Wiping away the past (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, September 11, 2015, 19:22 (3458 days ago) @ Leviathan
edited by Cody Miller, Friday, September 11, 2015, 19:38

I'll always remember Cody telling me I should get out of comics because he thought the medium was bad. But when I sit down to make a comic, that kind of comment doesn't help me or the potential reader of the comic. It's just Cody's opinion, which is fine for him to have. But if he keeps telling me that every issue I release or something, I'm going to say in a Dude voice, "Hey man, this is just a negative vibe at this point, man. Tell me how to make what I'm making better, not what I should be making. Man." :)

I think that the 'what' is a perfectly valid form of criticism. Bioshock Infinite was an FPS, but as Tevis Thompson put very well:

"This line of thinking seems illegitimate to most reviewers. You can’t question a game’s genre. You are supposed to take the game on its own genre terms, see what it’s trying to do within them, and then evaluate it fairly. But what if what it’s trying to do is dumb? Telling the story of a violent man trying to come to terms with his crimes while using lightning to make heads explode is dumb."

Narcogen has said multiple times that my criticisms should be discounted because I wish Bungie had made another game. Examining such choices critically is perfectly acceptable, and in fact should be encouraged. Destiny is a game about shooting monsters with your friends and getting cool guns. So why can I not argue that an MMO is a dumb way to do that?

Farmville was absolutely ravaged by critics, but by all accounts it did exactly what it set out to do. For the experience it was trying to provide, it was fantastic. But that experience was dumb. Just like having to play the same shit over and over so you can earn marks or get drops is dumb.

As for comics, I regret telling you not to work on them. While I stand by my belief that they are a medium essentially replaced by better media, the fact of the matter is those other better media are very resource intensive. Not everybody has those resources, so if you wish to hone your skills in comics and don't have a bazillion dollars to make animation, that's perfectly fine, and you can learn a lot about your craft by doing so. You might even make the best comic book ever!

But if you do have the resources and years of expertise, and you just keep putting out comics, I think it's entirely valid to suggest trying to express your ideas in a more capable medium. If your ideas or presentation are hampered by a limited medium, it's not improper to criticize that choice.

In that sense, such a criticism really is telling you how to make something better. If that director you were talking about didn't have 10 million dollars, than sure, make a play. But if he did, and the ideas in the play would have been better expressed in film, then it's a perfectly valid thing to say to him.

If I want to show the beauty of a sunset, and I shot it in black and white, would it be wrong to say "You should have shot that in color if that's what you were going for?"