The End of Videogame (and Art) Theory

[icycalm]

https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/673612287

Now that the dust has settled, is it about time we finally admit that Alex Kierkegaard was right the whole time?

Yes, that's correct. Smarter people tend to get bored with simpler games.

Icycalm is just trying to scientifically prove that his taste is the best taste in the world. Because he is the Overman; obviously. Whatever.

The Overman; reduced to streaming Rust on Twitch.

This is the same guy who thinks star citizen is the second greatest game of all time, just underneath his own vapourware title

What are some good First Person 4X games, /v/itizens?

Star Citizen

Not yet, but it will be.

>bait

No, icycalm is genuine.

He is the schizo-philosopher. I'm a huge fan.

>First person 4X
>FP4X

What the FUCK is this shit?

In terms of mechanics and systems. Dungeon crawlers are simple enough that a toddler could play them.

Not a toddler. I played them around 10.

Mediocre games are the most popular, that's all it means, which is pretty true

Yes, and great games are as unpopular as bad ones.

>Pseuds like being given puzzles with many pieces that take ages to solve while lacking the intelligence to see that it is a waste of time.

You could say that of any genre, including fighting games and arcade games. I think you're just coping with the fact you got filtered by genres that actually require intelligent thinking to get good at.

Yep, everyone who prefers dirt-simple games like FTGs to Rust et al. is massively filtered by reality, which is far closer to Rust than to an FTG.

Best Massively-multiplayer Multigroup Survival-building 4X Overworld GMRPG (Ultimate Edition) games?

This person understands.

[icycalm]

V3 of the videogame genre graph, that I mentioned a while back I was working on, is done. Some points:

• The main addition are the multiple race lines, so that the original White one is joined by black, brown, yellow, and even a superhuman/cyborg one.
  
• Why bother adding racism to it? Because we must. Everything must become racial from now on, otherwise the species and civilization are finished.
  
• A few words about the black line. It peaks at fighting games because that's the blacks' favorite genre: simple punching and kicking, and ideally in a 2D environment so their brains won't have to deal with a third dimension. As for what kinds of games they make, I've never heard of a black studio, but if one existed I am sure they'd make 2D FTGs with those braindead FTG-making programs that exist, and hideous art.
  
• The brown line meanwhile peaks at 2D side-scrollers because the one brown studio I have heard of is a brazilian one that makes bad, and of course ugly, copies of 2D side-scrollers from the '80s. I don't think the browns can work with 3D either. 2D seems to be their ceiling.
  
• Of course we know all about yellows, and their line peaks at basically Biohazard, i.e. 3D action-adventure. They've made a handful of cool third-person action games (you know what they are: Vanquish, Metal Gear Rising, et al.), and even a couple of interesting first-person ones (Maken X, Breakdown, et al.) which were not however very good. Nor can their third-person ones challenge the production values and sheer cinematicness of Gears of War, because yellows aren't good at cinema. And of course they can't even make open-world games at all because they dislike freedom, on top of the fact they lack the energy to build at such a scale.
  
• With Whites it's obvious that their peak is Cyberpunk 2077, meaning open-world CRPG, which has now been added to the graph.
  
• After nearly two decades of effort, I am proud to say that we have gestated a new form of life on Insomnia: I give you... Das Übermensch! And of course only Übermensches can make Übermensch games, which is why the only such game really, Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds, had to be designed, directed, produced, and coded by me. You are welcome, future superspecies. And also current Insomnia subscribers, the true Übermensches of today.
  
• How can someone become a discerning gaming Übermensch? Only one way: they must subscribe to Insomnia. The theory says so, it's not me, it's the theory that says it. So subscribe and prove you aren't subhuman.
  
• Couple of genres have been added: "Rhythm" on the far-left, and Star Citizen on the far-right.
  
• Note that the curves are ASYMPTOTES. Google it if you skipped math class. This means that they keep approaching the x-axis without every actually reaching it, which of course can't be represented on the graph, especially not with the thick lines it uses. But the point is that the Übermensch may still enjoy a good fighting game on occasion, just as a rare black person may play Star Citizen or my Battlegrounds. They wouldn't be able to make them though, just as the Übermensch wouldn't enjoy the fighting game all that much.
  
• There's some horseplay going on with the turn-based 4X genre. I keep moving it back and forth between the left and right sides of the curve between revisions. It's complicated. But briefly: Civilization is DEFINITELY on the left side of the graph (yes it's mechanically complex but aesthetically DIRT-SIMPLE, so the TOTAL complexity is LOWER than e.g. Divinity: Original Sin's). Alex Kierkegaard's Master of Heroes, on the other hand—the ultimate 4X game, which really is a 4X metaverse game—is definitely on the right side. I'll work on this in future revisions, and for the detailed analyses you'll have to wait for my Civilization and GTA3 VGART essays, as well as the completion of the "Roleplaying Culture" essay in the Ultimate Edition book.
  
• This graph is now featured prominently on the Insomnia frontpage (scroll down the left-hand sidebar). Click on the banner image to be taken straight to this thread: the last videogame thread on the internet.

Stuff to be added/revised in V4, in addition to the turn-based 4X issue:

• The Quality label at the x-axis should be rewritten as "Quality = Complexity (Aesthetic + Mechanical)", so that no one will any longer be confused about my meaning (see countless 4chan posts linked earlier).
  
• Under the function formula on the top-right should be added the intelligence formula: "Int = IQ + T", to make it clear why yellows underperform so badly.
  
• Star Citizen's genre should be changed to "First-person Metaverse (FPM)" and my Battlegrounds' to "Roleplaying Metaverse (RPM)" to make 100% clear what the crucial difference between these games and genres is: they are both metaverses, but SC lacks roleplaying because it lacks a Game Master, which is why it's inferior not only to my game but also to pretty much every decent GMRPG ever, as shown in the graph.

[icycalm]

https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/676677403

The best videogame related graph of all-time

It's incredible how much this graph manages to communicate with just one image. I've never seen any other graph attempt to explain the entire videogame playing habits of the entire human race in one image. And not only have I never seen anyone attempt to do this before, but it explains everything. Normies, weirdos, exceptions etc. all different types of gamers are accounted in this graph.

Not only are all of the different types of players modeled here, but all of the videogame genres are modeled here as well. It's completely unprecedented for someone to even mention all videogame genres at all, but to effectively rank them and in a single image... wow.

I'd recommend that if you find this graph interesting to look the URL in the image up, or search for icycalm, and buckle up for a wild ride....

Anyway, I'm curious about what others think about this? What do you see when you see this graph anon? What's the first thing that comes to your mind?

This is a really funny image
Game Master Roleplaying is awesome but you have no idea how many white guys play sports games.

Many also play flight simulators when training as pilots. Should we count those too?

What about CAD programs that rival Minecraft? Photoshop?

They aren't even videogames.

This graph isn't for software. It's specifically for videogames, and the people who play them. The American who only plays Madden and the European who only plays FIFA aren't gamers, and the software they're using aren't really videogames. Ergo, they're not on the graph at all. ("Sports games" on the graph refers to stuff like fantasy sports, sci-fi sports and the like, not to sports sims. There are no sims in the graph at all because they aren't games.)

I'd bet if you look up the sales figures of one of the 3D GTAs versus an individual Madden or FIFA or whatever I'm sure that 3D crushes those sports games in sales.

The hype around the semi-recent GTA6 reveal took of the Internet for a couple of days. I think their video broke some sort of record for how quickly a videogame trailer got however many views on YouTube. Meanwhile, I don't even know what the newest version of Madden is even called or even if they are still releasing them anymore, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Could your argument for Star Citizen not being high quality be that it's "vapourware"? I ask because typically when people have anything negative about the game that to say that can be communicated in like a sentence it basically just means that they haven't bothered to google the game in years, or haven't learned what early-access means for some reason.

Someone that doesn't on a deep level appreciate the entirety of videogames couldn't make comparisons between genres at all that remotely make any sense. Their understanding couldn't resemble anything coherent unless they truly "get it".

Look, if you could name someone who could write in-depth reviews explaining games as different as Rust, Gunvalkryie, Mushihime-sama, Power Stone, Sonic the Hedgehog, Star Citizen, Life is Feudal or even the first videogame Spacewar why would they be "genre-brained" or whatever dumb word you used. Someone who could write reviews on games that different obviously plays or has played every remotely artistic videogame that has ever come out. Could you name me someone else who has even played all of these games, or better yet has even heard of them all?

Have you read his site? His reviews? His essays? His forum posts? I struggle to understand how anyone could accurately appraise his output and call it superficial.

I suppose to understand your argument better maybe it would help if I understood what games you play and prefer. Whichever ones you play and prefer would be the ones where you can most accurately point out "errors" in his analysis so what are your favorites if I may ask?

I’ve done tabletop
I like it but it can be very time consuming and it’s obnoxious if you have shit players

Precisely because it's so demanding in player ability, it's the greatest genre. Because of the real roleplaying involved.

There are FP4X games? I've heard of FPS/RTS games but never a FP4X game

You have to read Insomnia (culture.vg) to have heard of them. Only icycalm and his readers use the term. It's something he invented. Examples of games in this genre are Life is Feudal, Atlas, and Starbase. Rust is close as survival-builder, maybe that's one you've heard of or played before?

Maybe reading this thread would be a good place to start learning about the genre: https://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=16&t=7 ... P4X#p33140

It's mentioned in so many places that I honestly don't know the best place to send people who would be interested in learning more...

To me this chart reeks of insecure "thing I like is for big-brain chad (me), and thing I don't like is for browns"

That's pretty much correct lol, just without the insecurity but a tremendous feeling of security.

>rythmn games put on the too simple most popular with blacks spectrum
Tbf, exponential difficulty scaling really kicked in in the 2010s after rhythm games fell off in the west. It's a very niche genre and as a result very few people even know what the skill ceiling is in modern games.

They don't understand the difference between form and example. WarCraft is example. The RTS genre is the form. The graph is about forms, not examples (the images are merely illustrative, to help speed comprehension). So it doesn't really matter if blacks play rhythm games. They WOULD be playing them if there were more such games with the simplistic and stupid kind of music that blacks prefer. Plus, keep in mind that blacks don't really play games in general. browns in general do not engage with art, and in the rare occasions when they do, it's very little art, very briefly. So of course in practically ALL genres, Whites will be more prominent than any other race. An exception is for example visual novels that are so retarded that only yellows like them. But that's just an exception.

icycalm still having an impact, awesome. dude was ahead of the curve so hard it's not even funny. he was on fire back when the indie scene was taking off, it was glorious. but not everyone can handle the neutron style.

>it explains so much about gamers and their playing habits
No it doesn't. Putting aside the numerous unsubstantiated empirical claims it makes and assuming the theory is sound, what does a statement like "platfomers are low quality" actually explain about the world? It's not explanation, it's religion. It's junk.

It explains a lot. But you basically have to read icycalm's writings to understand what it does. If I try to explain it I will butcher it, guaranteed.

But some of the things it explains are more obvious. Think about side-view action games for example. Games like Metal Slug, Contra, Castlevania etc. all have jumping in them. But jumping isn't the only action that can be performed in those games, and think about how different say Super Mario World is from Castelvania as a result. Doesn't it make sense then that the best platformer would ultimately be inferior to the best side-view action game since the entirety of the mechanical possibly space of the 2D platformer genre can fit in a side-view action game? It's one thing to say that, but it's another thing to show that in a single image, and across all genres.

It also explains that best 2D platformers are "low-quality" compared to the best Open-world CPRG games for the same reason. Think of how much you can do in a game like Cyberpunk 2077 versus Super Mario World. Doesn't it make sense then that if you're judging the aesthetic and mechanical dimensions of these genres that Super Mario World can ultimately be viewed as low-quality in comparison to Cyberpunk 2077. This doesn't mean that Super Mario World isn't a great videogame. I've played it and loved it, but is it is aesthetically or mechanically complex as Cyberpunk 2077? No.

Chess is just a turn based game strategy that only has 6 types of units kinda embarrassing most gacha games are more sophisticated

Black people don't play rhythm games. That's Primarily Asians.

That's because asians are more skewed to the left than Whites. Whites prefer PLAYING ACTUAL INSTRUMENTS, while asians, being far less mature, prefer the stupid version of instruments in rhythm games. And as for blacks, if someone made rap rhythm games, and africa or whatever music games, the few blacks who play games at all would play them, and they would play them a lot more than they play Star Citizen, ergo my theory is proved.

This interests me but the first red flag I have is listing genres by quality. To say every RTS is better than every CRPG just sounds like a silly comparison cause they go for two different things.

I never said this, he said this, and the graph doesn't show this. The quality axis shows the ceiling of each genre.

Yes, different people have different tastes, obviously. This is something that the graph demonstrates. Everyone doesn't agree inherently that reality=better, yes, also true.

Yes, I am speaking from my own perspective when I say that realism=better because for me realism is better.

If you personal preference is less real games that's fine. That doesn't change that in Super Mario World you are able to do the following in Super Mario World: move to the left and right, jump, get powerups... and that's close to the entire moveset of your avatar. In Cyberpunk 2077 you can do how many more things? You can run, shoot, jump, drive a car, take missions, customize your character etc. and I've barely begun to scratch the surface of this games' featureset. Just because you can do more things in Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't mean you have to like it more, but that doesn't change that you can do more in Cyberpunk 2077.

Don't talk about realism, talk about immersion and complexity. Realism is MS Flight Simulator, and we don't want that in art, because it is anti-art.

It's also frustrating to see people be looked at experts on videogames when they don't come remotely close to explaining the things that icycalm does. Frankly, I'm tired of seeing it.

Your graph seems to imply the most popular genre among asians is action-adventure. This is laughably absurd for anyone who has met a few asians. It explains nothing.

Yeah, the asian curve should peak at say MMORPGs, and Biohazard should be on its right, as "too complex for most asians", so that there would be more Whites than asians playing those games because Whites can appreciate them more.

But then that would open the can of worms of where do MMORPGs go in the graph? Especially asian MMORPGs that are dogshit.

Very far to the left. I would rather play a sports game than an asian MMORPG.

In sum, the reality is much more complex than the graph, and it's impossible to perfectly depict in any graph, or even in any collection of graphs. That's science. Not my fault if low-IQ gamers can't grasp it.

Think about how many open-world like games came out because of GTA3, and how that changed the industry. Games like Infamous, Prototype, and the later Batman Arkham games owe a lot to GTA3. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first of it's kind, so there hasn't been enough time for the successful imitators to exist yet, but they will. I don't know about sales figures and I assume that stuff is harder to find because of how many PC copies of the game where sold, but from what I understand Cyberpunk 2077 was constantly at the top of the Steam charts. The hype surrounding the game was enormous from what I remember on Twitter. It was a the game to like and hate for a while, so it was popular basically.

I came into the thread expecting pseud deflection from the OP and I wasn't disappointed

I feel like I can interpret what the author means, "quality=game wut maek him feel smrt". Games that don't scratch his ego are thusly not quality.

Pretty much.

Well, we got the ego waggling part when he calls his tastes the fucking Ubermensh.

Is this the guy that wrote an essay about JRPGs?

Why the fuck is the last image just a Two Steps from Hell cover?

Nice catch.

It's because I commissioned Two Steps From Hell to contribute to the Battlegrounds soundtrack. Then I bought them out, so they are now part of Cult Music Studios.

>Adventure and racing games being low IQ
>Open-world games being good
>Implying asians and specially japs aren't smarter than other races
I'm guessing this chart was made by some skinny pasty chud with no friends.

Chang you live in the shadow of the white man. Your architecture, fashion, technology, industrial society...not a single part of it was not stolen from your betters in europe

survival-buildingchads we eatin good tonight

I like how the chart says that fighting games aren't popular with asians, when for the longest while any game's top competition often was Asian, thanks to their arcade culture brewing a competitive environment to really learn in.

I was specifically referring to fighting games, not all games ever made. It took a while for Americans and Europeans to catch up in some fighting games, and now things are on more equal footing.

OP you're a faggot.
The chart means shit.
The only thing you're looking at is a chart that compares popularity (Y axis) to games that go from fast thinking (0,0) to slower thinking (+∞, 0) in terms of how much you can rely on reflexes for mechanical arcade machine style gameplay versus more cerebral, strategic manners of thinking.
> Fucking read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Fuck man I hate R e d d i t jack assery that's festering in the /v/irgin boards.

This is an interesting comment. Off the top of my head I would say that thinking fast isn't thinking, it's just action and reaction. When we say "a great thinker" we don't mean someone who can slap your hand faster than you can slap his. So basically his post validates my theory that intelligence rises from left to right on my graph.

I'll look into the book rec though. It's probably just a specialist text that validates my theory just like his post did.