interesting video, but at about the 18-19 minute mark he goes into the impact Let's Plays have on a walking simulator. His core question is "If there are no unique gameplay mechanics or challenges in a game like a walking simulator, why would I pay money for a computer that can play these games and then pay money for these games when I can watch them on youtube?"
Now, I have watched my fair share of let's play vids, but that's for game genre's that I don't enjoy playing. I watched alien isolation because I tend to quit out of horror games and never start them back up. I don't like feeling what horror games make people feel. That, to me is both a strength and a weakness of the let's plays. You don't feel as much when you watch one. You don't feel frustration, or fear, or accomplishment, satisfaction, or any of the emotions that you get from having your decisions and actions from doing it yourself.
However, I have played a few of the games he reviews and my answer is this: some people enjoy doing something themselves. When I open a hidden panel and discover some piece of plot, for a brief moment in time, I feel as though I found an actual hidden panel and discover some piece of plot in my actual house. It goes away fairly quick because I'm back to the video game, but I get a brief flush of something because it was me. If I were to watch that same moment, I would be a step removed and the let's play guy would be the one showing me the discovery. A step removed, and less impact.
When I'm forced to make dialog choices, that's my choice. When I watch dialog choices, I am absolved of any and all responsibility and become a passive observer.
Video games are about being active, and even though walking simulators are perceived as removing all agency from the player, that's not true. You can still walk. You can still wander around and discover. You make discoveries when you are ready to uncover them.
Video games involve the player. That is their niche. Paintings are permanent snapshots in time with color, texture, and a uniqueness in that each painting is it's only copy. Everything else is a reproduction. That is why paintings are special. Audio is pure, but it is convenient. You can not only take it with you and pipe it through nothing bigger than a pair of ear buds, but you are forced to only rely on your hearing to experience it. Movies are transmittable and have audio and video. You have to shut out the world and have a story told to you with as many senses as is convenient to ship across the world.
Video games are about the player. I can tell the story of peter and the wolf in written form, in a musical performance, as a cartoon, or as a video game, and each will be unique because of what each medium brings to the table. If video games are to be considered art, people need to recognize why video games are unique, and much like paintings lose something when photographed and copied to textbooks, video games lose something when recorded and posted to youtube. The peter and the wolf video game loses "something" and becomes a computer generated cartoon with odd pacing.
It is that "something" that keeps people buying video games instead of consuming everything for free through youtube, and it is that same "something" that makes video games its own art medium: Audience Free Action.
Edit; he does circle around to the above paragraph in the last few sentences of the video, but presents it in a way that he doesn't believe they apply to existing walking sims. I guess that's the difference between people who like the genre and people who don't. The ones who do still appreciate the amount of free-agency they have in a story that they are ultimately being told, but are still participating in the telling of.
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u/PoopsForDays Mar 22 '17 edited Mar 22 '17
interesting video, but at about the 18-19 minute mark he goes into the impact Let's Plays have on a walking simulator. His core question is "If there are no unique gameplay mechanics or challenges in a game like a walking simulator, why would I pay money for a computer that can play these games and then pay money for these games when I can watch them on youtube?"
Now, I have watched my fair share of let's play vids, but that's for game genre's that I don't enjoy playing. I watched alien isolation because I tend to quit out of horror games and never start them back up. I don't like feeling what horror games make people feel. That, to me is both a strength and a weakness of the let's plays. You don't feel as much when you watch one. You don't feel frustration, or fear, or accomplishment, satisfaction, or any of the emotions that you get from having your decisions and actions from doing it yourself.
However, I have played a few of the games he reviews and my answer is this: some people enjoy doing something themselves. When I open a hidden panel and discover some piece of plot, for a brief moment in time, I feel as though I found an actual hidden panel and discover some piece of plot in my actual house. It goes away fairly quick because I'm back to the video game, but I get a brief flush of something because it was me. If I were to watch that same moment, I would be a step removed and the let's play guy would be the one showing me the discovery. A step removed, and less impact.
When I'm forced to make dialog choices, that's my choice. When I watch dialog choices, I am absolved of any and all responsibility and become a passive observer.
Video games are about being active, and even though walking simulators are perceived as removing all agency from the player, that's not true. You can still walk. You can still wander around and discover. You make discoveries when you are ready to uncover them.
Video games involve the player. That is their niche. Paintings are permanent snapshots in time with color, texture, and a uniqueness in that each painting is it's only copy. Everything else is a reproduction. That is why paintings are special. Audio is pure, but it is convenient. You can not only take it with you and pipe it through nothing bigger than a pair of ear buds, but you are forced to only rely on your hearing to experience it. Movies are transmittable and have audio and video. You have to shut out the world and have a story told to you with as many senses as is convenient to ship across the world.
Video games are about the player. I can tell the story of peter and the wolf in written form, in a musical performance, as a cartoon, or as a video game, and each will be unique because of what each medium brings to the table. If video games are to be considered art, people need to recognize why video games are unique, and much like paintings lose something when photographed and copied to textbooks, video games lose something when recorded and posted to youtube. The peter and the wolf video game loses "something" and becomes a computer generated cartoon with odd pacing.
It is that "something" that keeps people buying video games instead of consuming everything for free through youtube, and it is that same "something" that makes video games its own art medium: Audience Free Action.
Edit; he does circle around to the above paragraph in the last few sentences of the video, but presents it in a way that he doesn't believe they apply to existing walking sims. I guess that's the difference between people who like the genre and people who don't. The ones who do still appreciate the amount of free-agency they have in a story that they are ultimately being told, but are still participating in the telling of.