source novel; on the other hand, the source novel is the only thing Burgess is known for in the popular imagination.]
- 'Orson Scott Card, a prolific author of fiction in genres ranging from science fiction to pious fiction, once answered the question, "Why do you write? What is your inspiration?" with the answer, "I write because nobody will pay me to do anything else. My inspiration is that from time to time we run out of money."'
- 'Thomas Hardy always wanted to be a poet and said that poetry has a "supreme place in literature". However, he wrote novels only because, in his early years, he would not make a living as a poet. With the success of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure (not to mention the latter novel's very harsh reception upon publication), he returned to the less-lucrative career of poetry and spent the rest of his life writing poems.'
There are dozens more.
Folamh3
4d ago
I think it's possible to write a great story when you don't feel emotionally invested in it, and equally possible to write a terrible story in spite of feeling very emotionally invested in it.
I want to do a sense-check to see if I agree with your core hypothesis. Here are a list of video games which I consider particularly well-written:
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004)
- Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
- Soma (2015)
- Max Payne (2001)
- Metal Gear Solid: 1 (1998), 2 (2001), 3 (2003)
- System Shock 2 (1999)
- BioShock (2007)
- BioShock Infinite (2013)
- Portal (2007)
- Psychonauts (2005)
- Detention (2016)
- Oxenfree (2016)
- Gone Home (2013)
- The Stanley Parable (2013)
- Bastion (2011)
- Silent Hill 2 (2001)
- Far Cry 3 (2012)
- Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (1999)
- Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (1996)
I count three games which came out in the past ten years, ten which came out in the ten years prior to that, and eight which came out in the ten years prior to that. This suggests that stories in games were finding their feet in the PS1 era, achieved a creative peak in the late PS2-PS3 era, and have been declining in quality since the onset of the PS4 era, with most of the interesting creative stuff happening in the indie space. However, this is a biased sample, as all of my gaming is done on PC and prior to a few months ago my laptop wasn't powerful enough to run any game which came out in the past five years.
Folamh3
4d ago
See also this article. TL;DR: National Book Award winners (and American novelists in general, by extension) used to come from all walks of life, but in recent years winners and nominees have been dominated almost to the exclusion of all else by college-educated novelists who have completed MFAs. This has the effect of making recent acclaimed literary novels insular and hermetic, with little of the grit, colour or life experience of literary novels from decades past.
Folamh3
4d ago
To be fair, he could well have changed his mind in the intervening two years.
Folamh3
4d ago
let me know if anything actually happens
It may be related to Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths. When video games were a niche interest, the only people making them were nerds who were passionate about what they were making and had a vision in mind. Over time, the medium swelled into a multi-billion dollar industry, which attracted a bunch of people who didn't care about the video games for their own sake and were only in it for the money/as a stepping stone in their careers/using video games as a vehicle to advance a social agenda/all of the above. I don't know if this is true of video games, but it is definitely true of video game journalism.
This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing (no one is more passionate about their art than some dork writing Sonic fan fiction), but a clumsy story written by someone who cares about what they're writing at least has an endearing quality compared to a mediocre story written by someone who only cares about the paycheque.
Whenever I watch a film directed by John Carney, I'm left with this very unsettling feeling. Watching his films makes me feel like he's never actually met another human being in his life, that his entire knowledge of what people are like comes from watching other people's movies.
This wasn't always true of Christopher Nolan (the performances in Memento are remarkably naturalistic in spite of the contrived plot), but has become the case over time. No one in Inception, Interstellar, Tenet or Oppenheimer talks or acts like a real person (particularly damning in the latter case, given that 95% of the characters are based on real people who actually existed).
Folamh3
5d ago
I worked as a cyclist for Deliveroo for three months. By the end of it I knew practically every back alley in the city centre, and would just glance at the address on the app, not needing to consult Google Maps to find my way. I don't know what the equivalent food delivery service is in your city, but a lot of these services are pretty chill about letting you pick your own hours. Even if you worked one shift a week you'd probably see a big improvement in your navigation skills.
I live in Ireland and still get my fair share of slagging. A few years ago I could hardly leave the house without someone pointing at me and saying "hey look lads, Ed Sheeran's on tour!" but that dropped off after I lost weight.
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