Beyond reviews

[Veknoid_Outcast]

the-pi-guy said:

Veknoid_Outcast said:
Now you're the one speaking in absolutes. 

Like it or not, I can be troubled by just about anything I want, your criteria notwithstanding. Again, there was no implication of anything beyond what I literally said: that I was bothered by his vision of video games. There's no secret message buried there. His vision for games is far different from my own. That's it.

As for your second paragraph, yes, movies and some games are similar in that they share a cinematic presentation and follow similar narrative logic, but they are so dissimilar in terms of storytelling and interactivity that the comparison becomes pointless. A game has more than one storyteller and is subject to change. A movie has a single storyteller and cannot be changed. Watch The Graduate 1,000 times and it will always end the same way; play Final Fantasy VII 1,000 times and you can experience it 1,000 different ways.

I just think Cage is barking up the wrong tree. Developers should be looking at new ways to PLAY games, not new ways to extract "meaning" from them.

Well, I think looking for new ways to extract meaning is Cage's motivation for finding new ways to play.  New ideas are rarely just formed, they are often created by taking influence from other areas.  His taking ideas from movies isn't a bad thing, it's a great thing.  We're finally at a place where we can comfortably take lessons from another source (movies) and apply them to games with in many ways impressive results.  

Interactive story telling like Cage is doing is awesome because it is not really something that games try to do, well lately they have been in their own ways and movies can't do.  You and I can play Beyond and get different story lines.  We can both take very different things away from playing it.  With movies that is not the case and with most games that is not the case.  

I don't know about that. I think his talk about "meaning" and "emotion" signals that his interest is in storytelling, not in developing new and interesting mechanics, which, in my mind, are the bedrock of video games. In other words, he's not finding new ways to play; he's finding new ways to show. And while video games are clearly a visual medium, they are first a foremost a set of rules and challenges that players must obey and overcome, respectively. Therein lies the challenge of games, therein lies the fun. Cage seems to want to take the window dressing and make it sine qua non, and that, to me, is a disaster in the making.