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katapotato55 · 1 year

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How to write a good metaphor

yall seemed to like my post on "how to write good horror" so i figured i should make another one of these.

1- do. not. explain. the. metaphor.

don't.

"oh but how will the audience know my deep and meaningful message- "

SOME PEOPLE WONT GET IT. if you explain what you mean then suddenly the metaphor won't be deep anymore. it becomes a generic forced message.

i know you are tempted to make a character infodump about everything, fucking don't.

followup on this:

2- a good metaphor should potentially have multiple interpretations.

"but i don't want people to get the wrong impression of the story!"

then you either need to make damn sure its an elegantly written metaphor, or none at all. the death of the author is the idea that everyone has their own vision of a story they read, rearguards of authors intent. you need to come to terms with this or else you won't improve your writing skills.

you need to trust that your audience is intelligent enough to understand the metaphor on their own without bashing them over the head with it. sometimes people misunderstand meaning, it is a fact of life.

The game little inferno was thought of as a metaphor about pollution, in which later the creators went out to say it was actually about capitalism and wasting your life with things like exploitative mobile games. you just need make it SUBTLE and hope for the best.

3- The story/gameplay/etc should inform the metaphor(and sometimes reference real life examples)

To mention little inferno again, the "you must wait x amount of time for in-game item to be given to you" is a mirror of mobile games in the real world that use timers to leach money from you.

another example: analogue horror.

broken old technology is scary on its own, but many good analogue horror artists tend to use this to the advantage.

analogue horror can be used as a metaphor for dying trends and technology, like how in the 30's through 70's we used asbestos in the walls. Analogue horror makes a great parralel to this idea (see Blue_channel by gooseworx for a good example.) . the audience questions WHY this is on an old CRT tv and not just a smartphone, perhaps to imply this was an event that happened years ago.

undertale is another example, where most RPG's encourage you to fight and to level up, undertale uses this as a simple metaphor about obsessive control and being cruel to get an arbitrary achievement (i recommend the escapist's video on "why i didn't review undertale" on youtube for way better examples)

tldr: a metaphor is stronger if you lightly reference real life occurances and implement your metaphor in the medium presented.

4- the curtains are blue because they are blue.

not everyone is going to understand your metaphor

and not everyone is going to notice every single little metaphor you add to your story.

remember those teachers that would constantly stretch to imply something in a story is a metaphor and that the curtains are blue because of some deep metaphor for death and sadness and shit?

those teachers are full of it. ignore them.

metaphors are allowed to be simple. not every metaphor needs to be a hyper deep depth defying world changing thing. I could even argue a bunch of small metaphors connected to each other can be better than one big metaphor depending on your story.

relax. don't think too much about it because your average audience member won't.

5- study movies, tv, books, games, etc and understand why their metaphors work.

don't fall into that "the curtains are blue because of a deep message" English teacher mindset mind you.

"but how do i tell what is and isn't a metaphor?" you may ask

simple. trust your gut. you won't understand everything you come across but the human brain has a way of telling what is and isn't a metaphor in stories.

(spoiler about bugsnax)

I could argue Bugsnax is a metaphor about drug abuse and addiction. The characters have personality traits commonly associated with people vulnerable to drug addiction. An athlete, a hippy, a married couple going through a rough spot in their marriage with the threat of divorce, a mentally ill person with trauma and paranoia, etc.

It isn't obvious, many people may disagree with me, but you can't deny that there are signs i may be right.

(end of spoiler) the point i am trying to make: don't stretch to find a metaphor when you don't see one. if you are curious google other people's theories and make your own opinion. metaphors are hard and you will learn over time. and finally 6- do not ever do "it was all just a dream" or "the character is secretly in a coma" etc this applies to writing in general but it is still related to metaphors. the only time i have seen this done well is driver san francisco, but what it did right was A- make it so the players can guess ahead of time the mystery, such as the radio saying voices of your character in the hospital, or if you zoomed out you could hear a heart monitor. and B- it didn't completely un-do the entire story. that is my core issue with this trope. it either wastes your time un-doing the entire story readers worked hard to finish, or it is just nonsensical and terrible. "dora the explorer is actually in purgatory!" "spongebob is a metaphor for the 7 deadly sins!" "ash is in a coma and that is why he never ages! " ooooor it is a cartoon and you are forcing meaning that doesn't exist in something that doesn't even imply it. the world being a bit weird is not enough to be a metaphor for anything. If you want to make a good metaphor: do more effort than just slapping a lazy "it was all a coma" thing at the end. Like horror, stuff like this needs to be built up properly. also consider authors intent. I understand death of the author and all of that, but do you really think a retired marine biologist made spongebob to be a complex metaphor about sinners in hell ? (rip Stephen Hillenburg btw. we didn't deserve him.) thank you for reading, hope this helps. and please, learn to understand the tropes of metaphors before you attempt to make the story of a generation. edit- adding a couple more things i forgot 7- "the darkness is going to destroy the land or whatever!" i see this used all the time. spooky wookey dark shadowy bits going to destroy a land and is the hero's generic bad thing to fight. stop it. it is not a deep and complex metaphor about depression or whatever the hell you are on about. its lazy and stupid. 8- a story should stand up on its own regardless if audience members understand the metaphor or not I don't like Gris. it is a very pretty game with lovely visuals But also the entire story is just the main character moping about artistically and shit and go on about how artistically sad and dramatic this all is. if i don't understand the story without understanding the metaphor, then your story and your metaphor sucks. an example of a metaphor done well: spiritfairer without the metaphor, it is a simple game about running a traveling boat. even if you didn't care too much about the deeper meaning it is a cute story and the gameplay is fun (spoiler) if you look deeper, it can also be taken as a metaphor about greif and learning to accept your loved ones will one day die. things like the boat being filled with empty houses you can't remove is a good example of this. (end of spoiler) your story needs to stand up on its own to be good. don't use a metaphor as a crutch.

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ducktastic · 1 year

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Derrick's 2022 Gameological Awards

Every year on the Gameological Discord, rather than a simple top ten list, we ask what games did what things especially well. Here are my picks in this year's pool...

Game of the Year

Game of the Year means different things to different people. Simply being “the best” is subjective. For me, it’s a matter of which game stuck with me the longest, a game that I couldn’t stop thinking about, a game that captured my imagination and would not let go until I was through. In 2022, no game did that quite like Tunic. A gorgeous isometric action-rpg heavily inspired by classic The Legend of Zelda games, Tunic fashions itself as a long-lost retro game. One where the instruction manual has had its pages separated and lost within the world itself, leading players to explore the world with little guidance and literally piece things together as they go. Mysteries on top of mysteries, stretching through the corners of my mind, obsessing for days on end. Tunic is a whole damn journey and no game in 2022 swept me away into its mythology, world-building, and sheer scope quite the way Tunic did.

Single-player GOTY

As we continue to blur the lines between the various forms of media, the main detail that separates games from comparable experiences in film and books is that games are about the agency of the player, that the person consuming the media is actively a part of it. It’s easy to escape into lives unlike your own by watching them on the silver screen or reading about them on the page, but games make you FEEL the way a different person might feel. Put aside the dreamy aesthetic, raunchy dialogue, and supernatural conspiracy story… the real star of Neon White was that it made the player feel like a goddamn golden God, launching themselves into the heavens and crashing down on the heads of their foes with righteous justice and unwavering focus. The absolute speed and force of Neon White’s gameplay made every player experience the rush of being a pro gamer, squeezing every last drop of blood out of a game’s throat as you dominated it. Yes, it’s gorgeous and sounds great and all that good stuff, but the adrenaline provided by Neon White was unlike anything else this year.

Multiplayer GOTY

The Splatoon games have lovely and imaginative single-player campaigns, but let’s be real, the franchise is all about frantic multiplayer paint action. Splatoon 3 is the least innovative game in the series so far, but that doesn’t make it any less joyous an experience to hop online with some friends or make some new ones while painting the town [insert your randomly assigned team color here]. New personalization features like SplatTags and lockers, along with games-as-service inspired seasonal catalogs and an always-on upgrade to Splatoon 2’s Salmon Run, Splatoon 3 is constantly hitting players with reasons to keep coming back for more.

Favorite Replay

The Stanley Parable remains an iconic experience from the previous decade’s golden era of indie games. It introduced countless impressionable gamers worldwide to the concept of metatextual narratives within gameplay and the relationship between the player’s choice and the creator’s voice. It was all set to remain a once-in-a-lifetime exploration of interactive media, right up until this year’s release of The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, a game that was, on the surface, a modern remaster of a decade-old PC game for modern hardware and consoles, but was secretly a stealth sequel with even more to say about the current gaming landscape. While the original Stanley Parable was happy to direct a mirror at gamers to make them question the choices they make when they consume media of any kind, the additional new areas of Ultra Deluxe raise new questions and concerns about the game industry and the ways that video games are designed, consumed, critiqued, discussed, and ultimately tossed aside. The revelatory experience revealed more than ever before, and remained effortlessly hilarious all along the way.

Didn't Click Award

Going into 2022, there was no game I was more hyped for than OlliOlli World. The first two entries into the side-scrolling skateboard trick-em-up were damn near perfect. Perfectly at home on the Playstation Vita, they were tight, thrilling, and oh-so-stylish. A long-awaited sequel was just so exciting, and the new Adventure Time-inspired aesthetic had a ton of potential, along with the ability to finally design your own skater and express yourself through fashion and gear. The only problem was… the gameplay never quite CLICKED. What was so magical about the previous games was how responsive the controls were. Just like Super Meat Boy assured people that, if they died, it was their own mistake and not the game’s controls, OlliOlli 1 and 2 both had immaculate precision with the skateboard controls. OlliOlli World did not. Controls are floaty and imprecise, sometimes it felt like the game just decided you didn’t jump in time or didn’t grab correctly. Without that precision, OlliOlli World just never felt right, and no matter how many times I tried, I just never connected with it the way I had with its predecessors.

Most Forgettable Award

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Netflix made its first proper foray into game publishing this year, along with its first showing at the not-E3 “Summer Games Fest,” where they announced plenty of successful licensed games coming to mobile devices via Netflix, several Netflix streaming projects based on popular video games, and most notably surprise-dropped a new Netflix-exclusive game from the creator of Downwell. “Poinpy” instantly trended on social media as gamers laughed about the humorously named vertical platformer, and as one would expect from the creator of Downwell, the game showed a surprising amount of depth and strategy. That said, I only played the game maybe three or four times that first week and then it lay idle on my home screen for months before I finally just deleted it. Poinpy was certainly a thing… but only for a hot minute.

(In)famous Award

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Social media could not get enough videos of the viral sensation Trombone Champ, a rhythm game played by sliding up and down the screen like pushing and pulling the slide of a trombone. People loved adding silly songs or viral audio clips and making Trombone Champ levels out of them. I have no idea if the game is fun because frankly I have no interest in playing it. The videos were funny for a while, but really, they just felt like yet another meme, just one that happened to be centered around this silly game.

Unexpected Joy

With an uninspired name like Vampire Survivors, a nondescript retro pixel art style, and the increasingly tired “rogue-like” label, I had absolutely no interest in what seemed like yet another flash-in-the-pan indie sensation. And then they went and dropped a free mobile port during The Game Awards and I was like “eh, what harm could it do?” And then I drained my phone’s battery twice a day for a week, completely addicted to its game loop. As much as the game lazily lifts from rogue-likes and bullet-hell shmups, it brilliantly and expertly lifts from idle games and clickers. The end result is a remarkably passive game that steadily makes you feel more and more like an unstoppable machine of divine power. It’s incredible and has no right being this good.

Best Music

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Melatonin only just came out a few days ago, so I haven’t had enough time with it to really consider it for titles like GOTY, but I can already say that this Rhythm Heaven-inspired minigame collection absolutely nails its inspiration when it comes to hooky melodies with toe-tapping beats. More than anything else, a rhythm game has got to have compelling music to keep you playing, and there is no doubt that Melatonin has that in spades.

Favorite Game Encounter

There were several fascinating encounters in my GOTY pick, Tunic, from enormous mechanized sentinels to flittering joyous fairies, but nothing this year came close to The Mountain Door. If you’ve played Tunic, you know. Opening The Mountain Door is a puzzle that literally spans the entire breadth of the gaming experience in ways that I still get excited about just remembering months after the fact. It requires using all of the knowledge you’ve collected along the way to explore, examine, and rethink dozens of smaller puzzles that culminate in one euphoric victory. And it’s still not even the end of the game!

Best DLC of the Year

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Little Inferno was the unlikeliest smash hit of the Wii U launch library, and proved to be an absolute delight when it came to PC and mobile devices. Equal parts idle game, passive toy, and black comedy narrative adventure, the game remains a truly special oddball indie romp. Ten years after its initial release, in Fall 2022, players were surprised with its first DLC—Little Inferno Ho Ho Holiday—taking the game’s already explicit anti-consumerism bent and applying it specifically to that most commercial time of the year: festive winter holidays. What an unexpected joy!

"Waiting for Game-dot"

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Disco Elysium. I know. I KNOW. It’s been sitting in my library for years now. I’ll get there someday.

Game that Made Me Think

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I continue to find Sam Barlow fascinating as a game creator. He and David Cage are the two directors most experimenting with the rapidly blurring line between cinema and game, and his latest title, Immortality, blurs that line even further by actually just being about movies. The game is, essentially, three feature-length films, broken up into reels and rehearsals and behind the scenes footage for players to scrub through and explore, and even more than his previous efforts Her Story and Telling Lies, Immortality really bonks players over the head with "THAT WAS IMPORTANT" by disrupting the footage in jarring ways that I don’t want to discuss in case people want to enjoy the game unspoiled. It’s not my favorite of his titles, and I had a harder time investing in the characters than his other works, but from an interactive standpoint, Immortality pushes boundaries in fascinating ways that I couldn’t stop thinking about, even when I no longer really cared about the game’s mysteries.

Girlfriend Reviews Award

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The last major feature update Harmonix’s Fuser got in 2021 added a “Diamond Stage” where users could buy spots on the bill and mix tracks live to a global streaming audience. As the game steadily died through 2022—first with an end to new DLC tracks, then the decline of weekly challenges, and finally online services being shuttered just this week—but even when the game didn’t compel me to come back and play more, the Diamond Stage kept me hooked on the official Fuser Twitch stream, enjoying endless mixes by players spinning live at all times. The stage is finally closed now, leaving legacy players to their own devices to play locally and share mixes as one-offs rather than real-time collaborations, but for half of the game’s short life-span, we had a lovely dance party available to us 24/7 we could all share together.

WILDCARD

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is just too good a game to not mention at all. It’s the best Kirby game since Super Star, which is very possibly one of the greatest video games of all time. It’s also, somehow, the first mainline Kirby platform adventure on a three-dimensional axis, something that other Nintendo icons Mario and Zelda did back on the N64 and Metroid did on the GameCube, all while Kirby kept happily within the confines of flat two-dimensional platforming (aside from some spin-offs like Air Ride, Blowout Blast, and Dream Course). Not content to simply mimic foes by stealing their powers, this time Kirby would take on the characteristics of inanimate objects in the world, becoming a car, a vending machine, a staircase, and more. The game ends with a spectacular over-the-top battle that feels like it belongs in Bayonetta, not the unassuming pink puffball that is Kirby, but it all works! Hell, this game gives Kirby a gun, AND IT WORKS!!! On paper, nothing about this game makes sense, but in practice, it freakin’ rules. If this is what 3D Kirby games are going to be like, I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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