Post

I know some folks see the yellow paint discourse as repeating old discussions. But do you have any idea how much of a repeat it actually is? Here is a video from Egoraptor explaining why players feel terrible about being handheld in less than a minute. Can you guess when this video was released?

But wait, there's more! It's all the same arguments everyone is still having all these years, again explained within one minute, and this was made by a non-gamedev at the time!

So when I see folks say 'If you're not a game dev, stay out of this conversation!' or 'You try and sit behind playtesters and see how they get stuck!' I am flabbergasted. He wasn't a gamedev, and he explained the problem in 1 minute. And he did this... 13 YEARS AGO www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fpi...

Its bleakly funny how TV discourse is having a moment around Netflix exec's going "what if someone is cooking pasta while watching this show, maybe the characters should announce what they are doing" and people mock it, meanwhile games discourse is often doing a weird defence of the same thing.

hardly the same. you can't get lost in a tv show or a movie. it's not a spatial reasoning thing. you're either paying attention or you're not in games it can be very easy to get stuck even if you *are* paying attention, this is why signposting exists, and why it's mostly done in 3D games

"you can't get lost in a tv show or a movie. it's not a spatial reasoning thing." It depends on what you mean by 'spatial' in this case. If you watch the 'Every Frame A Painting' episode I link down in the thread, he mentions how in fighting scenes the viewer *can* get spatially confused by bad cuts

OH MY GOD! EXACTLY RIGHT! It's such a weird thing to defend!

How did we come to the conclusion 80% are annoyed? What tells us it us not the 2.5% who moan loudly on internet?

In most cases the correct answer is "The level design and game design are not meshing together well, and we cannot resolve this for time, political, or expertise reasons. So, just slap some paint on that thing and call it done." and you feel this when you play it. Not your fault, but you do feel it.

Of course this isn't tied to just game development, which is especially why I find the 'Only game devs should be part of this conversation' train of thought so terrible. All creative endeavors have these problems. Every Frame A Painting did a great job explaining this with Jackie Chan:

That video is from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PC... When he says: "Why are you paying money to not see the action?" It's the same vibe as: "Why did you pay money for a game that you cannot play without your hand being held?"