You must log in or # to comment.
I’ve been reading Rosemary’s Baby, about 90 pages in. Why are there no games about home decor in a haunted house? Complete wirh an interesting collection of neighbours, including homosexuals and nosy old people with unsettling items?
More importantly the more you experience things outside of gaming your desire to engage with games will also fade.
This has not been my experience lol
Someone on here posted it the other day, it was an anime creator musing about how anime today is made by otaku for otaku and it’s basically stale and lacks substance. It’s the same for games in a lot of ways.
You’re probably talking about a famous/infamous interview from Hayao Miyazaki, which includes him saying:
“If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.”
“Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves.”
“Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know.”
“It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.”
“And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!”
“It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans” is the best encapsulation of the issue, imo
It’s also just tropes all the way down. I’m misanthropic, but that’s not because I truly hate people, I just hate what I’ve seen us become. At least I interact with people enough to be original though.
It doesn’t try to derive meaning from real human experiences, only other anime, so at best it can become a copy, an imitation of other existing anime, and then those anime get copied and so on until you get anime that is just a series of disconnected cliches and tropes derivative of other anime without any substance.
This is the feeling I get when someone tells me they’re studying Brandon Sanderson to be a better worldbuilder.
I couldn’t have put it better myself, exactly this.
Even misanthropy becomes a pale, sickly thing in the absence of genuine human contact.
Misanthropy is already a hopelessly disgusting thing, I don’t think it means much to make this distinction.
A very strong agree. And it’s a very universal thing to experience: much of the wisdom you develop from worldly experience is seeing and thinking about the connections between things. It’s something nearly impossible to teach, and young people can’t fully understand until they’ve experienced it.
This is so real, reading living life and talking to people can give art a new meaning.
Neat! I’ll have to check this out. I finally played Earthbound this past year, and it felt so original and interesting. Like none of the mechanics are groundbreaking (since they’ve been used in other games before/since), but it felt like a fun adventure in a massive “open world” set up; and I really didn’t know where the plot was going
Glad you enjoyed it, Earthbound is a really amazing game! I wish I could remember where I heard this from, but IIRC that fully connected “open world” nature of Earthbound (and Mother before it) was something Shigesato Itoi very specifically wanted. I’m sure you’ve heard it before but since you like Earthbound, definitely give Mother 3 a try at some point too.
Also if you enjoy that interview you might like this one with Itoi, Shigeru Miyamoto and the author Seikou Itou as well. It’s from about 5 years earlier, just after Mother 1 released, and it’s really interesting comparing the things they talk about to the modern day.
The mechanic of gaining/losing initiative based on sneaking up on the enemy sprite I think might have been new to Earthbound. Plus the food/condiment system of course
This is why I like to say that a worldbuilder’s best friend is a history book.
