Joe Wintergreen

@joewintergreen

video game man

he/him
impromptugames.com/

game dev technical designer/systems designer/tools designer/unreal generalist on other people's video games and also my own video games

also on tumblr and mastodon and bluesky and whatever, same name

I have a friendly game dev chat discord server you're welcome in if you don't be a fuckwit

I made a website for people fleeing Unity called Ugh I Guess I Want To Move From Unity To Unreal (Dot Com)

I made a website for documenting obscure Unreal engine information called Unrealscoops.com

I have an internet forum at IMPROMPTU DOT ZONE

twoot

twitter.com/joewintergreen

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen12/31/2023, 5:51 AM

what video game opinion got you like this

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in reply to @joewintergreen's post:

JP @vectorpoem12/31/2023, 6:01 AM

since that cow looks pretty content and chillaxed i'm going to go with

basically the formalist approach to tax*nomy is a dead end that leads to interminable stupid arguments over bullshit ("what is an RPG" and so on); what the wiki nerds don't understand is that videogame genres are actually art movements, and so lines of influence between developers and titles are more relevant to classification than structural features like "where the camera is" or "are there numbers on screen"

i'm ignorant of any larger discourse this might have shaken out of, but i think it's a highly reasonable position and puts us on better footing to have good discussions about design and game history. also having learned a good bit of art history at uni, it resonates with my understanding of how art movements have worked for the past few centuries.

Joe Wintergreen @joewintergreen12/31/2023, 6:14 AM

good take. will steal

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso246912/31/2023, 3:25 PM

Personally I think that a feature based taxonomy, while an academic dead end, does have a uniquely practical function in games as an interactive medium. A game asks an audience to do something and that requires communication and cooperation from an audience to be experienced. The form lacks much way of communicating what kind of experience a player must agree to outside of genre. Genre is probably still a bad way to communicate that information, but I think it carries more practical value than a lot of art movement taxonomies.

JP @vectorpoem12/31/2023, 6:02 PM

i think it's fine if someone goes into a work not having any idea what will be expected of them, though. people do it all the time in other media and i don't see why games are paradigmatically different, even though they're more interactive. i think "knowing what to expect" is more a consumer concern than one of someone engaging with art, and the dismal state of the discourse is largely due to consumer concerns devouring absolutely everything else.

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