OTGBionicArm wrote: Armored wimminz = badass.
My posts may be long. If this bothers you, don't read them.
My posts may be long. If this bothers you, don't read them.
DillButt64 wrote:
Bioshock Infinite EndingSpoilers bro..
Bioshock Infinite EndingAnd why would you need a "final boss fight"?
You know, you're actually just saying that you'd rather have a central antagonist to fight against in the final battle.
The general consensus seems to be that the boss fight in Bioshock 1 wasn't anything special and I'd agree to that.
People generally liked the final battle in Infinite more than in BS1, so it would seem like you're a deviant in this matter and I think it has little to do with the actual fight and more to do with the personal preference for demonizing a specific character.
"I love the dirty bomb tag because i get either
a) posts about the game
b) current world affairs" - steel-sentry
a) posts about the game
b) current world affairs" - steel-sentry
ohright my bad ill edit my post for spoilers
also with all the machines in the game they could have had used something, if i remember correctly they were making an even stronger version of the george washington machines but that got cut due to time/money/whatever it was, and i probably do have a preference for the whole "one on one" final battle scenario
also with all the machines in the game they could have had used something, if i remember correctly they were making an even stronger version of the george washington machines but that got cut due to time/money/whatever it was, and i probably do have a preference for the whole "one on one" final battle scenario
Thanks to TheNamelessBard for the signature
The hate that you build up in Bioshock Infinite wasn't made to have an epic boss battle where you can release all your anger on Comstock, unlike Borderlands 2 where all your hate piles up to the final moment where you can finally kill that ****head.
So the hate in Bioshock Infinite was made to give the ending more of a ''WTF''-moment after revealing the truth.
So the hate in Bioshock Infinite was made to give the ending more of a ''WTF''-moment after revealing the truth.
lifebaka wrote:
A large part of my problem with responding to this is that I don't think there's enough of a definition of what it is we mean when we say "avatar". To help solve this, I'd like to propose three different ways of thinking about how we interact with games: Cursors, Player Characters, and Avatars.
Well.. I quite honestly never saw any problems with defining the two..
I'd agree with pretty much all of what you're written regarding definitions, but the the main questions to me on this topic is: why/why not? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is one better for telling a narrative-driven story? Etc.
"I love the dirty bomb tag because i get either
a) posts about the game
b) current world affairs" - steel-sentry
a) posts about the game
b) current world affairs" - steel-sentry
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I'm eagerly awaiting your comment Baka (now you have to do it >:D)
What monster have I created? What hath science wrought? WHY DID I PLAY GOD?
Anyway. I think I actually have something to say now. Unfortunately, like most things worth saying, this is going to take a while.
A large part of my problem with responding to this is that I don't think there's enough of a definition of what it is we mean when we say "avatar". To help solve this, I'd like to propose three different ways of thinking about how we interact with games: Cursors, Player Characters, and Avatars.
First, we'll start with Cursors (which I'll always capitalize, to avoid confusion with mouse cursors). Cursors are the tools through which the player interacts with the world. I mean this in a very general sense: Mario is a Cursor, as mentioned in the video, as are Faith in Mirror's Edge, the Grey Warden in Dragon Age: Origins, your MMO characters, and anything else that you have direct control over in a video game. To look at the video's example of FTL, I'd classify the mouse cursor, the ship, and the ship's crew as all being Cursors; the player has the ability to give the ship and its crew direct orders, and has control over menus and such through the mouse cursor.
Second, Player Characters are the subset of Cursors which are also characters. Because Player Characters are a subset of Cursors, all Player Characters are by definition Cursors. Player Characters I also mean in a very general sense; any Cursor with any real amount of characterization counts. The rectangles in Thomas Was Alone, Sims in The Sims, all playable characters in pretty much all RPGs, Faith in Mirror's Edge, the Grey Warden in DA:O, MMO characters; all these are Player Characters. Characterization is a kinda' nebulous concept, so I'm not going to go into it here, but suffice to say that basically any Cursor that you can identify with in any sense is probably a Player Character, regardless of whether or not it's human (or even shown in any real way in the game).
Third is the Avatar, which I'm going to consider as a subset of Player Characters. The requirements for being an Avatar is a lot stricter than what I mean with Player Characters or Cursors. In order for a Player Character to be an Avatar, I think, there needs to be a lot of ability for the player to decide things about that character. Generally, the player can choose how their Avatar looks, although I don't think this is required. And the player needs to have a lot of choice about how their Avatar reacts to different situations and what their Avatar does in the game world. And, I think most importantly, a player's Avatar needs to be something specific to that player. By this definition, while MMO characters and the Grey Warden are still Avatars, Faith, Mario, and Sims are not Avatars.
I bring this up because I think there's a real distinction to be made here. Both Avatars and Player Characters are Cursors, and are therefore things that the player controls in the game world. You certainly control all the things mentioned in the video as "avatars", so they're all Cursors. And, for the most part, the video deals with characters that the player plays, so they're also Player Characters. But you don't have the kind of absolute choice necessary for all of them to be considered Avatars, I don't think. And this imprecision in language makes the Idea Channel's message a bit muddy, and it makes it really hard to talk about the question in a meaningful way. When we talk about game avatars, we're talking about MMOs, Second Life, or old school CRPGs. And the Idea Channel seems to be conflating that with the more general Player Character, like Faith or Mario.
I think that an Avatar sort of Player Character gives the player the option of being able to create their Avatar in their own image, physically or otherwise. But it doesn't require that the player actually do so. So, Avatars can be, rather than just an extension of the player in the game world, a representation of the player in the game world, making the choices that the player thinks that they themselves would make in that situation. Which is about as close as we can get to actually, ourselves, being in the game world.
Player Characters who are not Avatars, however, don't really present this option. Like Faith or Mario, they have their own things going on, and they are something inherently different from the player themselves. They are still an extension of the player in the game world, in that we experience the game world through them and get to tell them what to do, but we understand that they are their own characters, like those in more traditional media, and that we do not have control over them except in the specific ways that the game allows. They can't be a representation of the player, no matter how much we might empathize or identify with a specific Player Character.
I need to clean up the definitions, and the above could certainly use some streamlining, but this basically covers my thoughts on the video. I think I've got some more thinking to do as to what exactly it is that defines Avatars as distinct from other Player Characters, especially in non-video-game contexts such as table-top RPGs and LARPs. Still, this is a start.