skykiii
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2018
And I don't just mean audience misunderstanding, either. Sometimes the complainer themselves knows something bothers them, but doesn't know why.
Probably the Ur-example:
Politics In Fiction
What people think it means: "I hate that this has politics I disagree with!"
And for some people, maybe that's actually it.
In reality it can be more complicated.
Sometimes the politics are just a symptom of a larger issue. Rings of Power would probably be terrible even if devoid of any sort of progressive ideology, because the show ultimately is still a fanfic with a budget that watches like generic modern slop fantasy that just happens to have names you recognize.
Sometimes I find it can be a matter of expectation. For example, I can't imagine anyone sane being mad that they watched a show called "Bible Man" and then got offended that it was overtly religious (in fact, anyone sane would not be mad they watched Bibleman, period. Especially not a Willie Aames-era episode!)
However, I recall it used to bother me when I would watch History Channel's "A Haunting"--which was supposed to be about real-life hauntings--and literally every episode was about how the events stopped once the families involved started going to church.
On a similar thing, left-wing preaching bothers me far more in, say, Rings of Power than it does in Captain Planet. I knew what Captain Planet was when I turned it on, and at least Captain Planet was a dude creating his own original thing for his message, not co-opting 1950s literature that the author is currently too dead to object to.
Challenge in Games
This is a debate that I feel has gotten muddied, especially ever since Dark Souls came out and made "git gud" a meme.
For me personally, a problem I've always had with the Souls way of thinking is that it comes down to just memorization. The kind of challenge I like is when a game forces you to engage with the mechanics and make choices that might actually matter.
Let me use an example:
In the first Aero the Acro-bat game for Genesis and SNES, there's a lot of things that can instantly kill you, and Aero only has two attacks: throwing stars (these are limited) or a drill attack that launches him at a diagonal angle and could potentially slide him off platforms.
So imagine you need to jump to a platform that has an enemy on it. Drill runs the risk of sliding off the platform and into an instant-kill trap unless your positioning is perfect. Or you could just throw one of your limited stars and easily kill the fuck.
Aero 2 by contrast removes all such situations, so there's no reason to throw a star or do anything besides drill anywhere, and is a more shallow game as a result.
(People who have actually played either game know this isn't a perfect analogy but it was the first that came to my head).
What I'm getting at is: the real reason you want a game to be challenging is because it forces the player to test out and use all their options, not just coast thru on autopilot. Games like Dark Souls misunderstand this (in my experience, anyway).
So that's all I got for now. You people wanna add anything?
Probably the Ur-example:
Politics In Fiction
What people think it means: "I hate that this has politics I disagree with!"
And for some people, maybe that's actually it.
In reality it can be more complicated.
Sometimes the politics are just a symptom of a larger issue. Rings of Power would probably be terrible even if devoid of any sort of progressive ideology, because the show ultimately is still a fanfic with a budget that watches like generic modern slop fantasy that just happens to have names you recognize.
Sometimes I find it can be a matter of expectation. For example, I can't imagine anyone sane being mad that they watched a show called "Bible Man" and then got offended that it was overtly religious (in fact, anyone sane would not be mad they watched Bibleman, period. Especially not a Willie Aames-era episode!)
However, I recall it used to bother me when I would watch History Channel's "A Haunting"--which was supposed to be about real-life hauntings--and literally every episode was about how the events stopped once the families involved started going to church.
On a similar thing, left-wing preaching bothers me far more in, say, Rings of Power than it does in Captain Planet. I knew what Captain Planet was when I turned it on, and at least Captain Planet was a dude creating his own original thing for his message, not co-opting 1950s literature that the author is currently too dead to object to.
Challenge in Games
This is a debate that I feel has gotten muddied, especially ever since Dark Souls came out and made "git gud" a meme.
For me personally, a problem I've always had with the Souls way of thinking is that it comes down to just memorization. The kind of challenge I like is when a game forces you to engage with the mechanics and make choices that might actually matter.
Let me use an example:
In the first Aero the Acro-bat game for Genesis and SNES, there's a lot of things that can instantly kill you, and Aero only has two attacks: throwing stars (these are limited) or a drill attack that launches him at a diagonal angle and could potentially slide him off platforms.
So imagine you need to jump to a platform that has an enemy on it. Drill runs the risk of sliding off the platform and into an instant-kill trap unless your positioning is perfect. Or you could just throw one of your limited stars and easily kill the fuck.
Aero 2 by contrast removes all such situations, so there's no reason to throw a star or do anything besides drill anywhere, and is a more shallow game as a result.
(People who have actually played either game know this isn't a perfect analogy but it was the first that came to my head).
What I'm getting at is: the real reason you want a game to be challenging is because it forces the player to test out and use all their options, not just coast thru on autopilot. Games like Dark Souls misunderstand this (in my experience, anyway).
So that's all I got for now. You people wanna add anything?
