STORMCROW'S PROFILE

Are these all original pixels I'm looking at? Gorgeous stuff, great art style!

So, with 15+ years of gammak under my belt, my opinion on this is that side projects are a lie. Every side project I have ever started has either monopolized my interest and attention to the point where it replaced my main project, or just gradually withered on the vine from being ignored. And yes, the implication of that is that my displaced "main" projects wind up dying on the vine from being ignored. I think more than half of the "main" project I've ever had were side projects at first.

I try to do what LockeZ described I guess I just lack the discipline. The folder with the games I've started since returning to this hobby/scene last Spring is called "I Have A Compulsion". There are 6 theoretically active projects in there, but I have 7 theoretically active projects total: my "main" project, The Staircase, lives outside the compulsion folder. Of these projects, two are already finished, one is the one I'm working on now, and the remaining four (including my "main" project that I'm not working on at all because I'm working on my "side" project) will most likely never be finished. The folder is called what it's called because I think I literally have a compulsion to start new game projects.

To me, the first 24-48 hours of work on an RM project are pure joy, and not too far after that point, it becomes pure unpaid labor. So it's clear it's the "new project joy" that I'm addicted to, so to speak. But with 4 projects that will almost certainly never be finished, the effort put in to make them is at least mostly wasted (it's never a complete waste of effort, I find, because even now, as someone who's been doing RPG Maker longer than some of the people doing RPG Maker nowadays have been alive, I'm still constantly learning things).

Anyway, with my compulsion and general lack of discipline, I think the best I can thing I can do is to keep myself mono-maniacally on one project at a time in the hopes of actually one day finishing it.

author=Darken
As someone who has beaten GTAV and has watched repeats of the story through speedrun osmosis: I'm gonna ditto Shinan. It does not matter if the character faces some kind of hardship if the solution is do cool badass bank robbery /james bond stuff.

But it's not actually a solution, is the thing. Michael, who I consider to be the main character because he's



is just as much of a miserable fuck as he was when the story started. All of this shit happened, all of these heists and gunfights (Shakespeare: tale told by idiot/sound and fury/signifying nothing), and in the end it doesn't make one whit of difference. You know that poem, the Jabberwocky? It's the videogame equivalent of that. At the end, those borogroves are still all mimsy and them mome raths be outgrabing. (Yes, that was an allusion to Lewis Caroll.)

author=Darken
At the very least the game needs to not be about exerting power or removing peoples lives.

First off, Spec Ops: The Line would like a word with you. It is a game about exerting power and killing people. It is also the exact opposite of a power fantasy.

And I'm pretty sure I strongly disagree in general, at least I think.

How many people are you allowed to kill in a videogame before that becomes what it's about?

Conversely, how few people must you kill in a game in order for it to NOT be about taking people's lives?

What about every survival horror/survival whatever game ever? You kill plenty of stuff in those. But when those games are doing their jobs right, you feel like you're barely surviving, no matter how much firepower you might bring to bear. Doing everything you can to barely survive is again the opposite of a power fantasy.

I remember there was some foofaraw over ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock Infinite (one of my favorite games of all time). While the game certainly had obvious elements of power fantasy and also did have some design and storytelling problems, I never felt that Booker DeWitt slaughtering swathes and swathes of racist assholes was at all at odds with the game's narrative or characters. The story lays down pretty explicitly that DeWitt is an accomplished killer of men and has been long before arriving at Columbia: he may enjoy it, he may feel remorse/regret/guilt over it, hell, maybe some combination of the two or neither, who knows, he's not exactly the type to talk about his feelings.

On a whole, I don't think the game CAN be reasonably considered a power fantasy when in the end all of the power & powers you exert is ultimately in service of (MAJOR SPOILERS)



I love the Uncharted series but it's got to be the most glaring example of ludonarrative dissonance in modern gams. Nathan Drake is a well-rounded multidimensional character and a loveable rakish rogue/scoundrel/hero with a heart of gold and a great sense of humor...whenever he is not methodically murdering scores of his fellow human beings. It causes quite the whiplash.

I don't think a game necessarily needs to be as blatantly subversive as Spec Ops: The Line to have you kill lots and lots of people and not be a power fantasy. And also it's probably worth mentioning that some of the best storytelling in games comes packaged with the power fantasy approach: consider how power and player agency and interactive storytelling are combined in Deus Ex.

author=Darken
I think autuership is a load of bullshit though, so it's more hoping that video games don't fall into it beyond mimicry comparisons. Mainly to avoid the cult of personality problems that come with it.

Ironically, the one arena in video games where I think auteurship is actually happening is right here in the RM sphere (for reasons so obvious I don't think they need stating).

@Shinan:

I don't think that taking a game's narrative/dialogue/writing at face value is falling into a trap and I think that's kind of a strange and negative way of looking at it. As someone that tells stories for a living, I try to give other storytellers the benefit of the doubt as much as possible.

author=Shinan
You seem to be treating GTA5 (which, yes I haven't played, but every single GTA since San Andreas has done this. Watch Niko get torn up about killing a mobster and getting flashbacks to murdering innocent villagers in the Balkans... After just running over dozens of pedestrians with a taxi) as a movie, completely disregarding all the gameplay elements.

You see, a lot of these gameplay elements you can control. And I play any game that I play in any genre that has player agency and choices like I would a roleplaying game (I mean that in the specifically Western sense). And in turn, I take my cues for how to roleplay from how the characters are portrayed in the scenes that I don't control (yes, I play every single game this way). So I don't run over dozens of pedestrians with a taxi cab for no good reason because nothing, I try to have each character do what they would logically do the way they would logically do it. When I'm playing GTA V I even make some effort to drive like a normal person. I mean, blasting through stop signs and traffic lights at illegal speeds is something any of the three criminals you play as would do, but killing dozens of innocent people in the process is a big deal and I play the game in such a way that I refrain from doing that.

As you can imagine, I have myself created a very distinct difference between playing as Michael and playing as Trevor. The former at least has some nominal vestige of respect for human lives.

Now, my obsession with roleplaying in every genre of game is my own unique quirk, but it doesn't change the fact that the degree of ludonarrative dissonance depends on your approach to playing the game. If you ignore the cues from the story and decide to go on massive murder rampages for lulz, that's fine, but to a great degree you're creating the ludonarrative dissonance.

Which is especially funny after all the people talking about how games and movies are different media and shouldn't try to be each other.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands (or for that matter, Call of Duty: Black Ops, etcetera, many but by no means all games of that ilk) all at some point pretty much get the point across that you are not, exactly, a good guy. There's a moment in the first Black Ops where you're playing as Ed Harris and you are stuffing broken glass into a guy's mouth and then punching him in the face as an "enhanced interrogation" technique and it's like...wait, what the FUCK am I pressing X to do, aren't we the good guys? (And then because the writing in that game is garbage about two minutes later the same guy is inviting you to raid his personal armory and helping you escape like there's no hard feelings, but I digress.)

I find playing someone that is not necessarily a good guy interesting. Whether they have any remorse for their actions or not. In Wildlands, it is pretty obvious that Karen Bowman your handler is a seriously evil ruthless heartless bitch and by implication the CIA is exactly like her. You do some very morally questionable things in that game. Things that your characters discuss being uncomfortable with. In the end, as a player you're left wondering which is the lesser of two evils. I mean, to be clear, in real life as well as in video games, narco-states are super fucking bad and I think that the imperialist US military-intelligence complex is definitely the lesser of two evils here, but the point is the game acknowledges that it is about the lesser of two evils by acknowledging the evil on the player's side.

Now, Wildlands is totally a power fantasy, to be clear. It's like Just Cause with a coat of (it's all relative) "gritty realism" lacquered on. You're controlling the four most badass special operators on the planet and taking down an entire nation one province at a time in whatever order you want using whatever means you want. It is also not a roleplaying game (I no longer consider things like levels and stat progressions and skill trees to be RPG elements, they are things that have simply been absorbed into the omnigame, the ur-game, the vidya singularity) primarily because at no point do you get to make any meaningful choices about the morally ambiguous situation you're in.

Just so you don't think I'm like, making a point of disagreeing with everything you have to say, I will say you're right about the CoD/Battlefield franchises in general: their overall message that "war is terrible...and AWESOME!"/"war is hell...and TOTALLY SWEET!" is about as clear as mud.

Personally, I don't need anything as explicit as the character having a moment of crisis, or a breakdown, or getting their comeuppance, or switching sides, for these degrees of nuance to matter. The texture itself adds to the game's story.

"The 'good guys' do a lot of very bad things to save the world, enough bad things that good guys is in scare quotes."

is already an infinitely more interesting story (to me, anyway) than

"The good guys save the world".

I'm a little confused, is this over now or is it still ongoing?

That's a good tip, dethmetal.