Відео

I used to look up to Jonathan Blow - I adore the Witness and think its lessons about game design and player instruction are deeply important - but watching him play Elden Ring was surreal and swiftly eroded my respect for the man. He knows how to make games, but he doesn't understand games. It's such bizarre cognitive dissonance. Also, the random, edgy low-key gamergate-adjacent misogynistic or "anti-woke" sort of comment he drops are, I guess, not entirely off-brand, but sill disappointing as well.

1:13:20 I can think of a quite a few games that balance story, lore, and gameplay into a healthy balance, for the most part. From what I know, the games I know that do this include Nier Automata, Undertale, Wonder song, Celeste, Hollow Knight, Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, most of the LoZ games, Fable (it literally has morality as a mechanic). While each of these are from different genres and different grades of sub genres or other genre influences and different levels of difficulty and progression, each integrate their story into gameplay rather well. I do notice that there is a major drop in this in modern games, which is rather disappointing. And I think the best thing about gameplay being recognized as an aesthetic medium for storytelling is that flows so well with other aspects, like visual arts, music, and story writing. But it's up to the developer to recognize not only that this is aspect of games, but must embrace and innovate that in their creations to the best degree possible, and show their audience what's possible. To note I'm not saying Mark is wrong, he's absolutely right, if those two overlap too much it's rather boring or uninteresting, or have more than one over the other if both are present by too much. You might as well watch a movie instead, or listen to an audiobook (no diss on those btw). But they have to balanced and emphasized in proportion for the player have a good time in what you are trying to make the game do. For a game to have a good story and gameplay there has to be a consistency that is entertaining and clear to the play of what they can and can't do during the experience. For example, Dark Souls succeeds in both, making it feel satisfying and understood the more one plays the game. On another hand take a game like Skyrim. The game fails in pacing in both departments, making the experience bland or questionable. I will have to respectfully disagree with Mark's take on JRPGs, which I understand as he the kind of gamer that focuses on skill based games, like shmups, fighters, precise platformers, which is great and I love those too. But when one approaches JRPGs they need to have a different approach to it than other genres due to how they layer storytelling and progression with characters into the game. Let's take the famous Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei series. Both of these integrate their mechanics and sense of progression into their characters as a symbolic but very clear parallel to character and story progression, with Final Fantasy focusing on themes of bonding with people and the human spirit, or SMT focusing the psychological choices one has on the world and on themselves (Persona does this wonderfully). Action isn't necessary to tell a good story, as thought and depth creates bond and clear influences of characters in game. Some legendary examples would include games like Terranigma and Chrono Trigger, SMT 3, FF6, and FFX. Sorry for the text dump.

simple, you spam the heck out of the screen pixels until you have your image, use ray traced raster with entity sphere bvh, with screen vertical/horizontal lines as the intersection planes

On the issue of story(telling) in classic RPGs, the grind of progression should be seen as a parallel form of character development, where the time investment in empowering characters to successfully overcome the next set of challenges is equally a form of narrative investment (and vice-versa). When the grind is decoupled from narrative relevance you start to get that dissonance. I notice this a lot with single character so-called action RPGs, where you are constantly cued to finick over your build in ways that have very little relevance to how you will overcome ensuing parts of the game. The same few dominant strategies prevail everywhere, and the whole gamut of character progression - skilling up but also gearing up, and therefore inventory management and the inevitable crafting - begins to feel like a side task unrelated to the immediate problems of narrative progression. In classic JRPGs, characters were introduced on the premise that they would be essential to your immediate success through the next phases of the main questline. This often resulted in gratitude for and bonding with said characters, resulting in further narrative investment, and so on.

Beautiful discussion. Agree with Mark about video game story telling 100%. Its more operatic in that way. A good example of this is the Tomb Raider series. The original Core Design games have a very basic story and Lara is barely even a character, more like a figure or archetype. Its all vibes and gameplay. When Crystal Dynamics took over and pivoted towards a cinematic approach it became a very bland and uninteresting 3rd person action game. This obsession with psychology and relatable "characters" is a huge misstep in my opinion. As it is not like suddenly we have some European arthouse film type of character study..no we have a character that is even less interesting than the painting of an abstract person that we had with the original games.

The take about jrpgs and grinding is pretty misguided imo. Every good jrpg I’ve played I have never felt like I needed to grind and the game itself is still challenging and requires skill and knowledge. SMT Nocturne, FFX come to mind.

This is a really great listen

damn i remember listening to your cs podcasts

"Hibachi's sprite is just this little pile of shit" LMFAO

i think that jonathon should have been given some time to promote his game as a favor for being on the show

One thing I have trouble with is that Mark seems to believe that games journalists simulataneously force their tastes onto the public and also seemlingly just tell the public what they want to hear (i.e. God Hand) and like, it can't exactly be both. What I believe is that these major outlets are simply a reflection of the modern mainstream consensus and how that consensus arrived where it is today is a lot more complicated than "well, cuz IGN said so".

I loved StarCraft 1. I was hooked from that initial cinematic with the salvagers getting killed by zerg in the space station. Such an iconic cinematic! I hated Broodwar. I hated the shallow, ultra-evil Kerrigan and the whole super swarmy zerg thing, and it seemed like the whole game was just totally dominated by all that. It was painful and horrific to see it become massively popular. I just flat out refused to buy it or play it at all. When StarCraft 2 came out, at first I wasn't sure if I liked it more or less than StarCraft 1. The graphics were better, but somehow a bit strange. The pathing was more free and responsive, but I wasn't used to it. But I got use to it, and after I did, when I'd go back and try to play StarCraft 1, it seemed like StarCraft 2 was so much better that I didn't even want to play StarCraft 1 anymore. One thing I really appreciated about SC2 was shorter matches. 10 to 25 minutes is great. 45 to 90 minutes to play one match is just too freaking long. I absolutely loved the story arc in SC2! I mean just watch this thing: ua-cam.com/video/w9Jyn3WRrJw/v-deo.html I know a lot of people hate it now, but. Whatever. I loved it. But the constant patching and changing of SC2 was kind of annoying. Just about the time I thought I was maybe figuring a few things out, I got the rug pulled out from under me. Over and over and over. But in the end, they kind of landed in what feels like a pretty good spot. I know BW became really popular in Korea, and remained so long after SC2's popularity rose and fell. Even after watching videos like this one, I'm still not exactly sure what that is about. It seems like it's just about the Korean love for retro games and their veneration of retro gaming skill, to the point where retro game champions become actual celebrities. BW is definitely a lot more retro than SC2.

2:20:38 this sounds just like what a cryptocurrency I've been wanting to create for years would provide. I wish it were done already. 😢

Partial rebuttal to the Chekhov's gun argument, if I understood it correctly. The argument is that it's noise if it is not used, and the point of gameplay is allowing the player not to use it. Mutually exclusive, right? What if the gun isn't noise, that if the player doesn't use it, then it's used in some other way. You could even make the player able to hide it, so it isn't used. I do however agree that this is just one choice, and fleshing this out with free choice to something meaningful that makes for a good and polished story is difficult with enough branching paths. This makes games a medium not very fit for it. A possible future solution could be AI, but it would have to get as good at telling stories as the best of writers.

Interviewer was great, and Casey had so much great knowledge to share

The same could be said of films. Do you really think that actors behave like real humans? Or that the stories are really plausibile? Do you even find even one single character in the movie you can relate to in terms of phylosofical principles or intelligence that doesn't get ignored or killed in the first few scenes?

I think videogames have wanted to immitate cinematic experience because there was a trend and there still is a trend of big game studios to make videogames more cinematic because that makes the game feel more epic and because of the competiton between the videogame companies to produce more hyper-realistic graphics, I assume because that also drew sales. What we ended up with, though, is The Uncanny Valley and shitty storylines because all the attention was paid on the presentation (graphics and sound) and because of the "Cargo Cult" effect.

3:25 exactly. When you give the player all the option, he ends up discarding 90% of them to keep only the best of each. And in fact it renders the game more limited, less interesting in the end.

nah

Highly disaggre. Enjoy being misinformed.

It was crackdown 1. There were 500 agility orbs. I was stupid. I got 499 of them. Forgive me, I was 13 lmao.

The Last of Us had a superb story by any standard. Compared to books or movies, not just other games.

I could insert a coin between Pr0nogo's teeth. Facts aside, invaluable content 👏

Jonathan Blow has interesting insights when it comes to game design, but his takes on storytelling in games leave much to be desired.

Who's watching this after CrowdStrike? @8:00

This podcast auto played for me and i gotta say, great content guys. Earned a viewer in me

casey advocating for central bank digital currency without knowing it. which is cringe. both CBDC and the fact that he is unaware of what he's doing. the irony is that *he* is the one effectively saying "yeah but they wouldn't do that" in response to the hypothetical of nation states violating the rules of the financial system

fire emblem has been scoring your performance since the famicom bro

this is way better to listen to than castle super beast

Ayo the interviewer has got some good style!

Haven't watched the video yet, but I'd take the quote in the thumbnail one step further. Gameplay _is_ story.

Mark got me into Wanted Dead such a lovely game. Great conversation!

I absolutely loved your take on speed running nofraud!!

Wow, I LOVE the idea that video games are closer artistically to music than any other medium. Mark has opened my mind to a lot of game design truths, and completely changed the way I think about games! Dark Souls is my favorite game of all time, and it's because it evokes a story with difficulty. The story of Dark Souls IS your struggle with the game and the world.

In response to your comments about experience points always being bad: have you ever played a roguelike? Not the fluff that gets called roguelike these days, I mean an actual roguelike, like Nethack, DCSS or, well, Rogue. Keeping up with the experience curve is critical to success in these games, and mechanics like the food clock disallow grinding forever, forcing the player to constantly evaluate their own strength vs the enemies in front of them, whether they should flee or fight, use a consumable, etc. The randomness also makes finding new gear or skills meaningful, because the player must think critically about how to incorporate the new stuff into their current run.

excellent discussion i hit a new pb in hyper demon while watching this

such a verbose host

excellent discussion guys! Thank you

If your story is better than your gameplay, you should write a book or make a movie.

Oh man, this get better and better the more you watch. Thank you for this interview, I'm a fan of this dude so much now. Indie til death.

Great conversation. Thanks for the video!

Really enjoyed this guest.

When i play games these days "skip intro skip dialogue skip dialogue skip cutscene... ahh playing.... skip tutorial skip more dialogue skip skip"

i think a good example of a player skill forward jrpg would be Etrian Odyssey

Meh, don't really agree with around 9:30. Games can get really close to what other media does in terms of story telling, even by default. Don't really agree with most of his sentiments as far as gameplay paradigms contextualized by storytelling is concerned, but I guess that's a matter of opinion too, to some degree at least.

38:00 I'd be super interested to get his take on Bloodborne. I feel like that is the most perfectly realized world from Fromsoft. The story is both obvious (show don't tell) but convoluted. The way the world tells that story through a mostly linear experience is masterful.

Many of the issues with contemporary game reviews isn't even necessarily inherent to journalism. It's also part of a wider issue in the field in that the model at these outlets isn't actually journalism anymore; it's content farming.

1:22:00 An approach I've seen work in another game to slow pacing and help stabilize the early game is to increase the cost of economy and production structures while keeping unit costs constant, that way ramping up production is more expensive, but rebuilding from a bad fight isn't putting you as far behind your opponent.

Also about the lore of games: Older games had the movie principle of „show, don‘t tell“. The bosses were super hard, you didn’t have to tell the players constantly how epic and big the fight was. You felt it.

Feedback of players on problems with the game is usually good. Feedback of players on how to fix them is usually bad.