(no subject)
Comment to this post saying "IT'S ADVENTURE TIME!" and I will pick five things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random.
Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself, hopefully for the rest of eternity!
rijsg
Fighting game storylines
...are hard to make.
No really, there's an inherent difficulty in the idea of fighting stories that I don't think you face in other stories. Fighting games are based around competition of different characters who use different styles of fighting to win. So you've got a definite incentive to make a variety of characters who appeal to different people for different reasons. You make a huge guy because some people like being huge and imposing, you make a "cheater" who uses underhanded methods to win, or even someone with evil fire powers, because people like being bad, and so on. And people pick the characters they personally identify with and use them to win. For each individual person, therefore, their character is the main character. But that makes it hard to follow a traditional story structure where you have a protagonist the main story is about, and an antagonist who comes up against him. Nobody wants to be told that their personal character has less significance than the other characters in the story, that they're essentially background fluff (unless they're playing obvious joke characters like Dan, but then their non-significance is played for humor--that essentially IS their plot--and thus become paradoxically significant that way). The format of the fighting game itself, in other words, plays havoc with the idea of protagonism to begin with, and that's a hard hurdle to jump when you want to make a "traditional story". I think that's part of WHY fighting game storylines get so weird and convoluted--because they're twisting around the necessary contradiction of everybody being "a main character for someone."
With that in mind I think one of the best things Capcom could have done was to state that, no, Ryu WASN'T the strongest, he WASN'T the man that won the Street Fighter II tournament, he DIDN'T defeat Bison, as much as he was the obvious "main character" otherwise--everything from his basically accessible play-style, his karate man aesthetic, even the cursor starting on him when you start on P1 side said otherwise. It makes it more mentally conceptual for the idea that anyone COULD have won, including "your character" (even if your character is something ridiculous like Blanka). It also broadened his personal character arc when the idea of the Satsui no Hadou was introduced later--the temptation for easy power for the sacrifice of morality is also a compelling character arc, even if it makes you ask "why you so mad Ryu?" in later versions of the game. Now sure, it's not as subversive as it could have been--Guile could have just as easily been the protagonist otherwise, he has a straightforward cost of revenge arc and even resolves it when he beats up Bison but doesn't kill him (so Akuma can kill him (only not because of psycho power cloning tomfoolery)). But the base idea of maintaining that vagueness and indeterminacy is relatively sound.
I might go more into this later and break down all the other series.
the death of Eternity,
a) We got old. Now we have jobs and shit, it's hard to line up time.
b) Whether or not an individual system was fun, whether or not "gameplay" itself is fun even, it was consistently antagonistic. It was based on Survivor for god's sake, and those are some petty-ass people on that show--and so were we. We're all supposedly friends but we're trying to curtail our participation in an otherwise fun roleplaying thing. And at various times people used the game's nature to enable further meanness against people they didn't like. I mean, yeah, nobody likes everybody, but some real dickishness went on at various times and in various places. I've shown my own ass in that fashion more than once. A bunch of people quit because of that, and if you don't have players you don't have a game. I still say it's entirely possible to make a system that's not based on this basic idea of eliminating other players, but at this point we have like 10 people who still care about Eternity at all and none of them want to bother with numbers ever again ever, so oh well.
c) Hosting is hard and nobody wants to do it anymore. It's like herding cats. Even systemless you still have to coordinate plot threads and have a general direction to put the plot in, and the whole time you have to deal with a bunch of other people who want to go in their own directions.
4. I personally went to Eternity's house at 3:34 AM January 14, 2011, put a pillow over its face and slit its throat. With a piece of notebook paper, to ensure maximum suffering.
modern RPGs
Man I shot that little kid right in his punk-ass head too, and it felt good.
Yeah I like some modern RPGs. Man remember Mass Effect with the guns and the aliens and Shepard doing awesome things? Yeah that was good. I just finished playing Dragon's Dogma and goddamn it had a coked-out ending. Uhhhh I guess technically I played FF13, that's modern enough. Square needs to get their collecitve shit together, man. What's going on. Apparently Type-0 is actually good so of course they aren't bringing it out in America. Beyond that I don't know if I'm that up on the modern.
classic RPGs,
I have to admit I've had this weird craving to play an SNES-era JRPG (or at least a game styled like one) for the last couple of weeks. I have no clue which one to actually play, though...
As an aside, Final Fantasy VII came out 15 years ago. It's been a long time.
and why it cannot not, nor ever, be space time.
Well, now that it's not absolutely vital that we beat the Red Threat into space for unclear but necessary reasons, NASA's gotten its funding undercut in favor of shooting at brown people in brown climates and utterly failing to reverse a recession. So unless we discover some sort of Big Dumb Space Object I doubt USA, at the very least, will lead the charge into the great unknown. I mean I dunno maybe private companies will get their shit together and achieve it, but I remain skeptical that we'll even make it to Mars by the time I'm 100.
...
wait what am I talking about it's space time already.
Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself, hopefully for the rest of eternity!
rijsg
Fighting game storylines
...are hard to make.
No really, there's an inherent difficulty in the idea of fighting stories that I don't think you face in other stories. Fighting games are based around competition of different characters who use different styles of fighting to win. So you've got a definite incentive to make a variety of characters who appeal to different people for different reasons. You make a huge guy because some people like being huge and imposing, you make a "cheater" who uses underhanded methods to win, or even someone with evil fire powers, because people like being bad, and so on. And people pick the characters they personally identify with and use them to win. For each individual person, therefore, their character is the main character. But that makes it hard to follow a traditional story structure where you have a protagonist the main story is about, and an antagonist who comes up against him. Nobody wants to be told that their personal character has less significance than the other characters in the story, that they're essentially background fluff (unless they're playing obvious joke characters like Dan, but then their non-significance is played for humor--that essentially IS their plot--and thus become paradoxically significant that way). The format of the fighting game itself, in other words, plays havoc with the idea of protagonism to begin with, and that's a hard hurdle to jump when you want to make a "traditional story". I think that's part of WHY fighting game storylines get so weird and convoluted--because they're twisting around the necessary contradiction of everybody being "a main character for someone."
With that in mind I think one of the best things Capcom could have done was to state that, no, Ryu WASN'T the strongest, he WASN'T the man that won the Street Fighter II tournament, he DIDN'T defeat Bison, as much as he was the obvious "main character" otherwise--everything from his basically accessible play-style, his karate man aesthetic, even the cursor starting on him when you start on P1 side said otherwise. It makes it more mentally conceptual for the idea that anyone COULD have won, including "your character" (even if your character is something ridiculous like Blanka). It also broadened his personal character arc when the idea of the Satsui no Hadou was introduced later--the temptation for easy power for the sacrifice of morality is also a compelling character arc, even if it makes you ask "why you so mad Ryu?" in later versions of the game. Now sure, it's not as subversive as it could have been--Guile could have just as easily been the protagonist otherwise, he has a straightforward cost of revenge arc and even resolves it when he beats up Bison but doesn't kill him (so Akuma can kill him (only not because of psycho power cloning tomfoolery)). But the base idea of maintaining that vagueness and indeterminacy is relatively sound.
I might go more into this later and break down all the other series.
the death of Eternity,
a) We got old. Now we have jobs and shit, it's hard to line up time.
b) Whether or not an individual system was fun, whether or not "gameplay" itself is fun even, it was consistently antagonistic. It was based on Survivor for god's sake, and those are some petty-ass people on that show--and so were we. We're all supposedly friends but we're trying to curtail our participation in an otherwise fun roleplaying thing. And at various times people used the game's nature to enable further meanness against people they didn't like. I mean, yeah, nobody likes everybody, but some real dickishness went on at various times and in various places. I've shown my own ass in that fashion more than once. A bunch of people quit because of that, and if you don't have players you don't have a game. I still say it's entirely possible to make a system that's not based on this basic idea of eliminating other players, but at this point we have like 10 people who still care about Eternity at all and none of them want to bother with numbers ever again ever, so oh well.
c) Hosting is hard and nobody wants to do it anymore. It's like herding cats. Even systemless you still have to coordinate plot threads and have a general direction to put the plot in, and the whole time you have to deal with a bunch of other people who want to go in their own directions.
4. I personally went to Eternity's house at 3:34 AM January 14, 2011, put a pillow over its face and slit its throat. With a piece of notebook paper, to ensure maximum suffering.
modern RPGs
Man I shot that little kid right in his punk-ass head too, and it felt good.
Yeah I like some modern RPGs. Man remember Mass Effect with the guns and the aliens and Shepard doing awesome things? Yeah that was good. I just finished playing Dragon's Dogma and goddamn it had a coked-out ending. Uhhhh I guess technically I played FF13, that's modern enough. Square needs to get their collecitve shit together, man. What's going on. Apparently Type-0 is actually good so of course they aren't bringing it out in America. Beyond that I don't know if I'm that up on the modern.
classic RPGs,
I have to admit I've had this weird craving to play an SNES-era JRPG (or at least a game styled like one) for the last couple of weeks. I have no clue which one to actually play, though...
As an aside, Final Fantasy VII came out 15 years ago. It's been a long time.
and why it cannot not, nor ever, be space time.
Well, now that it's not absolutely vital that we beat the Red Threat into space for unclear but necessary reasons, NASA's gotten its funding undercut in favor of shooting at brown people in brown climates and utterly failing to reverse a recession. So unless we discover some sort of Big Dumb Space Object I doubt USA, at the very least, will lead the charge into the great unknown. I mean I dunno maybe private companies will get their shit together and achieve it, but I remain skeptical that we'll even make it to Mars by the time I'm 100.
...
wait what am I talking about it's space time already.