Hacker Cinema
Grounded: Making The Last of Us
2013 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Cesar Quintero, Jason Bertrand, Matt Chandronait, Ryan O'Donnell, Jeffrey Keith Negus
A feature-length exploration of the game's creation, and a love letter to the trials of exploring new territory. There are no road maps or guide books for creating a new world. The only way through is to fail—over and over again. This is the story of how a team of artists, musicians, programmers, writers, actors, filmmakers, playtesters, and a lonely UI designer—came together and pushed each other to build something larger than themselves.
3 positive1 negative1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I think that all this really depends upon the game. Some are indeed designed to be more complex, yet in a good way. And there is a bit of a difference between a printed manual, and a wiki. I find that wikis often have solutions you're supposed to hunt for, where as a printed manual may tell a "story" of the land, and just give more generic "how to play" hints.
In this context, I am very much mystified by "I played through game Y in 2.5 hours!". Uh, what?! I just paid for this game, and my goal isn't to run directly to some arbitrary finish line. I want to see things. Explore things. Learn the story that is presented around me.
And I'm not referring to side-quests, although those are fun too. I mean, I've been in some games where there is just "stuff" in the world around me, and you can explore and find random info.
I'm referencing games such as "The Last of Us" re: PS3/2013 version, where you could look at newspaper boxes and make out headlines, something that didn't make it with the same legibility into the PS4 remake. (Newspapers were still to be found in the PS4 remake, but a lot of places where there were papers in newsboxes had legible headlines in the PS3 version, and just blurred stuff in the PS4 version).
To run a max speed through a game with all sorts of side-info, is like watching a plot laden movie at 5x on mute. What a waste of money, and joy.
Another example is Horizon Zero Dawn, where there were all sorts of interesting recordings to be found, and just random info to be gleamed about "what happened", regardless of other main/sub plot info. Again, to fast forward "yay I did this in 2 hours!" is madness in the extreme to me.
My point in the above is, that any sort of wiki requirement for these games is a solid ruin. What a way to reduce fun, if everything about the game, and things such as "how this world came about" is just laid out in a wiki.
Yet at the same time, I don't want all puzzles to be so easily solvable. I don't want my hand held. Imagine playing God of War, with all puzzles solvable in 1 second. Why even bother?
I wonder, there is often talk of great 'apathy' today in youth. Games are a part of youth. An example is 'hide and go seek', which in the real world teaches one how to be sneaky, how to think as another trying to hunt you, how to be clever, and just how to play with others. This game is teaching you to hunt, and to escape when being hunted!
Video games of my youth taught me puzzles, were difficult, required fast reflexes, and by no means did I think better gear was the answer to issues I was having.
Now games are often one dimensional. People look for the solve online before even playing. People have issues and 1 minute later are looking for a work around. When I was a kid, maybe I could find help by phoning a friend, but talk about embarrassing!
Yet with puzzles comes satisfaction when there is a solve.
And with easy answers, comes an empty feeling.
So back to the wiki or not, I really think there should be no wikis, because the potential for lost joy is massive.
I wanna know what quality of zombie movie this guy is watching that The Last of Us is somehow beneath them. The only zombie movie worth a damn this century is 28 Days Later. The Last of Us Part II was an even more amazing story, I literally was saying NO at the penultimate scene on the beach. The franchise is so well done HBO is adapting it.
Nothing beats The Last of Us story for me (it’s why it became PlayStation game of the decade).
The Last of Us Part II spoils you even further, there isn’t anything else close to the level of detail and story telling that Naugthy Dog has done here.
“It’s a rollercoaster thrill ride which lasts like 20 hours and leaves you scarred for the rest of your days. 10/10”
FYI HBO and creators of Chernobyl have picked up The Last of Us and are filming 10 episode series right now with a bigger budget than Game of Thrones.
You have to keep in mind that gaming is a very new medium. The more artistic variety of games has only been around for a few years. To demand something on the level of Shakespeare is very disingenuous.
A better way of seeing why games can be art is through a comparison to movies. Games can be made to essentially be movies but with the crucial difference of immersing the viewer entirely into the world through the choices it presents.
I do not see how adding more possibilities to an existing art form (movies) can ever demote something from art to non art (whatever you think these things mean).
I think a game like last of us is a great exploration of the potential of this form of game play.
> We're winning because we offer something better than art. We offer Experience...Stop using the word 'art'. Erase it from your dictionary. It's too weak a word. I want nothing less than to compel you. I am coming to consume all your thoughts, all your attention. I want to absorb you to the point where it threatens your marriage and your livelihood.
Not all art is passive though. There has been performance and interactive art that can be pretty engaging. "Sleep No More", for instance. So I think the OP needlessly argues about the popular connotations of the word "art"
That said I completely agree with him that games such as "Last of Us" are not the ideal when it comes to video game as art. Just because a game's cutscenes can compete with a feature film in terms of theatrical quality does not mean it's great art as a video game. Nor does lacking cinematic quality disqualify a game from being art.
So far my favorite artistic epiphany from a game, not including games that shoot for being "art" more than being a playable game, came from the original "Portal".
There's a segment late in the game where you're asked to kill a inanimate object that you've been carrying around for most of the game. You know that it's inanimate. Yet as the narrator taunts you, I was tense the entire way because I was almost convinced it was a living breathing thing, solely because of the length of time I had been interacting with it. I half expected it to scream when I killed it. When nothing happened (I think) I laughed out of sheer relief. It was a feeling much more intense than watching a horror movie, and the only reason it was so intense was because of the interactive role I had -- both in carrying it and then killing it. That's the kind of unique artistic experience that a game can have that's not easily replicated in other mediums, certainly not film or books.