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JuliusHackebeil on 15 December 2024
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SvennoJ said:

Fighting and exploration is much more impactful on me from fantasy and sci-fi books, like Brandon Sorenson, Tad Williams and Peter F Hamilton can describe them. Games never come close to that. Books can literally make my heart pound while reading, can make me feel fear especially while describing claustrophobic sections (which have no impact on me in movies nor VR) and make me tear up or laugh out loud.

Emergent story telling is great but the undirected nature gives it little flow nor purpose. At most I feel like a cartographer in games, mapping out the play area (in my head or opening up the in game map). Over the decades I've become less and less interested in the actual combat, and my emergent 'stories' are now mostly about exploration of the world. My TotK / BotW memories are all about world exploration. Same for Dark Souls, the world in the art piece that sticks with me. The combat, I just remember Ornstein and Smough being a pita due to player invasions. Meanwhile futuristic battles describe by Peter F Hamilton, amazing what he can conjure up in your mind.

So yes interactivity to me is mostly exploring the game worlds, like exploring a museum / park / nature area.

The extra mechanics are cool but despite having played GoW1, I don't remember that at all, made no impact. I do remember Brother's mechanic but it didn't feel emotional at the time. It was as simple as press X to jump in my mind. The story made the impact, the 'mechanic' just felt like a clever trick like changing controller ports in MGS. In IcO it wasn't the hand holding mechanic that made me care for Yorda, it was the repetitive threat and having to run back to defend her over and over.

So no, these interactions are not displaying any artistic merrit to me. Controls are still a filter limiting how we can interact with the virtual worlds. The only game I felt where the controls had artistic merrit is Pixeljunk 3AM, where you use the move controllers to create music with different effects. Basically turning the move controllers into electronic instruments. Music is powerful!

Wow, this take really surprised me, coming from someone on a video game enthusiast forum and especially coming from you, knowing that your really like VR. No book (and I studied literature by the way) has ever made me feel dread and horror as much as the first moldead in RE7 standing up from the bath tub. Doing the things yourself is always more impactful to me than reading about them. And I always feel butten presses are closer to the action than reading. Letters and reading are more abstract to me than a control scheme of a game, especially in VR, where you have way more fine grain control over your actions and way less is lost in transition.

Spoilers for MGS3, 4, Journey, Flower, The Last Guradian, Shadow of the Colossus:

I know you said you cared about Yorda because of the games structure and mechanics (having to go back and defnding her). But caring about an NPC and feeling artistic merit coming from interactivity are still different. So I am curious if any other sort / moment of interaction with a game had artistic merit to you. You mentioned both MGS and exploration: Part 4 and coming back to Shadow Moses? Or part three the gunshot at the end? Or in The Last Guardian, controling (trying to control) the creature, having to send it away? In Flower, flying into the city? In Journey, overcoming the mountain? In Shadow of the Colossus, trying to fight the pull of the light?

And making music did it for you? Really surprising stuff. Cannot remember if we ever talked about it (I think we did). Have you ever tried "dreams" from Media Molecule? Creating music and everything else that could have a place in a video game. That game is really special to me (even if I created dreadfully little).