Hacker Cinema
Shadow of the Colossus
Film
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Based on the critically acclaimed video game, the story follows a wandering warrior battling a pantheon of titanic creatures in order to save his lost love.
2 positive3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
If you consider interaction a core component of a game, affecting all other aspects of the "experience", then reducing that interaction, and level of awareness, time, practice, etc that builds into the experience clearly alters the experience.
Consider the extreme -- play through any given game with a mario super star.. it's difficult to imagine the game experience isn't radically changed.
These kinds of defenses for "easy" modes (that is, easier than the game was designed for) seem to be fundamentally based on the idea that an optimal game is simply a movie with some (perhaps optional) QTE's to keep you from getting bored. But they're not. Clearly not all games get any benefit out of increasing difficulty (most game's difficulty increase amounts to turning everything into bullet sponges -- this rarely alters the experience in any notable fashion), but that hardly means difficulty has no purpose or place.
An easy mode might not ruin the game.. but it may be a worthless mode to have, and one that ruins the player's experience. The souls series would be generally uninteresting if you weren't pushed towards playing careful and meticulously. The DMC series would be generally uninteresting if you weren't pushed towards better and faster (and more stylish) combo'ing. Shadow of the Colossus, BioShock would have absolutely no impact/weight (incidentally, an easy mode has been added I guess to latest remasters). Super Meat Boy wouldn't even be a game anymore.
Imagine never experiencing 100 to 0 pikmin loss! Without that threat, is it even the same class of game?
If you couldn't play them properly, it would probably be a waste of time. Their stories aren't that interesting. They ain't books.
Of course, for many games it doesn't matter. Uncharted series really is just a movie with some QTE events (and QTE events in the fashion of a cover shooter), and difficulty isn't a factor. CRPGs/JRPGs generally have such uninteresting encounters that you could rip out most of the non-roleplaying combat mechanics and still have much the same thing (but you lose that sweet, sweet timesink).
Mass Effect 1 and Star Control 2 barely justify the existence of combat in the first place (reduce the fuel needs in SC2 and you'll radically change its early game however, probably much worse). They can be made easy... but it hardly applies generally. And these are all examples where they can be made easier, because they failed to make any use of their difficulty in the first place.
Those are some pretty sad games!
Just wanted to add two games that straight up left a void in me for a while after I was done
Shadow of the Colossus - Is on PS2,PS3, and PS4 and I really can't recommend it enough. Even if it technically ends with a hopeful ending its pretty pessimistic.
Life is Strange - The first two episodes make is seem like a pretty goofy teen drama but the last two episodes definitely become exponentially more existential.
Aeris' death is a bad example to show off the power of games due to the fact that most of the emotion in the scene comes from the players investment in the character. It's shocking and emotional because of the context, and you're right that it doesn't hold up without it. when FFVII was released, the state of graphics technology made expressing emotion in videogame characters solely through visuals difficult, at least for that 3D style. For some contrast, take a look at the intro of FFX. (I'm personally nowhere as fond of that as VII, but that's another debate) You have no idea who this guy his, who these people and this giant cat man are, but you can get the sense of emotion in that scene without context because the visuals were much, much better. Shiny graphics and audio may not matter if there's no story to hold them up, but they are useful to get a point across.
The example I've always use for how gameplay can make a scene more emotional is the end of your first battle in Shadow of the Colossus. You know your main character has been tasked to slay these massive creatures to bring back his dead love, but there's little information about them. It just lumbers slowly into view when you confront it, and what follows next is one of the most tense battles I've played in a videogame. You're clearly outmatched, a young man who barely knows how to swing a sword against this massive moving monolith, but you somehow manage to succeed. Just as you're ready to cheer out in victory as it falls, the game takes a shift. Instead of the triumphant battle theme, the music turns soft and sad, and you watch your foe slowly tumble down. Instead of glory, you feel regret, and your victory now seems like a tragedy.
Seeing that in film would be emotional, but it's not some character doing it on a screen. You did this, and you killed this strange and magnificent creature. Was it worth it? There's a similar example in the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, but I'd rather not spoil the amazing ending of that game (which would generally works as well in film, except that one particular moment).
I see! That's a fair criticism, but I feel like a lot of new games are distancing themselves from being mere time sinks. I would compare video games to books or movies: there are certainly countless examples of each type of media that are just time killers. However, every so often there are books, movies, and indeed, games (video or otherwise) that provide novel experiences, provoke thought, and titillate the player's intellect and creativity.
A few examples: Scribblenauts, a recent Nintendo DS game in which the player can invoke any object he can imagine to help solve the game's puzzles. Shadow of the Colossus, a Playstation 2 game from a few years back, has a unique mood and a compelling narrative that challenge many fine works of cinema.
Do you think those types of games change the playing field at all? 10 - 15 years ago, I would have agreed with you completely, but I think that, as a developing field, video games are coming into their own as a "proper" form of media. Also, you mention socialization and exercise as having value over video games, but see games like Wii Fit or Left4Dead which combine those things with gameplay.
EDIT: Also, communities can form around these video games. For example, I really enjoy one-on-one competitive sports & games. I fence three nights a week, and regularly travel anywhere from 30 to 300 miles for tournaments. However, I have also traveled similar distances for Street Fighter tournaments. I have found that the fighting game community is as tightly knit as the fencing community. A few times, I have come through a city where I know someone from a message board, but have never met. On those nights, I had a place to stay solely based on my connections through this video game-based community. Don't really know how that fits into the debate, but it seemed relevant.
There are two largely accepted definitions of art. The first is the view of art simply as the mastery of a certain action or craft. The second is the view of art as something that changes the person that sees it.
By the first definition, video games are inherently piece of art so long as there is an objective standard behind games. There's an art form behind, say, the comprehensive control scheme from Super Mario 64, which is in my opinion the best platforming control scheme I've ever used. There's an art to creating responsive and beautiful worlds.
By the second definition, games still qualify, but we're in a poor position in that thus far games are still parroting movies by-and-large. The large advancements that we've seen in gaming - I'll cite Shadow of the Colossus and Grand Theft Auto IV as the two pinnacles - are ones that, in terms of message, are still parroting movies. Shadow of the Colossus gives us the sense of loss, Grand Theft Auto IV gives us the sympathetic - and fully-fleshed - character. These things can be compared dismissively towards movies, since they're far more primitive in nature.
That's not to say that video games will remain as such. People are entering the field with ambitious minds right now. Many games are starting to hint at an expansion towards the sorts of things that gaming and gaming alone has to offer. I think that the "are games high art" argument will be moot 20 years from now, if not sooner. The gap is closing.
(I'll also say that if not the games themselves, music in video games is the least compromised that any forum of music has been for a century. I'm thinking of Nobuo Uematsu, whose soundtracks are regularly 4 discs+ long, who releases piano arrangements and orchestral and rock arrangements of all his pieces, and who - unlike, say John Williams - is given an incredibly wide scape of emotions to portray with every game he works on. His output is impressive, as is the output of Koji Kondo, though he isn't nearly as evocative in my opinion.)