I like the headline but I'm honestly growing a bit impatient with videos like this staying so vague in their analysis. Yea, "weird games" are cool but what does "weird" even mean? Does it mean...
I like the headline but I'm honestly growing a bit impatient with videos like this staying so vague in their analysis. Yea, "weird games" are cool but what does "weird" even mean? Does it mean "interesting"? What does "interesting" mean? Can we deconstruct the games that exemplify this ideal and see something common about how they treat their mechanics or what they're about? Is a game "weird" just for slapping some random gimmick or creepy art style onto an existing trope or is there something deeper to explore?
All we got here was a bunch of superficial reviews of non-standard games, loosely tied together. Bits of interesting content but nothing that answers the headline. It's kinda a summary of how little we know about why games work, what ideals we have for them or where we'd like them to move.
I think it's okay to just enjoy the weirdness and general sense of wonder in it all, but it's about time we get going some deeper, academic analysis in videogames that goes beyond just copying movie/literature analysis, being stuck with mostly storytelling. Videogames are interesting because they can do things with code that are literally impossible to do in other media. I barely ever come across criticism that dares to venture there. As soon as we come to actual mechanics, to systems and rules interacting, which are the defining space in which games exist, it's all "well that was fun because it exploded more", "oh, that's buggy" and "lol, I don't know what just happened". The gameplay itself is something magical we react to and have feelings about, maybe we test empirically (by playing) whether it "feels" unbalanced or whether the controls are annoying, but there hardly ever is an attempt at describing the underlying mechanics as mechanics ("shooting a fireball requires thinking about perspective and momentum") rather than clumsy simulations of power fantasies ("you 'are' a wizard because you 'summon' a fireball when you press the right trigger"). Games get way more similar and superficial once you focus on mechanics and the challenges that make them interesting, making it also easier to argue why so many AAA games are so boring. I guess that makes games that do anything different "weird".
I like the headline but I'm honestly growing a bit impatient with videos like this staying so vague in their analysis. Yea, "weird games" are cool but what does "weird" even mean? Does it mean "interesting"? What does "interesting" mean? Can we deconstruct the games that exemplify this ideal and see something common about how they treat their mechanics or what they're about? Is a game "weird" just for slapping some random gimmick or creepy art style onto an existing trope or is there something deeper to explore?
All we got here was a bunch of superficial reviews of non-standard games, loosely tied together. Bits of interesting content but nothing that answers the headline. It's kinda a summary of how little we know about why games work, what ideals we have for them or where we'd like them to move.
I think it's okay to just enjoy the weirdness and general sense of wonder in it all, but it's about time we get going some deeper, academic analysis in videogames that goes beyond just copying movie/literature analysis, being stuck with mostly storytelling. Videogames are interesting because they can do things with code that are literally impossible to do in other media. I barely ever come across criticism that dares to venture there. As soon as we come to actual mechanics, to systems and rules interacting, which are the defining space in which games exist, it's all "well that was fun because it exploded more", "oh, that's buggy" and "lol, I don't know what just happened". The gameplay itself is something magical we react to and have feelings about, maybe we test empirically (by playing) whether it "feels" unbalanced or whether the controls are annoying, but there hardly ever is an attempt at describing the underlying mechanics as mechanics ("shooting a fireball requires thinking about perspective and momentum") rather than clumsy simulations of power fantasies ("you 'are' a wizard because you 'summon' a fireball when you press the right trigger"). Games get way more similar and superficial once you focus on mechanics and the challenges that make them interesting, making it also easier to argue why so many AAA games are so boring. I guess that makes games that do anything different "weird".