![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
The media consumption environment of our current days has more programming than even Adrian Veidt could keep up with (assuming he wanted to watch everything, instead of having a carefully and rigorously curated list of things). Between books, shows, games, podcasts, music, drama, and plenty of other things, the average person will only get a fraction of the total amount of media available for consumption, even if they resolutely try only to consume media produced in the current year.
The interactivity of games poses a special problem, however. In many cases, significant parts of the story of any given game might be hidden behind whether or not a person explores out-of-the-way areas or completes challenging missions work good ratings, or quickly, or sometimes, acts entirely counterintuitively to the story as laid out and opens up a pathway where they discover the real narrative that has been hidden behind the original story. Sometimes these hidden pathways are signposted or hinted at, and other times, they are entirely a Guide Dang It, where these pathways are discovered entirely by accident, by someone trying to chart every single result for any given decision point, or when the official guidebook or walkthrough mentions their existence. (For example, one secret part of Batman: Arkham Asylum went undiscovered until the developers themselves mentioned its existence.)
Which is to say that sometimes, getting to the golden ending takes more skill than a person has or time that a person wants to invest in a particular game, and so they are locked out of that content unless they have someone who is willing to put in the time or has the necessary skills to achieve the conditions put forward for unlocking that bit. Visual novels are generally the best about making it possible for someone to get to the point where they want to make a different decision quickly, or to be able to back up from a decision that resulted in a bad ending and to take another pathway. Although sometimes they don't make it obvious where the real decision point has been made, which can lead to frustration over not being able to avert a disaster, when the truth was that you already had to know all the items to take from Arthur's bedroom and get all of them at the beginning of the game (or the part where you replay the beginning of the game in the middle of the game) or that you had to feed a dog a sandwich to avoid getting eaten later on. Thankfully, at least for main stories, not providing roadmaps for your players so that they know when things are going to go poorly or so that they know which thing is the action they're supposed to do is considered bad game design. I personally also think it bad game design to lock your content behind skill gates where the player is expected to perform several advanced moves in sequence and perfect timing to get access to this achievement or cutscene. Games like Kaizo Mario or I Wanna Be The Guy always seemed much more like exercises in frustration with the payoff of one perfect run that means you can go on to the next frustration task rather than something I actually would enjoy playing.
Thankfully, with the wider world of connected networks, and the ease in which someone can capture their screen, and also an audio stream or a camera and microphone attached to themselves, it's now possible for a game to be experienced much more like a movie, or a movie with commentary from the player of the game. The Let's Play name is often applied to these cinematic walkthroughs, whether by screenshot or screencast, even though it's an audience watching someone else play the game. But vicarious experiences are not new, and I would be a flagrant hypocrite (and not very good at English grammar) if I were to harsh on the enjoyment of others who feel satisfied and like they have achieved something good through viewing a thing, rather than directly doing it themselves.
Let's Plays exist for a lot of games, and more than a few people have garnered a large subscriber base by having an engaging, hilarious, or sometimes full of swear words experience, which can then be monetized through advertisements, patronage, merchandise, or other methods by either the person doing the gaming or by companies that claim copyright over the content in use. Recording gameplay and streaming it (or using that recorded gameplay to build a walkthrough, a Let's Play, or an entirely new series and narrative divorced from the story of the game itself made possible through a bug in the game where characters could lower their weapon so it no longer appeared in the viewport of the viewpoint character) is far easier now than it was before. Games have had replay features, often where you could save a match or a run to the console and replay it in the game itself for a long time, but it was pretty difficult to export that match data to a file format that could then be edited and uploaded. Emulation made this task much treasurer on any system that could be emulated, whether for screenshots or for recording video from inside the emulator or have a video card recording screen activity that then became raw footage to work with. The newest Sony console as of the writing, the Playstation 4, has a recording feature built in and turned on so as to make it exceedingly easy to stream or connect gameplay footage for editing and broadcast. And, apparently, as Kingdom Hearts III taught me, it is possible for games to say which parts of their experience should be forbidden from recording. Not that those parts didn't also work their way onto the Internet swiftly and get themselves edited into compilations of the game to be watched, but the console itself said that it could not be recorded. (The console also takes screenshots of when achievements are recorded, which is a slight bit of hilarity for Kingdom Hearts, as a lot of their achievements and things are awarded in between scenes or after the screen fades to white, so the screenshots that go with the achievements are mostly either a black screen or a white one.) Many relatively recent video cards also come with a software overlay to begin recording gameplay sessions at the touch of a button. Clearly, sharing gameplay sessions and putting together all of the cutscenes and narrative of a game, movie-style, or putting together a complete game session, start to finish, is definitely going to be with us for a while, assuming that companies don't suddenly decide they want absolutely zero footage of their games out there, or worse, they start selectively enforcing their copyright to remove portrayals of the game they don't like. And since the mere accusation is enough to generate a strike against an account, the DMCA can be used very easily to silence dissenting voices, because nobody is able to afford the cost of going through the the court case that would say "no, hey, gameplay footage for purposes of criticism is entirely a fair use of the footage."
And Let's Plays are enough in the cultural memory at this point that Toby Fox's role-playing game Undertale makes mention of the phenomenon in a fourth-wall break during one particular set of choices in the game.
I've watched a Let's Play or two, and read ones that are full of commentary, and it's a different form than the straight walkthrough, where the idea is to get someone through the game with as complete or perfect a game as possible and give them the information they'll need to be successful. In the Let's Play form, while someone is going through the game, and often is doing so with the intention of getting a particular ending, half the fun is in the commentary going on and the possibilities of making or getting jokes. And, sometimes, it's the game itself that's taking the brunt of being made fun of, instead of, say, a protagonist that never says anything or that can't defend themselves in any way against malevolent spirits unless they take a picture of them and apparently transfer some of the essence of the ghost onto film. Which is also a game that encourages you to let the ghost get as close as possible to hurting the protagonist before taking the shot so as to do maximum damage with the camera's power.
I'll probably indulge in a few Let's Plays if I ever get truly curious about horror games or twitchy games or otherwise games that I would have no intention of playing at all, just to see about their cultural relevance or to get caught up on the memes. For the games I'm interested in, though, I'm probably going to try and play them through as much as I can.
The media consumption environment of our current days has more programming than even Adrian Veidt could keep up with (assuming he wanted to watch everything, instead of having a carefully and rigorously curated list of things). Between books, shows, games, podcasts, music, drama, and plenty of other things, the average person will only get a fraction of the total amount of media available for consumption, even if they resolutely try only to consume media produced in the current year.
The interactivity of games poses a special problem, however. In many cases, significant parts of the story of any given game might be hidden behind whether or not a person explores out-of-the-way areas or completes challenging missions work good ratings, or quickly, or sometimes, acts entirely counterintuitively to the story as laid out and opens up a pathway where they discover the real narrative that has been hidden behind the original story. Sometimes these hidden pathways are signposted or hinted at, and other times, they are entirely a Guide Dang It, where these pathways are discovered entirely by accident, by someone trying to chart every single result for any given decision point, or when the official guidebook or walkthrough mentions their existence. (For example, one secret part of Batman: Arkham Asylum went undiscovered until the developers themselves mentioned its existence.)
Which is to say that sometimes, getting to the golden ending takes more skill than a person has or time that a person wants to invest in a particular game, and so they are locked out of that content unless they have someone who is willing to put in the time or has the necessary skills to achieve the conditions put forward for unlocking that bit. Visual novels are generally the best about making it possible for someone to get to the point where they want to make a different decision quickly, or to be able to back up from a decision that resulted in a bad ending and to take another pathway. Although sometimes they don't make it obvious where the real decision point has been made, which can lead to frustration over not being able to avert a disaster, when the truth was that you already had to know all the items to take from Arthur's bedroom and get all of them at the beginning of the game (or the part where you replay the beginning of the game in the middle of the game) or that you had to feed a dog a sandwich to avoid getting eaten later on. Thankfully, at least for main stories, not providing roadmaps for your players so that they know when things are going to go poorly or so that they know which thing is the action they're supposed to do is considered bad game design. I personally also think it bad game design to lock your content behind skill gates where the player is expected to perform several advanced moves in sequence and perfect timing to get access to this achievement or cutscene. Games like Kaizo Mario or I Wanna Be The Guy always seemed much more like exercises in frustration with the payoff of one perfect run that means you can go on to the next frustration task rather than something I actually would enjoy playing.
Thankfully, with the wider world of connected networks, and the ease in which someone can capture their screen, and also an audio stream or a camera and microphone attached to themselves, it's now possible for a game to be experienced much more like a movie, or a movie with commentary from the player of the game. The Let's Play name is often applied to these cinematic walkthroughs, whether by screenshot or screencast, even though it's an audience watching someone else play the game. But vicarious experiences are not new, and I would be a flagrant hypocrite (and not very good at English grammar) if I were to harsh on the enjoyment of others who feel satisfied and like they have achieved something good through viewing a thing, rather than directly doing it themselves.
Let's Plays exist for a lot of games, and more than a few people have garnered a large subscriber base by having an engaging, hilarious, or sometimes full of swear words experience, which can then be monetized through advertisements, patronage, merchandise, or other methods by either the person doing the gaming or by companies that claim copyright over the content in use. Recording gameplay and streaming it (or using that recorded gameplay to build a walkthrough, a Let's Play, or an entirely new series and narrative divorced from the story of the game itself made possible through a bug in the game where characters could lower their weapon so it no longer appeared in the viewport of the viewpoint character) is far easier now than it was before. Games have had replay features, often where you could save a match or a run to the console and replay it in the game itself for a long time, but it was pretty difficult to export that match data to a file format that could then be edited and uploaded. Emulation made this task much treasurer on any system that could be emulated, whether for screenshots or for recording video from inside the emulator or have a video card recording screen activity that then became raw footage to work with. The newest Sony console as of the writing, the Playstation 4, has a recording feature built in and turned on so as to make it exceedingly easy to stream or connect gameplay footage for editing and broadcast. And, apparently, as Kingdom Hearts III taught me, it is possible for games to say which parts of their experience should be forbidden from recording. Not that those parts didn't also work their way onto the Internet swiftly and get themselves edited into compilations of the game to be watched, but the console itself said that it could not be recorded. (The console also takes screenshots of when achievements are recorded, which is a slight bit of hilarity for Kingdom Hearts, as a lot of their achievements and things are awarded in between scenes or after the screen fades to white, so the screenshots that go with the achievements are mostly either a black screen or a white one.) Many relatively recent video cards also come with a software overlay to begin recording gameplay sessions at the touch of a button. Clearly, sharing gameplay sessions and putting together all of the cutscenes and narrative of a game, movie-style, or putting together a complete game session, start to finish, is definitely going to be with us for a while, assuming that companies don't suddenly decide they want absolutely zero footage of their games out there, or worse, they start selectively enforcing their copyright to remove portrayals of the game they don't like. And since the mere accusation is enough to generate a strike against an account, the DMCA can be used very easily to silence dissenting voices, because nobody is able to afford the cost of going through the the court case that would say "no, hey, gameplay footage for purposes of criticism is entirely a fair use of the footage."
And Let's Plays are enough in the cultural memory at this point that Toby Fox's role-playing game Undertale makes mention of the phenomenon in a fourth-wall break during one particular set of choices in the game.
"At least we're better than those sickos that stand around and WATCH it happen... Those pathetic people that want to see it, but are too weak to do it themselves. I bet someone like that's watching right now, aren't they...?"Without a culture already established that likes to watch video games get played by others, and, indeed, might enjoy watching video games getting played by others where they take cruel choices because they are curious to see how it changes the story or what kind of bad ends it results in, this piece doesn't land quite as well as it would otherwise.
I've watched a Let's Play or two, and read ones that are full of commentary, and it's a different form than the straight walkthrough, where the idea is to get someone through the game with as complete or perfect a game as possible and give them the information they'll need to be successful. In the Let's Play form, while someone is going through the game, and often is doing so with the intention of getting a particular ending, half the fun is in the commentary going on and the possibilities of making or getting jokes. And, sometimes, it's the game itself that's taking the brunt of being made fun of, instead of, say, a protagonist that never says anything or that can't defend themselves in any way against malevolent spirits unless they take a picture of them and apparently transfer some of the essence of the ghost onto film. Which is also a game that encourages you to let the ghost get as close as possible to hurting the protagonist before taking the shot so as to do maximum damage with the camera's power.
I'll probably indulge in a few Let's Plays if I ever get truly curious about horror games or twitchy games or otherwise games that I would have no intention of playing at all, just to see about their cultural relevance or to get caught up on the memes. For the games I'm interested in, though, I'm probably going to try and play them through as much as I can.
