Enjoyment and utopia in the Mass Effect and Halo universes

I've listened to one of Zizek's lectures where he mentions that the video game industry by now far surpasses Hollywood in profit making. I've drawn my conclusions and started watching TL;DP (too long didn't play – copyright:me) cinematic videos on youtube. These vids basically strip down the often 30 hours+ gameplay of video games to their (essential) cinematic parts.

A common structure of "AA" games should be noted here: the player is often motivated to do repetitive and mediocre sessions of "grinding" for the sole purpose of being awarded by finally being permitted to see a 1 minute long cinematic clip, wherein finally the real story line is somewhat set in motion, just so he could start grinding again, until the chore is finally done in the end of the game. I think this is important to note not just because it is a recurring way of structuring these games, but because this method structures the enjoyment of the players: you basically do a menial and repetitive task ("gameplay proper") in order to "achieve" the truly enjoyable, cinematic parts. Interestingly, the "reward" becomes sweet (acceptable, rather) because it is achieved by doing uninteresting shit. (Note the parallel with the wageslave's life.)

So after watching the "stripped down" versions of the Mass Effect and Halo universes (hint: I've consciously chosen sci-fi games, because sci-fi has always been the genre for self-reflecting on the present) I've noticed an obvious parallel between the two, namely, the (spoiler) trope of advanced spacefaring humanity & aliens finding a mysterious pre-built gigantic artificial space-station, whose origins are unknown, but are (immediately) presumed to be beneficial/exploitable to said exploring civilizations.

What a shock, it turns out that these absolutely bootiful and optimal environments for life are the constructs of a previous plot by another intelligence. So, in Mass Effect, we get the evil super-machines constructing a literal honeypot for biological species, making their extermination easy, and in Halo we get a long gone civilization's (nonsensical) plan to contain a parasitical threat by exterminating every living being.

Pic related from the movie Elysium is of course of a different kind (we learn that it was constructed for the convenience of the ruling class). In these two vidyas the Utopian environment is constructed with malicious intent, unknown to the naive explorers, which leads me to my conclusion: both games are reactionary portrayals of an "evil artificial Utopia" to which gullible people become captivated, and when they "try it out" it turns out that this Utopia tries to eradicate them.

Le bourgeois portrayal of communism much?

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This point is taken from the first essay from Adorno's Culture Industry, btw, wherein he notes the parallel structure of pop music and the structure of prole life.

So uh, if you want to skip the gameplay?

Let me try to restate my point in clearer terms: the gameplay (ech, gamework) of said games is the following.

1. You are thrown into a mysterious future world. You are shown a setting that makes you motivated to find out more about the gears of said world.
2. After (1.) you are required to familiarize yourself with basic game mechanics: shoot (fps/tps), advance (rpg elements), interact with the environment and npcs. This after a few hours turns out to be repetitive and chore-like. You do this in hopes of
3. After a point you get a reward of another cinematic part that advances the plot. After which you are back to the succession of (2.) and (3.) up until the game finishes with, usually
4. your final "decision" (typically: A, B, or C) that determines how the
5. Final cinematic will go.

That is not the gameplay, the gameplay is you shooting shit while leveling up your character.

Do you want to skip that or what?

I dont think cutscenes are the reason most people play videogames. Gameplay is its own reward, cutscenes are only a cherry on top that a non-trivial amount of players always skips anyway.

Speaking of sci-fi, do clearly anachronistic social institutions in futuristic settings bother anyone else a lot? I am not asking for every sci-fi setting to follow diamat and be FALC, but I just groan every time there is a space-faring theocratic monarchy or especially slavery. Only 40k does it right by invoking literal demon magic as a reason everything is so oppressive and backwards.

fuck off /tv/

Either you are missing the point entirely, or I wasn't able to make myself clear, or both. My point being that the "gameplay" is just an addictive ploy (chosing your "armor" and "rifle", making irrelevant "moral" choices, etc.) for players to be presented the real message of the game.


On a conscious level, no. In reality, tho? Absolutely. Take the game mechanics of Mass Effect, for example:
…


I was actually delighted to see a semi-serious criticism of feudalism in the Halo universe: self-proclaimed prophets chosen by gods rule over species.

Huh, I do not think you understand shit if you think shooting shit is not gameplay.

As I said again, do you want to skip it or not?

Why would you be? Even in this universe, we are heading right back to feudalism.

Meh, I think it's a questionable analysis. If watching cutscenes was the objective of videogames that resonates with most gamers, then ALL or at least MOST games would be interactive movies with series of quicktime events leading to more cutscenes. Which is where the industry is headed but it's not yet there, and this direction is not popular with everyone. The success of games such as Dark Souls or indies like Cuphead that are extremely light on narrative and have gameplay itself as their selling point serves as proof that gameplay can be its own reward (DS is an AA series or at least one that outstrips many AA games in fame and popularity)

*sigh*
I do know that "shooting shit" by now is considered to be gameplay proper – I question how this actually became the norm, and more importantly I ask what are the economic realities that made this acceptable, what this reflects.

For instance, take the dystopia of Fallout 1 & 2: there the "getting to know the world, the plot" in other words, was the gameplay proper, interwoven with (highly evade-able) fights.

When I played F1&2 I never had the feeling that I'm doing chores to achieve the reward of seeing the plot progress. In fact, whenever I saw cutscenes in those games I was pretty much surprised, but more importantly, they were typically technical cutscenes: they didn't "tell" how or what you did, they just provided a "smoothening" effect to your overall progress; they NEVER were essential. The essential gameplay was… your GAMEPLAY!

Are you a retard? One of the first video games was a shooting game, people like it because shooting shit is fine, like IRL.

And the fuck are you talking about, you also shoot shit and view cutscenes in Fallout 1&2.

I think you totally misunderstand the genre that is sci-fi. Sci-fi was never a way of portraying "le future," however counter-intuitive it might seem to you. Sci-fi was always a reflection on current historical events, on current societies, on current economic and political trends. If you never made the connection between sci-fi and the present you missed the core point of sci-fi, to be blunt. It is the genre that reflects on the present by hiding behind the future.

flag related

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That is dumb, unless Marxists think feudalism really cannot come back with a hi-tech version.

Explain to me, because it seems you are wrong, bucko.

In fact, try to talk your way out of mutant base in Fallout 1, bucko. Good luck.

Please… uhm… elaborate?

INT 10

Why can't someone call himself a king and demanding tithe from vassal planet in the future?

Also, Int10 can't help you talk past things that are inherently hostile to you.

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Really, that's your argument? Nobody can declare himself a monarch because…reasons?

I had a feeling OP has no idea what he means to day, and I was right.

I know that, and yet this is precisely why just dressing real world issues in sci-fi clothes misses the point entirely. To properly reflect on the present through the future, you picture a society that is radically more advanced than ours, and explore how they got there. Putting slavers on spaceships to say slavery is bad has all the wit, subtlety and poignance of making Superman punch Hitler and deliver a speech about how genocide is bad.

The portrayal of the "Utopian world that is ready for your taking" (i.e. communism) that turn out to be traps (i.e. le ebil communids honeypot) for killing the whole of the species in these games are literally porky-tier anti-utopian and anti-communist arguments. They are there to dis-encourage gamers (consumers) from looking into alternatives. Le "false-utopeyyas" are there to discourage you from actually reading a book.

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I honestly have no idea what your basic point is.

There is no reason why spaceship slavery and/or feudalism cannot exist.

What book in particular? And the notion of didcovering utopia by reading book is frankly ridiculous.

It's called historical materialism. History advances in a way that exploitation becomes more and more restricted.

Chattel slavery -> Feudalism -> Capitalism.

You advance a notion that somehow (*insert argument here*) society can go back. Why?

Despite all the hand-wringing about Silicon Valley technocrats enacting the Moldbyg Plan and reinstating serfdom, feudalism isn't actually coming back ever (save for a nuclear apocalypse) because material conditions have radically changed. That is basic histmat. Material conditions in 1,000 years will be even less amenable to feudalism or slavery.


Space slavers and space barbarians are shit writing.

Because it is an effective way to rule? Modern corporations are basically neo-feudalism.

Also, why is historical materalism taken as truth?

Halo up till Reach is actually fun though
I never bothered too much with the L O R E but someone could probably fill you in if it has anything anti-communist or maybe anti-capitalist
this stuff is only in the background of the games, but the spartan super soldiers were invented as imperialist tools to supress uprisings if I'm not mistaken

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I do not think you understand shit. Slavery happens because it is profitable, and it will happen again if it becomes profitable again.

For christ sake, slavery is still a goddamn thing today.

I think it's you who doesn't understand shit. Slavery (well, at least actual whips&chains chattel slavery, human trafficking still exists) no longer happens in most of the world because it isn't profitable RIGHT NOW. It hasn't been profitable for centuries - which is why it was abolished in the first place, not because slave owners suddenly had a change of heart. Why would it become profitable in a sci-fi future with automatization, robots, energy-to-matter and other shit?

But user, slavery still exists today. So what the fuck do you mean?

Also, all that space technology means dong shit if they can get a race to work for them for freem

We on same page, broda.


The funny thing about this is that literally all philosophers/"political-theorists"/humanists/etc. of that time knew that Feudalism was a social system rotten to the core, inevitably faced with self-immolation, and even funnier: even the most archetypical but honest conservative thinkers admitted this.

But by all means, please feel free to keep shilling the most obviously rotten system.

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Slavery today is completely different to slavery as a core social institution like it existed in say the US pre-abolition or how it is depicted in silly space operas. Even sweatshop wage slavery. You're kind of retarded not to understand that. Whipped niggers no longer pick cotton because it's more profitable, productive and safe to pay someone a subsistence wage to gather cotton with a combine. Similarly your hypothetical space empire is more likely to integrate an alien race and turn them into proles who are more productive, consume more and are less likely to revolt.

Why do I have to explain the absolute basics of materialism to someone on this board tbh

cuz overboard

This post is shit and youre up your ass.
Halo is fun and its lore is fun right about till the forerunner shit and mass effect is the same till the third game because it was rushed.
Shooting stuff is fun, even more so in a coherent setting that both series achieve with success (mostly)

*sniff*

Wow youre retarded

Your criticism is shit and youre up your ass

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Aright youre either a self hating burger or some snot nosed euro libbie that thinks that because you play rpgs youre somehowore thonkish than the rest. Youre retarded and op is retarded

;_;

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The poster literally said that profit did not exist before capitalism

Au contraire, my friend. I'm not in the "business" of comparing enjoyment A with enjoyment B. In fact, I'm more than anything interested in the very substance of enjoyment itself.

My questioning pertains to (1) how and (2) why a certain thing gets enjoyed. Your response was typical, and as such, dumped under the category of "idiotic ideology".

You are wrong.

Its almost as if yall havent played these games, or op for that matter

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holy shit, ima moron!

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It's almost as if pre-2k gaymes had moral/ethical choices and realistic worlds that went against the current order!

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That's not what feudalism means in the marxist sense. Feudalism as a mode of production in inherently tied to subsistence production, which is basically impossible past a certain level of development.

b-but we gon retract 2 feuDalism, see muh pic

LEL


uhm…

WE GON ETERNAL, LOL

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You don't understand what profits are do you? Profits as a distinct concrete term only exist within the Capitalist mode of production, Value or Surplus exist in all modes of production but they are not Profits.

I think a better example would be the grand theft auto games.
let's take San Andreas. You're promised the ability to go between 3 cities, fly planes, drive trains, do all kinds of RPG elements, customise your character's clothes, buy houses and so on. The reality of the game, however, is that if you want to do many of those things you're forced to go through the story elements. The core gameplay isn't the missions, but the basic game mechanics. You can have hours of fun without ever going into the story even with the constraints the game places on your activities. But say you don't enjoy the story, you only enjoy the gameplay mechanics, you're still forced to go through missions one by one in order to unlock the things you want. If you want to fly a fighter jet or use a jetpack, you've got to do the stupid dancing and lowrider missions. The game will force you to replay them a thousand times, but never let you progress without them. It becomes work.

This makes for an interesting example because it's one gameplay structure ("missions") being used to lock off other elements of the gameplay structure (free roam sandbox), and it's also particularly interesting how this restriction often encourages much greater use of the free roam mechanics. If you're constrained to one city but yearn to wander, you'll explore every inch of the city in detail before being given the reward of a new city, but if SA made like Skyrim and just went "fuck it, do what you want" you'd explore in far less detail.

Stop playing shitty games

Sorry for your loss of brain cells.
What do you mean by AA, Action Adventure? Usually, when talking about games AA means big budget and AAA means super-big budget. What you mention is a particular game-design mechanic and as such is not linked to budget size. I avoid games that have a lot of that like the plague. I think it's good how the Zelda games deal with grind, or rather how they avoid it. You can buy things with money, but the money is everywhere, it's literally growing on trees, and if you have decent aim and reflexes, enough of useful stuff comes your way as you go and kill the enemies that attack you. That you can cut down grass to get money and other things is more of a pity mechanism to give clumsy players a way to proceed.
I would just call that an example of the sunk-cost fallacy. A person blows a lot of time/money on something, so if it isn't good, that means admission to have done something stupid, and people don't like to admit that to themselves, and even less to others.

That's right.

But what if your opinion is stupid? Do you think people play VS multiplayer for the sake of story? Do you think I do time trial in a racer comparing my time with my brother to enjoy the real message of the game? Beat all the dev's records and get the message the non-visible nameless driver inside my car was secretly gay the whole time (picture here a hall full of clapping Hollywood celebrities with tears in their eyes)? Do you think Chess players have a strong tendency to be monarchists?

Yeah, and most platformers and racers and shmups and fighting games are light on narrative, too.

>Sci-fi was always a reflection on current historical events
He seems to write from that perspective, re-read his post.