Games without content?

[NotAI]

(From the same cloth as the thread about Negative XP? Yay? Nay?)

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas and every novelist starts writing novels about a novelist writing novels (about a novelist writing novels). Already seen novels, comics, and films like that.

Well, can an RPG have nearly no setting or content, by being essentially a game about making another game?

Something like baba is you x roblox x slime rancher x witcher about an actual character making a game like dwarf fortress, and the game inside the game actually is playable! (NPCs play it and give you negative XP if they hate it?)

You are a gnostic demon who explores the multiverse seeking loot, from defeating other demons, to make a simulation that is reality for some other characters. You level up when things you put together works better than before as implementing features. The **** you put together is a game inside a game. Adding features gives XP. Fixing bugs in your creation gives XP. Upgrading skills lets you fight your way to more modules that can be recombined. Or something!

Would that kind of "inverse dwarf fortress" be entertaining? Compelling?

[asf]

that sounds incredibly dumb

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas

Having a "unique idea" does not make a novel good or worth reading. Nobody reads the Starship Troopers novel (not the movie) just because it has good ideas. The book is boring, hence why nobody reads it. Execution is what matters. There are plenty of novels/movies/games that are derivative or rehashes of ideas that have come before, but the execution is great so people enjoy them.

[NotAI]

1. A similar argument was may by Paul Schrader. He argued that there only a a small number of ideas relevant to people, dressed up infinitely different ways by different metaphors.

2. Execution matters; true. Vampire Survivors versus Magic Survival and their differential successes.

3. Comment. Whatcha mean Starship Troopers sucks? It rocks! Everybody reads it! Everybody likes Heinlein cus he Mark Twain 2.0. Every other line is a one-liner. Nobody knows what Cat Who Walks Through Walls is about, but it also kicks *** and takes names.

[Acrux]

Everybody likes Heinlein cus he Mark Twain 2.0.

Mark Twain was a libtard.

[Suissant]

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas

Having a "unique idea" does not make a novel good or worth reading. Nobody reads the Starship Troopers novel (not the movie) just because it has good ideas. The book is boring, hence why nobody reads it. Execution is what matters. There are plenty of novels/movies/games that are derivative or rehashes of ideas that have come before, but the execution is great so people enjoy them.

I didn't think Starship Troopers (the book) was boring, I thought it ********. The part where the protagonist's father is shown as having enlisted to follow his son's enlistment in a metaphoric vietnam war is ridiculously maudlin. Nevertheless it's not "boring".

[Nessa]

Games without content.... I can think of some!

Vanilla:

• Skyrim
• FO3
• Oblivion
• Starfield - No point in specifying vanilla here of course.

And quite literally: FO76. Initially.

[Nessa]

You know the more I think about it, if we classify "no content" as content so abysmally ******** as to not be considered content......

Pick any of those recent woke games.

[rusty_shackleford]

Furcadia & Second Life both have no content

[Norfleet]

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas and every novelist starts writing novels about a novelist writing novels (about a novelist writing novels). Already seen novels, comics, and films like that.

That happened a LONG time ago. There is historical documentation of people complaining about this same **** hundreds of years ago. The well of ideas probably ran dry sometime in prehistory and people have been rehashing the same **** ever since. People just don't notice because by the time the next wave of rehash hits, most of the people who have seen it already are dead and it's new to the crowd that's seeing it.

Well, can an RPG have nearly no setting or content, by being essentially a game about making another game?

That game already exists, it's called Visual Studio. You create a character, then pick a class from a list of several preset choices or create your own from scratch, and then level up your programming skills and create a game.

[Brugmans]

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas and every novelist starts writing novels about a novelist writing novels (about a novelist writing novels). Already seen novels, comics, and films like that.

That happened a LONG time ago. There is historical documentation of people complaining about this same **** hundreds of years ago. The well of ideas probably ran dry sometime in prehistory and people have been rehashing the same **** ever since. People just don't notice because by the time the next wave of rehash hits, most of the people who have seen it already are dead and it's new to the crowd that's seeing it.

That's a very pessimistic quote considering Leibniz was a contemporary of Daniel Defoe

I think the surer sign of decay, more than novelists running out of ideas (as if ideas were a consumable item), is that we're so deeply bored that we need a new story or video game coming out every year or every month, whereas people used to enjoy the same songs and pastimes unchanged for generations.
It's not that our forbears were too forgetful to notice that Vergil was a rehash of Homer, or too stupid to invent chess expansion packs; they just had different a different value scale and originality (in a time when the very word meant the opposite of what it means now) ranked low.

[rusty_shackleford]

The only reason we think things used to be more innovative is because the things that weren't innovative didn't get written down.
Before everyone could share their dumb opinion on a typewriter, the interwebs, what have you, you had to actually have someone take a significant amount of time to record it.

Same idea with folktales, nobody repeated stories that sucked, it's why most of them are good.

---

The ratio of good games to bad used to be about 1:10, if we point at somewhere around the late 80s to mid 90s. This slowly increased — 100:1, so forth. We're probably closer to 1,000,000:1 now. Yeah, it turns out that giving everyone computers and advanced SDKs didn't actually mean more good games got made. Because of the backlash to goobergate causing developers to slam the acceleration on replacing creative, high IQ individuals with anyone that has brown skin or a vagina we're firmly in the middle of the worst period ever in video games for number of good titles releasing annually.
The inverse of what was expected happened: the wide access to development tools has made publishers have more difficulty finding good developers to fund. You used to see publishers paying for a small garage studio all the time, but there's no way they'd take that risk now. The average guy making a game in his garage in 1990 was likely well-off and with at least a gifted level of intelligence.


The worst thing that happened to videogames was making them more accessible to developers.

---

Anyway, to circle back around to the OP: derivative stories with nothing new to say got made all the time. They just weren't written down. Very few people were making derivative games with nothing new to add beyond taking game A and game B and mixing them together because the barrier to entry was so high that only people who truly wanted to create something made a game.

[rusty_shackleford]

As an addendum, I'll add the blanket statement that the reason so many old developers faceplanting when they tried to make new games is because they don't grasp how real the skill decline is, and how blessed they were to be surrounded by such intelligent individuals when they made the games they were known for.
Sadly, many of these developers are libtards and believe any person is just a replaceable cog.

[Brugmans]

The only reason we think things used to be more innovative is because the things that weren't innovative didn't get written down.
Before everyone could share their dumb opinion on a typewriter, the interwebs, what have you, you had to actually have someone take a significant amount of time to record it.

Same idea with folktales, nobody repeated stories that sucked, it's why most of them are good.

Things didn't use to be more innovative: there was no ideology of progress, no praise for artistic avant-garde, no "anxiety of influence". Old models were reverently imitated and occasionally improved.

[Ranselknulf]

[NotAI]

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas and every novelist starts writing novels about a novelist writing novels (about a novelist writing novels). Already seen novels, comics, and films like that.

That happened a LONG time ago. There is historical documentation of people complaining about this same **** hundreds of years ago. The well of ideas probably ran dry sometime in prehistory and people have been rehashing the same **** ever since. People just don't notice because by the time the next wave of rehash hits, most of the people who have seen it already are dead and it's new to the crowd that's seeing it.

That's a very pessimistic quote considering Leibniz was a contemporary of Daniel Defoe

I think the surer sign of decay, more than novelists running out of ideas (as if ideas were a consumable item), is that we're so deeply bored that we need a new story or video game coming out every year or every month, whereas people used to enjoy the same songs and pastimes unchanged for generations.
It's not that our forbears were too forgetful to notice that Vergil was a rehash of Homer, or too stupid to invent chess expansion packs; they just had different a different value scale and originality (in a time when the very word meant the opposite of what it means now) ranked low.

Good point. Agreed.

The only reason we think things used to be more innovative is because the things that weren't innovative didn't get written down.
Before everyone could share their dumb opinion on a typewriter, the interwebs, what have you, you had to actually have someone take a significant amount of time to record it.

Same idea with folktales, nobody repeated stories that sucked, it's why most of them are good.

Things didn't use to be more innovative: there was no ideology of progress, no praise for artistic avant-garde, no "anxiety of influence". Old models were reverently imitated and occasionally improved.

Reading Harold Bloom, I see, a man of culture

[J1M]

Leibniz said that civilization will be known to have ended when novelists run out of ideas

Having a "unique idea" does not make a novel good or worth reading. Nobody reads the Starship Troopers novel (not the movie) just because it has good ideas. The book is boring, hence why nobody reads it. Execution is what matters. There are plenty of novels/movies/games that are derivative or rehashes of ideas that have come before, but the execution is great so people enjoy them.

Starship Troopers is a great novel about how to turn a man into a soldier and why a man would allow that to happen to him.

[NotAI]

Heinlein is one of the few writers with good style and interesting ideas. His stuff holds up over time.