don't shit your pants is the quintessential aristotelian horror story that shows what videogames are TRULY capable of.

>>1605078 That's another good one. Aristotle probably would have preferred the relationship between Dante and Virgil to Snake and Liquid.

It would help if you defined it Also not reading that as I don't want to be spoiled

>>1605115 Is that Bill Dauterive?

>>1605078 Came here to post this. DMC3 has one of the best stories in the PS2 era, prove me wrong.

Almost forgot about this Spectrum masterpiece from 1985 https://theshich.itch.io/paradise-cafe

>>1606393 You're obviously shitposting, but microcomputers are a huge blindspot for me and most other retro gamers. You could program a game with consumer grade hardware in your bedroom over a week and sell it in computer stores for £1, all by yourself. Such a weird era of gaming that's closer to Itch than anything else from the 1980s. There was an absurd number of games in that era, literally tens of thousands. I've seen the UK and Ireland's computer games scene described as the Galápagos Islands of gaming; an isolated, diverse, almost entirely unique ecosystem. I think Cambrian Explosion would be more apt, as it all died out without affecting much once it came into contact with other gaming cultures.

>>1606238 The basic Aristotelian unities are: >unity of action: a tragedy should have one principal action. >unity of time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. >unity of place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location. There's a lot more to Aristotle's theory of drama in his book "Poetics," but these are the points most people focus on.

>>1606497 I much prefer the likes of Doom and Doom II, but by those definitions, I believe Half-Life is more appropriate.

>>1606487 > You could program a game with consumer grade hardware in your bedroom over a week and sell it in computer stores for £1 That's kind of why I posted it and have such a fascinating with older pieces like this, it was the wild west.

>>1606497 >tragedy Something tells me these principles were intended for a very specific context. Almost all games have a quest narrative, which is a template fundamentally incompatible with them all. That said, Shadow of the Colossus more or less fits.

>>1606497 >unity of action: a tragedy should have one principal action. The entire game is based on Jack-O destroying the Internecine, and manipulating everyone into helping him, and grooming a dominant to help him destroy it all. The war between the alliance and Vertex is merely a front for that, and the war between the ravens is a means to an end to weed out the Last Raven (tm) >unity of time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. The whole game takes place over a course of 24 hours. >unity of place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location. Technically it all takes place on one single physical location: Earth.

>>1605074 Ghost Trick.

>>1606497 The 24 hour limit is really limiting for video games due to games complex enough to have a "real" story also being large enough to warrant longer stories. Come to think of it though, a lot of the early "excuse" stories do qualify., especially if one takes "single physical location" to include bigger locations like "city" >a giant ape has kidnapped a woman and climbed to high parts of a construction site with her >a mad scientist has turned helper robots into villains and now they're rampaging across the city For a straight, relatively modern, example what about Portal? >the tragedy is the AI went crazy or (counting Portal 2) that Cave Johnson stuck his secretary into a computer to become a crazy AI >no indication is given that either game takes place in anything more or less than real time >everything takes place at the Enrichment Center or (in the ending) its campus

>>1606817 Aristotle focuses mostly on tragedy, but some of his points, like the three unities, can be applied to other genres. The main reason he prefers tragedy to epic poems (which usually were usually either quest narratives, war narratives, or both) is because they tend to have a greater unity of action, whereas epics often have diversions that distract too much from the main plot.