Story Beats: Dear Esther is Live!
Added 2016-03-08 22:01:56 +0000 UTCHowdy patrons! The new video essay, Story Beats: Dear Esther, is live! This is - Jesus - my first video essay in three months. Been gone too long! Glad to be back.
Quickie reminder that I'm counting this as 1/2 of January's video. If I can keep my intended schedule, we'll have 4 videos by the end of March (let's call it mid-April to be safe), which will be 2 to count for January and 2 to count for February. Then I'll try to get both march's and April's done in April, but we'll see how that goes. Again, I appreciate your patience while I've been dealing with bullshit on my end.
As long as I've got your attention, here are some recent capsule reviews:
Thoughts on Oxenfree
My take on Oxenfree, which I enjoyed considerably more than I'd expected.
Thoughts on Cibele
A brief take on Nina Freeman's little, autobiographical game, Cibele, which I referred to as "an adventure game about scheduling an internet hookup."
(More) Thoughts on Cibele
My brief take didn't end up being enough, so I posted more thoughts a few days later.
Thanks, all!
Comments
@Ian--oh! That's so many levels removed from anything I could have imagined. I thought it was somehow related to fawning over the author-cum-protagonist (because of the very frankly odd voyeuristic nature of this offering; edited: ODD to me, but then I don't even have a Twitter account) and feeling weird about sharing HER (I cannot recall her name) with a quasi-fictional other with a penis. But I couldn't map that precisely to "straight male gay panic". Also I thought the phraseology would be related to the normal use of that term (ie. people use it in court when they bash/kill gay/trans people, implying sexual confusion made them snap.) This reminds me of That Dragon, Cancer (which is a "game"--a cancer-game-- that does impress me very much of late.) The religiosity controversy: How odd it was that some in the audience seem to think they are occupying the head space of the characters as if it's imposed on them, like alien microwaves, versus just you know, empathizing with characters--aka. what all narrative media JUST IS.
Michael
2016-03-11 03:55:54 +0000 UTCHeh - "straight male gay panic," aka the assumption that a straight male audience will freak out at anything they consider "gay" about a game. In Cibele you play a women who is being actively flirted with by a man, and a lot of studios would chicken out of putting that in, because they assume a straight male player would be up in arms about being flirted with by a male character. (You see a lot of men up in arms about being flirted with by men in Bioware games, for instance.)
Ian Danskin
2016-03-10 15:26:36 +0000 UTCI really appreciated just learning more about Dear Esther. As someone who loves the medium but has no real time for it (especially because it's still a very weak medium, and I know just about every corner of it I care to.)
Michael
2016-03-10 15:05:14 +0000 UTC@Ian. for me it's personal because my career is tackling this complexity. And more so because I do not seeing anybody else doing it. People want to make games, but not tools for making games. And not ways of sharing resources. It's a problem that cannot be solved by brute force. It requires self sacrifice and collective action. I didn't think I'd get a bite on this one. What about "straight male gay panic"? I thought that would get a nip!
Michael
2016-03-10 14:59:41 +0000 UTCWell, I'm sorry to hear that! I make videos when I think something is interesting enough to share, and try to make them as long and as deep as the subject warrants. Bummed this one didn't resonate with you, but I hope the next one does!
Ian Danskin
2016-03-10 14:52:06 +0000 UTCMmm, while I don't love Dear Esther as much as some do, I found value in it, particularly the sequence I focus on in the video. I confess I haven't taken much interest in the other games in this model that The Chinese Room has released, but Dear Esther laid the foundation for Gone Home and The Stanley Parable, which I'd consider more successful. I don't think the problem is with the model itself, even if it's sometimes poorly-executed or not on a given player's wavelength. And I think it's popular because a) a lot of people find value in it and a number of developers are good at making it, and b) trying to design believable human interactions that are more systemically interesting than your 90's adventure game is, like, not just requiring of better planning, but ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more complex than a game like Dear Esther. Until there's some kind of creative or technical breakthrough, that kind of systemic NPC is simply out of the scope of most indie studios. Audio logs are ways of dodging that complexity by reducing a character down to just writing and voice acting, and even withing that model people are trying to iterate. Firewatch's Delilah is a step towards more character interaction. Still, though - my two cents are that the "single character/isolated location/voice-over" model still bears fruit often enough that I'm fine with it sticking around.
Ian Danskin
2016-03-10 14:48:03 +0000 UTCI have to admit, I'm a little underwhelmed by the video compared to your usual writing I feel this was less deep and shorter than I had exepected. I'll wait for the rest of the series to come out to judge though :)
Oscar Barda
2016-03-09 15:45:01 +0000 UTCJust out of curiosity, does anyone know what "straight male gay panic" means in the context of the last linked write-up?
Michael
2016-03-09 04:46:51 +0000 UTCHere I thought this game was just a walkabout interspersed with very unnatural, questionably written internal monologues. No, it's actually a purgatory romp. I don't know. The purgatory thing seems like it's overdone. Probably Jacob's Ladder was enough. I wish we could get past this overblown tech-demo phase of story driven games. It's too easy to find gimmicky ways to avoid putting in the work required to have a directed story piece of media in the form of a navigable space. Ultimately you have to have human characters interacting in ways that may require a lot more work, or better collective planning and activism to achieve. The insular studio model is misfit for the challenges of this 3D medium.
Michael
2016-03-09 02:57:16 +0000 UTC
