Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw writes, "Maybe this is another of those signs of aging that have been standing out all the more to me since I turned 30, but I've been feeling more and more uneasy about all the killing people we have to do in triple-A games. I don't remember this ever being as stark an issue in the past as it seems to be now, I mean, you kill human beings in Contra on the NES without worrying about justification. Maybe it's an issue that realistic graphics brings with it."
A gorgeous real-world Miraidon from Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has been created in Japan by the Toyota Engineering Society.
JDR thinks the gaming industry needs more licensed IPs. It's basically a cry for Firefly: The Game, and why not? JDR delves deeper into why more isn't adapted for the interactive screen.
Nah. Video games are their own thing they wouldn't be improved by leeching off Hollywood more.
Read the article and it gives no mention of the many problems prevalent with licensed IPs, such as games and dlc being delisted when their licenses expire, Adult Swim games being the most recent example.
Only if they're good, if its going to be a 2D sprite art game, you can get away with a small team and small budget. But if you're going to make it a 3D polygonal game, you're going to need a large team with a large budget, and often times these licensed games are quickly pushed out the door, unpolished, rough, boring, bland, snorefest at best, and downright broken at worst.
We have an Indiana Jones and James Bond game currently being developed by two veteran teams with I assume fairly sizeable budgets. Let's hope they turn out to be worthwhile.
A new Mad Max game to coincide with the upcoming film would have been awesome. I loved the first game, I'm guessing it didn't sell too well as they never bothered following it up.
"The Game Music Foundation are today very proud and pleased to announce an additional concert, circling back to the roots of Game Muisic Festival in Poland. On April 28th, 2024, the National Forum of Music in Wroclaw will once again become a place to celebrate the art of video game music, featuring scores from The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II." - The Game Music Foundation.
The closer graphics get to fidelity with reality, the more responsible we have to be. Their "reality" doesn't matter. All forms of media communicate notions of how things aught to be or how the author / writer sees the world - their ingrained assumptions and preconceptions, and violence isn't exempt from this.
If we churn out games that realistically and entertainingly portray violence, we run the risk of fostering toxic ideas about violence in culture. Violence in games is deliberately created alongside carefully constructed sound design, the promise of reward thereafter, and the response of the controls, as well as the animations. We cannot forget that in reality, violence would not feel or look the same - the biorhythms are different, it would not be an entertaining experience. In violent games, violence is CONSTRUCTED in such a way as to make it fun, and it has no bearing on the actual reality of violence in physical, mental, and moral terms. We cannot allow the virtual violence of videogames somehow come to supplant the place of real violence - we cannot allow it to stand for what the reality of violence is. This becomes more and more of an issue as videogames acquire a greater power to represent reality, and reality itself is blurred. Thankfully, many of us can see past this, even intuitively, but for many others I don't think it'll be the same. I'm not saying a person would suddenly kill another person, but certainly I can see someone choosing violence in a certain scenario, and that choice being informed by the understanding and the "vicarious experience" of violence that their videogames have taught them.
It is of course a storytelling issue too. Though storytelling and narrative are inextricably linked with cultural assumption, expectation, and preconceptions. Narratives from a macroscopic level reflect a kind of progression of life on the part of the author - a kind of self-contained possibility or lifespan which carries certain messages about life and existence. A narrative is a model for a greater archetypal thing that the author expresses (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes not). Not only this, but narrative is bound up in language, and language contains and defines all our meanings. Language is necessarily political and culture-forming - it fixes boundaries on the imagination and on understanding and is a vector of assumptions about everything. When you argue the point about "ludonarrative dissonance" (that's become such a buzzword) and bemoan the lack of narrative coherence amidst ultra-violence in games, you can't claim that your argument is only concerned with narrative. For that very narrative communicates life and meaning to us on an extraordinarily deep level as I've been saying above, and is formative of culture, which is basically how we operate as humans in the world, limited in our perspectives and needing to write stories and form hypotheses about the universe around us.
Nevertheless, what Yahtzee says is a good starting point to graduate to the arguments I'm putting forward (sorry, that sounds terribly self-congratulatory and arrogant haha), and yes, I'm damn tired of playing as "heroes" that kill hundreds of dehumanised and faceless "enemies" in really fetishised and choreographed ways. It's not cool, it's not glorious, it's stupid, artistically inept, and shallow, and it's plagues videogames. It is in fact one of the reasons videogames are so stupid.
The tie between video games and actual violence is a tired argument with no facts to support it. Unless there is new evidence to the contrary, let's move on.
I just don't get the whole argument. If you're bothered by excessive killing, don't do it. In The Last of Us, in many areas you can sneak your way through and in sections you can't, they're out to kill you so your use of violence is justified. It's not like you're just out there killing people for the hell of it or because you can. As the player, you have some role in how you play the character. Use the free will that is given to you, and if you don't feel you're given the freedom to do what you want, don't play it.
I don't even get his point about killing the guy who stole the guns early in the game. It wasn't Joel who did that. Why should you feel the need to try and relate with her situation.
Violent video games are a symptom of a violent culture.
I mostly agree with yatzhee, but I don't get why the last of us is his prime example. I thought it was one of the games that handled violence the best.