MiracleOfSound said:
Dunno where you've been looking, almost everyone I talked to discussed it in that manner.
I've been looking online, at reviews and blogs, where creative professionals and games journalists make public statements about what they thought of a game. If someone said something different to you in a private face-to-face conversation, I naturally wouldn't have heard about it.
MiracleOfSound said:
So what you're saying is, art is only acceptable to you when it psychically bonds with your brain before you see or hear it, and it then coincides with exactly how YOU would have done it. Gotya.
No. >_< Subversive art is great. Confusing art is just fine. But The Last Of Us was not presented to the gamer community in the way that, say, Spec Ops: The Line was. Reviewers didn't do their naval-gazing publicly. They just kept saying "yay, parenting!"
It reminded me a lot of high school. I guarantee you that every single parent at the school I went to would gladly throw the entire student body under the bus to give their own personal kid even a slight short-term advantage. Worse, I see this kind of attitude being used every day, by businesses and individuals, to justify all the shittiest human behaviors.
So. That's why this ranting. It made me angry. Or rather, I took it at face value and it touched off a lot of OTHER shit I was angry about. YOUR art is fine. I didn't get it. You explained it, and I get it now, and that was on me for not getting it. But the game itself could have been presented better, or at least critiqued better, because until you told me in your own words that that was the POINT of the game, I thought I was literally the only one seeing it.
And I have a secret fear that there are two types of men: People who think Joel was wrong, and people who think Joel was right, and that the second class of people are the ones spending the most money buying up all the brown man-shooters, so nobody in the industry dares question them or call them on it after Spec-Ops sizzled. Instead they just keep smiling and nodding and making vague statements that could mean anything to anyone who hears them.
Note that I'm not accusing YOU of that. You've been very candid and straightforward, once I got your attention. I just don't understand why nobody else is recoiling in horror at the ending. Nobody's even saying that there's anything horrible in the ending to recoil from. They're just saying it's a great game with a great story about fatherhood. What the hell, industry?
You really think *our* interpretation of the ending is commonplace? *Really?* Cuz nobody's saying anything. If this was a Portal sequel the big twist at the end would be a meme by now, spoilers or no spoilers. It just strikes me as... atypical.
How could it be that everybody gets it, but nobody's talking about it? *I* got it, I just didn't think there was anything *to* get, let alone that everybody *else* got it, that's what made me angry. You're telling me that everyone else gets it too and that revulsion is actually what the developers were going for? Really? So how come everyone else is playing dumb, then? I don't see anyone else bragging about how they get it, except in a sense so general that I can't be sure they aren't just praising the game at face value, which is typical behavior and therefore what I expected going into reviews and the like.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just more surprised and confused now.
