Then why did you respond to me?undeadsuitor said:
I thought that was the opposite of "tokenism".MarsAtlas said:
Why do you think it was an afterthought? What did you think his relationship with Grindelwald was? Just besties or what? Do you really think the character of Dumbledore would have been severly improved if the gentle, elderly man would often talk about all the dudes he had been screwing in his youth?undeadsuitor said:
The "twist", if there was one, was the subversion of plot expectation. The house isn't haunted, no one died, there's no mystery to solve. It's as much an interactive art piece as anything, and probably should have been marketed as such so that people who weren't in the target market wouldn't whine about it not meeting their expectations on forums.johnnyboy2537 said:
I guess it has something to do with my distaste for "portraying something that shouldn't be an issue, as the basis of a character".MarsAtlas said:
Oh I really do not want to restart the massive row I had with some of you regarding this character on this very forum, but here goes.Silvanus said:
Maybe it was just the LP I was watching because it took that guy a while to find it.MarsAtlas said:
The LP was absurdly boring but I managed to stick it out to see what the fuss was about.
How isn't the silent protagonist a cardboard cutout? The only silent protagonists I can honestly say I felt attached to were Gordon Freeman and Soap in CoD4. Even then they had inklings of a personality but they're really only one of the few silent protagonists from the last 20 years that I honestly think should have been silent protagonists in the first place. Because a lot of the time it feels like a Corvo from Dishonored type of situation where we're supposed to feel for and root for the character despite having no personality and there clearly being situations that he should have said something. That is when a silent protagonist actively hinders the game's story. They fixed it with Daud thankfully but it didn't stop the main game from blowing and it felt the same here. There were parts where it seemed like if the protagonist talked and reacted to things found in the game it actually would have made it better, more enjoyable, and possibly even somewhat compelling. Instead we just got someone walking around a house that they're supposedly supposed to have some sort of emotional reaction to. Some of the letters found in the game were actually well written and occasionally felt like they showed the personality of the person writing them but most of them simply bored me.
I might be mixing up the player character and the sister. After a while of watching something dull I probably started mixing up characters. The whole relationship the sister is in is absurdly unhealthy and absurd in general(now that I've had time to look this stuff up again). After a while it becomes obvious that the sister's happiness is dependent on her girlfriend being around and becomes suicidal and what saves her? Her girlfriend deciding not to join the military and then they run away to live happily ever after in a trailer park stealing food from the nearby farm because neither of them thought out how any of this was going to go and eventually they both get fat and die after being bitten by a rabid raccoon(eventually I got so bored watching the game and called the ending between the two correctly and started coming up stories of what happened to them after they ran off). But basically all the problems in the relationship are somehow the parent's fault because they're homophobic rather than the fact that their relationship is absurdly bad. That they ran away and were given a happy ending only made me laugh. Their relationship is made out to be purely good by the game rather than toxic for the obvious dependency problems which ultimately ruined the "happy ending". It's inconsistent writing. It wants to acknowledge certain hard truths while completely ignoring others.
No. Writing LGBT people and minorities as flawless human beings is something SJWs do. LGBT people certainly aren't perfect looking at the domestic violence statistics. I've written plenty of gay characters, I'm certainly far from an SJW, and do you know what I do? I write them as human beings and human beings have flaws, imperfections, and even demons. That's what the Last of Us got right. Do you think that any of these people would've have written Bill as gay? A fat slob who talks to himself(and is clearly slowly going insane if he hasn't already) and is the worst thing of all to these people: a white man? Do you think that any of these people would have thought to have his relationship end like that? Gone Home certainly didn't and it should have. It might have actually made an emotional impact. Instead it just feels like a bad romance novel where we don't even know either of the people in the relationship, even though one of the people is our sister.
I watched LPs. It's possible that the person I was watching was just terrible at it but even after I put the pieces together it didn't make it any more compelling. It's something absurdly shallow attempting to be deep and failing because it doesn't understand that everything isn't black and white. I realized the whole thing is basically wish fulfillment after I found out a lot of was written by actual gay people who grew up in the 90s. I'm not even sure if that makes this worse or better.
I was wrong and it was the sister that was gay, it's been a while since I watched the LPs so I went back to find them. It was a small twist that just made me laugh because it was trying to be compelling and relevant but failed miserably in my eyes, which is funny because this seemed to be trying to cater to people like me. The marketing probably is to blame for a lot of the complaints and problems with it. Ultimately I don't even know if it's good as an interactive art piece because it felt like it failed to me in a lot of what it was trying to accomplish. By the end I couldn't name one noticeable thing about any of the characters by the end except that the sister was gay and the parents were homophobic despite the fact that it was trying to sell itself on its political message. The fact that it was written by actual gay people who grew up in the 90s probably made it worse because they didn't treat the characters like people so they could push their message. They treated Sam and her girlfriend as purely good, despite the fact that their relationship clearly wasn't a healthy one but they glorified it anyway, and we learn next to nothing about the parents except that they're homophobic and have marriage troubles, neither of which is interesting or presented in an interesting way. It sacrificed a lot to push its message of "homophobia's bad" and could have been a lot better if they decided to completely delve into all sides of it. Instead they only pushed one side and it came off as lazy.BloatedGuppy said:
Well again though, that wasn't a twist, or "the twist". The "twist", insomuch as there was one, was the subversion of the 3 spooky 5 me atmosphere and the revelation that this wasn't a horror game at all, but just a coming of age story experienced by proxy. An inversion of the standard gaming audience expectation. No wizards, no aliens, no space marines, just a pubescent love story and a family's rather banal and ordinary problems. That's clever, but it's clever in a way someone coming in expecting and wanting a horror game is going to find deeply annoying.johnnyboy2537 said:
johnnyboy2537 said:
johnnyboy2537 said:
Yeah I...don't know what to tell you. Maybe I played a different version of Gone Home, but it didn't strike me as much of an "issue" or political game at all. It felt like a pet project. Accusations that it's a "walking simulator" stick to some degree, although I tend to find such complaints reductive and very limiting in terms of the scope of what games can aspire to be, but there's not a lot of "traditional game play" there to appeal to grognards so I understand the slight. Political though? Meh.johnnyboy2537 said:
I feel like this one is a small misunderstanding. It felt like it was put in there as a twist, it is set in the 90s and has gay writers, but it was ultimately so generic and poorly done that whether or not it was even twist is still debated. That probably could have been rectified if it wasn't for the game having a silent protagonist. There are good ways to write gay relaitonships and characters but this was just poorly done in my eyes.BloatedGuppy said:
Outside of the game that is how it was pushed though, at least by the gaming press but then again they're retarded. Spec Ops was great despite a few obvious plot holes(like why Adams and Lugo kept following Walker despite him clearly having lost his mind) because of its strong writing and emphasis on the characters. It didn't put the message first and sacrifice the characters and plot for the sake of their message. It got there slowly and organically, the characters slowly descending into the belly of the beast and madness both figurative and literally. They didn't suddenly go "war is hell". The characters got there through circumstances that fit the themes and their character arcs. They did something horrible by accident and it destroyed them. A lot of things also added to it like the increasing disturbing visuals in the background and the executions becoming more and more brutal as well as Walker's lines when doing them.BloatedGuppy said:
Righto. Just wanted to see whether we have entirely different judgements on this, and now know we do. I wouldn't consider those characters to have their sexuality as the "basis for their character" in a thousand years; the former mentions it in a single line (hardly basis-forming), and the latter has countless interactions that do not relate to it at all, several deep friendships formed with other characters which do not relate to it at all, and a single sub-plot which relates to it (in a way not unlike straight characters do all the time).MrFalconfly said:
What makes it "agenda-pushing", though, really? The relationship is gay, sure; had it been a straight one, with a similar plot and gameplay, nobody would think twice about whether it had an "agenda". It wouldn't even come up. The mere presence of a gay relationship is not an agenda-- when I'm walking down the street, I'm not agendering any-damn-body.johnnyboy2537 said:
Yeah well.Silvanus said:
Nonsense. Coming to understand and appreciate your closest family member's deepest secrets has less consequence than killing a bunch of aliens on board a spaceship? I think not.Ezekiel said: