waystatus:

nostalgebraist:

dagny-hashtaggart:

nostalgebraist:

Well I think we can all at least agree on one thing: gamers sure do get mad when you criticize the values implicit in games they like

I’m perplexed and a bit amused by all the “God, gamers are awful” responses to criticism of Undertale. At what point of committing time, feeling, and social identification to a game, participating in the fandom of that game, and getting really pissed off when people say bad things about that game does it start to occur to one that they may in fact be a gamer?

i’m angry at the gamers who are angry at gamers because gamers critically analyzed the game they like, because gamers don’t believe in critically analyzing games because gamers get angry when the games they like are critically analyzed and the game that they critically analyzed was the game that critically analyzes games

it’s a complicated case, you know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s

I’d argue that “gamer”, although it’s confusing, has morphed into a term with qualifications much more complicated than “plays video games” or “cares about video games”. (I am not the first person to argue this by any means, btw: see here for an example.)

It’s at least fairly obviously the case that “cares about video games” isn’t the only qualification. Someone who cares a lot about Candy Crush and no other video games would probably not consider themselves a gamer and would probably not be considered a gamer by gamers, whereas someone who cares a lot about Street Fighter or Starcraft and no other games definitely would consider themselves a gamer and other gamers would agree. There’s definitely at least the implication that gamers care mainly about a certain subset of video games, usually AAA games or games that can sustain large online multiplayer communities.

Because of this, I would argue that “gamer” is actually short for “hardcore gamer”, where the central “hardcore” game is a game with mostly skill-dependent online multiplayer and a large community released by a major studio, and other games fade out as they get more distant from that archetypal game. Undertale is on the edge of this definition at best: it’s completely single player and very indie. So I’d argue that people who really like Undertale aren’t really gamers. They certainly don’t seem to consider themselves gamers, and it seems weird to ascribe them the term considering it does have all this connotative meaning to it.

Sure, I agree – I was riffing on the fact that this blog post in particular strikes me as an act of something very similar to the “angry gamer defensiveness” it is itself critiquing.  The author may not be a hardcore gamer, but there are hardcore-gamer-like things about that post.

(via waystatus)

cakeandrevolution:

nostalgebraist:

dagny-hashtaggart:

nostalgebraist:

Well I think we can all at least agree on one thing: gamers sure do get mad when you criticize the values implicit in games they like

I’m perplexed and a bit amused by all the “God, gamers are awful” responses to criticism of Undertale. At what point of committing time, feeling, and social identification to a game, participating in the fandom of that game, and getting really pissed off when people say bad things about that game does it start to occur to one that they may in fact be a gamer?

i’m angry at the gamers who are angry at gamers because gamers critically analyzed the game they like, because gamers don’t believe in critically analyzing games because gamers get angry when the games they like are critically analyzed and the game that they critically analyzed was the game that critically analyzes games

it’s a complicated case, you know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s

I really don’t understand how someone with an Atlas Shrugged url thought they had opinions worth sharing on literally anything…

I think you are missing some context here, I am (basically) agreeing w/ dagny-h not disagreeing

(via estradoll)

dagny-hashtaggart:

nostalgebraist:

Well I think we can all at least agree on one thing: gamers sure do get mad when you criticize the values implicit in games they like

I’m perplexed and a bit amused by all the “God, gamers are awful” responses to criticism of Undertale. At what point of committing time, feeling, and social identification to a game, participating in the fandom of that game, and getting really pissed off when people say bad things about that game does it start to occur to one that they may in fact be a gamer?

i’m angry at the gamers who are angry at gamers because gamers critically analyzed the game they like, because gamers don’t believe in critically analyzing games because gamers get angry when the games they like are critically analyzed and the game that they critically analyzed was the game that critically analyzes games

it’s a complicated case, you know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you’s

(via dagny-hashtaggart)

Well I think we can all at least agree on one thing: gamers sure do get mad when you criticize the values implicit in games they like

philippesaner:

nostalgebraist:

I just wrote three distinct Undertale-related posts and saved each one as a draft rather than posting

Behold my nonzero level of self-control!!

Now to actually do something except for this useless activity

Sorry for dredging up this specter…

Don’t feel bad – I’m sure there I would have become aware of that blog post somehow in any case, and the effect would have been the same.

(via philippesaner)

jbeshir:

dagny-hashtaggart:

kelsbraintumbler:

nostalgebraist:

philippesaner:

Hey, @nostalgebraist. Can you give me the backstory on that Undertale Prime post?

I just read stormingtheivory’s latest article, and they held it up as an example of horrible badness. But I’m not sure exactly what the problem with it is supposed to be.

Also, are you and the other people in that conversation hardcore gamers? The article is largely an attack on them, but you guys are included in there and I never really thought of you as a gamer at all.

Yeah, I’m not really a gamer at all.  I don’t play video games at all and very rarely play computer games, and when I do it’s usually relatively easy ones (e.g. Portal, Analogue: A Hate Story, Undertale).

Cut for recounting stuff that may already be familiar to others (also, this got kinda long, sorry)

Keep reading

yeah, the Undertale Prime post was actually really necessary to me being able to enjoy the game. What got me wasn’t so much the combat thing, but the part where if you want to get the good ending, you need to be friends with everyone. including Undyne. She gave a giant speech about how it was absolutely evil for me to not just let her kill me, that death was my only chance at redemption, then killed me over and over and over while I tried to beg her not to kill me, tried to challenge her in the hopes that she would realize I was a worthy opponent not deserving of murder, then gave up and asked for advice and ran away, clearly not being a threat and not wanting to fight, and she kept chasing after me and killing me again and again. The part that was actually upsetting, was that after I finally won and made it clear I wasn’t going to kill her, I had to go make friends with her. The moment I walk in the door, she makes it clear that she still hates me, and only xenia is stopping her from killing me again. She decides that she is going to be my best friend in order to prove that she can, rather than because she likes or respects me. She asks what I want to drink, without a dialogue choice, and when I move to get up, she throws a spear at me. This is terrifying and I don’t want to be friends with people who hate me and threaten me with possibly-lethal violence while trying to be friends with me. I could probably not have gotten through this section of plot if I hadn’t read the undertale-prime reframing. it was a lot less awful to play through if I thought about it as a fan-work in which an angry but honorable character has to make friends with her hated enemy, than playing through it as-presented.

I am also really uncomfortable with Alphys putting obstacles in my path, trapping people all throughout the core, and having her friend attack me just so that she could “save” me so that I would need her. that’s. not at all okay, but I think you can’t get the good ending if you don’t forgive her? Same with the amalgamates. She did nothing wrong in their creation but she kept them locked away in her lab for years and lied to or ignored everybody who asked what had happened to them.

And at the end when Asgore starts to apologize for trying to kill you, and Undyne stops him and says that everyone in the room has tried to kill you, so he retracts his apology. Otherwise, I could maybe interpret it as everyone having quietly realized that they were wrong over the course of befriending you, and regretting trying to kill you and just not saying anything, but here it seems like none of them even actually regret it or see it as wrong, and that none of them have really learned anything? it’s not fun to imagine myself into character in an environment where everyone who killed me, even after I make friends with them, thinks that it was the right thing to do. It’s a lot less painful to see it as a fan-game where the change is that you can befriend the monsters at all, and the work is trying to explore the monster villains’ feelings and views, and give them a happy ending where they are not still villains, rather than trying to actually be a reasonable ethical commentary or have them actually change much from how they were originally, except in ways that are necessary for them to be happy.

To concisely state a point that I think is implicit in both Rob and Kelsey’s posts: STI glosses “this sort of writing brings up painful associations with behavior that was clearly controlling, harmful, or outright abusive” as “Undertale makes me feel bad and this is not what games are for.” And I say this as someone who liked Undertale, I just apparently have the breadth of mind to imagine a world in which I might not like it and remain a basically reasonable and moral being. We can’t claim to take ideas like abuse and triggering seriously (as the vast majority of people who’ve criticized Undertale Prime and similar posts claim to) and then rescind that the moment someone has those sorts of feelings about something we like.

To quote the old maxim, “I have triggers, you have fee-fees.”

I really liked Undertale, not in spite of but *because* of these elements, because… I *like* the idea of being so sufficiently secure, so able to review and rethink and plot out my own actions, so clever, that I can display All Of The Virtue, fix everything, and be so able to resist harm and overcome all attempts to harm me that I can do this totally without compromise, without needing to bend my values even the tiniest bit. I like a scenario where I can take the harder road and in doing so achieve Winning, distilled. It’s a challenge, reward, and, admittedly, a power fantasy. I play RPGs because I can try to save people, and win. My reaction to the “scrupulosity” content warning was to decide it would be a cool name for a playlist.

I find, in general, scrupulosity kind of “empowering”. Ultimately, it never feels like an obligation. It feels like working to reform the world to one I deem more satisfactory, instead of merely playing with it as it is, and for me this feels like the very essence of “what it is to be human”, as trite as the concept is.

But, other people get their own needs and preferences, and their own reactions to having things displayed to them. If setting out a scenario where you can be unreasonably good, and where (since everyone is amusingly genre-savvy) you’re expected to be so, makes some people feel obligated to emulate that in actual life and either feel they should accept *real* abusive situations, or else feel uncomfortable that emulating it in real life seems to be endorsed, then that’s a real consideration and we should, well, consider it.

I don’t like the idea of considering everything that needs a “scrupulosity” warning as “having a problem”. I think crazy supererogatory examples and stories to inspire us, to set out what we can wish we were, what we can wish we could achieve, and what we would do if we had no need for compromise, and how great the resulting outcomes could be, are good and I think they should get to exist. And I think that to avoid ever encouraging people in abusive situations to do anything but leave, we’d have to throw out the idea of patience, tolerance, and grace as virtues entirely, just for starters, and that’s simply unacceptable.

But we can at least admit that people’s feelings exist and consider anything reasonable that is put forward to alleviate their concerns- at the very least by confidently saying that you don’t have to try to pretend to be ridiculously capable and smart and forgiving and invulnerable and able to solve everything in order to be a good person in the real world. It’d be nice to be, but you’re only those things in a game.

I appreciate your concern here, but I think I should clarify my experience because it’s different from the one you describe.

It’s not that I object to the Pacifist-type behavior because I’m being encouraged to emulate it in real life.  I am in no danger of emulating it in real life.  That is because I have tried to behave that way (approximately) and it went terribly, not only for myself but for others.  And I’ve had people imply that this is the only moral way I can act, and that was very bad (for everyone), and playing Undertale reminded me of this experience, insofar as the game was also “telling me” this.

It’s not that the behavior is merely “supererogatory,” it’s that it’s in fact immoral.  The resulting outcomes aren’t “great,” they’re worse for everyone.

(To explain this a bit: in real life, one’s own choices are not responses to a static world, they are part of an ongoing exchange between people.  Showing that you are willing to tolerate horrible behavior will preferentially draw horribly-behaving people to you, and since you only have finite time resources, you will end up spending more time with these people to the exclusion of other people you might instead be spending time with.  Tolerating the abusive or exploitative is not “good work if we can endure it”; it’s a choice not to spend one’s limited time and effort forming healthier relationships, and that is a bad choice.)

I can see the appeal of being able to live out an impossible standard of goodness in fantasy, but where we differ is on our sense of what goodness is, not the height of the standards.  If Undertale behavior should not be emulated in real life, then why call it “good”?

It’s always possible to just stipulate that behavior works differently in-game than IRL, but in that case everything is purely arbitrary: you could make a sort of anti-Undertale in which you go around murdering everyone, but murder is “actually good,” and claim that it’s a moral fantasy.  If I were to object that this is disturbing, it wouldn’t be on the grounds of high standards, but on the grounds that murder isn’t actually good.

(via jbeshir)

I just wrote three distinct Undertale-related posts and saved each one as a draft rather than posting

Behold my nonzero level of self-control!!

Now to actually do something except for this useless activity

gdanskcityofficial:

gdanskcityofficial:

rapid-advance:

gdanskcityofficial:

rapid-advance:

gdanskcityofficial:

severnayazemlya:

Like one of the wretched reviews I looked at in preparation for this article was some video where this nerd spent ten freaking minutes complaining about how this game runs on Windows XP. Seriously. No, really. His primary critique was that this game SHOULD have been able to run perfectly on a ten year old computer, and the fact that it didn’t made it a Bad Game.

This is the absolute apex of classical formalism over content, placing the mechanisms whereby a game runs before the actual content of the game.

*hook-nosed silicon valley caricature voice* i agree that it is actually good for things to be inaccessible to the poors

‘it’s literally impossible for someone in a wheel chair to get into this building’ ‘THE APEX OF CLASSICAL FORMALISM’

I, too, compare using Windows XP to a severe disability

yeh bud, the analogy proceeds thus. XP is something some number of people have no choice but using. severe disability is something some number of people have no choice but having. bad not to accommodate things that people can’t help. straightforward comparison. were you operating under the assumption that i was implying similar severity? absurd. why believe that?

What is this number of people?

XP users are usually either retrogrades or using office computers with legacy software.

It’s a deprecated system that sees no new driver releases, I question the wisdom of optimizing videogames made in 2016 for computers with 256 MB RAM.

>bad not to accomodate things that people can’t help

Yes, but consider: accomodating the disabled instead of XP users

Wikipedia says it has 8% of the desktop market share, concentrated in Asia and Africa. m$ said there were 250 million users this time last year, when it had just under 17% share

but i don’t see how that actually matters. xp users and wheel chair users are not at odds with each other, and even if they were, it wouldn’t have any effect on an /analogy between the two situations/. accommodate whomever! it’s almost certainly rather more important to have disability accommodations than Windows XP accommodations! I’m not asserting equality here!!

Even if it’s an accessibility issue in principle, do recent games generally work on OSes that old?  If not, ii’s strange to focus on this as a flaw in the game (it’s not like it’s worse than other recent games on that score).

And in that case it’s pretty uncharitable to read the quote in the OP as implying “I don’t care about whether people can play games affordably” rather than “I don’t understand why this guy is making a big deal about a technical issue that also affects most other recent games.”

The game does say it works in XP, so I would guess that’s why the guy is complaining?  I haven’t seen the review though.

Anyway, the quote in the OP seems wrong to me, but for a different reason.  It’s equivocating between “formal aspects of a work’s construction” and “the technical issues involved in faithfully transmitting a work to an audience,” when they have very little to do with one another.

If I say I can’t enjoy a painting because I can only access it as a tiny low-quality JPEG, it’d be wrong to say that’s a flaw in the painting, but it’s also not a criticism of the painting’s form.  The painting itself is a painting, not a JPEG; those artifacts aren’t “flaws in the painting’s formal construction,” because they’re not part of the painting at all.

Or, if I buy a novel for my Kindle and it turns out to be so ridden with formatting errors and typos that it’s barely readable, I might write an Amazon review saying “don’t buy the Kindle edition.”  It would be bizarre if someone were to respond to this by saying “you care too much about form in novels and not enough about content.”  Like, that’s a real debate, and it’s interesting, but “can I read the damn thing” is not within its purview.

(via dharma-initiative-official)

kelsbraintumbler:

nostalgebraist:

philippesaner:

Hey, @nostalgebraist. Can you give me the backstory on that Undertale Prime post?

I just read stormingtheivory’s latest article, and they held it up as an example of horrible badness. But I’m not sure exactly what the problem with it is supposed to be.

Also, are you and the other people in that conversation hardcore gamers? The article is largely an attack on them, but you guys are included in there and I never really thought of you as a gamer at all.

Yeah, I’m not really a gamer at all.  I don’t play video games at all and very rarely play computer games, and when I do it’s usually relatively easy ones (e.g. Portal, Analogue: A Hate Story, Undertale).

Cut for recounting stuff that may already be familiar to others (also, this got kinda long, sorry)

Keep reading

yeah, the Undertale Prime post was actually really necessary to me being able to enjoy the game. What got me wasn’t so much the combat thing, but the part where if you want to get the good ending, you need to be friends with everyone. including Undyne. She gave a giant speech about how it was absolutely evil for me to not just let her kill me, that death was my only chance at redemption, then killed me over and over and over while I tried to beg her not to kill me, tried to challenge her in the hopes that she would realize I was a worthy opponent not deserving of murder, then gave up and asked for advice and ran away, clearly not being a threat and not wanting to fight, and she kept chasing after me and killing me again and again. The part that was actually upsetting, was that after I finally won and made it clear I wasn’t going to kill her, I had to go make friends with her. The moment I walk in the door, she makes it clear that she still hates me, and only xenia is stopping her from killing me again. She decides that she is going to be my best friend in order to prove that she can, rather than because she likes or respects me. She asks what I want to drink, without a dialogue choice, and when I move to get up, she throws a spear at me. This is terrifying and I don’t want to be friends with people who hate me and threaten me with possibly-lethal violence while trying to be friends with me. I could probably not have gotten through this section of plot if I hadn’t read the undertale-prime reframing. it was a lot less awful to play through if I thought about it as a fan-work in which an angry but honorable character has to make friends with her hated enemy, than playing through it as-presented.

I am also really uncomfortable with Alphys putting obstacles in my path, trapping people all throughout the core, and having her friend attack me just so that she could “save” me so that I would need her. that’s. not at all okay, but I think you can’t get the good ending if you don’t forgive her? Same with the amalgamates. She did nothing wrong in their creation but she kept them locked away in her lab for years and lied to or ignored everybody who asked what had happened to them.

And at the end when Asgore starts to apologize for trying to kill you, and Undyne stops him and says that everyone in the room has tried to kill you, so he retracts his apology. Otherwise, I could maybe interpret it as everyone having quietly realized that they were wrong over the course of befriending you, and regretting trying to kill you and just not saying anything, but here it seems like none of them even actually regret it or see it as wrong, and that none of them have really learned anything? it’s not fun to imagine myself into character in an environment where everyone who killed me, even after I make friends with them, thinks that it was the right thing to do. It’s a lot less painful to see it as a fan-game where the change is that you can befriend the monsters at all, and the work is trying to explore the monster villains’ feelings and views, and give them a happy ending where they are not still villains, rather than trying to actually be a reasonable ethical commentary or have them actually change much from how they were originally, except in ways that are necessary for them to be happy.

(via kelsbraintumbler)

cyborgbutterflies:

nostalgebraist:

philippesaner:

Hey, @nostalgebraist. Can you give me the backstory on that Undertale Prime post?

I just read stormingtheivory’s latest article, and they held it up as an example of horrible badness. But I’m not sure exactly what the problem with it is supposed to be.

Also, are you and the other people in that conversation hardcore gamers? The article is largely an attack on them, but you guys are included in there and I never really thought of you as a gamer at all.

Yeah, I’m not really a gamer at all.  I don’t play video games at all and very rarely play computer games, and when I do it’s usually relatively easy ones (e.g. Portal, Analogue: A Hate Story, Undertale).

Cut for recounting stuff that may already be familiar to others (also, this got kinda long, sorry)

Keep reading

“People complain about Undertale because it makes them feel things” also sounds like pure anti-charity to me?

Keep reading

You write:

The people who -are- complaining about Undertale seem to be coming at it specifically from a place of scrupulosity, abuse experiences, and the like. Not from a desire for grittiness and stoicism.

Yes, this is what is confusing me about response like that StIT post.

If people say “I don’t like this game because It made me feel horrible in light of my own past experience and/or mental health state, in a way that I don’t think was artistically justified, or for that matter intentional on the creator’s part,” I think the response from fans should not be “you just don’t want games to be art.”

I think we should have at least learned that in 10+ years of gaming discourse about (unnecessary) grittiness and “censorship” and games that try and fail to tackle heavy subjects and all that.  (Remember the conversation around Bioshock Infinite?)  Admittedly I’ve generally absorbed that stuff from the sidelines, without playing the games in question.  But still.

There were some dumb criticisms of Undertale from the “hardcore gamer” crowd.  There was plenty of that on GameFAQs back when Undertale was winning their poll.  But those aren’t the criticisms we’re talking about here.

(I’m not blaming you or anyone else in the thread for this, but I really shouldn’t let myself start posting about this topic again, so this will be the last time I post about it for now, unless there is some special reason to do so.)

(via cyborgbutterflies)