The Stanley Parable/s, all of them - This is a game?

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The game clearly lays it out in the museum ending: if every choice has been pre-determined, are you really making the choice yourself? Is that choice really meaningful? All of the "choices" in the game are routes the devs created for you to follow. The player has basically no agency outside of deciding which ending he decides he wants to see first.

This is of course a faggot way of looking at media by mouth drooling retards. If the writing is good then the player would feel like he is making the choice rather than it being forced upon him. The choice is meaningful as much as the player is immersed in the writing. The player has agency in pursuing the story/gameplay or deciding he has something better to do with his time.

In general the whole "what is a choice" thing is one of the stupidest shit that I'm glad that died out before causing too much damage. It's psuedo intellectual bullshit to force a meaning for people curiosity and willingness to explore different scenarios.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

It's psuedo intellectual bullshit to force a meaning for people curiosity and willingness to explore different scenarios.

What would a real intellectual's take on the fact that 'choice matters' game narratives are effectively just somehow-more-poorly-written choose-your-own-adventure books be, then? Because that's all that they're saying. It's a little sequence that discusses a limitation of the medium, expressed within the medium. "These narratives are not making use of the medium's full potential."

I assume you don't like film history, but there were a lot of old short films that lampooned how early film was essentially just adapting stage plays, with people overacting, static camera positions, flat blocking, lack of cuts. They aren't everyone's cup of tea, but without them you don't get Evil Dead.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

What would a real intellectual's take on the fact that 'choice matters' game narratives are effectively just somehow-more-poorly-written choose-your-own-adventure books be, then? Because that's all that they're saying. It's a little sequence that discusses a limitation of the medium, expressed within the medium. "These narratives are not making use of the medium's full potential."

I assume you don't like film history, but there were a lot of old short films that lampooned how early film was essentially just adapting stage plays, with people overacting, static camera positions, flat blocking, lack of cuts. They aren't everyone's cup of tea, but without them you don't get Evil Dead.

You can have an intellectual take on the concept of choice in a specific game, like Bioshock (the first one, Infinite fucked up in that regard), but trying to have a take on that matter for an entire sub genre as game is as feasible as having an intellectual take on using the analog stick to control your character. "These narratives are not making use of the medium's full potential" is retarded, I've played games that used the choice element extremely well and it's ridiculous comparing them to Stanley Parable laser focusing on Telltale games and Mass Effect 3 (especially as it's the usual issue of people pretending everything that is not extremely successful does not exist).

 

[BetterFuckChuck]

The game clearly lays it out in the museum ending: if every choice has been pre-determined, are you really making the choice yourself? Is that choice really meaningful? All of the "choices" in the game are routes the devs created for you to follow. The player has basically no agency outside of deciding which ending he decides he wants to see first.

yea but that's just how media works in general. of course it's meaningful because it's sort of a puzzle in how the player figures out some of these endings. like what obscure tricks do i do in order to get this? and it's discovering all the ways the game gives you dialogue for certain actions. so yea ofc. youre making a choice. it's like if a movie opened up with "is being engaged really engaging if the movie designed itself for you to be engaged?" ...yes. next question.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

They removed the portal and minecraft segments which is bad enough, but jim sterling had his ego stroked with them adding an easter egg with his troon name

The first update to the non-mod version of the game was an art asset being removed because of 2 people complaining.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221910/discussions/0/792924952358334606/

That other part of the game with the non-coloured baby careening towards the fire was fine though. So tiring

 

[You gain Brouzouf]

The Stanley Parable is interesting to me because purely by rereleasing the same game multiple times over the course of a little over a decade, it has perfectly mapped audience fatigue with writers who think they are smarter or more clever than they actually are.
I really enjoyed the mod when I first played it and the first remake was just more of the same with polish and graphics which was cool at the time.
I have yet to play Ultra Deluxe but it doesn't interest me too much from what I've seen and does at times seem to come off as a little masturbatory, but I'm not actually sure the writing has changed all that much.
Aa huge part of this boils down to what @Rich Evans Ayypologist said a year+ ago.

playing with the fourth wall was a lot more funny when things like Brazil or Monty Python would do it, but nowadays it's so overdone and boring and uninteresting that there's no fucking meat left on the bone and we need to return to genuine, passionate things made and played straight

Hopefully they remake the gam e again in 5 years so I can gauge how I feel about fourth wall shit then.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

You can have an intellectual take on the concept of choice in a specific game, like Bioshock

You're going to toss around the word pseudointellectual, and then you're going to cite Ken Levine as an intellectual take?
Oh, yeah, Bioshock really does say a lot about player choice and agency in video games: you can either play the game, or you can not play the game. Captivating stuff.

Bioshock is where that insufferable term "ludonarrative dissonance" popped up from. Because Bioshock's narrative structure inherently disobeys its themes. It is a completely linear structure that barely even takes into account the handful of times you can choose to spare someone, which then beats you over the head about agency that you never once were given the impression you actually had. At no point do you think the game is anything but a linear narrative, and the twist is that you're... in a linear narrative? Bioshock would work better as a film, which is clearly what Ken Levine has always wanted to make.

I've played games that used the choice element extremely well

And they're somehow different from choose-your-own-adventure stories? At no point does The Stanley Parable suggest that what you're talking about is bad. It's saying that the medium could do more.

Let me put it this way - is Universal's Dracula a bad movie because it is borrowing a lot from stage design, the position of actors relative to each other and the camera, overacting and melodramatic vocal delivery, etc? I certainly don't think so - it's still plenty of fun, and I appreciate the craft of it. But boy, it turns out that when you move the camera, you can make a lot more interesting sequences in film. It turns out when you make more frequent uses of cuts, or of lighting, or of color, or of - you get the point?

What is the medium not making use of? When you type a prompt into a generative AI, and it tries to play off of your responses, you are fundamentally exploring where narrative in games could go. You could design a game's narrative purely around a set of specific rules and a set of prompts, then allow the AI (and the player) to go... effectively wherever with it. Perhaps this sounds absurd - until you consider it's not unlike party games like Fiasco, in which a set of rules and a set of prompts spins wildly into whatever the players want it to be.

Or you could make more extensive use of multiplayer to strengthen your world's atmosphere (Demon's Souls), or you could use intentionally oblique and bizarre sequences to encourage the playerbase to collaborate and try to 'solve' (SIREN, PT), or you could make use of something like discord integration and have a bot run by the game feed the player information that fundamentally alters the experience of a narrative but give it a certain unpredictability factor which may have it speak in bizarre nonsense and riddles or attempt to mislead the player, etc.

The Stanley Parable doesn't suggest or recommend or point to any of these ideas: it just suggests that DO YOU SAVE THE TOWN? / DO YOU NUKE THE TOWN? is a very narrow, limited way to engage player agency that the medium doesn't need to limit itself to. Mass Effect 3's ending sucks because it's badly written. Even if it had taken your choices into account, it's still just CYOA branching narrative. That series also tends to punish you harshly for not sticking to strict Renegade / Paragon anyways, meaning it's even less of providing you with meaningful agency, but that's an aside.

but trying to have a take on that matter for an entire sub genre as game is as feasible as having an intellectual take on using the analog stick to control your character.

The day of Ultra Deluxe's (which still, afaik, hasn't gone on sale for the amount I'd pay for it) release, it sold 100,000 copies. It has been cited by narrative designers, often ad nauseum, in influencing how they regarded player agency, narrative design, and even at times system design.

You probably don't create narratives. You probably don't really analyze narratives, or sit down and talk deeply about structure - not about the story itself - with people. That's fine - this game isn't really a thing for you. You do not belong to the market for this game, but there's a market for this kind of thing.

If you want to say that Dear Esther is a pretentious waste of space, absolutely - that game is irredeemable as anything but a tech demo for graphics (and even then). That 'game' also had an interesting approach to narrative (the narration scrambles itself), and it fucking sucked and was boring. But Stanley Parable is nothing like that heap of garbage - SP has a point, makes it quickly, does so with a bit of dry humor, and that's all the more.

it's like if a movie opened up with "is being engaged really engaging if the movie designed itself for you to be engaged?"

The Stanley Parable is closer to a movie opening with the camera being knocked over. For the next thirty minutes, the characters discuss and debate whether they should pick the camera up, at times attempting to pick the scene back up from the top and acting as if nothing was going wrong.

Hopefully they remake the gam e again in 5 years so I can gauge how I feel about fourth wall shit then.

I don't think the fourth wall will ever return as something that people broadly respect. As blithe as it is to say "hah, you are the audience, and I know you exist!" it's irresistible to hacks. Straightforward, simple narratives without twists don't generate buzz, whereas retarded shit like Doki Doki Literature Club sets the internet aflame because IT READ A FILE ON YOUR COMPUTER!!!!!!!!!

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

You're going to toss around the word pseudointellectual, and then you're going to cite Ken Levine as an intellectual take?
Oh, yeah, Bioshock really does say a lot about player choice and agency in video games: you can either play the game, or you can not play the game. Captivating stuff.

Bioshock is where that insufferable term "ludonarrative dissonance" popped up from. Because Bioshock's narrative structure inherently disobeys its themes. It is a completely linear structure that barely even takes into account the handful of times you can choose to spare someone, which then beats you over the head about agency that you never once were given the impression you actually had. At no point do you think the game is anything but a linear narrative, and the twist is that you're... in a linear narrative? Bioshock would work better as a film, which is clearly what Ken Levine has always wanted to make.

Any specific game would do, I just said Bioshock because it's one of the games to popularize the concept. Also aren't you talking about Infinite that did the whole "choice doesn't matter lmao" rather than the original that just gave you good and bad choices with killing zombie children.

And they're somehow different from choose-your-own-adventure stories? At no point does The Stanley Parable suggest that what you're talking about is bad. It's saying that the medium could do more.

Let me put it this way - is Universal's Dracula a bad movie because it is borrowing a lot from stage design, the position of actors relative to each other and the camera, overacting and melodramatic vocal delivery, etc? I certainly don't think so - it's still plenty of fun, and I appreciate the craft of it. But boy, it turns out that when you move the camera, you can make a lot more interesting sequences in film. It turns out when you make more frequent uses of cuts, or of lighting, or of color, or of - you get the point?

What is the medium not making use of? When you type a prompt into a generative AI, and it tries to play off of your responses, you are fundamentally exploring where narrative in games could go. You could design a game's narrative purely around a set of specific rules and a set of prompts, then allow the AI (and the player) to go... effectively wherever with it. Perhaps this sounds absurd - until you consider it's not unlike party games like Fiasco, in which a set of rules and a set of prompts spins wildly into whatever the players want it to be.

Or you could make more extensive use of multiplayer to strengthen your world's atmosphere (Demon's Souls), or you could use intentionally oblique and bizarre sequences to encourage the playerbase to collaborate and try to 'solve' (SIREN, PT), or you could make use of something like discord integration and have a bot run by the game feed the player information that fundamentally alters the experience of a narrative but give it a certain unpredictability factor which may have it speak in bizarre nonsense and riddles or attempt to mislead the player, etc.

The Stanley Parable doesn't suggest or recommend or point to any of these ideas: it just suggests that DO YOU SAVE THE TOWN? / DO YOU NUKE THE TOWN? is a very narrow, limited way to engage player agency that the medium doesn't need to limit itself to. Mass Effect 3's ending sucks because it's badly written. Even if it had taken your choices into account, it's still just CYOA branching narrative. That series also tends to punish you harshly for not sticking to strict Renegade / Paragon anyways, meaning it's even less of providing you with meaningful agency, but that's an aside.

But here's the thing, it's meaningless commentary. The "medium could do more" can be said on literally every facet of media design, and evil/good paths were always a joke. It's the usual fart huffing of saying something very obvious observation and then thinking you are really smart for pointing it out. And because the observation is genre wide it can't say anything deeper. Like holy shit, devs can't make hundreds of different quests for every character choice, who could have fucking known?!

The day of Ultra Deluxe's (which still, afaik, hasn't gone on sale for the amount I'd pay for it) release, it sold 100,000 copies. It has been cited by narrative designers, often ad nauseum, in influencing how they regarded player agency, narrative design, and even at times system design.

You probably don't create narratives. You probably don't really analyze narratives, or sit down and talk deeply about structure - not about the story itself - with people. That's fine - this game isn't really a thing for you. You do not belong to the market for this game, but there's a market for this kind of thing.

If you want to say that Dear Esther is a pretentious waste of space, absolutely - that game is irredeemable as anything but a tech demo for graphics (and even then). That 'game' also had an interesting approach to narrative (the narration scrambles itself), and it fucking sucked and was boring. But Stanley Parable is nothing like that heap of garbage - SP has a point, makes it quickly, does so with a bit of dry humor, and that's all the more.

I like to think of gaming narratives, and I've played enough to think myself as able to make a deep analysis of them. And considering the game came out in 2013, which is pretty much the year gaming stagnated massively, having people praise it was more a sign of a cancer than inspiration for new things.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

The "medium could do more" can be said on literally every facet of media design

To simplify this into even finer of a paste: film is capable of more than stage plays. Early film did not take advantage of this. People lampooned it. Film eventually started to move the camera, fuck with the lens, incorporate cuts, etc.

Stanley Parable is saying: video game narratives are capable of being more than CYOA books. The sequence, specifically, where you go 'out of bounds' not only spells that out, but spells out that a CYOA book allows you to turn to a page completely out of order, which is something that video games either have to intentionally allow you to do... or only do as a result of an oversight (like speedrunning skips). Very, very few games have taken advantage of alternate narrative options available uniquely to games as opposed to books or movies. That's it.

Spoiler: shrinking the rest

Also aren't you talking about Infinite that did the whole "choice doesn't matter lmao" rather than the original that just gave you good and bad choices with killing zombie children.

The, uh, choice where you lose basically nothing for rescuing them because the studio intervened to make it less of a sacrifice? It's a non-choice that the game's narrative doesn't acknowledge. Some characters give you different dialogue and you get a slight branch that ultimately still leads to the one-of-two endings.

The Andrew Ryan scene, and the whole Would You Kindly? reveal is supposed to be this big metanarrative about how you, the player, have never -actually- been the one making choices about what you're doing. You've been programmed to obey! You haven't actually had any choices throughout the entire game! ...except, uh, that was obvious? Because if you don't complete the objectives (obey), you literally don't progress the game. A MAN CHOOSES! Except... there's literally one choice for you. Hence, (ugh) ludonarrative dissonance.

Spec-Ops: The Line also has this issue: you get berated for dropping some white phosphorous, except that you genuinely cannot progress the game if you don't do it. Your other-option is to stop playing the game - stupid. Its advantage, at least, is that its themes are about desensitization, not agency.

Infinite is worse though, don't get me wrong. It's also way more proof that Levine wants to make (bad) movies, not games. Many such Kojimacases.

evil/good paths were always a joke.

This concerns story content, not narrative. So I'll clarify:
Narrative is how a story is told, not what the story is. It's the difference between a totally-linear story (Halo) and one where the narrative branches (Witcher 2) and one where it's totally out of order and all over the place and a puzzle (SIREN), etc.

Having played games that "used the choice element extremely well " means you played a game that had a branching narrative and good writing (acknowledging the choice, making logical conclusions for the choice, having the choice feel like a meaningful or difficult one, etc). It's the same exact narrative whether that choice is good or bad. Parable is not really making fun of games that have shitty stories or that have pointless choices.

And considering the game came out in 2013, which is pretty much the year gaming stagnated massively, having people praise it was more a sign of a cancer than inspiration for new things.

It's almost as if it was lampooning bad, negative directions that the industry had been moving in from the PS3/360/Wii era onwards, where game narratives were endlessly iterating over shit that would work better in film or in novel format. And outside of the indies (which have made lots of fantastic games since), everyone else appealed to what would be the most popular with audiences: the same, boring, safe, stale shit. So yes, an indie title whose sole point was about a topic most people hate... influenced mostly indie developers.

Then again, I'm not the kind of person who says "I hate AAA!" and then buys a bunch of AAA games, complains about them, then buys the next suite of AAA games to repeat the process. If you pluck out Elden Ring and RE2make (and I guess BG3? That's more like AA), I haven't touched AAA in nearly a decade and I've never once come close to running out of good games to play. This take is one I've never understood. Who the fuck cares if AAA is bad but everything else is great?

 

[You gain Brouzouf]

The Stanley Parable doesn't suggest or recommend or point to any of these ideas: it just suggests that DO YOU SAVE THE TOWN? / DO YOU NUKE THE TOWN? is a very narrow, limited way to engage player agency that the medium doesn't need to limit itself to. Mass Effect 3's ending sucks because it's badly written. Even if it had taken your choices into account, it's still just CYOA branching narrative. That series also tends to punish you harshly for not sticking to strict Renegade / Paragon anyways, meaning it's even less of providing you with meaningful agency, but that's an aside.

It's funny to think about how little choice in games has evolved since Mass Effect/Fallout 3 were released and is why I don't really blame The Stanley Parable for targeting what it does.
In most mainstream cases you're just making selections off of an itemized list and for myself I don't think of the choices but instead the type of outcome I am hoping to get.
The Stanley Parable in some ways takes better advantage of the medium than a lot of mainstream games because the entire game and all the choices you make are at least made via gameplay rather than a list of clearly laid out choices.

I don't think the fourth wall will ever return as something that people broadly respect. As blithe as it is to say "hah, you are the audience, and I know you exist!" it's irresistible to hacks. Straightforward, simple narratives without twists don't generate buzz, whereas retarded shit like Doki Doki Literature Club sets the internet aflame because IT READ A FILE ON YOUR COMPUTER!!!!!!!!!

There's a (relatively) recent Mathewmatosis that touches on the idea of meta being a shortcut for pretending to be smart and some other aspects unique to the medium.
It also spends a lot of time taking a meta look at game critique as a whole so might be irritating to some people but I thought it was appropriate to bring up.

In general I can't think of a single game released in the last decade with meta elements that I wasn't immediately irritated by except for maybe Nier where they felt mostly earned and fit the overall theme of the game.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

It's funny to think about how little choice in games has evolved since Mass Effect/Fallout 3 were released and is why I don't really blame The Stanley Parable for targeting what it does.

Which, to be clear, isn't bad. It's just not everything the medium is capable of. People praise Fallout: New Vegas over 3 a lot, but the narrative structures are largely the same. NV just has plainly better writing. Odder, weirder narrative approaches don't necessarily lead to better stories, and often lead to the opposite (House of Leaves is not fun to read, and not particularly satisfying) - but you need to experiment in order to advance.

The Stanley Parable in some ways takes better advantage of the medium than a lot of mainstream games because the entire game and all the choices you make are at least made via gameplay rather than a list of clearly laid out choices.

And even in that regard, it's not unique in that it did it - Deus Ex is a far older game, and really made use of the game itself being designed to accommodate player choices both as dialogue options and as means of navigating the level itself. Of course, Deus Ex also doesn't change the overall narrative based on your choices: level progression is rigid, so your choices mostly change some dialogue and some rewards you get between the various beats of the story. Stanley Parable is just beat-to-beat, like a flowchart.

meta being a shortcut for pretending to be smart and some other aspects unique to the medium.

The way that meta is generally used, yeah. I don't, personally, understand the enduring appeal. Like I said way earlier, when we're talking about older films, I totally get it: they were flouting convention. There's something mischievous and rebellious about it, because people genuinely didn't do that. By the time that video games started having stories, the taboo against acknowledging an audience... ceased to be a taboo. There's nothing new about it: it's often just tedious. But it really is a matter of how it's used.

Meta also includes metanarrative, which is almost totally ignored by game writers. Very few seem to trust the player to come to their own conclusions, and seem instead intent on spoonfeeding every little detail and moral. That said... eh, they're generally not wrong. A lot of people seem to need things spelled out for them, or they throw a fit. I cannot imagine how stifling writing for AAA must be.

In general I can't think of a single game released in the last decade with meta elements that I wasn't immediately irritated by

Pathologic 2 is good. I would not in a million years recommend Pathologic 1, but 2 has a solid core gameplay loop that has several characters who clearly understand that they are in a game - or, as the game contextualizes it, actors in a play. I wouldn't describe the game as 'fun,' but it's designed intentionally around being oppressive and at times frustrating. It's a rare case that threads the needle well.

 

[You gain Brouzouf]

Meta also includes metanarrative, which is almost totally ignored by game writers. Very few seem to trust the player to come to their own conclusions, and seem instead intent on spoonfeeding every little detail and moral. That said... eh, they're generally not wrong. A lot of people seem to need things spelled out for them, or they throw a fit. I cannot imagine how stifling writing for AAA must be.

To be fair I don't think a lot of writers for AAA games are really being stifled . They probably can't do any better.
Including a meta narrative in your writing is also something I sort of dread at this point if done poorly.
I think in a lot of cases by it's very nature you need to sacrifice a part of or even your entire setting in order to explore a lot of those ideas fully.
In a lot of cases that can mean you ruin your potentially perfectly fine setting to try and illustrate just how smart you are which so it ends up being very similar to breaking the fourth wall for me.

Pathologic 2 is good. I would not in a million years recommend Pathologic 1, but 2 has a solid core gameplay loop that has several characters who clearly understand that they are in a game - or, as the game contextualizes it, actors in a play. I wouldn't describe the game as 'fun,' but it's designed intentionally around being oppressive and at times frustrating. It's a rare case that threads the needle well.

Pathologic 2 is a game I've been meaning to get around to, but I really have to be in a particularly masochistic mood for something like that.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Sorry for the delay in posting, finally got to a PC.

To simplify this into even finer of a paste: film is capable of more than stage plays. Early film did not take advantage of this. People lampooned it. Film eventually started to move the camera, fuck with the lens, incorporate cuts, etc.

Stanley Parable is saying: video game narratives are capable of being more than CYOA books. The sequence, specifically, where you go 'out of bounds' not only spells that out, but spells out that a CYOA book allows you to turn to a page completely out of order, which is something that video games either have to intentionally allow you to do... or only do as a result of an oversight (like speedrunning skips). Very, very few games have taken advantage of alternate narrative options available uniquely to games as opposed to books or movies. That's it.

The issue with this statement is that in 2013, games have finished the exploration phase and started the exploitation stage. Early RPGs gave you massive amount of freedom in doing shit and fucking yourself over, or letting you play as god/villains, or making the whole thing satire. The reason most games stick to a simple good/evil narrative is because that was the thing that sold.

The, uh, choice where you lose basically nothing for rescuing them because the studio intervened to make it less of a sacrifice? It's a non-choice that the game's narrative doesn't acknowledge. Some characters give you different dialogue and you get a slight branch that ultimately still leads to the one-of-two endings.

The Andrew Ryan scene, and the whole Would You Kindly? reveal is supposed to be this big metanarrative about how you, the player, have never -actually- been the one making choices about what you're doing. You've been programmed to obey! You haven't actually had any choices throughout the entire game! ...except, uh, that was obvious? Because if you don't complete the objectives (obey), you literally don't progress the game. A MAN CHOOSES! Except... there's literally one choice for you. Hence, (ugh) ludonarrative dissonance.

Spec-Ops: The Line also has this issue: you get berated for dropping some white phosphorous, except that you genuinely cannot progress the game if you don't do it. Your other-option is to stop playing the game - stupid. Its advantage, at least, is that its themes are about desensitization, not agency.

Infinite is worse though, don't get me wrong. It's also way more proof that Levine wants to make (bad) movies, not games. Many such Kojimacases.

You can see the twist in the first Bioshock as either about the player character or a meta twist, the former still works as motivation for your character doing what he does as well as how he got there, while the meta narrative falls flat. So it's not that bad.

This concerns story content, not narrative. So I'll clarify:
Narrative is how a story is told, not what the story is. It's the difference between a totally-linear story (Halo) and one where the narrative branches (Witcher 2) and one where it's totally out of order and all over the place and a puzzle (SIREN), etc.

Having played games that "used the choice element extremely well " means you played a game that had a branching narrative and good writing (acknowledging the choice, making logical conclusions for the choice, having the choice feel like a meaningful or difficult one, etc). It's the same exact narrative whether that choice is good or bad. Parable is not really making fun of games that have shitty stories or that have pointless choices.

Isn't the "press X or the baby dies" a joke about it? Anyways the game I played is a game where you start as amnesiac and needs to do a mission, you finish the mission and then start again with a choice to remember what you did the previous path, which leads you to make different choices that reveal more of the world and aligns you with different faction, etc. Though I guess it is linear by design.

It's almost as if it was lampooning bad, negative directions that the industry had been moving in from the PS3/360/Wii era onwards, where game narratives were endlessly iterating over shit that would work better in film or in novel format. And outside of the indies (which have made lots of fantastic games since), everyone else appealed to what would be the most popular with audiences: the same, boring, safe, stale shit. So yes, an indie title whose sole point was about a topic most people hate... influenced mostly indie developers.

Then again, I'm not the kind of person who says "I hate AAA!" and then buys a bunch of AAA games, complains about them, then buys the next suite of AAA games to repeat the process. If you pluck out Elden Ring and RE2make (and I guess BG3? That's more like AA), I haven't touched AAA in nearly a decade and I've never once come close to running out of good games to play. This take is one I've never understood. Who the fuck cares if AAA is bad but everything else is great?

I think the issue of gaming was that developers realized that people would rather make gameplay choices than narrative choices, thus content became king while the games were unmemorable and faded from memory (ie, "the Ubisoft game").

 

[BirdUp]

ultra deluxe takes the piss out of anyone who wanted new storylines or had concerns about it being worse than the 2013 remaster (which it is—it's two hours of the writers making fun of you for wanting a new experience, and there is no conclusion to all the shit they set up)

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

The issue with this statement is that in 2013, games have finished the exploration phase and started the exploitation stage.

I don't really know what you mean by this. All forms of media have cycles. Because of an influx of people who were not drawn to the core premises of gaming, and who were instead drawn to shit games that emulated movies, we're currently saturated with shit like God of War Playstation Exlusives. The cost of making those kinds of games is starting to cause the AAA industry to collapse in on itself, as a single title failing to launch is now enough to crater a studio.

If you look at film and comic books as close analogues, both of those mediums have had similar cycles. And during those cycles, there were plenty of small, independent, underground creatives releasing short-form shit that was doing nothing but taking the piss out of how the medium was stagnating.

Spoiler: saving space

The reason most games stick to a simple good/evil narrative is because that was the thing that sold.

And it will always be the thing that sells best, yes. What most people enjoy are simple narratives. But the medium is capable of doing more than just churning the same shit out endlessly in an effort to try to appeal to every single person. Not every game has to be for everyone, though, and you can make games whose sole point is to lampoon industry trends or wax poetic about the medium's potential, and they'll have their small audience.

The suggestion that every game that releases should be enjoyable and targeted at everyone is why AAA is what it is now.

You can see the twist in the first Bioshock as either about the player character or a meta twist, the former still works as motivation for your character doing what he does as well as how he got there, while the meta narrative falls flat. So it's not that bad.

The twist works in a film or a comic or a book format, where we are not the one making the decisions for the protagonist. When it's a game, the twist is retarded - if you don't do what Atlas says, you quite really can't progress through the game and your only option is to stop playing. Flaunting 'you never really had a choice!' when all of the levels have one path to completion causes the twist to be... stupid. If you had more than one option, and you could disobey Atlas, the twist (and story) thereby don't work.

It's not a story that works well for the medium. Compare it to the Prey reboot? thing by Arkane, which is way more System Shock 3 than is Bioshock, and you see the issue. Prey's ending has a similar twist as the Ryan debacle (everything is predetermined), but it at least gave you the impression you were actually making choices.

Isn't the "press X or the baby dies" a joke about it?

That sequence strikes me as a joke about how certain people will chase any carrot on any stick if there's a promise of 'content' behind it. I take that part as shitting on how often games started intentionally throwing things in that are mundane and tedious whose only point is to waste the player's time, which has become an industry standard (that most players fucking love, because they are retards).

Anyways the game I played is a game where you start as amnesiac and needs to do a mission, you finish the mission and then start again with a choice to remember what you did the previous path, which leads you to make different choices that reveal more of the world and aligns you with different faction, etc.

So, when thinking about the analysis of that game, consider how it works. You have a straight line through the first time, presumably, and then you loop around from the final 'node' of it back to the first. You repeat the story again, except now there are additional decision paths that branch out from different nodes. This is an adaptation of branching narrative, which is just tried and true.

This is also why Stanley Parable isn't calling this kind of storytelling bad. Because it's retarded to call branching narrative bad. Calling back to Telltale's Walking Dead, that game released in 2012. Stanley Parable's mod-form was 2013. Walking Dead made a huge deal out of 'player choice' and 'THIS CHARACTER WILL REMEMBER THIS!' and was pretty obviously a cynical appeal to people who don't like and don't play video games. Because it's just branching-choice narrative, something that has been in games from the earliest days.

If SP is saying anything about branching-choice, it's that it's nothing particularly special in and of itself, as Telltale would go on to show by writing absolutely dogshit stories that made virtually zero use of branching-choice narrative, only to be surpassed in their shit quality by David Kage down the line. The quality of writing and the narrative itself aren't really related, barring that more complex narratives demand more capable writers.

I think the issue of gaming was that developers realized that people would rather make gameplay choices than narrative choices

You can't... really make narrative choices as a player. I've tried to think of a way to do this, but even choosing not to explore a branch is still making a choice, and the branch is still there. As a player, you cannot change how a story is structured and told - you can just choose how you progress through it.

Most players like simple, straightforward narratives and seem to love autistically poring over endless, stupid, irrelevant lore. You can bloat up your story to be a completely godawful, shambling mess with way too many spinning plates and gaping plotholes - but as long as you keep the actual narrative simple, people will eat it up and praise it (Mass Effect).

Games that come along and explore more abstract and bizarre forms of narrative (AI generation, integration with other aps or mediums, etc) will generally not be as well-liked as the conventional kind. SIREN's bizarre narrative is the kind of thing people love to watch videos about, but hate to actually experience.