Comments on: The Sunday Papers

By: Andrew F

Andrew F — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:28:12 +0000

Perhaps for the next night they’ll have to specify that when they say they play New Romantic Dark Electro Post Punk Disco, they don’t mean all at the same time. Though that would obviously be brilliant. Actually, I’m pretty sure it happens somewhere on Britney’s album before last…

By: yhancik

yhancik — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:06:06 +0000

I guess this is the darkest side of Achievements : http://kotaku.com/5139250/nolan-bushnell-bets-on-gamewager...

All I can say is : O_o

By: solipsistnation

solipsistnation — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:56:09 +0000

editing posts seems to do something strange

By: solipsistnation

solipsistnation — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:54:18 +0000

“A NEW ROMANTIC DARK ELECTRO POST-PUNK DISCO?”

Why would that cause whining? That sounds like big piles of win. Also my iTunes library.

By: EyeMessiah

EyeMessiah — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:11:59 +0000

The “chase” sequence 3/4 of the way through brazil is a bit weak but its worth sitting through for the superb ending.

By: chesh

chesh — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:02:21 +0000

That club had me at Warm Leatherette, really.
However, that Tale of Tales page. Blinding. Argh.

By: qrter

qrter — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:45:59 +0000

Munchausen is where the real joy is, though.

That film works in bits but doesn’t flow well as a whole. That said, it’s one of my personal favourites, the stories are wonderful and it all looks incredible etc.

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:41:39 +0000

Brazil is officially installed in RPS’ hall of awesome.

By: yhancik

yhancik — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:34:12 +0000

Ah, Dinger’s reply wasn’t there when I was writing one.

>> the problem isn’t achievements, but the game design itself, which was flawed in being narrative-heavy to the disrespect of the player’s experience.
Yes !!

By: yhancik

yhancik — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:31:09 +0000

@Dinger :
I second almost everything you said

@Robin :
I don’t see how achievements (as a concept, not in their possibly terrible contemporary implementations) “impose a ‘correct’ developer-sanctioned interpretation of (all) the interactions available to the player”.
How do they influence our interactions more than the “gameplay” ?

For example, in most games, you’ll find enemies attacking you on sight. It means that my only interaction with those characters will be to kill them or escape.

For example, add achievements to Hitman, like Killed Absolutely Everybody, Walked Out Dressed as the Victim, Visited 10 Every Crime Scene’s Toilets, Executed the Contract Only with the Piano Wire (etc etc etc etc), it doesn’t impose you anything, you can still play as you want.

But makes it an “every NPC will try to kill you and launch the alarm” game like Splinter Cell, and you force the player to kill those NPCs or hide from them, period.

My point is that the gameplay‘s influence on how we interact with the game is faaaaaaaaar more important than optional achievements.

Now I agree that there’s a lot of work to do on those achievements and how to implement them in games. You can’t have a funny pop-up in every games. You shouldn’t have a list of unlockable achievements in a lot of games. And above all, it was a terrible idea to link “achievements” to “points”.
I think “achievements” (the name is terrible to start with) should tell about “how you play”, no “how badass you are”.

By: Dinger

Dinger — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:28:10 +0000

Lewis: This a comments thread; I’m disagreeing with everyone. If I understand you, you find achievements an extradiegetic distraction that’s imposed with the ruthlessness of convention regardless of whether it benefits the particular style of game. You could say the same thing about a numeric score (which, back in the day, even the Infocom games had).
I don’t particularly object to that, nor to the notion that, like scores, many games don’t need them, and for anyone to require achievements is rather shortsighted (“Ok, then let’s make an achievement for completing the tutorial, and an achievement for each level of the game completed”).

My point was that, when a game’s design and achievements reach the level of dissonance that achievements favor ways of gameplay counter to the rules the game purports to lay out, the problem isn’t achievements, but the game design itself, which was flawed in being narrative-heavy to the disrespect of the player’s experience.

“Achievements” cover a wide range of phenomena. Long before they got the name, people were doing timed runs, or playing through Doom using only the chainsaw. All those minigames in the so-called “sandbox” games as best inaugurated with GTA III (more properly called “theme-park games,” if you ask me, and you didn’t) are based around the same notion as achievements. And I see these things, loaded with minigames and stupid puzzles along with annoying conventions such as randomly spawning bad guys matched to your skill level, and then they try to “tell a story” in there. Huh? In that model (The Elder Scrolls Series, GTA, Bioshock, WoW, and so on) advancing the narrative is just another achievement: an artificial reward for doing something according to the developer’s plan.

Yeah, BYU center for family and morality, again, that’s all you need to know.

By: Lewis

Lewis — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:47:41 +0000

Woah, fucked up HTML tagging there. Apologies.