Drawing is the best videogame
thecreativeindependent.com
thecreativeindependent.com
Video games have always meant a lot to me, but Zelda is one of the few franchises which have blown my mind and made me reassess what games can be and do. (Earlier, I'd had that from the Magic Carpet games and later on I'd experience it again with Morrowind).
I can also relate to the idea that understanding more about what games are and how they work can take away some of the magic. It's no longer a vast world filled with freedom. It's a computer program with a scripted story. On the other hand, having learned programming as I grew up and having worked for the last few years in the video game industry brings a whole other level of appreciation for the craftsmanship and attention to detail in some of the best games.
That said, I do still feel like I can lose myself in the world of well-crafted modern games as well. All it takes is a game which is good enough to tickle the imagination and invite your immersion. It's funny, though, that the one game in recent memory which made me re-experience that sense of vast freedom and that treasured feeling of "can games do that?" was the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
What amazed my with Ocarina of Time was the incredible freedom, variation and sense of scale _for its time_. It came out more than 20 years ago, so it's obviously not groundbreaking anymore. If you look at that game and don't see what amazing freedom it gives compared to more recent titles, that's definitely understandable.
In case you played Breath of the Wild and didn't see why this would impress, let me explain what blew me away.
There's a whole host of things, mainly centered around how the world feels very dynamic. Much of this has to do with what they refer to as their chemistry engine and how different materials react to different "elements" (wind, water, fire, heat, cold, lightning, magnetism...). It makes everything feel less like just 3D meshes with some few pre-programmed interactions with key objects and more like an immersive world.
My favourite example was when I, thoughtlessly, cut down and chopped up a tree in high grass using a fire sword. The grass caught on fire, the fire spread and engulfed the wood I'd cut up, which turned into a campfire, complete with a button prompt to sit and wait by the fire. The apples which fell out of the tree also caught fire, turning into baked apples. All these dynamics bring life to the game in a way you don't often see.
The environment, its climate and weather also feel more real than in most games and interact in more ways than just visually. Going to a cold area you need to plan for how to survive the cold. Very hot areas will cause things to catch on fire, which burns up wooden weapons and cooks raw foodstuffs. Rain is a serious problem because surfaces become slippery and electricity gets amplified by the moisture.
Some of the dynamics in the game are very fantastical and unrealistic (e.g. the way lightning acts, striking almost exclusively metal and signalling for a few seconds ahead of time where it will strike), but that doesn't matter to me. They still help establish the dynamics and laws of physics of that world and in manages to help it come alive.
Interestingly enough the experience was the complete opposite to me at this very point, it was immediately obvious I just exited the "tutorial" to set foot on a fake open world rigged with artificial gates. I suppose Baldur's Gate† (the first one and its later expansion, not the second one which I didn't enjoy nearly as much) and games like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls series spoiled me, and all I could see in OoT was, although hidden with great care, an expansion of the DooM key system under an uninspiring story.
† Yes it was out one month later but I didn't got a hand on a N64 til a friend had one a couple months later. Oh, and how much I hated that controller.
I think this is really what happens. With more experience you are better able to deconstruct the building blocks in light of past experiences. Instead of a well crafted fire dungeon, someone can see the building blocks that could easily enough be repainted with poison theme or lightning theme. Much like when one reads enough fiction they notice the tropes the author is using as soon as the author introduces them, to the point that people begin to even joke about things like death flags being raised.
When I did experience in college, it didn't have the same wonder of the games I played as a child. Not just LoZ, but basically every 'missed' game I tried.
I think it is just a sign of growing up and learning about the man behind the curtain with fictional stories. As a child I felt like there was more game there than really was. In Chrono Trigger I felt like there was so much story I was missing. As an adult I realize that none of what I imagined was ever coded. It didn't exist.
As an adult I grapple that with fiction, it is all fake. As a child, I didn't have that weight. These days I try to capture of the magic of 'if this fictional world was real and not limited just to what the author(s) painted', but as a child that came far more natural.
Checking out Zelda I left unimpressed, while I can imagine the game making an impression if one is younger and one spends a lot of time in it. But it has nothing over similar games on other platforms that were less popular and are now lost in the seas of time.
Actually I felt mostly annoyed trying out some Zelda games because of endless, unskippable, stale dialog.
Elite is one of the games I remember most fondly from my childhood.
I'm not sure that's fair. I was a big C64 fan myself and didn't get to play Nintendo games 'til later, but there's very little on the C64 to compare to the sheer size of Legend of Zelda, particularly in the same time frame (1986).
The only thing that comes to mind is Ultima IV (1985), which is an RPG rather than action-adventure. U4's story and dialog system stood alone against anything else on any system at the time, but Zelda's gameplay is far more polished. They were trying to do different things.
But Breath of the Wild was just great. The world was so pleasant and I enjoyed being in it regardless of what else I might have been doing. The puzzles and shrines were quite nice as well.
I skipped the one on the SNES, absolutely adored OOT, was pretty mystified by Majora's Mask, and when I could finally borrow Twilight Princess and the Wind Waker from a friend (again pretty late after their release), I finished both of them in one or two weeks.
(edit: "mystified" might be the wrong word. I really like it. And finished it. It's just... strange :) )
From that perspective, BotW is a really beautiful game, the size of the world is astonishing, and the chemistry systems and their interactions are great.
But the whole feel of the world feels... meh at times. The foundations are there, but the story and world design on top of it feels shallow.
To start with, all the interesting characters are dead (the four guys who died in their "beasts"); except for Zelda, who you don't get to interact with during the whole game, too. The only character left with some wonder in him is Kass; I was always pleasantly surprised whenever I heard his tune.
The intricate little stories you find throughout the older games have usually been replaced by some "fenced-off" substitutes (because you are supposed to find all of them with your own timing). Example: You wonder what that heart-shaped pond on a mountain looks like (from the map), go there, and then get a quest that only applies to that place. Bigger, more interconnected stories are few and far between.
And the "core gameplay" has suffered, too: The dungeons are an outright joke if you are accustomed to earlier Zeldas. The shrines often hinge on a clever idea, but are usually over just when things get interesting. One exception is maybe that island (trying to avoid spoilers here). That was great.
TL;DR: I still enjoyed BotW for its exploration aspects (which reminded me very strongly of Gothic), but it doesn't fill that "Zelda" niche for me. It's the first Zelda game that had me stuck before the final boss with no technical obstacle, just a lack of motivation to beat him, because the castle design turned me off that much (remember the dungeon design? Yeah).
Perhaps I should have another go at it.
BotW is my favourite and to me it feels very Zelda. That said, I definitely see what you mean about the dungeons. The different dungeons all have exactly the same visual style and theme. They all feel very much the same, which is so strange in a game which is all about variety and dynamics. Even the boss fights, which Zelda games excel at, all feel quite similar. I feel like I understand the idea behind those decisions, but the end result still suffers from it.
On the story, though, I have to disagree. It's true you don't really live the tale as much as find out about it (unlocking memories), but I absolutely loved the story (especially Zelda's character arc) and the juxtaposing of the struggle to prepare for Ganon's return with your attempt to build up the strength to face him after he's already brought ruin to the kingdom.
The fact that your adventure takes place a hundred years after Ganon's victory removes the kind of fake urgency you often have in video games where you need to hurry! but are also invites to partake in countless small quests. To me, the way you're learning about what happened adds a nice bittersweet tone to the hopeful preparations of the champions who you already know failed their mission.
Since it seems I left you with the impression that I don't like the story per se: That's not at all my problem with the game. Zelda's main story has been rather simplistic in every iteration anyway, and I don't see much worse in BotW. And, as you say, Zelda is actually not that much of a cardboard character this time (OOT only had her for the "damsel in distress part", it seems), which is great.
But that I don't get to experience it and just get to collect a montage of snapshots instead is exactly my point. That's just bad storytelling to me (basically a "reverse Half-Life": the videogame equivalent of show, don't tell).
But, as I said, the main story line is one thing. What bothers me more is that all the little stories you would find throughout the world in earlier versions are somehow... lost because of the "open world at all costs" approach the game takes. An earlier post in the thread mentioned The Witcher 3, which I think has tackled this problem much better. Its world is open, but you still get to discover interesting stories in a halfway guided way all over the place.
Another thing, since you point it out:
> The fact that your adventure takes place a hundred years after Ganon's victory removes the kind of fake urgency you often have in video games where you need to hurry!
Interestingly, for me, the effect here was a different one, too: I continuously kept wondering how this world could have kept working for so long. I mean, basically: The apocalypse happened (more or less), there's evil guardians and monsters everywhere, all went to ruin -- and yet, some little mountain village got over all that, no problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Kakariko seems really resilient in this regard, I had the same issue with OOT, too (but it's easier to believe it if we're only talking about 10 years).
Edit: Oh, and since you mention it:
> Even the boss fights, which Zelda games excel at, all feel quite similar.
Yes, that bugged me a lot, too. Basically, the intro-fight for each beast was way more interesting (or Molduga, for that matter). And I don't think they had to be this bland, even with the "orthogonal" dungeon design. That you're not supposed to have seen it all in sequence doesn't mean they can't have a "gimmick" like in the earlier games.
And, speaking of Molduga: This is one prime example of the storytelling I keep trying to articulate. That could have been an absolutely epic little storyline. But instead, all we get is someone in the Gerudo city telling you "get me its guts!".
There are still games which manage to create surprising experiences through emergent design, such as Dwarf Fortress. Even though one could analyze each piece in isolation without much difficulty, the interactions between all the pieces provide that sense of a complex world.
It's difficult to tell a story when all the characters involved seem apathetic to actually partaking and shaping the story beyond going through their daily routines and doing what you tell them to do. Sure, rulers will demand a fancy office and issue a ban on the export of some random item and miserable dwarves go berserk. But that's about it.
https://tci-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/ditbvg/ditbvg-transcript...
I don't think the storyteller took into account how hard it is to focus on text when the background looks like an optical illusion.
It's also completely inaccessible to people who are severely visually impaired. Thanks for considering the author's intent, but some of us need a handicap ramp to get up there.
To expand the scope of the world you can create, you really do need to visit the worlds imagined up by others. Be it in books, video games, TV, movies, or radio (try listening to “War of the Worlds” sometime with an era-appropriate mentality, it’s kinda crazy).
But a while back, I played a game with artwork I really enjoyed and I started actually looking at it the way the lines were drawn and everything and realized there wasn't that many of them and it wasn't really all that complicated despite looking nice. So I set out to draw as many of the sprites and characters from the game as I could and did them over and over again until I got them as close to the references I was using as I could.
Since then, i've tried to learn as much as about drawing and art as I can. I'm not saying I would really call myself an artist now but i've been happy with the progress i've been making and find myself enjoying the process. It's a cool feeling to look down at some paper and see an object that came from your mind.
Lately, i've been learning more about shading and colouring my drawings. I've been enjoying learning about light and colour theory it makes you look at the world in a new way. I also like the process of layering colours or values in a drawing. I also do stone carving and crafting and it reminds me of the process of polishing stone.
I still enjoy video games occasionally but I do find myself leaning more to creating something, playing music or working on hobby programming projects than playing a game.
Painters Painting (1973) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCnvrNfrUGg
Film before Film (1986) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTvEsvH59g
These are the types of games that make no assumptions in how you will play. They give you a set of rules, yes (otherwise, would it be a game? - This is the only problem I have with the article, it's not fair to compare drawing to gaming), but after that, in a way, the d-pad is your brush, the buttons are your colors, and the game is more about how you express yourself rather than advancing a story or reaching a goal.
These are few and far between though (Ikaruga, fighting games, parts of Katamari Damacy, among others), and many popular games are so rigid and linear that I can understand where the criticism is coming from.
I even built a small city in the game myself several years ago, and would spend some nights just watching tv while strip mining in the game, in order to gather the raw materials to build with. No other game before or since has compelled me to do that.
There's probably a market for a dedicated paint program where you are essentially placing different shapes and colored/textured 3d blocks on an invisible grid, with the focus on providing features for that, not making a game around it.
Tell that to the developers of Swift Playgrounds, Codea, Pythonista, Continuous, Hopscotch, Scratch Jr, Pyonkee, and plenty of other apps.
(Yes, I am aware that one can do a lot less with these than native development with Xcode, but that "less" is still non-zero. In the case of apps like Codea or Pythonista, a few now-native iOS games started life in those apps because they expose quite a lot of the native frameworks to the user.)
EDIT: Fixed by the author. Thanks for the accessibility update.
As an example:
> [ Illustration of what I thought Zelda was versus what Zelda really was. ]
This is a map of the game world with a distinctly visible 16x16 grid and a highlighted 4x5 region. That "what Zelda really was" was more than 12 times larger than "what [you] thought Zelda was" is lost in that description. But that information seems to be what that picture is intended to illustrate.
The transcript reads more like a draft: "this is where that picture goes". Instead it's more helpful to think about why you want to put that picture in particular there, what a normal sighted person can see in it that that you want to emphasize.
For example:
> In-game rendering of the Zelda world map laid out on a 16 by 16 tile grid. A small village in the West wedged between a forest to the North and a mountain range to the South, lakes and rivers throughout the East. The village I thought encompassed the entire playable area barely covers a tenth of the map.
(or something like that, I don't words good)
Yes, it would be quite different. It’s be readable, to start with.
Also, GP was complaining about the font — which is very decidedly /not/ made for legibility. You’ve added colours to the hypothetical, slightly changing the argument.
Also, what’s with the crack about Material design? That has nothing to do with anything, least of all the well-studied and thoroughly understood principles of text legibility.
No, people don’t go into art galleries and complain about them not adhering to user interface design principles because that’s absurd and irrelevant. This is text intended for people to read, not a drawing. Your argument is a weird straw man one.
Speaking more generally, I was just being annoyed with this type of comments. See any post that links to a website that doesn't adhere to whatever the latest web design fad is and there is a good chance that a large part of the discussion will be about how the font or colors make people's eyes bleed. As much as HN is able to foster intelligent discussion, this aspect of it is pretty annoying.
Legibility is not a fad, and it certainly isn't limited to web design. Legibility has been studied for decades, font foundries have worked to perfect the balance between style and legibility, and the principles are well-understood.
This goes back to your crack at Material design, something wholly irrelevant to what is being talked about by me and GP. Design frameworks are not the arbiters of the legibility of text.
That you think legibility is an optional extra for text is simply bizarre. Sure, it mightn't be the author's number one priority, but that doesn't put it out of criticism's way. Legibility is not simply a passing trend.
I was lucky to have an 11” display that I was reading this on - I could enlarge the text to a point where it was readily legible. It was a good text, but the experience wasn’t enhanced by the fonts used. If I had a phone, I would not have been able to read it, even with reading glasses. The voice version of it was so slow and monotone I gave up on it after realizing the body of the text would be spoken in the same cadence.
TL;DR: Your stylistic choices can limit who can even view your text.
And sometimes that's okay.
Even the OP came out with transcripts and improved accessibility in the long run - but you have to dig in the HN threads for those. How many potential valuable followers and opinions were lost in that time?
Gaining followers and financial success is usually a sideshow to the artist's message.
Compromising your message for more money is like the actual definition of selling out.
There's a subreddit devoted to the rather painful ridicule of this (unfortunately common) belief. It's /r/ChoosingBeggers and it has lots of tales of people who try and exploit artists for "the exposure" and accuse them of "selling out" when they demand payment for their work.
I know of no professional-grade artists who are happy to give away all their art. Even face painters at fairs charge for their moderately simplistic work.
Artists shouldn't give away their art for free, but audiences shouldn't expect all art to be easily digestible either.
there's a reason paintings are framed and that same reason is why helvetica exists. UX.
Luckily there's a transcript.
EDIT: FWIW something (presumably the subtle color rotation going on throughout the entire page) seems to cause my laptop's fan to spin up as soon as I'm on that page.