domain:kvetch.substack.com
Fair point, but I would maintain that there is still a significant difference in reach and intended audience between the big-name game companies of the 90s and those of the 2020s.
Wow. There are no bodies?
Cremation couldn’t have been involved, perhaps?
It's a common misconception that performing a cremation burns the entire corpse to ash. Even a modern crematory furnace leaves behind thousands of identifiable bone fragments. For example, teeth do not cremate to ash, they calcinate and remain perfectly identifiable after a cremation. As Revisionists have pointed out:
And finally, we must note that the teeth of the supposed victims could not have been destroyed by the primitive methods attested to. Even if each of the alleged victims had only 20 of the usual 32 teeth left at the time he or she died, there would have been at least 17.5 million teeth to be disposed of at Treblinka. This means that we should still be able to find some 5 teeth per cubic foot of the 3.53 million cu.ft. of material excavated at the alleged site of the crime.
And there would have been orders of magnitude more identifiable bone fragments for each victim than teeth for that matter. If what is claimed actually happened, even if all the victims were cremated, there would be metric tons of physical evidence which could be easily found within a single afternoon of digging.
Even in a murder case, when there is a suspected cremation of the victim involved, it's equally important for investigators to excavate the remains of a murder victim. In no case would investigators say "oh well witnesses say the victim was cremated and buried there, so I guess there's no point in doing a dig to prove that's actually what happened."
Like, it’s remarkable you bring up the apparently fake Canadian graves, when the same technique was used at Treblinka and they found stuff.
No mass graves have ever been excavated at Treblinka. You say "they found stuff", whatever that means, but no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site.
Try to at least be aware of evidence you claim doesn’t exist:
I am well aware of the studies by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, I've read through her papers. You should be aware of the evidence you are citing:
"...We knew where the mass graves were and we weren’t going there,” Sturdy Colls says. These initial assurances, she adds, helped the rabbis feel comfortable letting the team excavate around the gas chambers, as they were not located on top of a mass-grave site. “Because of the way these technologies respected the religious law, they actually facilitated the investigation.”
"The techniques respected the religious law" is referring to the "technique" of purely using GPR to identify a mass grave with no subsequent excavation to actually prove what the ground disturbance was. She did not find any mass graves, she did exactly what they did at the Kamloops site.
The methods used by Caroline Colls to identify the "possible mass graves" were the exact same as the Kamloops hoax: GPR results were used to call ground disturbances "mass graves" and then they were forbidden from excavating the ground disturbances based on claims of cultural sensitivity.
She did, though, excavate human remains about 1km from the site of the alleged Treblinka mass graves. She went to a marked Christian graveyard, found a few bones, and then cried on camera. No problem disturbing those graves!
The most dramatic piece of evidence uncovered at the Treblinka extermination camp was not any mass grave, it was a clay tile which Caroline Colls misidentifies as showing a Jewish Star of David whereas in reality it was the brand mark of a porcelain factory in Poland.
Imagine you bring in the TV cameras with an archaeological team to investigate a crime scene where 900,000 were murdered. You don't find any mass graves, but you find a terracotta tile and immediately jump to the conclusion that the tile featured a Star of David to lure Jews inside the gas chamber, whereas in reality it was a manufacturer's branding. But nobody watching the TV show is going to learn the truth about that tile, or wonder why they are making much ado about a terracotta tile instead of investigating the enormous amounts of physical evidence that would be right beneath them, if what is claimed actually happened.
The reality is Caroline Colls did the exact same thing as the Kamloops archaeologists: use GPR to claim to have found mass graves, but don't excavate any of the disturbances you are claiming contain mass graves. It should also be pointed out the GPR results themselves run completely contrary to witness testimony regarding the size, shape, and locations of the mass graves. The GPR results do not prove any mass graves at Treblinka, but they disprove witness testimony about them. If they actually did a scientific investigation of the site and excavated them, it would immediately disprove the story.
Like I said, there has never been a single excavation of a mass grave on this site because Jewish authorities forbid it using the exact same claims as the perpetrators of the Kamloops mass grave hoax.
Edit: Here's an update on the Kamloops situation, if anybody is wondering, from a couple of weeks ago:
The Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc band is not close to excavating the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, where it says it found signs of graves nearly three years ago.
In May of 2021, the band announced it had found signs of 200 probable graves on grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School through a ground-penetrating radar survey.
During a press conference announcing a sacred covenant between the band and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, reporters asked Kúkpi7 Rosanne Casimir if there was an update on the identification of the unmarked graves anomalies, if any excavation of the site had been completed to date and, if not, whether there were any plans to do so in 2024.
“We have not started excavation,” Casmir said.
Tk’emlúps spokesperson Racelle Kooy told reporters the band is still at a point of doing archival research in its investigation.
“We’re still at the oral tellings with the truth telling part of it,” Casimir added.
Casimir said any talk of excavation of the site “is very intrusive” and it is “a very sensitive step moving forward.”
She said taking that step will entail a lot of dialogue, with supports in place for band members and residential school survivors, as well as collaboration with other First Nations impacted by the Kamloops Residential School.
“And we're not at that point yet. We're still very early,” Casimir said.
Casimir said the band intends to provide updates “at key points” in its investigation into the probable graves.
“We will be sure to reach out and share,” Casimir said.
In September of 2021 Kooy told reporters at a press conference the band had done “non-invasive work to date” at the site.
It's literally the exact same script as the Treblinka case. Rely on "oral truth-telling" and refuse to excavate, claiming cultural sensitivity, because you know it would disprove the stories which have gained enormous cultural prominence based on extremely thin physical evidence.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29d ago
To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.
Lewis2
29d ago
A couple of points. First, although I suppose it wasn’t clear, I was responding to RandomRanger’s last sentence, which I do think is wrong. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a group that is more stable than the Amish, even though they have opted to go without modernity to some extent (the extent varies by Gemeinde).
Secondly, going back to coffee_enjoyer’s comment, I didn’t take him to be saying that we would need to adopt the Amish life wholesale, but instead that we could carefully pick and choose which parts we wanted to adopt (“incorporating such things into modern life”), just as the Amish carefully decide which parts of modernity they want to adopt. Some kind of synthesis between the two cultures would probably be a net gain over the current state of the modern West. If nothing else, I think the average modern person would benefit massively from the strong sense of community that the Amish have.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
Funny you mention that. I'd heard enough positive chatter about it that I bought it on sale and jumped in almost completely blind. I've been very pleasantly surprised, and I'm about 4 hours in.
This kind of petty antagonism is unbecoming of you.
I know there are plenty of regulars here who are fond of noticing, and working that into the conversation, however, George doesn't seem to be like that, but regardless, accusations such as:
I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.
are unacceptable.
You're a valued poster, but please, the angry nihilistic Russian trope can get old, as does lashing out at little provocation.
WaltBismarck
29d ago
obviously traits that are more physically apparent are more salient to social stigma of interracial marriage
this is a weird gotcha that utterly misses the point
Jiro
29d ago
Explaining that we're on the edge of the map and can't move any further
This is like complaining that on page 83 of your printed book, there's the number 83 written in the corner and you think that nobody in the book has a reason to say "83" in character.
Even if it's a character who speaks the line (I can't access the link), that's a genre convention and has no bearing on writing quality.
TowardsPanna
29d ago
Good thing I used spoiler tags then. :D Have fun!
Has that book been released in English? Do you recommend it? What kind of Mottizen?
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
29d ago
If the relevant authorities are all atomic apocalypse positivists we're also fucked. Yah' just have to trust in people not ending the world sometimes.
I got to agree that the highest achievement for a game is to be able to carry its narrative in its gameplay. To do the opposite of the often mentionned ludo-narrative dissonance and achieve ludo-narrative convergence.
Another example that attempts to achieve both kinds of narrative crafting (both through writing and ludo-narrative convergence) I'd say is Death Stranding. It only achieves ones of them (ludo-narrative convergence), the writing being symptomatic of a man who has been told too much he is a genius and started believing it. But the way the gameplay is structured seems to be tailor made to reinforce the game's theme: cooperation is better than isolation. The game forces you to forge ahead in areas that are without any infrastructure, and that is where things are at their most risky. Once the region is connected, you can build infrastructure, but the costs are usually exorbitant, requiring unfun grinding to achieve. But the online system sometimes puts other people's constructions in your game, the more time you spend in a region helping the NPCs the more help you get from other players, and what was once difficult treks across inhospitable terrain becomes trivial milk runs due to all the roads and bridges you've made. And eventually you're spending hours building a zipline network in the most challenging region of the game not even for yourself since you don't have to stay there anymore, but for other players to enjoy. The game makes you altruistic. Not by forcing cooperation onto you or by heavily incentivising it, that would be meaningless, but by making you feel grateful for other people's help and by making you feel the gratitude of others (those almost meaningless likes you get when someone mashes a button on infrastructure you built).
I don't know if I can think of any game in older generations that have achieved such a tight integration of narrative in its gameplay. It's the exact opposite of Spec Ops: The Line.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
29d ago
I think that's a great edit because it makes the non-sequitur in the final paragraph very clear.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
29d ago
I don't think I am that successful yet but I do think I can't thrive to the extent I can in a city in an Amish community. Do note that doing many of the things you suggested, they wouldn't remain Amish for long.
The Amish can greatly increase their yields using modern farming equipment...
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
29d ago
There is a whole book on it too which is neat:
https://www.bitmapbooks.com/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition
WestphalianPeace
29d ago
There is also the issue of budgets. It costs more and more to make a video game. How big did a studio need to be to make a JRPG for the ps2 vs how big does it need to be for the ps4. As it gets more costly to make a console game the harder it is to justify taking a risk on an interesting narrative. I loved Specs Ops: The Line and I maintain that it's the best way to read Heart of Darkness. But I simply can't imagine it getting made in this environment.
PC gaming is getting better and better though, if only through accumulation over time. And if you consider visual novels like Utawarerumono to count as video games then things have never been better. More top 5% of visual novels are out then ever before. I remember when it was regarded as an unprecedented victory when we got VNDB's 3rd most highly rated VN (Muv Luv Alternative), let alone the more obscure stuff, or legendary H games like the Rance series, Evenicle, or Dohna Dohna.
On a more narrative stories with plots, etc point we did get Disco Elysium, which was pure lightening in a bottle never to be regained. If you have not played it before it simply must be experienced. Suzerain may count, although it's characters are more expressions of political factions that exist and the real character is the nature of Turkiye post WW-2. But books have used individuals to express such situations for a very long time now.
Overall I think both your initial argument and your critique of my own are strong.
Perhaps it's that when graphics were bad and gameplay restricted that one of the only options left was to rely on strong writing. But now that graphics are good pretty much everywhere and gameplay design is a fairly well mastered craft there is just not as much pressure to perform on narrative. But that's just an intuition.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
29d ago
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But regardless, it should be clearly marked. Many of them seem not to have a mute button at all.
WhiningCoil
29d ago
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
It also applies to South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. If there are any nations one would consider woke in the Pacific, it would be Australia and New Zealand. Wokeness is a Western mindbug, not an American one.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Whites were never under threat of being virtually extinguished in the US in the 1600s - 1800s.
Harlequin5942
29d ago
I believe that there are writers primarily motivated by money, but that's not the same as being emotionally uninvested in a story. (This is distinct from being passionate, in a strong sense, about the story.) However, yes, I think it's hard for someone to prove that they aren't emotionally invested at all. How does one prove such a thing? 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?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Yes, something like this would be great to have at the top of the post. Most of this could be understood by carefully reading the entire post, but something like this would be helpful to know if reading the post would be of interest in the first place.
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.
roystgnr
29d ago
Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings?
The theory I've heard is that they can't sell the stories afterward.
Currently they're making their profits off blockbusters, where after putting a quarter billion dollars into production and marketing you've got too much on the line to risk your dialogue not being trailer-worthy and lowest-common-denominator approved, and if you know your best sequences are going to be CGI kaiju fighting, why would you shorten those just to buy time to make a side character slightly more well-rounded? But mid-budget films, the ones where they used to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to get back a few more tens of millions, aren't working out so well as they used to ... and yet it's the mid-budget range that used to occasionally spiral into massive box office successes and Oscar takeaways for the biggest winners, because they were in the sweet spot where they were cheap enough for directors to take risks, too cheap to replace characterization with special effects, and yet expensive enough to exhibit real production quality behind the risky ideas that worked out.
I have no idea whether this theory is actually true; there doesn't seem to be nearly as much overlap as I'd like between "people who actually know something about the movie industry" and "people who back up their theories with quantitative analyses".
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 on 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.
More options
Context Copy link