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Notes -
Video game thread.
I played return to moria this past two weeks. It's a survival crafting game. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard for the genre. The setting of middle earth is fun. I'm not a massive LOTR nerd, so I'm sure I missed some subtleties.
There are some mechanics that definitely make the game better suited for co-op. I played it alone and felt like I was missing out. Storage sizes always felt too small, there were legendary gear items that you could only carry one of, and you could be picked up upon death by a comrade if you had one. I eventually downloaded a mod to fix the first two issues. It expanded storage and allowed carrying multiple legendary items.
Progression happens entirely through gear. And gear drops on death. Corpse runs were not as brutal as I feared. The game seemed to handle agro and grave placement in a way that helped corpse runs.
Resource collecting was generally pretty standard but sometimes I'd find myself making fun little mining platforms to get higher.
The map is procedurally generated, but it's more like pre-made rooms that are stuck together in an odd assortment rather than fully new terrain each time.
Navigation was tricky with the map not helping much except to provide general directions. I ended memorizing a lot of tunnel layouts in order to get where I needed to go.
Replayability felt low. I didn't want to totally start from scratch after getting used to all my awesome gear. The next update is supposedly adding NPCs for bases, I'll probably replay the game when that comes out.
Meta-gaming question I have is: what are some game stories that can only function in the form of a game. Archetypal games that were bound to happen at some point.
Games have art, music, story as components. The unique part is the interactive component with the player. A game like SpecOps:TheLine could function as a book. Spitballing a few famous tropes.
game has no story. pure skill expression.
gameplay making sure the player understands the story.
games that setup difficulty as an exclusive club:
games where the entire main story is a lie that the player can optionally uncover
morality where being evil makes the game easier
You can do this in a book, like Pale Fire - many postmodern authors have tried with varying degrees of success. What makes Dark Souls unique is the minimal information you get and the diegetic storytelling (Silksong take inspiration from the latter and really ramps it up).
I think the question of difficulty and slogging-through as an emotional experience is closer to the core of the question, but that's also in books and films - look at Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below or Bela Tarr's adaptation of his novel Satantango, or Twin Peaks: The Return for TV. IMO the slam-dunk in this list is branching paths, like morality choices changing the game.
A notable difference I see between Pale Fire and Dark Souls is that there's a real possibility for a reader to miss the content of the underlying story as a medium.
When reading a poem like Pale Fire the reader can experience the story differently depending on order they read the poem and the footnote-narrative. But because the medium of the book presents all the story in the same up front manner there's no opportunity (at a medium level) to hide a second story underneath such that someone exploring every nook and cranny is going to find a new character that they couldn't even perceive without some skill/knowledge/exploration checks in the interactive domain.
A novice reader can simply open up page 140 of Pale Fire and plainly observe the words of Kinbote's commentary, whereas a novice Dark Souls cannot observe Gwyndolin's story or even know it's there ahead of time.
I probably should, but cheeky answer is that I probably won't go the first-hand experience. While I enjoy the idea of it I probably won't walk the walk in this kind of thing.
I full agree on changing the game itself, the way of interaction, more than the branching morality paths.
Choose-your-own-advence books have branching paths based on choice to experience, but because of the medium can't give a difference experience depending on the choice, only different words.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here, but isn’t that just the entire field of literary criticism? A reader who isn’t perceptive enough or doesn’t put enough thought into what they read won’t be able to fully uncover all of the implications of what was written on the page. For a non-academic example, consider the painstaking work that Gwern put in in order to show that a certain enigmatic short story by Gene Wolfe is actually abouta town in which vampires “won” . And that’s just the most literal example of how new information or “lore” can be discovered in written stories by those who have superior “skill” in reading, to say nothing about higher-level concerns (i.e. rather than merely understanding what the work is saying, can I understand what the consequences of what it’s saying are, and whether or not I agree with them, and why?)
I was thinking that a game could present more author Text, while literary criticism can only offer alternatives through ambiguity.
I've had trouble understanding literary criticism before, so I intuitively see the additional text of a video game as more real (and therefore different) from literary implications. On reflection seems there's less difference than I thought
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