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That was a long watch, but worth it.

Thanks!

I missed some of the aspects discussed in the video when playing through Soma the first time, because I was expecting Amnesia like scary monsters.

Funny, I didn't even know who the studio was until much later, so I had the opposite reaction. I found out they made Amnesia and thought "huh, okay, that explains the Proxies and other monsters".

There's a Safe Mode, and if you don't like horror games or anxiety-inducing chases, it's a good compromise. I talk about that in the intro.

Simon is the most audience surrogate of all time. Also, I think his continuous lack of understanding is partially due to his "flat" scan, being done when the technology was in its infancy.

Space Quest Historian put out a good video talking about these kinds of games. I think it's too easy for people to get so hung up on these definitions. I know everybody has these kind of expectations of what a "computer game" is supposed to be, but story-focused "walking simulators" still have a place in an interactive medium.

You can't put yourself in Simon's shoes like this in a movie or TV series, because you're controlling him in a first-person view. It just wouldn't be the same perspective, which is critically important in a game where the POV is almost a centerpiece to the story.

It's a different kind of game, sure, and not everybody is going to like the lack of traditional "gameplay" or whatever you want to call it. But, it's a category of game that should be respected as just a valid a "game" as any other computer game. It's just far more story-focused than most.

Also, also, @Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world, since you asked me to let you know when it was out, here it is!

Only 5%. That seems to be a rather optimistic take.

I was on lemmy.film.

Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.

I think you're ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.

But, people don't have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that's not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people's time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.

It's not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.

Will do! One of my favorites as well, which is part of the reason why I'm working on this thing.

OMG, this is like the best/worst time to be working on a two-hour video about the first game. I guess I better get cracking on finishing it up.

It's kinda of a generational issue, though, because people are borne into this new world with new habits. It's no longer paying attention to a single piece of media on a TV, but instead, turning on something in the background, while watching or reading something else on a phone.

I don't really understand it, even as somebody with ADD. If you don't like what's on TV, change it or move to a different room while you read on your phone.

Even with places like YouTube, where LUFS level is strictly defined, there's sooo many creators who have no earthly idea what LUFS is, which levels YouTube enforces, and how it corrects for it. They post their videos with quiet narration and wonder why viewers get annoyed at all of the turning up and turning down of volume on each video.

See, YouTube enforces LUFS on videos by reducing volume on loud videos down to -14 LUFS. But, it doesn't do anything to quiet videos. If you ever bring up the "Stats for Nerds" and look at the "Volume / Normalized" value, you might see something like "content loudness -5.9dB". That means it's -5.9dB quieter than it should be, and the creator should have amplified the video to normalize the volume levels before uploading it to YouTube.

So, you end up with a video that's about -6dB quieter, and you have to turn up the volume to actually hear the narration. Then your TV or whatever device you're watching will get blasted by the next video, which is properly normalized at around 0dB, and you're forced to turn the damn volume back down.

YouTube has finally started to acknowledge the problem by introducing the Stable Volume feature. But, really, creators should educate themselves on how to properly mix their audio. I know editing is hard and there's so many moving parts to deal with for YouTube uploads. But, audio quality is everything in a YouTube video. Nobody cares about whatever random B-roll video game footage, or PowerPoint slide presentation, or watermarked stock images, or videos of you presenting the narration with a lapel mic tied to a tree branch you're using on the video side. It's all about narration and audio quality.