The Polygon review of KRZ

[mendel]

In another thread, ilyaforpresident mentioned the polygon.com review of Kentucky Route Zero[www.polygon.com]. (Also be sure to go to the comments section and read the long comment by davidkma.)

The article made me realize that for most games, the aim is to make something happen on the screen. You can consult a walkthrough to make the things happen that need to happen, and they'll happen the same way for every player - the experience is mostly the same.
Games that diverge from this are usually open-world games - open-ended toolboxes like Minecraft or Sim City that allow/require players to pursue their own goals in their own ways to have fun.

Kentucky Route Zero is different in that the experience of thee game varies from player to player, yet the gameplay is essentially linear and you'll end up in th same place as everyone else. Sure, there are "sidequests" on the map, but you'll have to talk to Joseph, Weaver and Shannon to finish act 2. In an ordinary game, these talks would all go the same way: you'd have some dialog choices to make, and choosing the correct choices eventually gets you out of the dialog and moving on. There's little expectation that other players will experience the dialogue differently from you.

But that's not how the real world works. Everyone has had conversations where the person you're talking to just doesn't seem to get it - they experience the conversation differently from you, they discern and remember different aspects of it, and may disagree with you about "what just happened". The experience of that conversation, and our experience of other people, is shaped in our mind.
Good literature does this as well - it creates something in our minds, and that's what the book is really about. Still, it's largely the same for each reviewer, at least if they have the same cultural frame of reference from which to understand the book (but think of the poeple who love or hate Twilight!).

Kentucky Route Zero transcends this bound, much like performance art transcends the bounds of traditional art by being more accepting of the audience's part in shaping the art: art is a process that is only ever (half-)finished in the mind of the person who appreciates it.
KRZ uses writing coupled with game mechanics to do that. For one, there are "hidden" events that players may stumble upon on the roads, making for somewhat nonlinear gameplay; that's still fairly "mechanical". But there are also different dialogue options that don't really do much else than change the way you perceive that dialogue. For example, early on you get to choose how to address your dog. Through the game, it will still remain the same old dog in a straw hat, but you'll think of it as "Homer", "Blue", or some nameless old dog, and that subtly changes how you relate to it - or rather, it allows the story/game to express how you related to it all along.

Playing Kentucky Route Zero is a different experience for every player - not because the game is different for every player (it is that in part because of the nonlinear elements), but because it lets each player create a different experience of it in their own minds. (As a corollary, if your mind isn't open to resonate well with the game, the experience will suck.) Of course that's more or less true for every game (and in fact everything you do in your life), but Kentucky Route Zero is a game where this matters more than it does in other games. This is by design.
I believe even the abstractness of the artwork supports this.

Kentucky Route Zero is less of an interactive novel and more of interactive theatre: theatre has long since moved from the realistic to the abstract, to audience interaction. Jake Elliot and Tamas Kemenczy have taken far more than the act and scene numbering from theatre, getting us to make our own narrative experience from the script they have provided us with.

What fun!

[Hairy Goober]

Цитата допису jacob:

Цитата допису Royal Espionage:

Clearly you've not been a gamer long if you think that. Look around at various bogus Kickstarter campaigns, or even an open-world pirate themed seafaring game I backed four years ago which turned out to be a slightly modified version of an unreleased and abandoned project. The "developers" of that one vanished into the ether with the cash, and left us something one could barely consider an alpha. The "in-game footage" we were shown turned out to be some slightly modified CGI scenes from an R-rated pirate kink movie. XD

why dont you give me an example instead of painting me as the ignorant one.XD. you are asserting its happened without giving me a single example besides some unnamed "pirate themed seafaring game". Just because you''re claiming to have been made a fool of by some amatuers one isolated time doesn't mean that happens on a frequent basis or to many people.

Trolling takes skill, buddy. You don't have it :D

[ilyaforpresident]

Is this thread seriously equating a two-week delay for Act 2 with DUKE NUKEM FOREVER? Or, worse, with some

Cardboard Computer released a lot of games over the years, they won an award for KRZ at the IGF, and based on the quality of Act 2, the wait was worth it. All this "didn't get Act 2 on time, screw the developers" talk is a little silly.

[OldGregg]

ilyaforpresident.. um you feeding the troll dude, the troll wasnt that i thought the game was would never released, but that it is an alternate reality game where the release and waiting is as crucial to the game as it the actual game itself.