Being critical is important. Being critical is not negativity. Being critical is how you get good art.
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Personally, I find it important to watch “bad” films or films I know that I’m not predisposed to like in order to help me understand why I don’t like them, which in turn helps me appreciate why I do like the ones that I do.
I don’t recommend this strategy to anyone else, but it works for me
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more importantly: how can you really know if something is bad unless you experience it yourself first?
please don’t reply to this post with things that are obviously bad
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I also worry that if I only watch “good” things that I’ll suffer from a stratification where the floor raises and I stop enjoying things that are “good” and start requiring “great”.
I did not attend film school nor study literature during my time at university so this is the mechanism I’ve landed on that helps me to introspectively understand why I do or do not enjoy a particular film. This also applies to games, with the caveat that I’ll almost never walk out of a film or stop it early, but I sure will stop playing a game.
Knowing I’m only investing approximately 2 hours of my time on a film helps
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I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to narrow your choices to things you know you’ll like when it’s something you do for fun. Obviously we still need to try new things, but we’re always getting better at knowing what we want.
I had a conversation with a coworker about this stuff. He’s a drummer and takes his bands very seriously. I wanted to show him Puddle of Mudd’s cover of About a Girl because, first of all it’s hilarious, but secondly I think it’s important to experience bad art in order to better understand what makes good art. He just wasn’t curious about it and I think that was to his detriment as an artist. You can learn a lot about what not to do from bad or amateur art. Also I thought he would find it funny, but some people just cringe when they see cringe.
I’d rank this very low on quality but extremely high on interesting!
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I think this is the really important thing. Not going out of your way to consume “bad” stuff, but cultivating that curiosity that will inevitably lead you to some bad stuff.
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I agree with the sentiment but I have to admit if a coworker asked me to watch a puddle of mudd video I’d probably say “no I’m good thanks”
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And me, I’m so drawn to CGI slop that I have to be intentional about watching good things. I spent years waiting for Warcraft to hit a streaming service so that I could watch it and not enjoy it
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I don’t enjoy any of those types of movies but I can’t help but wonder if the next one is going to be good. I won’t know if I don’t watch them
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How will you know when you’ve found the really good one? Is it just a feel sort of thing or is there something you’re looking for that they’re not doing?
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I’ll let you know when I find one.
Jk, it’s not so much a quest for “the one” as it is a feeling that I used to genuinely enjoy things like the MCU and I wonder what’s missing now. I know these kinds of movies shoot with unfinished scripts and are kind of built by committee in a way that’s antithetical to art, but it seems to bizarre to me that they’re basically all bad. Plus, Warcraft has like a 29% on rotten tomatoes - surely I could agree with 3 out of 10 critics!
I don’t really know what it is I guess. And I really do watch more interesting things than that, it’s just that when something like Blue Beetle comes out (bad example because this one isn’t embarrassingly bad) I just feel like I want to know how they handled it
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would love to hear what you think is interesting about this lol. I’m a notorious song cover hater though. I would put this squarely in uninteresting, but maybe the rumoured z axis means I can’t look away
Similarly a book that has stuck with me despite being godawful is Verity by Colleen Hoover. Basically Hoover, famous smut/romance writer for middle aged stay at home parents wanted to write a “dark” novel, and what you get is Verity. It’s overly graphicly and sexually violent, it is poorly written (like oh books can just have bad sentence structure), plot hole after plot hole, and the main character is an unlikeable self-insert character for the target demographic who is in love with the unlikable brooding man with exposed forearms. Everything you could do wrong in a book was done. And yet my partners Mom recommended that we read it and then we both hate read it cover to cover and were enthralled. It’s the book equivalent of watching a car crash and not being able to look away
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You kinda nailed my reasoning already haha. It’s just so astoundingly bad that it’s wild to me that it was published on such a large platform. It’s wild that his grunge voice sounds so forced but he’s been a career musician for decades. It’s neither an impression of Cobain or an homage because it fails in every way.
Then it cuts to the other musicians who look like a mix of confused, amused, and “it’s a living”, but they play their parts sufficiently enough though robotically. If they had played better, it would only make the singing sound worse in comparison. It’s a very emotionless sounding execution from them.
Then you read the Wikipedia on the singer and he’s just one big mess and I think about how mediocre people with privilege are given these opportunities they have no business taking. Like, did he warm up his voice? Did they practice this? Did no one say, “Hey, man. I don’t think this is working.”? Would he listen?
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Sort of similar, I also love Neil Breen movies. They’re made with so much confidence and passion but so little skill that I’m captivated from start to finish. I genuinely love watching his movies.
Some friends and I do a movie night once a week and we’ve started calling any visible green screening “Breen screen”.
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I guess something like Neil Breen is interesting to me because it is a focused effort. I know nothing about Puddle of Mud, but I can fully imagine they decided to play the song a few days before, and practiced it a couple times but just enough so they can actually play it through.
I do fully think it’s an impression which is just really weird to do as professional singer so I understand how that is car crash interesting lol. I use impressions when I sing as a regular dude but nobody pays me to sing so it’s allowed
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I think Gungeon taught me more about game design by counterexample than any good game ever did. Sometimes you hear good advice or think something plays well but can’t put your finger on why, and you need a game as bad as Gungeon once in a while to fully understand why certain things are bad ideas.
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I’m kind of a hater on that game so interested in hearing more
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Another fun part of this was Post Malone of all people livestreaming a Nirvana cover shortly after that’s actually pretty dang good so there’s a twisting of the knife where the comparison made it look even worse. As a self proclaimed cover hater, you probably won’t like it though.
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I’m also a Gungeon hater. Please, go off.
I was so sure I’d love it after playing the heck out of Nuclear Throne and that games locked at a prehistoric 30fps!
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I’ll take popcorn enemies to stick to one example. Look at this screenshot of Gunbird 2
Here we have a couple different layers of threat types. The little helicopter guys will power you down if you run into them, discouraging you from sitting too close to the top of the screen. Then you have the little tanks, these can be bullet sealed by flying over them and encourage you to avoid staying in the bottom of the screen. Both of these enemy types fire aimed bullets, encouraging the player to be constantly moving. Then you have the big mechs, these will fire large set patterns after a few seconds, encouraging the player to focus fire them down as your main objective. All these play well together: this section is “about” fighting the mechs, and the helicopters and tanks add flavor to the fight, but aren’t threats in themselves. Their shots are predictable and they die in one hit, they are there to harmonize with the focal point.
Now for contrast, here’s Gungeon:
Again we have a few layers of enemy types. There’s the shotgun shell who shoots in a fixed pattern, and the bullets who shoot aimed bullets. So far so good. But both of these take the same high number of shots to kill and all have the same pathfinding ai, they will usually bunch together and the aimed bullets will start blending with the set shotgun blasts. There’s no focal point here and little incentive to focus on one enemy over another. So the screen becomes about kiting them all as a group in circles around the room slowly until they eventually die. Every enemy in Gungeon demands exactly the same amount of your attention and the game kinda turns to a homogeneous mush as a result. Every room is about running around the room in a circle and firing in the general direction of the blob of enemies following you.
It’s hard to immediately see the benefit of popcorn enemies while playing Gunbird 2 because they very purposely don’t draw your attention. But playing a game without them like Gungeon their absence is felt and their utility is easier to grasp on a gut level, at least personally. And if Gungeon works for you, great! My point is more that playing games that don’t work for you can help you appreciate things in games that do
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