Compromised Visions Are Superior
ericnormand.substack.com
ericnormand.substack.com
Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? It is, like, a pretty bad and un-fun game, doesn’t hold up as well as pong or pac-man at all. I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.
It seems like a counter example to the thesis of the piece IMO. I get the idea that constraints can become part of the design and you get interesting ideas. But in this case, Pitfall! just does it’s best to mitigate the constraints and becomes a worse version of every successor that was made after the limitations were cleared.
> We will only have settings that fit on one screen.
But, like, please don’t actually remove all the setting, that’s annoying.
I'd argue Solaris is, by far, much more impressive than pitfall.
There’s basically 3 levels in how players should approach the game. Basic mechanics which aren’t that difficult, but time pressure and trying to remember a rough and there’s a meaningful challenge. Exploration/ Routing, options are limited but exist so you need to discover and remember the games layout. The correct route crossing over your starting position also means you can explore significantly further than an optimal run. And finally actually putting together a run without hitting 20 minutes or 3 deaths to find all 32 treasures.
Put it together and you’ve got a basic but perfectly playable game someone could sink a lot of time into even 40 years after release.
This is an explanation, not any sort of moralization. I'm completely unwilling to expend this amount of effort on a game either. Old school dungeon crawlers need the same thing, so most of those are pretty difficult to get into even if they are good in the abstract. I don't mind a modern game working like Etrian Odyssey and creating a hybrid map making system but pencil & paper is not something I'm interested in.
Interestingly, there were really few bad games on the GameBoy. I think that was because you were forced to invest more than money to create a game. Getting more people wouldn’t help you to get it done, your only solution was to have a smart team who would be capable of working through the insane constraints.
Plus, we were kids sitting in the back seat of cars and on busses… the nostalgia factor is real, not hard to beat activities like “staring out the window” or “annoying your sibling.”
The first star wars trilogy, but especially the first movie, was extremely budget constrained to the point where Lucas had to exchange his own salary for merchandising rights (an accidentally brilliant move), and they did the best with what they had. decades later, he decides that now he has the budget to make them the way he really wanted to, he goes and makes major changes with CGI and destroys the original copies, which can only really be found in unaltered digital form on underground sites.
Then the prequels come and it's very obvious he had unlimited budget and creative control, and the result just simply was not even close to good, or at the very least not even close to the magic of the original trilogy. Giving creators unlimited control seems to have great capacity to end very poorly.
I hear this a lot, but the prequel plots had a great deal more politics, intrigue and a bevy of nuanced characters. The originals were pretty black and white in comparison. I think the prequel plots have aged better.
The only reason they have appeared to have aged well is because they filled in a lot of the silliness and nonsense with quality content from other sources such as clone wars (which ended up being good) and comics, etc. to fill in the gaps.
It also helps them age a lot when you compare them to the latest trilogy, which I'm sure I don't even need to elaborate why that is.
For the record I still occasionally watch the prequels now, but when they came out, they were very poorly received and for good reason.
I wonder if in ~10 years we'll have a new batch of people who like the latest trilogy. First ironically as they get through their edgy teenage phase, then unironically as they grow up further and point out some great scenes from between the (admittedly many) terrible ones.
The next two, especially the empire strikes back, are really good in their own right in terms of film-making artistry. They have the right tone, rhythm, imagery, scenography.
The rest, though, is catastrophically bad.
Interesting it doesn't fit into any trilogy.
Andor is also very, very good.
At least we both agree that the Clone Wars (and associated material) is good.
The best thing you can say about the prequels is that they're ambitious. Lucas wasn't content to repeat himself. But the acting, characters, and script are all complete failures.
The first Star Wars movie is indeed an example of "compromised visions are superior". The movie was famously saved in editing by George Lucas' then wife. Lucas didn't even direct the second and third movies, he handed them off to more capable filmmakers.
And the politics of the prequel was uncomfortably black and white. "There is Good v. Evil and Evil Won At Politics!" is an approach with a frustratingly low-functioning level of emotional intelligence; that just isn't how interesting politics works. Part of what made GoT such a sensation was political storylines were done properly.
I think Oppenheimer did pretty well on that. Better than I would have expected if someone had described it before I had seen it.
The prequel trilogy has so many scenes that feel sterile because the actors are clearly separated from the backdrop. It's hard to feel like the actors are in a desert wasteland when they don't even look warm.
I think it's a rare example of a good easter egg because it still communicates something important to the scene without just feeling like it's there for a nod or reference.
I don't think that was an explicit callout to Star Tours -- which opened at Disneyland years after RotJ came out (1983 and 1987). If anything, the easter egg went the opposite direction!
Ah, that’s it! That perfectly encapsulates why the prequels felt so off.
To be clear, that's the best part of a terrible film, so it's still not very good.
I think that comparatively to the market Star Wars was ahead of it's time, 50 years ago. But now we just tell way better actlual Sci Fi stories, which are not child oriented movies with lots of funny costumes and simple rags-to-hero plot?
I suspect it was a combination of being intimidated by what was being proposed (prequels to some of the most beloved films of all time) and Lucas retaining creative control to a level other people felt like they couldn't really do it? Not sure. I'm sure when Lucas passes away we will learn a LOT more about the entire thing.
I think it boils down to the fact that this is nowhere near being an absolute irreducible truth. Sometimes if you don't do the features I want, the product will suck and I'm getting another product from someone who has something other than a ruthless asceticism as their only core value.
This is very easy to achieve in "physical" engineering disciplines. It's remained an elusive idea in software engineering for whatever reasons.
I also believe, but i have no proof, that setting limits on the scale of a country, will provide tangible benefits : for ex, assign a maximum allowed power consumption increase per year, and let the market figure it out.
I like to dabble in fiction writing, but give me a blank piece of paper and I freeze. With the journaling solo TTRPG's you are essentially given a list of prompts which are quite often set in a predefined world. Somehow by being forced to write a story with these prompts I can write so much more and far quicker then I could by staring at my own piece of paper.