radiant fracture

( Partial cut/paste of video description behind cut )

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When I first saw this video in my Feedly feed, I clicked on it just long enough to load the Youtube page and look at the video description to get the actual name of the game, which I then looked up on Steam. I thought it looked vaguely interesting, but I balked at the $20 USD price tag. Note, in the video above, the claim is made that it "never goes on sale," so I guess I'll never be playing it myself. I stopped the video at that point and came here to write this paragraph before going back and watching the rest of the video. So... basically, this whole paragraph here serves as an extended caveat that, no, I have not actually played the game being talked about here, and it's possible I never will, because I ain't paying $20 for that. *shrug*

TL;DR gist of the previous paragraph: Caveat: I have not played The End of Gameplay myself, nor will I ever. Probably.

(Another caveat: prior to this video, I don't recall ever hearing of this droqen guy before, or of the "kill gameplay" philosophy [or of that Dogme 95 stuff, either, for that matter]. Also, I still haven't yet played Silent Hill f or Mixtape, though both of those games are in my Steam wishlist).

So, anyway, I then watched the rest of the video.

As one of the comments (which I saw prior to starting the video) under the video muses, games like The Sims or Minecraft (OG Minecraft, anyway, back when it was really just being tossed into a huge world and being allowed to do as you want, before all the various "gameplay modes" and pre-built levels were added to it) could be analogous to the "kids in a yard kicking a ball around" thing, as opposed to the "playing in the World Cup Final" thing. At no point, however, does the video mention games like The Sims or Minecraft, mind you. (EDIT And, of course, some dipshit immediately replied to that comment with an asinine, banal "That's because Minecraft and the Sims aren't games," which spawned a huge sub-thread of people rightfully calling this guy out and him going into a bunch of semantic nonsense to try to defend his so-called point that they aren't games, which reminded me of why I so very rarely bother to look at Youtube comments in the first place. /EDIT)

That bit about Sudoku was just... weird, though. Like, personally, I fucking loathe Sudoku. I'd rather punch myself in the side of the head repeatedly, figuratively speaking if not literally, than to try to do a Sudoku puzzle. The one time I was forced to interact with a Sudoku puzzle, I immediately went online and found a Sudoku-solver and just plugged in the answer (which was tedious enough all on its own), without even bothering to try to work it out myself.

With that said, however, I don't feel like Sudoku needs to have a point or to "express something" to exist. (I don't personally dislike Sudoku because it doesn't "express something," I just don't like it at all, period.) Also, being good at painting is not inherently "better" than being good at Sudoku or any other game.

(Outside, I suppose, of its potential to make you money or whatever, if you're really good at painting [or are, at the very least, good enough at bullshitting to convince people to buy your "paint literally thrown at a canvas" style of "painting" or whatever]. But then, of course, one could make money playing video games, too, if one becomes good at (fak)e-sports, and I find that to be way more asinine than someone creating and selling a painting. But then, apparently, there are also Sudoku contests that can award upwards of $10,000 in prizes if you win, and... wow... just... wow... ಠ_ಠ ...but I digress.)

Other games I thought of as I watched this were The Beginner's Guide (this droqen dude kinda seems a bit like a real life equivalent to "Coda" in some ways) and game, game, game and again game.

But what I really thought of, based solely on the video's title and just from looking at the game's page on the Steam store, was Reality Hunger, and I still feel that way after having watched the whole thing. This game feels vaguely like the video game equivalent of Reality Hunger (minus, hopefully, all the intentional quasi-plagiarism, anyway). A lot (too much for my tastes) of Reality Hunger consisted of repeated rants against "mainstream" literature, such as novels and memoirs, and it presented itself, and works like it, to be the "future." And my response to The End of Gameplay, at least based on what I've seen of the game in the above video, is kind of similar.

To paraphrase myself from my review there of Reality Hunger:

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I am glad this [game] exists. I am glad that I [watched a video about] it. I mean, after all, it compelled me to write this wall of text about it, if nothing else. However, if all [video games] started to trend toward being like this, which seems to be what the [game's creator] wants, then I think I'd probably have to just give up [playing video games] altogether.

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In the end I agree more with i am a dot than with droqen: Long live gameplay.

With that said, I also don't necessarily completely disagree with droqen, either, especially based on what he has said here.

The main difference is that I don't have any qualms about labeling something "uninteresting" if I find it to be uninteresting. I've admitted many times in the past that I've straight up abandoned a lot of games when I lost interest in them. It doesn't frighten me to say that. I don't feel a need to equate games that don't interest me with those games being "bad" or "evil," or whatever. Gameplay, as droqen himself apparently came to realize there, is not inherently "evil." But it can most certainly be "uninteresting" or "boring" (though I have come to dislike the latter word on a visceral level [enough so that I've taken to immediately downvoting reviews on Steam if any variant of the word "boring" appears in them, even if I might have otherwise completely agreed with them]). Grinding can be uninteresting. Fetch quests can be uninteresting. Hours of non-interactive (or even interactive) cutscenes can be uninteresting. Mindlessly gunning down endless waves of "enemies" can be uninteresting. There have been a lot of games that I may play for 1 or 10 or 100 hours, but then, at hour 2, 11, 101, it's like a switch flips in my brain and I'm like "no, suddenly, this is no longer doing anything for me," and then I just exit out and uninstall, even if I haven't actually finished the game yet. I may reinstall the same game and try again later, after an hour or a day or half a decade, and I may actually get through it on the second or third or fourth or fourteenth attempt, or I may never finish it at all or even ever make it even as far as I did on the first attempt.

(Also, tangentially related, I also do that whole "is today still 'today' if it's after midnight, as long as I haven't gone to bed yet?" thing. Is it "tomorrow" if I stay up until 4am or whenever, or does it only become "tomorrow" after I go to bed and wake up again at noon or whenever? Like, I'll be sitting here thinking "well, today I did such-and-such and... wait, no, technically I did that 'yesterday' not 'today,' because it's after midnight already, but I still think of it as 'today.'" The mysterious 報復性熬夜 is usually in full force at that point. ¬_¬)

Post started at 2:45pm. Post actually posted at 7:08pm.