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Weekend Confirmed 144 - Holiday Special Part 1 - 2012 retrospective
by Jeff Mattas, Dec 21, 2012 11:00am PSTThis week kicks off a special two-part episode of Weekend Confirmed to celebrate the best in gaming for 2012. A cavalcade of special guests joins Garnett, Jeff Cannata, and "Indie" Jeff Mattas, including Shacknews' Andrew Yoon, James Stevenson from Insomniac, Jason Paul from Naughty Dog, Andrea Rene from Machinima, and comedian Christian Spicer. Personal favorites of the year are revealed, and much fun and merriment is had by all. Be sure to tune in next week for Part 2 of the special Weekend Confirmed holiday/end-of-2012 celebration, too!
Weekend Confirmed Ep. 144: 12/21/2012
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Show Breakdown:
Round 1 - 00:00:50 - 00:32:19
Whatcha' Been Playin Part 1 - 00:33:04 - 01:04:24
Whatcha Been Playin Part 2 01:05:08 - 01:42:40
Listener Feedback/Front Page News - 01:43:23 - 02:19:06
Tailgate - 02:19:46 - 02:26:03
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Mike Schramm @MikeSchramm
Jason Paul @jmpaul
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Original music in the show by Del Rio. Get his latest Album, Club Tipsy on iTunes. Check out more, including the Super Mega Worm mix and other mash-ups on his ReverbNation page or Facebook page, and follow him on twitter @delriomusic.
Comments
So the reason Mass Effect 3 fails, where as TWD succeeds, is that ME is asking the player to project a personality onto their avatar, where as TWD is asking the player to change what happens by changing what an existing character does. Its like giving the player the opportunity to participate in a person's life Ground Hog Day style.
That said, everyone who is engaged in this debate, and deriding The Walking Dead as not qualifying as a game, needs to watch this trailer for the PS2 title Shadow of Destiny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9e4fkop7CE
"It may seem trivial,
but suppose you're in a cafe
trying to decide between coffee and tea.
The you that chooses coffee,
after a long deliberation,
and the you that chooses tea
actually both exist."
And a tag line: "Life is a wheel of changes."
This is an adventure game with 8 endings, and dozens of variations in the plot leading up to those endings. It is no more mechanically in depth than the Walking Dead, but it does compensate the player for figuring out a variety ways to shape the long term outcome of the plot.
"Player choice" is a falsehood, but branching narrative is not.
So on The Walking Dead you can't just say it isn't a game because the architecture of the design is built around its story. And likewise you can not just isolate the story itself and proclaim that it isn't "game." The story of TWD is intrinsic to what kind of game it is.
So likewise on Mass Effect, it is irresponsible for a critic of games to just throw up his or her hands and say "well there's just no way they could have actually made the story different based on your choices." That game's failure was based on the false concept of the player projecting his or her individuality into the experience, and conflating that with strong narrative.
Also props to Garnet for going all out on this episode.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 26 replies.
The point about board games is this: they're games. Just as sports are games. Just as games are games. Games in all flavours have evolved for centuries without the inevitable endpoint being that they become storytelling media. If that were the case, all sports would be just like the WWE.
Video games are unique in that, yes, they can have it both ways. If we actually were going to have it both ways in the future, that would be wonderful, but I've seen or heard nothing to convince me that this is going to happen. Your sweeping generalization of the fighting game community betrays you in that respect.
But if you're right, and the resurgence of popularity in fighting games is due to people's enjoyment of watching cartoons punch each other, and the popularity of Call of Duty is from tweenage boys watching things go boom, then the rise of story games and the decline of mechanics driven games are one and the same trend.
Street Fighter is neither deeper nor more shallow than The Walking Dead, they're just different. The depth of one game is in it's narrative, and the depth of the other is in it's mechanics, and they both play to their strengths. But the strength of each game is either a weakness in the other, if not a burden that was better off being cut out.
If the appeal of fighting games is the novelty of watching a dude punch another dude, as you say, then clearly, mechanics driven games have lost, because we're looking at them on the same terms that we would a narrative driven game. If all is as you say it is, then the games I love to play are either going away, or are going to be simplified to the point where there's no reason to even bother.
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