Notgames Forum

Hello everybody, I´ve been away from this forum (and from making games) for about a year but I´m slowly coming back.

So I just read this article:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-02-polite-games-for-polite-people


The thought that maybe these simulation games share something fundamental with what we are looking for here made me smile. Should we perhaps have a closer look at what they are doing right? All these simulators of mundane and unsofisticated tasks feel pretty notgamey to me, even if they are goal or score-oriented.

Wow, that is pretty inspiring, actually. :)

I think it's totally in line with the whole "gameplay is overrated" idea of notgames. Yet more evidence that plenty of people want immersive simulated experiences without actually caring if it's a "game" or not.

I find games to be bizarre for the most part. Maybe that means I'm getting old. But the appeal to me of making games more like movies is you don't see bizarre movies, and you don't see movies that simulate being a trucker or anything like that.

If movies were anything like video game or simulator products they would be radically different. So a lot of the appeal of getting away from traditional games to me is to have more games I can identify with. All of the Tale of Tales games except for maybe the Endless Forest are pretty straightforward things that you can imagine as movies. Nothing bizarre at all. I find that comforting.

That reminds me of Le Camion by Marguerite Duras, one of my favorite film makers (whose novels inspired our game Bientôt l'été).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nczd500mZAc

Anyway, I agree on the one hand that games about dragons and magic and soldiers are bizarre. But on the other there's not nearly enough diversity of content in games. So I'd be loathe to discourage the bizarre. But yeah, I like art.

I don't know how we define bizarre. I think maybe you just become divorced from contemporary culture as time goes on and so it seems like it is bizarre. But if so I think filmmakers are similarly still stuck in the older culture (perhaps to be expected since filmmakers are aging people) or video games just tend to be bizarre!

I don't think dragons and magic and soldiers are bizarre at all, because we have lots and lots of movies and literature about these things, they are the furthest thing from it. What I mean by bizarre is that most of the games featured on Kill Screen for instance are setups that have no analogue at all in our culture heritage, no cultural touchstones, they seem to spring fully formed from the wildest imaginations of who are probably young people who know the world through self referential Internet memes and surreal cartoons that have yet to or cannot ever leave a mark on the longer cultural dialogue possibly because they seem to be divorced from it. In a nutshell bizarre to me is the things that melt your grandmother's mind, and that you've learned to tolerate and sometimes even appreciate but still wonder if you shouldn't hesitate to invest too much into it all.


PS: I expect a big reason for the bizarreness is most games are boutique games and so it's hard to conceptualize something for them to be that can still work within the limitations that gamemakers of today feel like they are forced to subject themselves to. Personally I think if 1% of these gamemakers would just get together and focus on tools and resources for gamemakers and have a dialogue about what we really want out of games then this divide would begin to mend itself within a decade.