/digipen/ - DigiPenitentiary

Oh man, the freshmen are fucked.

Was this Rowan's doing? This sounds like something Rowan would do.

wow, and i thought gat120 was shit when I had to take it. LOL

Gone home?

Okay, so, I like Gone Home a lot. I paid full price for it when it came out. I regret doing so; I think it was $15 or $20, and either way, that was a lot of money. $5 on a steam sale, or heck even like $7.50 is a good amount.

Gone Home is a really cool interactive experience which proves that there's tons of room for storytelling in video games. It's definitely one of the more important games of the past few years.

ALL OF THAT SAID

LEARNING ABOUT IT IN GAT120 IS FUCKING STUPID

Gone Home is perhaps the best game in this new budding genre of "walking simulators". Video games in general are in their infancy (or maybe toddlerhood?), and I think this is the problem that DigiPen has to deal with.

Incoming game design students are as follows, from my observations:

- a handful of people who want to design tabletop games

- many people who enjoy playing video games and have their own ideas for video games and want to make them but nutting up and doing programming is HAAAAARD (BSGDs are not part of this group)

- many people who enjoy playing video games and have had an idea for a game once or twice and they have rich (usually Redmond) parents who see DigiPen as a way of channeling their love of watching League of Legends matches into something productive and respectable, working in the tech industry like the parents do

- a handful of people who have a great mind for design and actually think about the design of the games they play and want to use this insight to design games of their own

- many people who enjoy games with good story and think that a game design degree will somehow help them get a job writing for games one day (some of these people overlap with the second group)

Here, BAGDers, I'll do your homework for you:

Gone Home is not a well-designed game. I'd even argue whether it's a game. It's an interactive experience where you move around and interact with stuff and watch the story unfolds. When you make it to the final area of the game, the game ends and the credits roll.

It's not a poorly-designed game; the stuff that you can interact with is laid out well and mostly believably. Sometimes you'll think to yourself "man, it's weird that like, clues that point to your mom (almost(? I can't remember, it's been awhile since I've played it)) had an affair are just littered around the house where anyone can find them." But the game does a decent job of making you turn that part of your brain off and just enjoy exploring the richly-realized game world.

The walk speed is fine. Picking stuff up is fine.

Like… what is there to talk about? There's almost no mechanics, and the ones that exist are totally fine (like I said, walking, picking stuff up). The environments are great, but that has nothing to do with game design.

Gone Home is a great interactive experience but should not be seen as an example of good game design, especially when you're taking GAT110 (whatever that even means anymore) and you have Holcomb classes coming up. I don't know what you're supposed to glean from it.

DigiPen's design program is fucking retarded.

oh right sorry i forgot LESBIANS

Sorry BAGDers, I'm not writing ten pages about how the game has lesbians and why that's a Good Thing for you. That's probably what the professor wants, right? That's why Gone Home got 10/10 on every website. If it was a heterosexual romantic relationship it would've been seen as an interesting thing but nothing groundbreaking. But it has lesbians so it's a Very Important Game.

Keep this in mind, fuckers, when you're making games in the coming years. Think about exactly how many transexual people there are in your game. There could always be more! Even if you don't want to, or if your idea for the story is something else. If you want Polygon et al. to gush over how great your game is, don't include characters that have four or more of the following:

- straight

- white

- American

- cisgender

- middle-class or higher

- average build or thinner

Or if you do have characters like that be sure to depict them in an unconditionally negative way.

This is the future of video games. This is why DigiPen is doing what it's doing.

This is why I got the fuck out and never look back. This is why I'm not applying for games-related programming jobs right now.

Video games are over.

I need a drink.

> Video games are over.

lol

>gone home

>constantly shitpost on /v/

>so much shitposting that caught on to 'gaming' websites

>"Progressive!"

>in reality it's full of plot holes

>No real goal since you can just grab the key and finish

>great voice acting

Apparently the key to success is make it progressive and shitpost on /v/. It's worked more than one occasion.

Stanley is a good walking simulator. Although a joke of a game, but it does defy the choices that you make. Dear Esther if you want some deep meaning game. What does Gone Home do?

Is Gat120 one of the ones that BSGDs have to take without being acknowledged as well?

>>2499

This guy ain't exactly wrong though, if you put a non-cis character in your game you get automatic good press cause diversity.

This is leading to a lot of shitty games unfortunately, like gone home

I actually really enjoyed Gone Home.

But I can't see any reason to study it at DigiPen. There isn't anything it does particularly well, or anything that it does so poorly as to merit paying attention.

>>2504

it has "GAT" right in the name so yes of course it ignores BSGDs, there isn't a single fucking class at the school that acknowledges that BSGD exists

>>2507

Very true, but the joke's on the badgers when we get hired and they most likely don't

>>2508

BUT WHO WILL REMIND US ABOUT THE FUCKING INTENSITY CURVE

>>2508

>>2510 has a point, I can't think of a single AAA game dev that has an Intensity Consultant, so in 10 years if The Rhino manages to brainwash the industry into thinking it needs them, BAGDs will finally get the jobs they literally went to school for! It probably helps if you're gay or trans or "of color" too, because then you get the one-two punch of Useless Job That Makes You Feel Important About Doing Jack Shit and Filling The Diversity Quota!

>>2502

Are you fucking serious in saying that Dear Esther is more of a game than Gone Home? Both are good, but Dear Esther is literally moving your character controller through a beautiful map while some good music and a minimal story happens. Gone Home at least had emotional impact. At worst they're both as good, at best, Dear Esther was a great proof-of-concept and Gone Home was the full realization of the "genre".

(I still have some Dear Esther screenshots in my Steam Screenshots because damn that game looks amazing.)

>>2511

Never implied dear Esther was a better game. It had a better deep story,but that's it.

My understanding is that GAT120 students can now choose the games the get to research.

When I was in GAT110, we also had to write a weekly paper, a "design journal" (aka waste of time) on whatever game we wanted.

I don't think the school chose Gone Home, I think those students did…and it very easily could have been something they already knew very well and just wanted to bs the paper. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

>>2520

Senior here, taking GAT120 due to reasons. Nobody's asked me what I want to write papers about and as far as I can tell the games are teacher assigned.

Gone Home is shit. Dear Esther is shit. 99 out of 100 poetic experiences are SHIT.

Make games. Stop making not-games.

"Buh buh buh they're games" shut the fuck up they're lousy interactive novels, linear as fuck, admit it or get the hell out of here.

>>2591

Of course you don't have the guts to go and challenge Ellinger to his face on that.

>>2592

That'd be a waste of my time. Stubborn rhino.