Ben Kerns

I really enjoyed your article, your arguments for the game’s world housing a flat ontology are very convincing, but I don’t know if I agree with your conclusion. You claim that Katamari is inherently a game about deconstruction, but the main mechanic and narrative driving point in the game is consumption. Your argument here is that “the katamari, removes object A from its existence inside and as a part of object B” but you neglect to mention that object A is then recontextualized as a part of object C, the Katamari. Object A doesn’t cease to exist, it is consumed by another object. I’ve always taken the main theme of the Katamari games to be a kind of senseless consumption, a reflection of materialist society.

The game claims its goal as the creation of a star, but the star is only briefly shown to the player and then it spends the rest of its days acting only as a trophy that the player can look back at. The real meat of the game is in the act of consumption the player goes through. The reward lacks meaning. The game drives this point home when you play a level again and are given the choice to simply destroy the Katamari, reducing it to stardust. It doesn’t matter that you picked up all that stuff, its gone, never to be seen again.

I don’t think the game says much about deconstruction because nothing is really even destroyed. You can always go back to to the level and find all of the objects there as pristine as the first time you played. Everything is fresh and new again, ready for you to pick up and hold onto. Even if you only hold on for a brief time.

I really should have titled this article differently.

Great points all around, but that isn’t what I’m talking about in the article. I’m talking about the effect violence in a video game has on story of the game, and how the characters are developed. I don’t think violent video games have an effect on society.

This is as great point, and I thank you for it. The main reason I didn’t include Call of Duty or Battlefield in the article is because of their competitive nature. The games aim at creating an interesting multiplayer environment instead of a compelling story. And an honest answer to the question I pose is “making video games is hard.” It takes a lot of creativity to even make a decent game that fits into the mold of the modern gaming sphere, so creating one that breaks that mold is even harder.

That’s great dude! I’m glad to hear you have chosen a life of pacifism. But I don’t think that’s what I was trying to address with my article. I was talking about how a video game’s story is affected by the violence in the game, and how that violence effects the development of the player-controlled character. Sorry if that got muddled in there. I in no way think that there shouldn’t be violence in video games, I just think developers need to think a little more about how it affects the stories they are trying to tell.

Also, great article! 🙂 Sorry I didn’t mention that in the first comment.

I think something that contributed pretty heavily to the general theme of death within beat literature is the insularity of the movement. Like how Neal Cassady’s death could be seen in the writings of many of his contemporaries.

This is a great article! I’ve always loved how Nightvale uses Cecil as a way for the audience to connect to the stories being told, rather than using him as the hero. I think it allows for us to gain a deeper bond to the story being told. Instead of simply standing on the sidelines and watching the action unfold, we have someone there with us. We play a more active role as an audience member because the story is essentially being told from the audience’s perspective.