am i just trying to run away from procgen because i feel like there's backlash against it? i don't know. i think i know that i want to tell stories and that the stories i want to tell would benefit from handcrafted levels. but maybe i shouldn't want to tell stories? i'm not very good at that. how do i best reconcile my desire to tell interesting stories with games with my complete inability to tell good stories/fascination with the purity of systems?
@lycaon at some level all of these things become formulaic, if you scope them to be large enough. It kind of stops me from playing AAA because the formula is realized with an army of labor
@Triplefox i think that's bullshit and also not particularly relevant to my concern. scope and budget have nothing to do with quality or interestingness, the corporate machinations inherent to capitalism that discourage risk-taking do. in a socialist society there'd be no issue with making weird, interesting games that are huge in scope because you no longer have to worry about selling to an audience to pay rent since we guillotined all the landlords.
@Triplefox but more importantly the thing you said is totally irrelevant. i'm not asking about what happens when you scope up games. i'm wondering about what I should make next. these are different questions.
@lycaon it's not about capitalism but that i find it inelegant to approach it that way (but only if you buy into my premise that we actually are doing formulaic things most of the time, and to support that i would point to every piece of genre fiction, every popular song, and every soap opera)
@Triplefox ok but. that's still not relevant to anything i said and also wrong. even if you don't *mean* that condescendingly (and I don't know, you could mean it that way, i'm just giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don't deserve), calling whole swathes of media "formulaic" is still massively condescending. but also "formulaic" is totally irrelevant. one can make interesting, engaging work within the confines of genre fiction, popular songs, or even soap operas! what matters is not the circumstances of the creation of media but the value you get out of it.
@lycaon i like all of those things! So... I embrace it as I see it but also have to reconcile that against pragmatic means of achieving similar stuff in my own work. I'm trying to extend my creative process by understanding patterns of design and fiction and harnessing them in the same way that basic technique might be studied and practiced.
If that comes off as irrelevant condescension or simply wrong, my apologies. I just get excited about the topic!
@Triplefox who cares. i'm wondering what kind of game i should make next. i don't care about your wrong condescending theories about how actually all things people like is forumulaic i'm so very smart.