Mrebo said:
Thoughts?
I've not seriously played console games since controllers had about 8 buttons and a single directional pad, but it's a sort of game I'd be interested in trying.
It is a really great game. I loved every second of it, as I've probably stated a dozen times in this thread already.
I got out of playing video games during my college years. But I have always been a huge fan of the art of story telling in general. I mean, who isn't? It is something we have done for all of recorded history... it's how we started recording history!
There are all sorts of ways to tell a story, and a lot of them shine in their own ways.
I got out of playing video games because I deemed them a waste of time, and felt I could gain nothing from them. I probably still can't. They probably are a total waste of time, as are so many things we enjoy.
Sometime after college, I hit a rough spot and started playing games again as a way to waste time and stop my mind from dwelling on painful things I couldn't change. I don't play games much anymore, but this reintroduction to games made me realize what a great vehicle for storytelling they really could be.
Far from the imagination inspiring games of my youth, where the story was delivered in two pages of the instruction manual and the rest was left for you to fill in the gaps, modern games can really get you invested in a world and its characters, making the story all the more powerful.
I still prefer books over TV and film, and maybe that is why. A week or two invested in a novel and wondering what will happen next in the story while you are away at work, for me, makes the end result of the story a lot more powerful than it is watching it unfold over the course of the better part of two hours, or in forty five minute, often drug out, and hyperexpanded segments of a TV show. I think video games have this same sort of power, but with a potentially higher degree of immersion.
Half-Life 2, Bioshock, and plenty of others to lesser degrees have left me with that same sort of feeling I get after finishing a really good book. The Last of Us most definitely did this for me as well.
I find the guy in your article a bit silly in how he continually reiterates how baffled he is that The Last of Us can be called a game, and how he argues that it isn't. And calls the whole concept of games like The Last of Us a "problem".
It is kind of like arguing that Pac-Man is a game, because the difficulty increases and you earn a score at the end, while Super Mario Bros. isn't a game, because you don't have any choices in it that impact the outcome and all players who make it to the end will eventually get the same ending. What??
You can finish the "game", of course, and get the ending that all players will inevitably get, but there's no real skill involved. Even the clumsiest, slowest, dumbest gamer -- me -- will eventually get there. There is no way to "lose" this game other than to choose not to finish it.
This describes almost every "game" that has been called a "game" since video games were a thing.
I kind of get the impression this fellow hasn't even played The Last of Us, as it isn't super easy, or even really that easy. I died in the game. A lot. Yeah, you don't have three extra lives that when gone force you to start over at the beginning. But what game does that anymore? That is a gaming aspect of the past. Nobody would play a game like Bioshock or The Last of Us if they had to start at the beginning again after dying a few times. That sort of "forgiving" game play began with the likes of The Legend of Zelda. I played TLoU on normal difficulty, and found its challenge on par with most modern games, and I have heard that survival mode is downright brutal. It got a bit tricky at times, and sometimes you had to figure out little "puzzles". How is that anything but a game?
What is this guy even arguing anyway? The more I stop and reflect on what he is saying, the sillier he sounds. It is totally linear, and it is totally story driven, but you still play it, you still shoot enemies, set traps, figure out puzzles, get killed and have to restart at your last autosave like any other modern game. He seems to be dogging it for being linear, and that every player who plays it all the way through will have had pretty much the same experience.
For most of video gaming history, games have been a linear experience. From Super Mario Brothers, to Metroid, to The Legend of Zelda, to Doom, to Tomb Raider, to pretty much any game ever that had a storyline, by the end, you've experienced the same things all your fellow players had. Multiple endings, moral descisions that shape the game, main stream open-world play-however-the-heck-you-want games are a fairly new development in gaming.
The Last of Us is in every sense, and by every definition, a game. Only it is one of those damn good ones that manage to be thought provoking, as well as emotionally engaging.
