Why we're dead

FC's post in "Phunner" thread by Cereal.

FlagCapper wrote:From Youtube:

And yet, somehow, this game is still epic.

Good shit.

Seriously, nice job. It's very difficult to be creative in LR anymore, and you pulled it off very well. Agreed with the post-modernism thing; it's very much like the way art developed. At first the impressive aspect of it was the ability to create something exactly as it should be -- simply a demonstration of raw skill. The ZNF days were all about discovering new tricks and making things faster, flow better, and just generally handling the rider in a more impressive way. After people like Techdawg and BHCS scenery was about rendering things as realistically and as detailed as possible. This is quite damaging to line rider, because most people don't have the time it takes to display that skill (essentially why I stopped playing), and so fewer people are encouraged to make tracks, and the scene slowly dies.

A post-modernist revolution would be nice. =P

A million times this. I feel that we've advanced so much that even if people were still playing line rider, their thought is "wow I could never do that" and it's becoming a reason there's little activity of new members.

Random

Except ther eason behind my playing at all is the thought that "man I could never do that"
And now I want to do all of the things

I feel like we're almost having that in a way. Everyone who isn't trying to fling fling has been branching off into their own little niche and deciding "I like it here. This style of track is fun, and people like it." Which sounds like we're starting to stagnate at first, but at the same time, if we're not getting better technically, the only way we can do anything different is by thinking outside the box, and that's really starting to show.

Yeah, kinda what Opal said.

After the marathon this really became apparent to me - during the 2007-2009 era people were all trying to play line rider as, well, a game. Trying to beat each other. Make a track that is better, faster, more tricks, harder tricks, more detail, less airtime, more lines, even things like more flowy, more creative, more unusual. But Line Rider isn't a game, it's an art form.

More recently we see people who are just doing their own thing, experimenting, trying out stuff to see if THEY like it, and to a lesser extent if other people like it, but not just to see everyone else decrees it as more skilled or better than their previous tracks. Look at ZNF, the main reason he stopped making tracks after KING was that he didn't think he'd ever be able to "top it". The biggest thing I see that came out of the ZNF era is that so many goddamn tracks were just trying to do ZNF style better than ZNF. Even people like Hedge and FC and Cereal - the majority of their tracks are ZNF track style with a twist of some kind, or just plain better than ZNF himself could do. Even ZNF himself was always trying to outdo himself at his own style.

It's actually pretty incredible how many things have yet to be explored in this game. I'm not gonna spell them out for you because 1) it's really hard to articulate things that haven't really been done yet and 2) It's so much cooler to actually do them and see what happens than it is to just talk about them. But one example is offsled. Cruise Control is hands-down the most entertaining offsled track, and it was made ages ago, but that doesn't mean we can't make new and different things in offsled world. Nobody has tried making anything like cruise control since cruise control. Look at how people like conundrumer and anomaly were 1) doing their own thing, and 2) always experimenting and trying out new stuff.

So 1) we're not "dead" and I'm sick of hearing that
and 2) instead of trying to "beat" other people, experiment. Try things out. It's an artistic toy, not a game. The only way it will be boring is if you confine yourself to only doing things that have already been done a zillion times, like ZNF-style mauquirk.

I think it's mostly just a struggle to find people who are interested in line rider. Like, what kinds of people might be interested in this stuff? Who knows? not really gamers. but not really artists either...?

"people only have so much creativity"
LIES AND SLANDER
people have infinite creativity. Creativity is not a well that you use up and then you can somehow never be creative ever again. You have to nurture your creativity and explore lots of things to give it a chance to grow, and also be prepared to take big risks that your ideas might completely fail. But your creativity is endless and the a surefire way to extinguish it is by saying you're not creative and simultaneously trying to smash it into a wall in your mind until you come up with something mindblowingly brilliant.

Here, just googled "how to think creatively" and clicked on the first result. this is all good advice:
http://lifehacker.com/5990617/nine-of-the-best-ways-to-boost-creative-thinking

Also want to throw out Aristotle's rules for art critique (paraphrased ) since we talked about it in chat.
1) what are you trying to do
2) how well did you pull it off
3) was it worth doing?

Sorry that my use of terms like "ZNF-style" put you off. "ZNF manuquirk" might be more accurate. You know as well as me that ZNF made Bluyx, which basically has defined all XY scenery since, and his whole series of blue manual tracks that was hugely influential but not for the quirk, and battlefield which is still regarded as one of the best flatsled tracks ever, all of which are not the same style as EPIC or KING. And yes of course hedge and FC and cereal didn't ONLY make EVOL/EPIC/KING-style, but those were considered the "best" tracks by the community and so they ended up making more of them and getting better at this style - when all along the reason they were received well was that they were compared to ZNF's most well known manuquirks, or later on, compared to tracks that had been compared to tracks that had been compared to ZNF's most well known manuquirks.

I think we're saying very similar things here - that the idea that someone has a "best track" in the eyes of the community is problematic. I think I've seen, over basically all of line rider history, people making "experimental tracks" where they try out new stuff (usually with intriguing results, but they usually don't try terribly hard), and then "serious tracks" where they try to copycat styles that are somehow established in some way and then people critique them based on a somewhat established criteria. Were the manuals balanced. Were the flings powerful. Was the rotation varied. Was it synced to the music well. Was the airtime appropriate. And THEN we critique each other's criteria for what makes a good track and we argue about if more or less airtime or more or less power made the track better or worse. It's all kind of silly, because it seems to me that that should be the stuff that is like, the small side-projects. Copying other people's styles and learning how to do what they do.

I'm thinking we should be talking the experimenting more seriously, and stop trying to conform as much. Basically, we should be more creative. But I'm trying to point out that this doesn't mean come up with something totally radical and brilliant - it just means we should treat the "experimental" tracks as "serious", and the "serious" tracks as "learning" tracks - so we learn how to do things other people can do. Tools that we can then add to our toolbox and then go and experiment some more with more tools at our disposal. Except instead of calling it experimentation, we should call it making art.

That was a great post, Rabid. Seriously. We are all lil' bitches and we're all afraid to show each other what is in our hearts, so instead we just spurt out something that we know people will like. Let's all do some different stuff. \o/

ACwazHere wrote:That was a great post, Rabid. Seriously. We are all lil' bitches and we're all afraid to show each other what is in our hearts, so instead we just spurt out something that we know people will like. Let's all do some different stuff. \o/

But I'm dead