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unproductive-software-blog · 2 years

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𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐞𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐤𝐬

Bloodborne is a perfect video game to some people.

Bloodborne is a critically acclaimed video game.

Bloodborne is beloved by a shockingly active fanbase given its status as a single game released over 5 years ago.

My most popular post on this blog is a “quick tip” reminding people that the player character model has a highly detailed spinal protrusion. This post was popular because I used simple sentences and the word “sexy” while talking about a popular video game on Tumblr.com

My best friend’s Aunt loves playing Bloodborne. Her son, who played in an emo band and grew up with Danganronpa, has also loved Bloodborne since he was 13.

Bloodborne is exactly what people who hate video games hate about video games, right down to the presence of guns.

Bloodborne is also exactly what your run of the mill game reviewers are always saying they want: tonal cohesion and consistency, with story and gameplay harmonizing in a singular and jaw-droppingly detailed setting.

My friend at age 7, Evan, would have loved Bloodborne, because “you can kill in it”.

I lived with someone whose primary hobby was working out, who plays maybe one video game per year, and he and I devoured Bloodborne together. We made fun of it the whole time for being stupid and unfair, but never earnestly considered dropping the game. Our character was named Chad. He used the worst, slowest, dumbest weapon in the game, the Kirkhammer, nearly exclusively, and had an orange face shaped like a crescent moon. We never touched his Arcane or Bloodtinge stats, despite hitting the “soft cap” on strength-related damage increases about 1/3 the way through the game. We hit level 105 within 44 hours of play, and made a joke of the game’s “true” final boss. We then joked about how dumb that ending was, and put it away, before years later playing through Sekiro together and treating it with an earned sense of extreme reverence.

I have an incredibly close friend who once told me they “play video games for the writing”. Not even the story, but the writing. Bloodborne is one of their favorite games. They relate to it on a personal level given their life experiences. They are probably the closest thing to an expert on Bloodborne lore someone can even be without making things up. This person is also a professional games journalist, whose work I read consistently and dutifully. I consulted with them before writing this article, to see what they thought about some of my more negative opinions on the game. I asked what they thought about the fact that you can fist a pig to death in the game, and how the game design essentially begs the player to do it at times. They called me a crass term for female genitalia. Well, I would rather be someone who gets called a pussy than someone who calls others pussy for their opinions on a video game.

My best friend Aidan, a successful and well-adjusted scientist, athlete, and off-and-on hardcore gamer, took one look at the game, the pig fisting, and the dismal nighttime setting, and determined that Demons’ Souls and Dark Souls were more his thing

My former co-director at our now-defunct video game studio, Studio Casting Key, likes Bloodborne. He and I played it together online. He paid for my PS+ account, because he’s a good friend, and friends don’t let friends pay for Playstation Plus. He and I were doing research for a Lovecraft-inspired RPG we were concepting at the time. He lamented that Bloodborne’s developers clearly wanted players to engage with its story and characters, but needlessly obscured much of that content from them. I disagreed at the time. I make it a habit to disagree with people when I talk to them, in order to coax out a more nuanced and intelligent version of their opinion from their subconscious. Playing “devil’s advocate” (the devil in this case, fittingly, being Bloodborne) I said that I liked how obscure the story and side content was, because it’s “more eldritch that way”. I said I wanted our game to be a card game where the cards are written in a fictional language, and the only way to learn what they did would be through play, but many of them would have disastrous consequences. Then he said he said something or other about his favorite character, whose name I struggle to recall even now, having fully completed her storyline in my third playthrough. I didn’t know who he was talking about, but silently felt cool for not caring one way or the other, because caring about the story in a game like Bloodborne was, to me, nonsensical. I was, like Micholash, Host of the Nightmare, from Bloodborne, navel-gazing hard.

Over the course of our playthrough, my friend’s internet-approved build was causing him frustration. He said that building up beasthood was impossible. I thought he was dumb to try and do something the internet said would work. I had no idea what beasthood even meant. I have currently played Bloodborne for well over 100 hours and have still never actually filled that stupid beasthood meter. That mechanic is stupid. It’s the developers’ fault for putting it in the game, not my friend’s fault for assuming a mechanic in the game would “work” or “be fun” just because it was in the game. We continued to take turns making fun of the game and praising its sound design (which, when listened to alone with headphones, actually includes a lot of glitches, such as the same one second loop of audio sometimes repeating endlessly during the battle against Rom, the Vacuous Spider, or the painful pop which damages my $500 Bowers and Wilkins headphones every hour or so during regular play) until reaching Micholash, Host of the Nightmare, and stopping because that fight was “stupid”. “Why would they even put a puzzle boss in a Souls game”, we wondered aloud as we gave up on the game for what once again, felt like the last time.

Why, then, did I return to Bloodborne, a game I only ever pretended to be interested in as a way of relating to my more casual gaming friends, and spend all of my free time for the last month on a 100% playthrough of the game, reading every bit of text I could find within the game and online? Because, as fans of this blog (if any exist) would know (if they existed), I played Demons’ Souls, and discovered just how rich the “Souls” series of games can be when one devotes 100% of their attention to playing and understanding them. Demons’ souls has puzzle bosses, and they are awesome and meaningful. Bloodborne, I assumed, must share the worldly perspective of the other games in its “series”.

Unfortunately, Bloodborne is not in the Demons’ Souls series of games. Bloodborne is what happened when From Software stopped being the dark horse game developers who made that weird flop Demons’ Souls (you know, that timeless masterpiece that changed gaming forever?), so Sony begged them to come back home (and bring their die-hard audience). From Software, now a ravenous beast reveling madly in the blood (money) of its fandom, could not resist Sony’s Pungent Blood Cocktail (money), and devised to create a game so utterly appealing to gamer bros and modern game critics alike, that they would all have to buy Sony’s bloodbourne (Uyghur slave labor driven) game console, the PS4.

Yeah, Bloodborne does have some themes in it. I personally love the theme of people getting so caught up in fantasy/ideals/religion that they let the real world fall to pieces. It’s just too bad the whole thing feels so totally lacking in self-awareness. It’s practically hypocrisy. As if getting to NG+7 is any more noble than Micholash, a villain of the game, spending all his days lost in a dream, vainly searching for meaning where there is none. Video games are basically the new religion anyway (especially if you correctly think of modern social media websites/apps as giant, horribly managed MMOs). Back in the day, people used to spend their free time in real life, thinking about real life, and having ideas about real life that they called religion. People kept building on those ideas, and they got pretty unwieldy, especially with all the money involved. Nowadays, people spend all their free time in video games, thinking about video games, and having ideas about video games that they call content. People kept making content, content about content, and content about that, until it got pretty unwieldy, especially with all the money involved. Attention has always been monetized, but I guess everyone’s just gonna keep letting it happen in this current form until we start having wars over the stuff. Then they’ll invent something else.

Near the beginning of this game, a little girl asks you to help her find shelter after you kill her father, who had become an insane killing machine. You tell her where to go. Then you go there, and she’s not there, like every other character you’ve led to safety. If you return to the place you met her, she’s gone. For most people who even make it this far into the quest, it ends here, with a big unsatisfying question mark. I looked it up, and she died on the way to the safe house. The only way to tell is to kill an enemy you have no reason to return to and see that he has a bow you never saw the girl wearing in the first place (she isn’t modeled). How were you supposed to find that? Was I supposed to go searching the city, worried sick (I was), until I found this? It’s extremely stupid, because if the game had allowed me to do as I pleased, I never would tell a little kid to run through a gauntlet of madmen and monsters by herself, I would have escorted, or even carried her. From Software didn’t let me do that, however, because that would mean modeling the girl, or worse, letting me kill her. You see, it was part of their design philosophy at the time that just like the “enemies”, any character you can see, you can kill. This philosophy led to a lot of interesting decisions in the Dark Souls games, but those games never featured any child characters, likely for this reason. This makes suddenly seeing a child, and having the option to save them, hit so hard at first; you feel like you’re saving the last sliver of hope and innocence in a world gone mad. This makes it feel all the more pointless and contrived when she dies due to the developers refusing to go all-in on their own design philosophy. Instead of making another game about moral choices, self-sacrifice, and the relative easiness of doing things the wrong way, From Software chose to rob their players of any real meaning this scene would’ve had in the name of keeping the game “consistent” and “cohesive” (my least favorite words in modern games discourse).

Enemies bleed when you attack them. Your character can get blood on them. It’s a great feature that adds a bit more ickiness and realism to your actions, making you feel a bit like a monster yourself at times. However, the blood effects are so stupidly exaggerated, that your entire character can become dyed red in a way that is only ever (unintentionally?) hilarious. If it is intentionally hilarious, then the game should try to say something with that humor, and double down on it. As it stands, Bloodborne is a ridiculously stone-faced game that tries so hard to make you feel bad, while doing what Killer 7 (consuming your enemies copious blood spray), No More Heroes (blood rain, hyper-gore moves), and Space Funeral (overuse of proper nouns containing the word “blood”, Leg Horse) did as satirical jokes making fun of this exact type of excessiveness. Bloodborne also has serious elements in common with those same games (uncertainty over who the real victim is, hallucinations, kidnapping/abduction, trauma, enemies that sound something like a real person in severe pain/anguish), but it dives so head-first into the deep end of edginess for the sake of edginess, that it reduces the impact of its violence when it actually has something to say about pain/trauma/mental health.

Also, you can fist a pig to death in this game, and the game design practically begs you to do it.

It’s ridiculous failures of game design like these that cause people to not take video game experiences seriously. It’s moments of investment in a story or theme or tone being subverted by nothing but cowardly game design, a refusal to create additional assets, and over-adherence to a tone or theme regardless of how the player is made to feel in real life, that causes gamers to grow desensitized and turn to stupid jokes when discussing the medium, as opposed to real criticism of games as art, not just entertainment.

I refuse to laugh it off and say “it’s just a game, dude”, because I really do love video games. To shrug away these tone-deaf moments would be to dismiss all the genuine emotional experiences I’ve had with games, including the genuinely funny ones.

I refuse to let my $30, 130 hour investment in a video game control my emotional responses!

I refuse to become an insensitive, unthinking, sarcastic person in the name of turning off my brain and enjoying a game for the gameplay!

I can enjoy gameplay WHILE thinking deeply about a game and its place in the world, and I can do it while MOSTLY criticizing the game!

If you can’t do that, you’re probably too young to be playing a game like this! This is why we call it M for Mature, because it takes MATURITY to spend time with a flawed and excessively dark game like this and NOT get weirdly desensitized!

Brains on people!

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retrogamingloft · 1 month

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Mikie, a classic video game from 1984, was brought to life by Konami, initially gracing arcades before making its way to various home systems. Its gameplay and novel concept quickly won hearts.

Players step into the shoes of a high school student, Mikie, embarking on a quest to gather hearts across different classrooms to woo his girlfriend. The journey unfolds across diverse settings, including classrooms, a cafeteria, and a dance studio, each presenting unique challenges and adversaries.

This game is celebrated for its vibrant music and sound effects, along with the vivid graphics characteristic of its time. Mikie must skillfully dodge or incapacitate teachers, cooks, and other characters to secure all the hearts within each level to progress. The gameplay is a blend of action and strategy, requiring players to meticulously plan their movements while evading or confronting foes.

Mikie holds a special place in the realm of retro gaming, cherished for its distinctive charm and the rigor of its gameplay, epitomizing the inventiveness and pioneering spirit of the 1980s arcade era.

However, it's essential to acknowledge the game's more controversial aspects, which, through a modern lens, reveal it as an early instance of politically incorrect content in gaming.

At its launch, Mikie was part of a cultural landscape less critical of video game narratives, where the breadth of themes in entertainment encompassed those now deemed questionable or potentially harmful to impressionable audiences.

The game's core narrative, depicting a student maneuvering through school to amass hearts and ultimately elope with his girlfriend, reflects actions and attitudes now at odds with current values on education and respect for authority.

Moreover, Mikie's portrayal of conflict resolution through evasion and physical aggression—encouraging players to dispatch school staff to achieve goals—showcases a problem-solving method that diverges sharply from the conflict resolution and respect teachings emphasized in educational settings today.

Additionally, the game's focus on pursuing a romantic interest at the cost of educational disruption may appear to belittle the significance of schooling and student responsibilities.

This portrayal of a school environment, where the primary objective is to abscond with a girlfriend rather than engage in the learning process, might be construed as diminishing the value of education and respect for the educational institution.

In the current era, with a heightened focus on producing content that promotes positive values and behaviors, Mikie stands as a testament to the evolving nature of cultural perceptions and sensitivities.

While it remains an iconic piece of video game history, fondly remembered by many for its technical and creative merits, the content-related controversies it sparks continue to fuel discussions on media's influence on societal norms and behavior.

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