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In last week's episode, we talked about video game bosses.
Let's see what you had to say.
So by pure coincidence, extra credits
on the same day that we uploaded the video game bosses episode,
released an extra frames about "Shadow of the Colossus."
So I just want to make sure that if you haven't seen
that, you should go watch it.
It's great, and we managed actually
to get some remarkably similar looking footage as well.
Promise, Dan did not steal my footage.
I did not steal any of Dan's-- I mean, not that we know of.
M. Avery writes a really interesting comment
that I'm going to kind of stumble
my way through responding to.
So they talk about how there are two different kinds of games
maybe, that there are games where you meet difficulty
and you struggle with it, and you move beyond it and that
there are games where you don't.
Or the difficulty that you meet is much more abstract
and is not nearly as on-the-nose challenging
as this other kind of difficulty,
in that these games you walk, you discover, you appreciate,
whatever.
But in these games you fight, and you struggle,
and you level up, and you progress.
And the metaphor that M. Avery gets to
is how this sort of can allow us to think
about two different life experiences,
that there are these life experiences where
you constantly meet difficulty.
And I think that when you have had a life experience
like that, when you are constantly meeting difficulty,
and you encounter someone who has mostly
had this other experience where their life experience has been
mostly about walking, discovering, appreciating,
it can seem hard to relate to them or that you can feel
like they maybe just haven't even had a life experience,
that they've just been sort of wandering around.
But what M. Avery was able to get
at by thinking about the game version of this life
experience, the games themselves and not the lived experience,
is that these games wouldn't exist
if there wasn't a market for them,
if people weren't interested in having them
or experience in playing them for some reason.
And so then that might sort of provide a way
to relate to the life experience,
that that must be doing something
for this group of people or it must have
some value beyond just, yeah, you just kind of live your day
to day, you kind of live your life,
whatever, blah, blah, blah, as opposed to what I think
can often feel like the more-- I don't
know what the right word is-- not righteous,
but the more sort of real experience of living
a life that you are, like you've really seen some stuff.
And I think that this is a really interesting sort of case
study in how we can use media and not
just the stories that are told in that
media but the actual media objects
themselves to think through the life
experiences of other people and to use it to sort of think with
and to show how there's more to these things than just, oh
yeah, you like walk through a house
and you pick up pieces of paper, that that can embody in itself
a life experience.
This is such a good comment, and I
think something I'm going to be chewing on for a while,
and I would suggest you do too.
KirbyMaster5 asks a really interesting question
about "Shadow of the Colossus," which
is essentially that if everything is a boss,
isn't nothing a boss?
And I think that this, I think, kind of
assumes maybe a very insular experience
of video games, that that may be true
if the only game that you've ever played
is "Shadow of the Colossus" but that the way that "Shadow
of the Colossus" works, how it imparts the meaning that it
does, is that the Colossi themselves
appear as though they are what we would
call a boss in any other game.
And so that's what makes them the momentous occasion
that they are, even though you kind of only
ever meet momentous occasions.
Unless you-- I'm assuming that, for most people,
riding your horse across the countryside
is not a momentous occasion, but maybe it is.
But there is, I think, a really interesting point to be
made about whether or not the environment
itself is in some way like a minion,
and that was a great conversation that
happened in the comments.
So this inspired a great thread.
Highly recommend checking it out.
Emily from The Brain Scoop talks about also-- Hi, Emily.
Nice to see you-- talks about how
she avoids playing games that have bosses and has
for quite a while and wonders whether or not
this has something to do with her avoidance of conflict
in real life.
And I would be really interested to know
if there is a study for this, if people have sort of looked
at direct confrontation as embodied by a video game boss
and how that relates to people's opinions of or the ways
that they deal with direct confrontation
in the not-gaming parts of their lives.
But I will say that when I was younger,
I definitely felt the same way and did
a lot of the same things.
I remember, I think I restarted "Super Metroid," which
at this point is now one of my favorite games of all time,
probably seven times because the bosses just stressed me out
so much.
I could not deal with it.
PauLtus B gets to one of the things
I was really hoping that someone would talk
about and a thing that didn't make it into the episode, which
is the witness and how there can be
boss-style puzzles in a puzzle game,
and-- I want to make sure I get their name right--
Tarek Sharif says exactly what I would say,
which is brings up the challenge from the witness, which
to me is like the paradigmatic boss puzzle,
with maybe the exception of the fact that-- maybe
the exception that you don't have to beat it in order
to progress to the end of the game, that like the game ends,
and then you have the option of challenging yourself
with the challenge.
But, man, yes, yes.
Boss puzzle.
Robot Priest, your comment made me
think about who the boss bosses of other areas of the arts
may be, and without getting too mired in the like what
is the "Dark Souls of X," because that's got a very
specific thing about it-- made a whole video about it--
you know, like who are the bosses of painting?
Where are the boss battles in sculpture?
I'm going to say, respectively, maybe Cy Twombly for painting,
Joseph Beuys for sculpture, maybe Anselm Kiefer.
On the topic of video games without what we would normally
call a boss, Clayton O. talks about
how "Gone Home," specifically at least,
is maybe kind of a boss-like experience as a whole.
And this, I think, is pretty close to what I would say,
that I think a lot of these games that don't necessarily
have aggressors are boss-like in that they still
require you to switch up your strategy,
look at the environment in a different way.
It's just the strategy that you're switching up
is how you play games.
And the environment that they're asking
you to look at differently is the environment
of media or game-related meaning, [INAUDIBLE],
et cetera, et cetera.
And that you get actually a fair amount of self-knowledge
from these experiences once you are able to kind of invest
yourself in the way that those games expect of you, which
can often be very, very difficult,
can be as difficult as a very difficult boss
fight in, say, "Dark Souls."
It's just a very different kind of difficulty.
Sheepman talks a little bit more abstractly about narrative
moments as encounters that might resemble something like a boss
fight, and I really like this.
And they talk about this moment in "Dear Esther"
where you enter into a cave for the first time,
and there's a sense that something has happened there,
something that you should be aware of.
There's some appreciable facet of the environment
that's not immediately clear.
And so maybe it's worth it to kind of just
sit there and soak it up for a little while.
And I think that that is another really great way
of finding the boss-like in a bossless game,
that the game can challenge you to do exactly the opposite
of what it's asking you to do.
It's a walking simulator.
You walk around in the game, but then it
challenges you to just sit for a second,
just stay and watch and think about where you are,
and think about the meaning that the environment is
trying to impart to you.
And I think that that's also another really great way
to look at this.
Slow Wolf Gaming wrote a really great blog post in response
to the episode that I highly recommend you check out.
We'll put a link to that in the description.
KawikaP on the subreddit writes a really great comment
about how in games like "The Stanley Parable," which
is just, man, that's a great game to talk about with
regards to boss fights and the boss fight like,
that with games like "The Stanley Parable" or "Gone Home"
or "Dear Esther," a lot of times you
can look at the developer themselves as the boss.
And I really love this, and I love
imagining Davie, the developer of "The Stanley Parable"
and the Beginner's Guide as the sort of the aggressor that
is forcing me to have some kind of introspective
self-experience, and that's very accurate.
That's just very accurate.
In response, kidasquid talks about how another way
to find the bossness of these kinds of games
is in their supporting material and talks specifically
about the wiki of certain games and trying to make sure
that you've seen everything, that you know everything,
that you've sort of-- you've stepped foot
in all of the individual corners,
and I think that this is a really interesting way
to look at bossness, and I think locates it
in a really meaningful way in yourself,
because you for yourself want to make sure
that you have seen everything.
So that's a nice idea.
James Zike writes a really great comment on "The Idea Channel"
Facebook about whether or not you can really
say self-literacy is an aspect of bosses and boss fights,
and I just want to point this out
to say it's a great comment.
You should go read it.
Links to this one and all the others in the dooblydoo.
Don'tRobMe, we will make a video about "Pokemon Go"
at precisely the moment that the hype is over.
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