The state of games today
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This dialogue reminded me of a book I saw recently, called, The Girl Who Could Move Shit With Her Mind. And it got me thinking:
Am I the only one who's annoyed by how common profanity is in every medium? I don't mean from a moralistic standpoint; I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the words themselves. I would even say that there's a time and place for them. But if you use them every other sentence, it makes you sound crass, uneducated, and childish.
I was a teenager, once. I had my swearing like a sailor phase. But I outgrew it when I wanted to be taken seriously as a professional. Meanwhile, I have relatives who read Go the Fuck to Sleep to their baby every night because, "it's just words."
The (over)use of profanity, like with installing woke elements, is a cheap way to appear “hip” with the intended audience (that either doesn’t exist or hates that sort of stuff). It gives off strong “How do you do, fellow kids?” vibes.
It’s also used to make up for bad writing. Sometimes it’s used well, like with Chapelle or Carlin. More typically now it’s used to stand in for a punchline.
Cut to one guy:
Cut to the response:
Another cut to someone else:
The formula’s so common that if I hear that I just assume something’s going to be crap. Not always, but at this point anything new that does that tends to suck. Same with seeing a cast of characters that are all female Skittles. A movie or game or show that’s mostly female Skittles cursing? Just assume it’s like Velma.
Which is a shame because tasteful profanity is a lost art. Just look at The Sopranos.
It reminds me of every time the MPAA relaxes its standards a little. When I was a teenager, they changed the rules so that you could say the word "fuck" exactly one time and still retain your PG-13 rating. Suddenly every single PG-13 movie had one "fuck", usually at some le ebin moment that makes it feel like the entire script was written around this one word.
The fact is, even above average writers are still pretty horrible. The worst thing you can give a talentless person is freedom. Being forced to work around constraints is good for them, because otherwise they just swear and make Current Thing references because that's what their idea of good writing is.
I don’t think you understand the difference between a restriction and a constraint in creative writing.
Mindy Kaling wrote for 26 episodes of The Office. She also wrote Velma. For the latter, she had total creative freedom. For the former, she had to work within numerous constraints.
Constraints can certainly be bad, at which point they can become more like restrictions. But a lot of the time, constraints function to impose structure and direction on a project, and these things are usually required for someone to do their best work.
Look at George Lucas. Constraints = original trilogy. No constraints = prequel trilogy. The man needs someone telling him “no”.
What are engineering standards for bridges?
Those are just constraints said the women only engineers.
The rest is the bridge under the water.
You say that, but after almost sixty years of woodworking my Dad still maintains that he did his absolute best work when he had access to fewer tools and was forced to improvise and innovate, so there's something to what u/WhoIsThatMaskedMan is saying.
What do mean DmC: Devil May Cry wasn't Shakespearean?
It absolutely was in comparison to newer writing
Not at all. You could write a whole post on that topic here on games alone.
I can't understand parents like that, but most of the ones I've encountered were woke liberals. I doubt they'd still agree "it's just words" if the book was Go the Fuck to Sleep, Nigger.