I think it was Francis Ford Coppola who said the purpose of critics is to “show me how to make the next one better”
That seems like a pretty healthy way to view criticism, that twitter has probably fucking destroyed
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On no, that’s been destroyed since the birth of any sort of medium that can be criticized.
A lot of famous artists were extremely salty about their critics to a comical degree.
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True, but you used to have to put in the work to get back at critics.
William Randolph Hearst, allegedly, hired a sex worker to ambush Orson Welles in an attempt to discredit him
And D.W. Griffith made a whole ass movie, THIS movie:
Because he got upset people thought The Birth of a Nation was incredibly racist and that they tried to organize a boycott
Nowadays, you can just quote rt and legions of defenders will flock to your side
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weird how embarrassingly childish the people who make deep meaningful games about fatherhood are /s
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I don’t know if this is the right place to bring it up, but I want to know if I’m the only one who has been trapped in an ad loop for the last several episodes. Every single ad break is the same two ads of Rob talking about Alienware PCs.
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I think Jason lost whatever moral high ground he might have been on when he tried to dunk on the original twitterer with a sarcastic Anne Frank joke.
“Trying to seriously compare these works with other art is tacky and insensitive but using them to make sick burns for Twitter points is fine” is a pretty fucking flimsy platform.
(Also, wtf are you doing, Cory?! Just stay the hell out of it for crying out loud.)
Edit: also just remembered Jeff was the “What if A did B? What if X did Y? The answer to this and more is God of War” guy. Dude clearly needs to work on his hyperbolic metaphors.
I think there’s a pretty big difference making a bad joke among some twitter people in a reply chain and directing targeted harassment towards people not liking your game.
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I didn’t say anything about what Neil Druckman said or did.
Edit: and it’s got nothing to do with Jason disliking the game. He has said himself that he hasn’t played it. He objected to the original comparison on principal, not merit.
If I was Neil Druckmann or Corg Barlog, a rich game dude who exploited his work force and helped institute corporate Cultures of sexual harassment yet continue to receive widespread critical acclaim because we made the good daddy games, I would simply relax in my backyard pools and eat expensive steak instead of attacking journalists on twitter and trying to sic my fanboys on them. I would simply have too much money to have such a pathetic victim complex.
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So, the dunkee did eventually clarify his position, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that Schindler’s List should probably not be the movie you reach for when talking about video games. Under any circumstances.
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I think my hope for “games as art” is that we maybe someday have a game that’s worthy of the comparison. But it’s almost certainly not going to be a triple A zombie killing simulator, and it most definitely isn’t going to come from the sad dad collective bitching on Twitter.
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The thing about that comparison though is the inherent problem of using Schindler’s List, specifically, as a broader barometer for “games as art.” Holocaust literature and media is its own, insular thing — for a game to be worthy of that comparison, it would need to actually take on the Holocaust as a subject. Not just general hatred or violence. It’s about directness vs. indirectness, and the shield that calling something an “allegory” can provide. A game made explicitly about the Holocaust wouldn’t be able to shield itself as “just a zombie game” if its writing weren’t strong enough to handle that subject matter. And a game that’s about anything other than the Holocaust, directly and immediately, can’t merit that comparison.
And from my perspective, Holocaust literature specifically carries its own… incompatibilities, with games? Because there’s a loss of agency and fatelessness emblematic in a lot of Holocaust literature that games are, well, very bad at. There’s a very good article about this idea in Wolfenstein: The New Order, which, for what its worth, might be the closest a AAA action game is ever going to come to meriting that comparison.
Gita made the point on twitter that this guy could have easily said Children of Men instead — another film by another acclaimed director that’s also about genocide, ultra-violence, racism and fascism, etc., but that doesn’t try to be something that it’s inherently not (i.e. about the Holocaust). Whether that comparison would be merited either is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t have that same inherent issue that Schindler’s List does. To me, this just reads as utter hubris from people who won’t be satisfied until everyone on Earth bands together to tell them how wonderful and grand they are.
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I mean it’s certainly not impossible for a game to take agency away from the player to make a point. But yeah it probably wouldn’t work as a 60 hour experience, and “gameifying” it would be insulting.
The only way I could see a game like that working is if it’s something like Devotion, where the player is tasked with reconstructing an atrocity after it happened rather than living through it, in a game world that reproduces the experience in the way the subconscious mind would. In that sense, if you’re not going through the event yourself, your agency as a player becomes entwined with the act of reconstructing a trauma out of bits and pieces. A game in that mold that’s well-written and well-designed could model the experience of surviving, I think. Something that’s more like Maus than Survival in Auschwitz.
But I don’t think a game that’s set in the moment so-to-speak could ever work. Because it would need to take away agency in a way that’s permanent and traumatic — and I just don’t think that’s possible, on a fundamental level. To go into that would drag me into like, an level of academic theory that I don’t want to foist on everyone here, because I feel like I’m being annoying enough already, but it does strike at a deeper critique of this comparison that’s not just “oh it’s tasteless or hyperbolic.”
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Games like this remind me to give Drakengard 3 credit for at least trying.
And Jeff is an actor who has been reviewing films on podcasts for well over a decade now, so he shouldn’t lack the cinema vocabulary. I’ve been listening to multiple of his podcasts for many of those years and have been a big fan, but as time has gone on and I’ve been growing (and my far more observant and thoughtful wife has been pointing things out to me), I have been noticing his blind spots. He’s painted as the most positive guy on the planet, and he is - to a fault. He’s the old version of me who believes that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by rational thought and a positive attitude. But then instead of responding sensitively to this challenge, he’s in the replies aggressively asking ‘Why?’ to anyone who says he maybe shouldn’t compare the two. Not because he wants to know their answer to the question, but because he wants to make clear that no one should be questioning his freedom to make any comparison he wants. It’s pretty disappointing.
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I’m not particularly surprised with what ended up being in the game, and the, uh, discussion that’s come out around it since it’s been predictable since Drukman has been pretty open about what this game was going to be. Personally I decided not to buy LoU Pt 2 or any further ND games since I listened to the audiobook of Blood Sweat and Pixels and screamed at the section about Uncharted 4 and how ND’s VP said something along the lines of “we embrace crunch” and stated that it was baked into their production schedule on top of their bad response to sexual harassment and their use of virtual black/brown face in Uncharted 4/Lost Legacy.
Also, not sure why this isn’t getting any coverage, but they did virtual brown face again in TLoU Pt 2 the part of Dina is credited to Shannon Woodward of Westworld fame. If you didn’t know Ms. Woodward is quite white and Dina… is not (she even wears a hamsa, so she’s not even supposed to be coded as white) . In fact Dina is modeled after Cascina Caradonna (hopefully she’s credited in the games credits, but… something tells me not to be sure about that). I knew Shannon Woodward did the motion acting for Dina in the game because it was a part of the game’s early promotion, but it took some easy googling to find out abut Cascina. So 
. I think it was overlooked when the character was initially announced since The Kiss was a such a big deal. Oh and I found out about the hamsa on the TLOU wiki, Cascina isn’t even mentioned on the page, fortunately Cascina has a you tube presence so googling the character lead me to her pretty quickly.
TBH I wouldn’t be surprised if Dina isn’t the only one who is played by someone not of their own ethnicity, and that combined with the fact that I’m like 90% sure she gets fridged to kick off Ellie’s trail of blood… I’m really not that torn up about my decision to not play or buy TLoU Pt 2.
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Isn’t it cool that no one who’s played can even say whether this character is fridged or not (until Friday when it’s out I guess) because they’re not allowed to talk about the story even a little, when that is ostensibly Naughty Dog’s main selling point - that they create Great Stories?
Is this Infinity War’s (not Infinity Ward) fault? Did Disney do this?
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The refrain of “DON’T SPOIL IT” has been a thing for as long as I can remember, but Avengers Endgame was probably the first time I ever saw the concept of “no spoilers” mutate into, like, a real thing that people get fucking SERIOUS about
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I dunno, I think in terms of press embargoes it’s not a particularly new phenomenon, though it’s not a particularly old one either. Like reviews of the original BioShock didn’t spoil the “Would you kindly?” thing, but IIRC a few did spoil how the “moral choice” with the Little Sisters plays out. However, I don’t know if there was an embargo on “Would you kindly?” or whether the reviewers just left it unspoiled because they organically decided it was a good surprise to leave for players to discover.
