Much of the enjoyment of playing old games is in being held to old game standards as a player, little things like "you can only move in exactly 4/8/16 directions," or "ok this part of the animation is gonna look dumb, just bear with us here"
Remember when our beloved publishers decried We, the Gamers, as entitled? They were right--it's that they were looking at the software improvements, and we were looking at the money-to-product-quality ratio
Another type of thing--Luna and Kimahri make it through the Besaid Cloister of Trials alone with Yuna not because it's the easiest puzzle ever conceived, but because you hadn't been trained to ask questions of continuity like that yet. This frees the creator in many ways
Also this game is dripping with sexuality, but the grown up, sophisticated, feminine sexuality we don't experience anymore
Jesus this cutscene: Dream about being with a girl on a dock talking about "escaping before anyone finds us," get accosted by another girl who's mad because promised "we'd go together." Then Dad shows up, takes the women, antagonizes, goads us to cry
Women, in turn, goad aggression. Start awake shouting "I hate you!" at Dad. Since when were such intricate fabrics woven in the psyche? Hard enough to muster sadness or embarrassment at this point
The vogue thing is advocating "behavior in accordance with desire," but there is a stage past that, where you're playing a social game to see who gets what portion of what's desired on top of what we desire
This is the mean girl game, the paleolithic village game, the one that supposedly was the true cause of the cognitive arms race
Are we playing different games because these ones were dumb, or because we're dumb?
Are we playing different games because these ones were dumb, or because we're dumb?
To be clear: The objective of this game is to directly control others' behavior by way of coercion or some form of trickery. We don't play this game hardly at all anymore, and this is a very recent development
Copy distribution of this game is seldom and highly localized. Hand it to another set of four people a half mile away, and it doesn't translate at all
It was always exactly half about the women and half about the power. But now there's no "about" to the women, it's either ya or no, no big game of harems or who's marrying who, nothin'. This causes anxiety. We want chicks to dig us along some sort of discrete ranking system
It concerns us greatly, really. If betas are in second place, where is all the puss? If they'd been told they were in last place, they would be fine. And they must have at least the necessities covered of what a second best kinda man would have, jeez, work with em a bit
Ppl used to talk about stuff like this as though it's profane, implicit proof we're mere nasty monkeys. But no, this is some of the most intricate thought we're capable of--it's just that we're naturally attuned to it, take it for granted. No computer is close to pulling this off
