Second Truth Blog

Game Jam Post Mortem

2012-02-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

Another blog at Tap, linked here!

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2012/02/scenes-from-the-game-jam/

I am particularly proud of my "Game Jam" header photo. I searched online for cute pictures of jams to use as the header, but then decided I felt really bad stealing the pretty home-made jam photos from dedicated cooking blogs.

Good food photos are so hard to take. I never had the knack for it. Much respect, food bloggers.

...Speaking of food bloggers, you've seen this, right? Gourmet Gaming! This was like the blog of my dreams. I want to make this take on Peanut Cheese Bars, but they look very bad-for-you. Maybe for a special occasion.

Saints Row

2012-01-21T09:30:00.000-08:00

Life is short
so love the one you got
'cause you might get run over
or you might get

Shot

By me, mostly, playing Saints Row: The Third, where you will find my impressions on Tap-Repeatedly.

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2012/01/21/saints-row-the-third-no-longer-by-proxy/

I'd like to write a longer article at some point dealing just in particular with my feelings on how it handles male versus female characters, but there's still some things I need to see. In particular, there's a mission where the main character flirts with a woman (while he's disguised as another dude, the joke being that it's out of character for the original dude to do so). I wonder if I still do this if I'm playing as a woman, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Of course, I'm no stranger to flirting with women in games. But maybe, as a female, I'll disguise as a different character? Or maybe this is a situation where it's clearly written for the male default and just awkward with a woman? I need to play more of the game.

On Gettin Ladies... in Games

2012-01-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

Critical Distance is running a "blogs of the round table" challenge for people who pontificate about games, and I thought I'd jump in, because it seems like good times. The topic this month is "Being Other." The idea is to discuss moments that a game made you feel like someone you are not.

You can view the other blogs here:

http://www.critical-distance.com/2012/01/16/bort-january-12-roundup/

At first when I saw the prompt, I thought, well, this doesn't really work for me. I'm a straight, white woman. When I have the opportunity in a game to create a woman, I do (though I don't always create a straight one). Most other games cast me as a straight, white man. This is rarely a profoundly embodied experience.

Except, well, okay. I kind of act differently when I'm roleplaying a straight man. I really should force myself to analyse this behavior.

If sexuality isn't part of the question, or, if there's no choice in the matter, then it's not really relevant. But if there's an opportunity for a romance in a game, and I'm playing as a man (white or otherwise), I have a tendency to play as the biggest possible sleazeball. I flirt constantly, with everyone. Can I sleep with every woman? Awesome. Do I just have to pick one? Well, okay, but she'd better put out. I am that jerk who is thinking about sex with girls while they are talking. I pick any dialog choice that I hope will lead me in to a relationship.

I guess this pattern behavior started with the Leisure Suit Larry series, which, I've always liked. The point of those games is generally to have as much sex as possible (though usually it only ends up being the one time, after a series of comical mishaps). It may also have something to do with something I've written about before: JRPGs that often stuck my male avatar with a milquetoast love interest I didn't much care for. Or maybe it's just really fun to roleplay as the suave, sophisticated James Bond guy who gets all the ladies. Maybe it's fun to imagine about that guy.

Or maybe I flirt for a nicer reason. If a game has more than one choice for a female love interest, that means the game has more than one woman in it. And the women are bound to have somewhat different personalities. It's an opportunity to see and talk to female characters, and see how they're written and portrayed. A little romance, maybe a little skin, is a nice bonus on top of that.

This is profoundly different from how I act and believe in real life. I wouldn't want to be manipulated in that way or treated like a number on a score card. But in a lot of video games, I would like to "score as many chicks" as possible. I don't know if this gives me any real insight at all in to how a straight man thinks. I do know that it's kind of perversely fun, though.

I've heard I'm not alone, and there are other women that do this when playing as a straight guy. So who else is with me?

I have been told that "The Witcher" is probably the game for me in this regard. So I will play it soon and write some kind of trip report. Hopefully with sexy results.

...But I really am a straight woman, honest.

The World of D&D is Changing Again

2012-01-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

Everyone's talking about it! Dungeons and Dragons made the New York Times today. They'll be making another edition.

I haven't written about tabletop gaming in a while, but I have mentioned in the past that... despite the contentious divide, I like Fourth Edition. I think it did a lot of things right.

I'd love to talk about this in the actual WotC group, but it's (unsurprisingly) having some technical issues. So, from the perspective of someone who has been running D&D4 home campaigns since, basically, it was introduced, here's what I like about D&D4 and here's where I find it lacking.

Stuff I Like!

Tactical Combat. Mages and Fighter-types who generally level up together and are on the same keel together and can stand toe-to-toe together at all levels. Everyone being able to participate in most every situation.
Streamlined monster creation. It's easy to modify the monsters. Useful because I want to run different kinds of encounters and creatures.
Streamlined skills list. There's not much chance you'll pick a "bad" skill you'll never use, which was a big problem in 3.5. Plus many types of characters didn't have the skill points to get around.
Nerfed multi-classing. This was stupid-broken in 3.5, and you had to take multiple classes just to get a basic character worth using. If one person was doing it, everyone at the table had to do it. Some people say "they like the options," but I'd rather have the options in-play as opposed to staring at six different books trying to optimize for a prestige class before play even begins.

Now, here's the stuff I don't really like. Oops! It turned out to be a long list.

Streamlined skills list may be a little too streamlined. My current campaign is a nautical one with a boat, and pirates! I've always wanted to run a campaign like this, and based on yesterday's players vs pirates ship battle, it was a pretty good idea. But I've run in to a problem: no skill for sailing! I've had to settle for Nature, Perception, Athletics checks because I didn't think to house-rule in a sailing skill. I may still end up doing this later. At any rate, skills for Handle Animal, Sailing, and other professional skills need to return to the game in some capacity, because the ones I'm using don't feel right to me. And sometimes you need to know if, for example, your ship crashes in to the pirate ship, or if you manage to turn it about.
While we're at it, more support for non-combat stuff in general. In my previous campaign, my players wanted to train a baby hippogriff. This is not actually the kind of thing that would be an uncommon occurance in a D&D game, but unsurprisingly, there's no rules for this kind of thing. I ended up having to poach from 3.5 to find any information on how someone would do this. I still have all my 3.5 books, but there's no reason this kind of flavor couldn't be in 4e.
Skill Challenges. The 4e book would suggest using a Skill Challenge to do basically... anything that isn't combat, such as the aforementioned hippogriff training. "Run it as a skill challenge" is, I am sure, what the advice for training the 'griff would be. But skill challenges are... sort of wiggly. I ran two of them yesterday: one for keeping the boat steady during a magically-created storm, and one for researching the activities of a cult the group found a symbol for. They were fine. I think everyone had a good time. But since the group is currently level 3, I have two options for how to write a skill challenge: either write it at the top of the old sub-tier, where challenges are based on a group between levels 1-3, and thus really easy for a level 3 group, or, run the DCs at level 4-6, where the challenges are hard, and give XP appropriately. I chose the latter. Perhaps predictably, the group did not fail. After the (very early) skill challenge errata that happened for the original DMG, it's near-impossible for a group to fail a skill challenge. The DCs are too easy. Prior to the errata, it was nearly impossible to succeed, instead. These were never playtested, or at least, were playtested too little and not rigorously. Incidentally, even if skill challenges are a designed part of the game-as-written, it's sort of annoying that I always have to write them myself. The only other option is to search through years of D&D on-line magazines and other things to find the "correct" one, at which point I might discover it's at the wrong level for my group (sorry, you can't encounter a storm at sea until you are level 8 or 9).
Level tiers. Sorry, I do like to start at the beginning, so I typically run in the Heroic Tier. The idea that everything magically jumps in to a new difficulty at level 11 is a little strange to me. There's no reason the progression needs these big leaps all at the same place like that.
Points-of-Light is a pretty milquetoast and non-committal setting. I see that they're trying to just make the setting as accessible as possible, so people can get right in to the game, but the flavor of PoL is kind of weak. In my old campaign, I resolved this by... redoing a lot of it. I changed the gods to my own pantheon with more individual personal flavor, eliminated a few class/race opportunities, added some very basic politics, and never used "The Shadowfell." In my current campaign I'm running PoL basically as written. I still think the default gods and demons are bland, and I'm always looking for ways I can spice them up and make them more than just "good vs evil." I get that some people want that. But most D&D players are adults, and are not really interested in Saturday Morning Cartoon type villainy where evil is evil just because. It's more fun to write bad guys with some motivation, not just "they are evil because Shadowfell." Yes, it's more fun to write interesting villains even if my players are just going to chop them up. Yes, there's also a place - a big place - for stuff with no personality to just be chopped up. But you need both, I feel.
Lots of weird and unfamiliar races and classes. I dunno; it feels like some of these were just added to sell splats. I get Tiefling and Dragonborn and think they're both pretty cool starting races. We have a Deva in our current group, which works out okay, except we're just roleplaying that he's a very mystical human instead (with a cool body tattoo. I picture him like one of the magic users in Fable II). The main problem with introducing a lot of brand-new races is a problem of lore. When I started my other 4th ed campaign, I had accounted for the possibility of gnomes and half-orcs coming in because I knew they would show up in a later book (PHB2 as it turns out). I hadn't accounted for the possibility of Goliaths, because...what? This was not a thing.
Bizarre design philosophy in the published adventures. This is a long bullet point. I will discuss it later.

I think there's stuff I wouldn't change, that other, older gamers would say to "change back," like the discrepancy between power levels of different classes depending on level.

I also don't like the idea of a stronger push for everything to be digital. I never really grabbed on to the idea of playing D&D on-line, and any campaign I played in that was that way didn't last for very long. I think it's more fun with people around a table, having a good time exploring a fantasy world together while socializing and having snacks. There's already a ton of games I can play on-line if I want the "sitting at home at my computer" experience and that is not why I play D&D.

I'm going to be watching these changes eagerly. I honestly hope to be involved in the playtests, because I have an eager group who I'm sure would enjoy breaking in to a new game. I guess we'll see how the updates come out over time and see how D&D will change from there. Whatever happens, 4th edition will still work fine for my campaign, but I think everyone house-rules it a little here and there.

Katawa Shoujo

2012-01-06T10:34:00.001-08:00

Since I enjoyed "don't take it personally babe" last year, I thought I'd give another visual novel a try: Four Leaf Studio's Katawa Shoujo.

Here is my mini-review!

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2012/01/06/impressions-katawa-shoujo/

I Oughtta Get Angry

2012-01-05T07:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a thing happened on Twitter. Vox Media is a new game news web site in development. They started their media blitz by talking about how they were all "handsome" and were then forced to answer the question "are there any women on your staff?"

So, well, no: this is a thing started by dudes who presumably all know each other and as these things sort of tend to go they probably hadn't really considered that a lack of diversity (race, gender, etc), would be a "thing." Turns out it was a thing, so they started asking on Facebook "hey, who are the best women who write about games?"

Related! Here's a list of some of the best game articles of 2011, as picked by Critical Distance and its readership. Look! Some women!

Worth commenting on: The bottom section, where women are talking about the culture of gaming, and how they often feel under-represented, has the majority of the female writers. Probably the easiest way to get noticed that you are a woman who writes about games is to write about how much this can suck. I think it's an important conversation to have, but I'm not entirely sure that this is fair, because women write cool shit about games all the time. Just this week I thought this was interesting and also this. Maybe women have a different style of writing, and when this same writing is being vetted by male editors it becomes more invisible. Or maybe:

Yeah, actually: that.

Also, there's this extra cool thing about being a woman where your appearance matters than if you're a man, where you'll get insulted and called "fat" on the internet by men (and other women) a lot more, and where it matters a lot more what you're wearing. As a bonus, if you're really a man but just pretend to be a woman, you can find some real success if you pretend you are, like, super-hot.

The Vox editors took the thread down after I guess they realized that making this a popularity vote ie "Shepard's Hair Color" wasn't necessarily the right thing to do, and they should have either accepted applications or just scouted for more writers themselves. Anyway, that's what institutionalized sexism looks like. Women already should've been considered (while we're at it, more diverse people in general). I think part of the problem here is, men tend to want to work with people that make them comfortable, and that generally means other men, that they already know, rather than also inviting someone not in their circle. If they reach outside of the circle merely to be inclusive, it rings of tokenism and is still hollow. If it's a popularity contest, it is hollow.

I oughtta get angry. But honestly, I hate being angry. I want to be positive, and write about games I like. So I'm not really angry. Just tired that these conversations need to keep happening, over and over again.

Thoughts on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Its Critical Reception, After Playing it 130 Hours

2011-12-16T09:04:00.000-08:00

This will probably be the last time I write about Skyrim here. Probably because I should really move on to something else, considering my play time, even though I'm not even actually "done" with either the main quest or the war quests of the game. My To Do List is finally shrinking to something manageable (in the game, that is; in real life I still have grades to post and holiday gifts to buy). It's at least shrunk to the point that I'm not sure which of the remaining quests I really care about, and sometimes I avoid doing one at all and just wander off in to the wilderness looking for a thing to kill whose stuff I want to take.

I hit level fifty last night. My build isn't the most optimized: I used some perks in Smithing to reach Dragon Armor only to realize I don't wear it very much, and some early Destruction magic perks are wasted in late game, when I find myself using only the runes and the bow. Forum-dwellers insist that spending any Lockpick perks at all is a waste, but I wanted to pick locks. Overall I am having fun with the game, and it really isn't necessary to spend all your perks "correctly" or pre-plan an entire build, which is how I feel it should be. There is room to make an error or two. At level fifty, very little in the game gives me trouble at this point, especially since I have been constantly improving my gear and have a 100 in Sneak.

That isn't really what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is how I love this game, even though it's terrible.

I think my love is evident enough in the sense that I wrote a paragraph obsessing about my character's build and skill perk choices. But the game is terrible in so many ways and even when I do love it it's a love-hate relationship.

First of all, Skyrim is a really buggy game. It has crashed on me often (though slightly less since the recent patch). I saw a horse once walk off of a mountain and in to the sky. Once I fell through the level geometry in to nothingness. I had to complete one quest with the use of the console, because the game didn't recognize that I had a quest item that I already had. I have other quest items trapped in my inventory because the game doesn't recognize that I completed the quest I needed them for.

The interface in Skyrim is bad. The game just isn't designed for a mouse and keyboard at all. With the 360 controller, the experience is smooth enough, but navigating a huge menu every time I want to change a spell or drink a potion is a bit of a flow-breaker. The PIP-Boy in the new Fallout games isn't perfect either, but at least you can create some controller shortcuts for your favorite weapons. Skyrim replaces this with a "favorites menu," which I keep forgetting to use mostly because it's not that great a solution. Allowing me to, say, hotkey half my keyboard, since I'm using the controller anyway, might be a good start here.

The animations in Skyrim are wonky. It's an improvement over previous Bethesda titles... except when I go in to third person, where my avatar still looks terrible moving around. She looks fine in screenshots, but third person combat has no solidity to it. Everything looks like it's floating above the ground. Footsteps have no purchase on the environment. Horses' feet literally sink in to the ground, as if they are running on mud. Every time my character dies - which, really, is quite often - her little badly-animated kitty-tail hovers over her body flopping around wildly.

The challenge in the game is unbalanced. During the middle of the game, I was basically quick-save master, because you might round a corner and get your butt kicked by any given bandit with a two-hander. A dragon might spawn at random while you travel; it might be low-level, or it might be a higher level one that wrecks you. Far more often than this, its mere presence aggros the entire countryside, forcing a reset when an entire town or caravan would turn on me for the sheer audacity of trying to rescue them from a dragon. My character depended often on stealth to survive, but it wasn't until just recently that I found a reliable way to determine how many enemies might be in the next room. Prior to the Detect Life Whisper, my method was to run in, aggro everyone, then reload the quick-save. This works just fine, by the way. It's merely somewhat less than elegant.

The story in the game forces my character to be wildly inconsistent. The alternative is to miss half the content. Playing someone who always makes the "good" choices in Skyrim would be a roleplaying exercise, and is something perhaps worth trying, but isn't going to really reward you the way just going along with everything does. In the mean time, I very rarely get dialog options that indicate what my character likely would actually say in certain situations, and a lot of times, there's just one dialog option, necessary to move the conversation on to the next bit, where I get paid.

NPC dialog is repetitive as hell. Their lines are also stiffly written. I've been home basing out of Solitude for the last twenty levels or so, and every time I walk through the main drag of town, a woman makes a point of telling me that she's much too busy to talk. She has all sorts of errands to run. That's nice, but the fact that you're walking up to me to make a point of telling me how you're just much too busy for me is pretty passive-aggressive of you, too-busy-lady. Let alone the fact that you tell me this every single morning.

The AI is so dumb! Especially companion AI, since my followers consistently hit every single pressure trap in a dungeon. They get lost a lot, jump in front of my weapon, and aggro things for no reason.

Have I complained enough? Did I hit all the fail highlights?

Game of the fuckin' year, man.

I mean I really liked Portal 2. Very solid. Definitely "my other game of the year," so far as these things are ranked. And I'll be moving on to a few other titles too, as soon as Skyrim stops sucking me in. Skyward Sword seems to hold excellent promise.

And yet: and yet!

Skyrim got a 40 in Famitsu, the first western RPG (western game period) to receive a perfect score from the Japanese publication. Skyrim won Game of the Year at the Spike TV awards too, for what that's worth to you. Skyrim has a consistent 90+ Metacritic on all platforms.

But Skyrim is terrible oh my god it is so terrible.

But it's so good.

I'm not so awesome at articulating this inconsistency, but SWERY probably would be. SWERY is the creator of Deadly Premonition which is just the best game and is also pretty terrible by many supposedly-objective measures. This, I assume, is why publications gave it bad scores (except when it got good scores). Problems like "being buggy" or "having bad textures" seem to be a big issue in the gaming press when they would like to give a bad score to a game. On the other hand, if everyone wants to give a good score to a game, these things are easily overlooked. It's worth repeating that Famitsu gave Skyrim a perfect score, but the game is not even close to perfect.

And I think what I learned from SWERY's talk at GDC, is, the reason Skyrim works has nothing to do with textures or buggy horses or combat consistency. What works about Skyrim is that, like Deadly Premonition, it gets stuck in your head. It's a game you want to think about, and talk about, even when you aren't actually playing it. It's a game that, through sheerly random AI behavior, crazy emergent stories continue to happen to share with other players. It's a game where you can write an entire article about the weather because the weather makes you feel something. Skyrim might make you think of Skyrim when you see a sunset or snow. It's a game where the silly repetitive dialog crawls in to your brain and nests. It's a game that allows you to do mundane things, because the repetition of mundane tasks in a game is a trick to make you think about the game next time you do that mundane task in the real world. Skyrim could make you want to stand in front of a forge creating jewelry and then selling it because the idea of a jeweler-adventurer is cool even if you don't need the money. Skyrim is a game that might inspire you to loot cheese and make a room full of cheese. Then you might be reminded of Skyrim next time you eat cheese.

Every game I've loved has had this in common: the idea that it's something that you think about when you aren't playing it, too. If a game had that effect on so many other people, then it's something wonderful, something worth talking about.

But maybe we should stop pretending that it's even possible to give an experience like this something like a numerical "score." Maybe it's silly that we ever tried.

Or at the very least, I think it would be more honest if major game publications stopped giving games bad scores using buggy code as an excuse. I think this should be a turning point for us to realize that this obviously doesn't matter if the rest of the experience is effective. One could instead write "This game just doesn't work for me; it doesn't have that special magic. If you're like me, it won't be for you."

Or maybe one might write "This game is pretty messy in every conceivable way. I played over 100 hours. I can't wait to play it again."

Christmas Cleaning

2011-12-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

Trying out a new template. I also installed a mobile template if you are reading my blog on the go. If you are having any problems with it let me know.

I made Critical Distance this week with my article on Tap! I know I'm just drawing a big circle by pointing this out. But all the stuff there is worth reading if you don't already.

Last note: I enabled ads for the sidebar for the blog. I don't really anticipate this being obtrusive, but you'll start seeing them there. If you click on them, that's good for me; if you don't, no big! It is just an experiment. Mostly I am glad if you are stopping by.

On Failure

2011-12-08T08:58:00.001-08:00

Today, I wrote a little about failure. You can read it on Tap-Repeatedly.

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/12/08/the-incredible-threat-of-failure/

When I was finishing up my graduate degree, my interest in video game narrative started to take over my life, and is what I wrote about in my thesis. In particular, I was interested on how what is done by a "DM" translates in to what is done by a game AI.

I think that we have seen a lot of movement toward more "gamemastery" kinds of game design, where a game is creating a narrative for a player to enjoy, while putting up challenge as a sort of obstacle to make that narrative more exciting. I know that lots of game designers also play tabletop games, and I find the cross-pollination between design philosophies interesting.

With that in mind, I'm kind of shocked that the only time I see the phrase "credible threat of failure" used on the web, it is in regard to banks and finances. It's an intriguing game design philosophy too.

Potpourri Entry

2011-11-30T11:00:00.001-08:00

I found out today there will be no more GameSetWatch. I am saddened! They had some of the neatest, quirkiest game coverage, and that's, for example, where I learned so much about Roguelikes and Dating sims.

Other than that, yeah, mostly playing Skyrim. Insert standard comment about how I'm 100 hours in and haven't done the main quest. I do have the super-duper-rare Thieves Guild Achievement for returning the Guild to its former glory, but man, that took forever. I think getting all the Achievements may actually be possible for me this time, but the marriage one makes me a little unsure because as it turns out, there's no marriageable khajiit. I'll either have to re-roll, or deal with marrying cross-species. I'm also a little nervous because a lot of the unfinished quests on my list are some that I have heard rumors are bugged, and I'd like to see a patch to fix some of those issues before trying to finish them.

If you follow me on Twitter, you might see I had made plans to go to Magfest. But, financially, I can't make too many trips next year, so I'm choosing to go to GDC. GDC is always a learning opportunity and this year I'll be covering it more from the press side. If you do make it to Magfest, I'm jealous! But, you know, GDC. I am also interested in PAX East, but it looks like press registration isn't open yet for that.

In other news... I might be working on an Interactive Fiction. I hope to have it ready for beta before the end of the year... they typically don't take a real long time to write for experts, but this is the first time I've tried to develop such a game with the actual intent to finish, as opposed to just messing around in Inform. I will say that it's a horror game, and thus might not be for everyone, but I'd love to have some people with experience willing to beta a first-time author.

In more IF news, I stumbled on this blog entry while on Thanksgiving Break saying that Andrew Plotkin was the one behind Cold Iron, a game I thought was well-written, but too short! A glimpse at the entry reveals why: the game itself wasn't really the point. Instead, it served as one arm of a meta-puzzle that stretched across four games, which myself and other reviewers simply failed to notice. I know I definitely didn't suspect. Cold Iron and Last Day of Summer did seem thematically related, but so far as things like having a man with an indescribable hat in each, I guess I just assumed that was an IF Meet or IF MUD in-joke and paid it no additional mind. Well, like the entry states, you don't really see things you aren't looking for.

Finally, I have one more article that I'm drafting that I hope will hit the net soon. And proposed a new feature for Tap-Repeatedly that I'm excited about.

So I'm doing a great job of pretending to be busy, even if logging 100 hours of a video game in the past few weeks.

A great start to the holiday season!

I Accidentally the Arch-mage of Winterhold

2011-11-19T15:16:00.001-08:00

This contains complete spoilers for everything that happens in the Mage's College quests in Skyrim.

I cast a little Destruction magic in my spare time, because it's an easier way to get around guys who use shields.

Everyone said I should check out the Mage's College, so, I did. I solved some small student problems, and did an underground quest in some tombs where I found a great big spinny orb. Everyone seemed really impressed by the spinny orb.

I wandered off to do some other things.

Later I thought it might be nice to visit my friend the other Khajiit at the college and see if he would travel with me, so I checked in at the college for some work. They wanted me to get some books, which had information about the big shiny orb thing. So I did that. No worries.

So now I'm the Arch-mage. I would say I'm not sure how that happened, but, ever since you're sent upstairs to see the sitting Arch-mage's room and see all the pretty alchemy ingredients and shiny trinkets that are marked "hands off," it seems inevitable that this can somehow be your own room some day. The funniest thing about being the arch-mage is I'm not that great a caster. I purposely skilled up Illusion just to get silent spellcasting, and I'm an Adept level at Destruction from lobbing fireballs at dudes. I have a couple heal spells, because you need that, and I generally know a lot of spells because I can't be stopped from clicking on books I find in the world. But I'm not really what you would call a wizard. I haven't spread out my magic perks much, and I don't use the spells all that tactically.

For one of the college missions, I ran around in robes that I found on a necromancer. They had a bonus to casting Destruction, and, I thought, looked rather fetching with their emblazoned skull pattern. The problem with this plan was that I really had no mage armor or defensive spells to speak of, except for the beginner-level Ward, and every creature in Boatmurdered was gnawing me to death. I survived by virtue of Resist Poison vials and lots of quicksaving. At one point I almost resorted to setting the game on God mode because I was so frustrated.

Today I thought: well, screw that, and instead went and put on some actual armor, loaded up on enchanted weapons, and crafted myself a Glass Sword, then set about completing the rest of the story.

Lo and behold: Bethesda, as it turns out, is like your dick Dungeon Master. The final mage dungeons truly are the ultimate challenge for a Mage. For someone who is specced as a thief primarily, it turns out they are not so tough. What would be a hard challenge for a mage, asks your dick DM. I know: I'll put an enemy in the dungeon that periodically drains your spells. Then I'll give enemies weapons that drain your spells! Some of the monsters will have high magical resistances. Combine that with a couple of big arena-type rooms where you're forced to move forward, instead of being able to kite enemies in to defensive Rune spells, and that would make things really tough for a magic-user.

The thing you'd think would be most thematically appropriate would be to take another college mage with you, study some new great spells, put on your robe and wizard hat, and venture forth. I hired a basically pure fighter, gave her a magic axe, then put on Glass Armor and packed some invisibility potions. I defeated the undead magic-draining lich of high mucky-muck by standing on a tower and lobbing him with about forty cheap arrows. I even sneak-attacked a Skeletal Dragon to death.

The final boss of the story arc is telegraphed from 600 miles out. He's an elf named Ancano and it is barely a spoiler for me to tell you you have to kill this man. The moment he showed up, I knew I would have to kill him, because:

A: Every single person you talk to at the Mage's College has a question allowing you to ask them something about Ancano, even if you literally never met the guy. Then they can tell you he is suspicious.
B: The dude looks like Raistlin.

Remember how I said the enemies in the final mage dungeon have weapons that drain magic? You can take those to an enchanter and learn the enchantment yourself. Then you can enchant whatever you like with it. If you're really bold, try two: one for each hand. I enchanted a vampiric dagger, and hacked Ancano with it until he was out of blood. Upon doing this, the college made me Arch-Mage.

Here is a list of the mage-like actions I undertook to become Arch-Mage of all Skyrim:

1. Cast a few Novice-level elemental spells, to bypass magical puzzle locks.
2. Enchanted a dagger.

I now look forward to beating the rest of Thieves' Guild story by charging in with a greatsword like Conan, and beating the Fighter-oriented Companion quests by lobbing fireballs. Because I bet those quests have a lot of guys with shields.

And I am, undoubtedly, the best mage in Skyrim.

Thoughts on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, After Playing It 30 Hours

2011-11-16T08:51:00.001-08:00

Over on Tap, the thread I started about Skyrim kind of exploded. Skyrim is obviously somewhat controversial and as a game of the size that it is, there is so much to discuss that a five-hour preview barely scratches the surface. I should have realized that before posting, but I did anyway, because it's good to start a conversation and see what comes of it. Now (as I said last entry), I'm trying to collect my thoughts in a more concrete way.

I'm far, far, from done with the game. Thirty hours is the point where a lot of people had deadlines and reviews to write, and like many players I've barely scratched the surface of the game's main quest in search of other profitable pursuits.

Words to follow may contain what some might call mechanical spoilers. I won't be talking about the story much, except for the tutorial. However, some people define spoilers differently, and I believe this is a significant enough buffer for warning that I can now cut with abandon. Consider the next paragraph to be the actual start of my essay, so to speak.

Skyrim (AKA The Elder Scrolls V) is an RPG of the western style, with interactive real-time combat and a character and personal story that you create. The story that happens around you is partially pre-determined, if one takes up certain quest chains, but often procedurally generated, thanks to a new type of Bethesda's "Radiant AI" that randomizes certain situations and quest lines and has parts of the world react to your actions.

Skyrim is a game about doing stuff, lots of stuff, on a long list. It's also a game about slaying dragons, but sometimes those dragons happen randomly without being on your list. Other times they are on your list. Like many RPGS, it is set in a fantasy-like world with medieval trappings, a low level of technology, and lots of ancient ruins and tombs to explore. It is a very large game with a lot of things to do.

My Identity in Skyrim

When you first begin the game, you are a prisoner who is being taken to his or her own execution. Well, no, I have that wrong, let me start again. When you first begin the game, you are a prisoner who is being taken to his own execution. You don't get the opportunity to define your character as female until after you are pulled off of the back of the cart you're riding in, at which point the game lets you choose your race, and then your gender, with Male Nord being default. The word Nord is a made-up one, but that is, Nord, as in "Nordic;" that is, a blond Viking type, and a man. That's the face you're wearing when you're first pulled off the cart, which only then you can change. Race is a more important choice than gender, because it has a mechanical effect, but both of these affect the game in some way.

I almost always play a game as a woman if that option is available to me. This time, I also decided to choose a non-human race: a Khajiit, or cat-person, because I was interested in playing as a stealthy character. Sometimes the game knows who I am. Sometimes it doesn't appear to. What's notable to me is, if at any time the game can use the fact that I'm a cat-woman to be hostile to me, it does so. How many bandits in Skyrim have killed their cousin's cats? Lots, apparently, because I remind them of their cousin's cats, which they killed, and they would like to alert me to this fact, and also, the fact that I would "make a fine rug." (Not a fur coat, even though it's cold outside. A rug.) On the other hand, a woman in Whiterun likes the Khajiit a lot; she is interested in trading with their caravans. Would I like to learn more about the Khajiit? No thanks, ma'am, I am one. No, but she would like to tell me. She does not seem to recognize that I am one herself, nor do most other Khajiit that I encounter, even if this should make them more well-deposed toward me.

I meet a Khajiit in the mage's college. He is studying Destruction magic, because he would like to use it to steal things more effectively. I am like you! I want to say. We should be close friends, or maybe even "frienemies." This is not possible, at least not when I first meet him. It would require more writing than telling me I would make a fine rug.

There are different strategies that one can take in playing a game such as this. I like to do the strategy of doing a little roleplaying, of deciding who my character is, and therefore, what she wants. I pursue the quests that I think would interest such a catgirl: stealth and magic, and I let others slide. Sometimes, even, when at an inn, I buy food even if I'm not actually low on health, because it's dinner time and I should be hungry then. (That doesn't stop me from chowing down from an entire menu in the middle of combat if I need the health, though. Roleplaying only goes so far.)

Thiefcat cares very little for the conflict between two different types of Nords, the Rebels and the Imperials. I get the feeling the game wants me to care, but I will have to save caring for some other alt, a Nord alt. The way it introduces this conflict initially, I think, is somewhat poor. During the beginning of the game, you are being chased by a dragon, and trying to run for your life while your hands are bound. The rebel enters a building by one door, and the Imperial by another, and you need to pick one to follow at that moment. I chose the rebel, though this was not really a conscious decision. At this point in the game, you are running from a dragon, you are still trying to get the hang of the HUD, and you may have made the mistake of trying to play the game with a keyboard and mouse, hampering your progress. Did I mention you are running from a dragon, and that odds are at least 50/50 your character isn't a Nord in the first place? I picked a door and entered it. All you white humans look alike to me.

Fortunately my choice wasn't binding, but since your contact suggests his favorite side to you upon parting ways, there it shall always be in my to-do list. "Join the Stormcloak Rebellion." One item on that list that I do not believe that I will ever do.

Big and Little Things To Do

As I said at the start, that to-do list is the essence of Skyrim. In fact, it's the essence of all games of this type. If I were to try to look at this game on its own: not using Oblivion as a benchmark, not comparing it to the (very comparable) Fallout: New Vegas or other games of this ilk, I might end up comparing it instead to Cityville.

Here I'm going to bring out Chris Trottier's GDC talk again, because parts of it are absolutely meaningful for things that are in a completely different type of game for a completely different audience. Here are some things she likes in social games: Wanting, Getting, Having. Slide number 86: "A 'To Do' List where I make actual progress."

We have really evolved to love the to-do list. I know many days, having such a list, then doing the things on it, is the only way I can get through the day feeling good about myself. It makes me feel productive. Now here are video games that make you feel the same way: productive. The quest list has been around for a long time, of course, in various MMORPGs, in older CRPGs, a To Do List Where I Make Actual Progress. In real life, I have lots of things to do: get some vegetables for dinner, book hotels for the holidays, start Christmas shopping, wrap up one personal project and start another, grade papers, write articles. In Skyrim, I have lots of things to do: pick up one dagger and take it to another person, to get a reward, then cash in another quest while I'm in town, and while I'm here I'll pick up some potions, and buy some furniture, and I have this tusk I've been carrying around to give to the lady who asked about caravans and ... *b'doink!* I got an Achievement! Well, actually I'm playing on PC, so I don't get the cool sound effect, but I still got an Achievement. Running these little errands has made me "Hero of the People." That's kind of neat, because running errands for my own household does not make me hero of the people. It just makes me a person who is doing the basic necessary things to continue on living in society. In Skyrim I might have my to-do list interrupted by bandits or an assassin. In the real world, I might have my to-do list interrupted by the cat throwing up on the rug. But the point I'm trying to make here in a roundabout way is that this is not so different from Cityville. Sure, the things you have to do to check off your to-do list are different, but this is ultimately the same exact kind of brain manipulation that a social game does, just carried out alone in a 3D space instead of requiring the hassling of your friends.

I mentioned that there is more than one play style here; there is the roleplaying play style that I prefer, but there is also the list-heavy play style, where everything on that list is gospel and you must do it no matter what, or feel unfulfilled on some basic level. This is not to mention the Achievements, which are a different to-do list outside of the game which you also might be interested in following, checking off, and feeling unfulfilled if you cannot accomplish each individual item. With this play style, even if it makes no sense for your character to choose a side in the Nord civil war, or to become an Assassin, or to become a werewolf, you do this, because otherwise you would miss an Achievement that you could get, otherwise. Wanting... getting... having.

Lovely Vistas

Here is a Tweet from Quintin Smith today.

Here, linked, is that screenshot.

And here are a few of mine (though taken on the medium graphical setting).

That last view is the sight I see immediately upon stepping out of the Honningbrew Meadery. It is not an illustration of epic scope, but it is as composed as if a concept artist delivered it straight from his digital paintbrush. Perhaps one had: and this is a view that, by the way it is placed, almost every player will see exactly this way. Imagine my delight when I stepped out of a cave, turned my head, and saw the northern lights across the sky for the first time. I wanted to make it my desktop wallpaper - still thinking about it - so I can see Skyrim even when I'm not playing Skyrim.

Now here are the words on Trottier's Slide Number 90: "Yummy on the Eyes."

So another thing that keeps people playing, and gushing about, Skyrim is the beauty this landscape has to offer. Even if you don't fall in to the obsessiveness trap that's set by that long "to do" list, you may have the curiosity to see what's just around the next bend, and what lovely photographs you will take.

Where It All Falls Down

So now I'm going to actually spoil a small part of a quest, which is a Thieves' Guild quest, and is basically the second big job that they give you. Here I am tasked to shadow a guy, follow him to a location. He walks around town, then walks in to a warehouse and around a long maze of boxes. The boxes are surrounded with guards. The guards aggro on me if they spot me, and go straight in to bloody murder mode. The guy I'm shadowing, on the other hand, does not seem to react to this at all.

I die to the guards. I die a lot.

Finally I get the bright idea to just wait until the guy goes to his final destination instead of following him through a maze of crates. I can get there by swimming under a dock, and waiting for a really long time.

This was worth doing, because the rewards for the quest were good, but it was a giant pain in my butt. It was also an immersion-breaking pain in my butt, because it's crazy that this character didn't see me when a half-dozen guards are on my case and spotted me right away. It's also crazy how I die a lot. I die so very much. Now, I just save after every major combat victory, because I have no idea if a guy with a broadsword might be around the next corner and blitz me in one hit. I end up living the game in a sort of "Groundhog Day" way, using quicksave to scout ahead in places, being prepared to die, then sneaking in to the situation on the second try prepared with the magical foreknowledge that I will need to succeed. I have an 'enemy radar,' but it's useless for stealth, because it only shows me the locations of enemies that have already aggroed and are going to kill me. When they don't see me, they disappear. My super cat-senses cannot compensate and I must rely on simple human hearing, with headphones, to judge their positions.

If you can get past the sense that you're being manipulated, in a social-game way, by the game's To Do List (like you are in so many games), then you're left with this: Almost all the problems with Skyrim are interface problems.

If the combat doesn't feel tactical or satisfying, well, really, it's an interface problem: you can't see very clearly what you are doing a lot of the time, and the melee in third person doesn't give you enough feedback. If you can't figure out what the active spell effects are on you, or if you have a disease, that's because that's a little buried in the interface. If you forgot to level up, that's because the game reminded you at a time when you were distracted by something else, then you found the level up screen to be confusing. If you forgot to put on armor, that's because you were playing in first-person mode, there's no character sheet, and you took it off for a social mission and just plum forgot. This did happen to me.

Another Thing That Happened

After a friend and fellow adventurer told me a tip about the carts, which would take you safely from town to town, I jumped on to one and rode it up to Winterhold. I don't know how I forgot about this feature from Morrowind, but, it has been a while. While in Winterhold I visit the Mage's College, join up and do a quest, and then realize there is no cart in Winterhold to return to another city. The nearest major city is Windhelm, where I haven't visited yet, but it doesn't seem to be so far, so, I figure I can walk.

I begin walking down the mountain, and I see something shiny, blue and pretty. In my player mind, and in the mind of roleplaying a catgirl who also dabbles in alchemy, I think: Oh, something shiny! It looks like a pretty bug, and I like to eat pretty bugs. I am going to check it out.

I get close to the pretty bug. The HUD says it is an Ice Wraith. It is shiny-shiny and OH NO, oh god, it's shooting ice at me and epic combat music has started and the ice hurts like cold burning. I try shooting fire at it, but that doesn't seem to do much. So I break and start running down the mountain. Maybe it won't catch up.

Suddenly, on the HUD, I see its health go down. Oh, good, something is attacking the thing. I will slowly turn around to see who my new friend is--

A DRAGON

I continue to run down the mountain, to just outside of Windhelm, where with the help of a couple of town guards, and using my own fire magic, I defeat the beast. The guards are all suitably impressed with my epic, heroic deed.

One dungeon later, I will be chewed to death by a poisonous rat.

IF Comp is over!

2011-11-16T08:29:00.001-08:00

Not that you needed to hear it from me, but, the top-rated comp games have been announced, and you can go here to find out more. Congratulations to the winners... heck, to all the participants, because you made and released a game! The top-rated game turned out to be Taco Fiction, a game about which my own review said little primarily because I had so little to complain about. It's notable for NPCs, and a distinct personality for the PC, which are things I like.

In the mean time, I am trying to better collect my thoughts about another game.

A Thing that Happened in Skyrim

2011-11-14T09:01:00.001-08:00

So last night like thousands of other people I was up a bit late playing Skyrim on Steam.

I was waiting around to --

...you know, a lot of people don't have this yet, so I'll buffer just a little and put in a spoiler tag. I'm not sure how to say what part of the game I'm in not to spoiler it, but, I'm maybe 15 hours of play in, and just wandering doing random things?

Anyway, I was waiting around to play hide and seek with a ghost girl in the middle of town. When suddenly, a group of three guys - labled "Hired Thugs," come up to me on the street and charge at me with intent to murder. One of them had an enchanted axe. And let me tell you, these guys were tough customers. I have fought dragons, and they weren't as hard to kill as these guys. The first time I fought them, they slaughtered me, and the second time I put up a good fight but they still did. On another reload, they killed my companion, which also was no good, and there didn't seem to be any way to prevent them from spawning at this point.

Finally, using hit and run tactics, I took them all down, and looted the gold off their bodies. The leader of the group had a note - a contract, saying who hired them.

I read the note and realized it was signed: Lami. The nice alchemist lady that lives right here in this village! Why, I know where she lives and everything!

So since her home was unlocked, I barged in and talked to her, figuring I could demandingly ask why she hired three incredibly though assassins with magical axes to chop me in to flaming bits. But she just gave me the same answer wheel she always did: a sort of hello, would you like to have training in alchemy?

What the hell?

The note that I found said "this will teach her not to steal things that don't belong to her." I was confused, because... I never stole from this lady! Sure, I steal things a lot, but I hadn't stolen from her...

And then I remembered that I accidentally did, kinda. See, the mouse sensitivity in Skyrim is really bad, and when I meant to click on her alchemical bench, in order to use it, I once accidentally clicked on a little object that was sitting right next to the bench as a decoration, and "stole" it. She saw me do this, so she gave me a slap on the wrist and said "Hey, I saw that!" and put it right back. Her conversation options didn't change, and I didn't get a bounty or anything, so I figured, oops, misclick, no harm done really. It wasn't even an expensive or rare item (I think it was actually bone meal).

Except now she's hired literally the toughest guys I had fought to that point in order to destroy me for doing that? I sure hope that this doesn't happen again while I'm doing other peaceful things, because that is a really stupid way to interrupt my experience, over what is really a dumb UI glitch.

I will say one thing, though, I went right back to her shop and took literally everything off of the shelves. She owed me, so, if she's gonna summon flaming axe assassins, I may as well make it worth her while.

Now Playing Skyrim

2011-11-12T08:33:00.001-08:00

I started playing Skyrim yesterday! Then I wrote a bit about it, at Tap-Repeatedly.

I might chronicle Cultural Cat Girl's adventures here in greater specificity, but only if I find the time between actually playing the game. I am a huge fan of taking screenshots, though.

IF Comp 2011: The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M ... and final thoughts

2011-11-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M is likely to be the last comp game that I review, because I can't figure out how to get Ted Paladin and the Case of the Abandoned House to run right, and the comp itself is coming to a close very soon.

I admit I had a small ulterior motive in reviewing comp games, other than to bring in some new and additional traffic to the blog. As I'm taking a high-end game art class through CG Society right now, I figured I wouldn't have the mental energy to devote to thinking about and writing about larger commercial game releases, and the bite-size comp games fit well in to my schedule in that regard. So, hopefully when the week is out, I'll have some lovely new art to display, and then I can look at the big games I've let pass me by recently like Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and so on, in anticipation of Skyward Sword later this month. If you want to see my thoughts on any of that stuff, it may be here, or it may be on Tap-Repeatedly, where I intend to post some more Zelda-related writing and some other indie game writing rather soon.

Overall, this IF Comp ran the gamut for me: there were some strong games, and some not so much. If The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M will indeed be the last game I play, it's a pretty good note to go out on: competently written, well-paced, and with a very interesting theme. It wasn't exactly perfect - some puzzles were a little too fiddly for me to get right away, needing some walkthrough help - but it's a game that will stick with me. After I had completed two hours and wasn't quite done, I wanted to return to it.

Here there be spoilers, then. If you don't click through yet, let me just say, thanks for stopping by and checking out my reviews.

In some ways, this is a game about things that have been done before: it's about being in the afterlife, which I've seen, and it has a fairly familiar three-puzzle structure at its core. But what's interesting about the theme is that you play as, essentially, Dr. Kevorkian in the afterlife, and your task is to relive fictionalized versions of the assisted suicides that made you infamous. After that, the player is tasked to choose his own method of judgement: Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, with three different endings.

The actual setting of the game, with the afterlife as some sort of hotel, isn't all that unusual, though there are some cool touches like a door that leads to different locations depending on what key you use to unlock it. When I talk about fiddly puzzles, I'm not referring to that, so much as a puzzle where you have to fix the hotel bar taps for the angel and devil. I'm a little embarrassed to say I spent way too much time trying to figure that one out on my own before hitting the walkthrough. This is a strange little bit with a lot of moving parts that I'm sure could've been simplified, though, I guess I understand that the point of it is to force you to go in to the crashed bus and retrieve the items that are there. By comparison, I didn't find the death device as difficult to operate and figured it out pretty quickly, but maybe it was because I better understood how the game was handling such things at that time.

Overall, I'd give this one a recommend, provided you can deal with the theme and are okay with a game where "kill self" is a valid command necessary for completion. (Though I guess the game also accepts "commit suicide" and the slightly less dramatic "press button," which is what I used.)

One other weird note: I guess the author is pseudonymous, but I'm also wagering he is a Portal fan. At least, presuming the music that's playing outside the bar is in fact Exile Vilify, which is anachronistic but sort of appropriate? Look, I'd recognize that song anywhere: it's my ring tone.

IF Comp 2011: Cursed

2011-11-06T15:08:00.000-08:00

I don't really like this very much, but it's taken me about an hour to convince myself that that is not my fault. My first instinct when something is fairly well-written is to blame myself instead of the design, but in the case of this game, it really probably is the design. This is kind of too bad, because it's pretty competent in a lot of other respects, but it's just hugely frustrating on so many levels.

Read on if you like.

The beginning of this game is a long sequence of static fiction where you can't do anything much. You're a prisoner that is being sentenced. The only actions you can really take are looking around or waiting for something to happen, and going where you are told to go while your character has some flashbacks. I tired to do some other actions, but there's no way at all to subvert any of this.

After a lot of that, you are sentenced, and then there is the real hook of the game: you are cursed by being turned in to some kind of animal. You get to choose which animal from the choices of rat, fox, or snake. However, which animal you choose doesn't seem to have much effect on your initial experience, except that different animals have different senses. When a castle guard sees your animal form, he kills you. I found some places you can hide from the guards, but other than that I was able to make zero progress without checking the walkthrough.

From there on, it's evident that the game is pretty long, but even trying to follow the walkthrough I die randomly a lot. That is really no fun at all and if I weren't trying to fairly review the game I would've given up sooner.

The game reminds me a lot of my experience with Xenosaga, really, where you watch about two hours of cut-scenes, then are thrown in to an instant-death scenario with no prior method to practice.

I'm giving up now.

IF Comp 2011: Playing Games

2011-11-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

I actually played this one a few days ago, but it was so underwhelming I forgot to post about it. I'll spoil-cut anyway because I am polite.

All this game really amounts to is a series of three visual puzzles that are in a text format. They're basically like a ball you roll through a maze. There's a 'solve' command for if you have a screen-reader and can't do this, but that makes the game more pointless than it already is. I actually used 'solve' on the final puzzle because it was large and I was bored.

The end. Not very recommended, as if for some reason you want to solve mazes, you can probably do this in some other format.

IF Comp 2011: The Ship of Whimsy

2011-11-04T17:37:00.000-07:00

Another untested game. I'll play it anyway and tell you what I think!

I don't think much, really. This game plays as if someone realized suddenly that they could set a game to ship directions instead of compass directions, so they just had to do that. Beyond that there isn't much to it. Go here, pick up an item, go there, pick up another item. Underwhelming ending.

The "walkthrough" turned out to be source code, which is interesting because you can see how small the game is and where it actually goes wrong. Where it went wrong for me was the gray alien in the bottom of the ship, who I couldn't figure out how to talk to or do anything to other than hand him the object he needed to move the game to the next state.

Some character and item descriptions seem to indicate that the author might be a passable writer but doesn't really know what to do to make an interactive story. An odd amount of attention was paid to some items that don't pan out to be anything useful, which makes it uneven overall.

IF Comp 2011: Kerkerkruip

2011-11-03T18:32:00.000-07:00

It's... it's a roguelike?

Challenge Accepted

It took me a few tries before I got the hang of it. The first time, I got all the way to the last boss and had pretty good equipment, but couldn't figure out how to damage him. It turns out the "concentrate" command is pretty crucial to your success, but, to be honest, I had really glossed over the instructions and never bothered to use it my first time through.

My next few runs weren't so lucky, but on attempt five I managed to defeat the game (on easy) by fighting the last boss with a basic pattern of "concentrate/attack, concentrate/attack." By then I was pretty used to the encounters that would be most problematic in easy mode and knew how to plan accordingly for them. I was also lucky enough to find a dimensional anchor so the sorcerer couldn't teleport out of our climactic battle.

I like Roguelikes!

I guess my personal feelings in this regard will make it hard to score the game; it's so different from the more traditional IF offerings in the contest. If I was trying to be more objective I would say it's really quite fun, but the commands you need to win could stand to be explained a bit better. On the other hand trial and error is kind of the point of this sort of game, and if I did win on my first run I would've been surprised. I can't say whether or not I'll return to the game now that I've unlocked normal mode, but I might, just to see what else it offers.

If you want some generic advice for winning: as far as I can tell, the most important thing is to be able to defend yourself well. Also, being able to hit reliably is, in the long run, better than being able to hit hard. I actually won using the nunchucks, because they have a bonus to parry. I never encountered a truly detrimental scroll; that might mean that there simply aren't any, or that I was just lucky enough not to find them. (The worst scrolls I found were the Scroll of Shadows, which really doesn't seem to do anything or just has a very low proc-rate, and a Scroll that, upon reading, told me YOU HAVE LOST THE GAME. Ha ha, now you too have lost the game. It's okay by me; I don't really play it. But it was a funny little touch.) I DID encounter a cursed item, a crown which subtracted from my Defense, but I wore it anyway because it boosted my Willpower more than it subtracted Defense, and, dammit, there's a mind-control slug to defeat.

IF Comp 2011: Fan Interference

2011-11-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

I'm running down to the last few games, and I've played a pretty big block of them in the, let's say, "home stretch." Bad pun intended, since this is a game about baseball. You play as a baseball fan, and the object of the game is to interfere with a real, historical Cubs game so that the Cubs win.

I immediately thought: this is going to be tricky, because I'm not a big sports fan at all. But, I thought, the game seems well-written, and I really should give it a fair shake.

It starts off pretty promising all things considered. There's an intro scene where you, as a kid, talk to your mother, then after the little flashback you're lead in to the game proper, where you are attending a live game as an adult. The game is annotated with little footnotes in case you don't understand much about baseball, and seems to be full of minutiae if you are actually interested in baseball, like who individual players are and etc. As a historical study of a real event this is very cool and it probably was quite a feat to document a real game so completely as all this.

I solved the sequence of puzzles to get in to the stadium, which involves buying some fan shirts and then getting a ticket from the mysterious stranger that tells you to interfere with the game. I didn't get much further than this, though I did wander the stadium picking up unusual items.

The game indicates that you should buy a particular T-shirt before going in to the stadium, and then later on you get a marker that you can use to modify the shirt. If you try to go in to the stadium without this shirt, the game will warn you that you need it before proceeding, so that's fine. But since I couldn't figure out how to progress once I got in the stadium, and I was wandering aimlessly, I checked the walkthrough and there was apparently some other random item (a tape?) that I missed while I was solving puzzles outside.

I suppose it's entirely fair to include an old-fashioned cruel puzzle like this, if that's what you're going for. But I didn't have a save file before I had entered and at that point had already sunk quite a bit of time in to the game, so I was pretty disheartened to discover this. I guess I could say this one has some really neat tricks, and does its best to be user-friendly, but in some situations it isn't as user-friendly as it could be and there are puzzles that will force you to restart. On the other hand, you don't have to interfere with the game itself until sometime in the 6th inning, so you can probably spend quite a bit of time exploring outside and still manage to win? I personally didn't figure out how to get the ticket to enter until the baseball game had already started, which I think is built in to the design, but it never warned me about the tape, if that is indeed the thing I needed...

IF Comp 2011: The Hours

2011-11-03T17:24:00.000-07:00

This is a game about time travel. My review will contain swears this time!

The story in this one is so bad-ass! It's about this crazy conspiracy that's happening in a time travel "company," where people are involved using their own time-travel-created duplicates from the past and there's murder and intrigue and you're attacked by your own alternate self with a baseball bat. There is some serious Primer shit going on here!

....I... can't play the game! It literally lags for me. I got, specifically, to the point where the key NPC Evil Eric left you behind in his room to find a necklace he hid for his new conspiracy wife, and I guess he was doing something really computationally expensive off-screen because the game slowed to a crawl. It was taking like a minute to resolve each simple command.

I finally got bored waiting and checked the walkthrough to see how long it took Evil Eric to come back to the room, and the answer is apparently "quite a while!" But since the walkthrough turned out to be a transcript that contained the story, I read it... and I was intrigued, but I was having considerable technical problems with the actual game.

It's too bad, because, all things considered, I would've rather played this than read a transcript of it. The transcript was fairly normalized when it came to conversation options, but until I hit unbeatable lag, I was tending to choose the "none of the above" conversation choices that made my character in to a raving psycho. That amused me greatly.

Now this is one of those rare instances where I read a bunch of other reviews before posting my own, spoilers and all, because I wanted to see if other people experienced that technical problem or if it was just me. There was also a part that I figured was going to be controversial, and, it was! Specifically, the game lets you choose your gender after the first introduction scene, but it does so by offering you two items of clothing which are gendered. If you choose the dress, your character is female, and if you choose the suit you are automatically male. I personally prefer wearing a dress to a suit anyway, but obviously not everyone, especially in the IF community, is going to be comfortable with these enforced norms.

Anyway, I was really disappointed with the technical issues in this game, because the actual situation showed promise, but there were a lot of bits that felt buggy or under-implemented. Mainly, it was slow, good gravy. I have never played an IF game that was this slow to process basic commands (and no, I wasn't running anything intense in the background, and, I just got my computer fixed and there's nothing wrong with it).

IF Comp 2011: Professor Frank

2011-11-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

Untested and kind of messy.

The loose plot of the game is that you have to escape from a library in which you are trapped. Sudden deaths can happen, so the game gives you "rescues" that will nullify one of them, though there is a limited amount. The game seems, by some text, to be planned for beginners, but I think beginners would quickly get frustrated by it.

The game refers to your character in the third person, then insists on including him in the description of every room, like so:

Roof
The professor is up on the Library roof, high above the ground. The roof is covered with snow, and it is freezing cold. Behind him to the south is the elevator. To the west he can see another part of the roof.
Professor Frank is here.

Almost all things in the game are described by color, and only by color, so, for example, there is a Red Door and a White Door in the first room you start in. You can waste a "rescue" to unlock both of these doors, but it turns out the key to unlock the white door is behind the red door. I have no idea how I was supposed to intuit this (it's only mentioned if you check the hints for that specific area). The color situation also leads to fascinating ambiguities such as:

>drink blue
Which do you mean, the blue door, the blue drawer, the blue lever, the blue flask or the blue radio?

Puzzles make little sense: there is a crazy old woman who demands food, but trying to give her all the food items in my inventory met with no response/sudden death. Maybe I didn't have the right food item, but how would I guess this? There is a giant machine which is wacky whose purpose makes no sense nor does it have anything to do with getting out of the library.

And I know this is supposed to be wacky logic land, but, honestly, if the Rescue Squad comes to Rescue me when I fall off the roof, why do they put me back on the roof? Why not just take me home at that point? Honestly, you came all this way.

The game is apparently Scottish with a lot of Scottishisms, and any game where I can type "Eat the Haggis" can't be all bad, but this one mostly is.

IF Comp 2011: Death of Schlig

2011-11-01T20:45:00.000-07:00

OK, I'll be honest: I've been putting this one off. I clicked on it three times, but every time I was confronted with that so-wacky opening graphic, and kind of stared at it. Then I saw that the protagonist was another detective, but that the whole thing was going to be wacky monkey cheese antics, and, well... It just took me a while to feel like playing it.

After doing so:

I have no idea why the protagonist needed to be a detective. It could've easily just been some random Joe, except for that you get points for finding a jacket and fedora and putting them on, which didn't need to be in the game anyway. You actually start out the game as someone who works in a deli, which makes me think that really you just work in a deli and wish you were a detective. So if you just started out as "a guy who worked in a deli," and the detective part wasn't in the game, you lose nothing. ...For that matter, the deli doesn't really factor in either.

Anyway, the first room in the game has cheese and then later on a different room has cheese and you solve a puzzle using the cheese. But there's no monkey, so I was only half-right about the monkey cheese. Maybe the deli thing would've worked better if you brought the cheese with you from the deli, but you just randomly find it. Also, the Time To Crate on this IF is: two rooms.

Other stuff was sort of amusing, though, in that lol-random sort of way where you have a fart gun and you fuel a space ship with live kittens. The world the game describes makes no sense but definitely doesn't need to. The way the game is programmed causes some weird issues with item descriptions in a room, such as this bit with the metal tray:

Lab (on the operating table)
You are in a brightly lit medical lab. Rows of strange and unidentifiable medical instruments line the walls, as well as anatomy charts of no creature you've ever heard of... except for the human one. Against the back wall is a bunch of Zarconians. An alien Nurse is here, as well as an alien Doctor. They appear to be whispering to each other.

An automatic sliding door leads north.

It is a small metal tray. There are no tools on it just now.

You can also see a Nurse, a Doctor and a bunch of Zarconians here.

That is exactly the description that I see when I start out in this room.

Also, I can't attempt to talk to the doctor or nurse about anything, but if I Listen to them, suddenly the next cut-scene is triggered. When the game first started, I found it kind of annoying that solving puzzles didn't actually give me any agency, but rather, were just a matter of something to do to trigger the next cut-scene. When I finally started planning my daring escape from the aliens who could kidnap me, then I discovered the character could die, but of course that seems to be part of the point. This doesn't actually reset anything except your position in the area (even your inventory items remain after death), so it may be said to be a minor setback at most.

For some reason I kind of found it refreshing that hitting and shooting dudes (even if it is with an ice ray or fart gun) had an actual effect in this game instead of the default response. But the end result of the game is I kind of felt like I was trial-and-erroring my way through more than I should have. I didn't really end up taking advantage of what can be said the game's core mechanic, which is that you can stretch your eye out to view rooms ahead... because if you do die randomly from not looking ahead, it doesn't really limit you very much at all. Plus the deaths are probably the most completely written part of the game, so you should at least view one or two. They call to mind the old, elaborate Sierra-style deaths that Larry Laffer would sometimes have to endure.

IF Comp 2011: Fog Convict

2011-11-01T17:46:00.000-07:00

Sorry, this just isn't doing it for me.

Now apparently this has the same author as Blind, which I pretty much liked? Or else two authors just have the same name for some reason.

This game seems to involve a meticulous recreation of the college the author went to. When I loaded up the Feelie map, and saw the size of it, I figured I was headed for a rough time here, but I had no idea. Individual hallways of the dorm are created, room by room, and I have to wander tediously through all of them...

And that's as far as I got. The game starts out with the fire alarm going off, and you have to escape from your dorm room while on fire. But no other doors, including the front lobby or the clearly marked fire doors, seem to be opening for you to do so. You get an annoying prompt about the fire alarm every round, while you wander down confusing identical hallways.

And when the halls do have something unique to show for them, it's not implemented:

north hallway (by room 106)
This is the north hallway of Mabee Hall. A drinking fountain is built
into the south wall, beside the lobby door. The door to room 106 is to
the north, and the hall continues to the east and west.
The fire alarm beeps loudly.
> drink
What do you want to drink?
> water
I don’t know the word “water”.
> x fountain
I don’t know the word “fountain”.
> x drinking fountain
I don’t know the word “drinking”.

Because why the hell would it be? I got 16 more identical halls to write about.

I gave up pretty fast, and went to the walkthrough on this one, just to figure out how the heck I was supposed to get out of the dorm.

It tells me to pick up my homework paper from the first room, and use it to "open" the bathroom door. The prompting for this is extremely unclear. You don't get any indication that you can't open the door because it's too hot. In fact, the text you get looks like this:

> open bathroom door
It’s locked.
The fire alarm beeps loudly.
> open bathroom door with paper
The homework paper smolders a little, but you succeed in opening the
door before the heat becomes unbearable.
As you open the door, a wave of smoke pours over you, sending you
into a coughing fit and stinging your eyes and nose. Heat pours from
the bathroom, causing the air conditioning system to turn on.
The fire alarm beeps loudly.

I don't actually know what the plot of this game will turn out to be, but I can see from the walkthrough that you actually win by waiting five times! Since I can't skip to that part I'll just call it off here and move on.

IF Comp 2011: Calm

2011-11-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

I feel like this is a little big for a comp game, or maybe I'm just bad at it. I feel like I was progressing, but had no idea how far I was from the end before I hit my time limit. Other impressions after the jump.

This is a game about the post-apocalypse. The game allows you to choose your character's motivation and special skill, then drops you in to a survival scenario. Your starting situation depends on your motivation. It also lets you select difficulty, though what this actually affects is not clear. The major hook of the game is that your character can take on stress. As the character becomes stressed, spores in his/her immune system will slowly start to take over and kill you, so some way to manage the character's mood is necessary.

I played the game on Normal. My initial character choice was "find food and water" and "psychopath," but psychopath turned out to be not so useful as there was no way to "destress." After failing to make any progress I switched to the "researcher," "monk" setup, which seemed much easier to manage, since the monk can "meditate" to lower stress levels.

I also found a strange bug that allowed me to continually lower stress levels, though it may have just been a poorly documented feature. As the researcher, you can motivate yourself by going to the break room and making a cup of tea or hot chocolate. Later on in the game, you encounter a kitchen in a ruined restaurant, and I was somehow able to make livegiving destressing tea and chocolate there as well, even though the tea and other items aren't included in the room description.

There are a few unusual verbs, though sometimes they do not work right. I found this exchange really amusing:

>unclog
What do you want to unclog?

>drain
The drain isn't wearing any clogs!

I like the robustness of the game, and even though the post-apocalypse trope is well-worn, it has an interesting hook with the stress levels on the character. But it has some glitchy bits as you can see, and once I got to a certain point, near the end of my time with the game, I couldn't figure out what else to do or how to actually solve the game, or indeed how close I might have been to doing so. The area that you cover walking is really immense with lots of different rooms, and the way to navigate them is very circuitous. It's also often not clear what, if anything, in any given room allows an affordance. I can't really recommend it until it gets another pass for general playability.

IF Comp 2011: Keepsake

2011-10-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

Impossible to discuss without spoilering:

I kind of assume that the name of this game, Keepsake, is play on the name "Memento," which of course is a movie that told a story in the way similar to the way this game tells a story. I don't actually intend to spoil Memento, since most people know the part that's pertinent here: the primary conceit is the story is told backwards, which is how Keepsake goes about doing things, as well. So Keepsake is what you get when you put Memento in a thesaurus, and, make it interactive... kind of.

At the beginning of the game - which is actually the end - you have shot someone. Your actions from then on don't have much effect on the ending of the game, which is already in progress, but they do have an effect on your overall game score. The game will rate you on how nice of a person you were before you shot the person you shoot, but you have no control over the part where you shoot that person, which is played out for you. Basically, you play out the actions that you took up to that point, backwards, until the moment when the game starts (which is actually where the interactive part ends).

If that's confusing, go ahead and play it, because it really only takes a couple of minutes.

Now during play, what I found most confusing what I was and wasn't allowed to do at certain times. I spent a lot longer than I probably should have trying to pick up the angry old man's cane, which, as it turns out, you can't do. What you have to do is take a happy man's cane away from him, and put it on the ground, which creates the angry man. That's because that's the good action that you can take, played in reverse. When the game goes back and plays it in the right direction, you'll pick up the cane and give it to a grateful man. So after you puzzle this out, it makes a lot more sense what you're actually doing in the game, but until then I spent a lot of time typing "get cane" variations, and it's always a little irritating in IF when two items in a room are essentially the same and need an adjective to differentiate them. With this particular execution, there's no way around that.

I think as an experimental thing, it was all right. For some reason I felt a little hollow about the way it ended (began? no, ended.).

IF Comp 2011: Beet the Devil

2011-10-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

I might be running out of steam for how to evaluate puzzle games in my reviews. There are a lot of games this year!

This one was... okay! Although the theme of it is fairly well-worn, it had a nice little twist. The theme: solve puzzles based on the Seven Deadly Sins... the twist: ...using vegetables and a puppy. Mostly vegetables. But the puppy was really cute.

Anyway, nice execution, clever writing, good contextual hint system, multiple ways to lose. Cruel, in the sense that you can permanently lose an item that will help you to beat the game, but, fair, in the sense that it prompts you often if an action is going to be a bad idea, and also prompts you if the action you just took might block you out of completing the game (suggesting you should "undo"). Sometimes the game will hint that an action is a bad idea, but then nothing bad happens, but usually that's just for humorous intent.

The only room that really tripped me up was the next-to-last, with the devil's daughter, for which I had to use the walkthrough command, since I just couldn't figure out what action wasn't going to screw me out of completing the thing. I think that room was just more challenging than most of the others.

Anyway, definitely a good one to have played on Halloween.

...Wait, Halloween? That means I better get to finishing these reviews. It'll be over before I know it.

IF Comp 2011: Escape from Santaland

2011-10-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

A Christmas-themed puzzle game, this felt suitable for today, as it's snowing like a winter wonderland outside in October.

This is basically purely a puzzle exercise, but it's very user-friendly. I particularly liked that exits were flagged with where they lead after you passed through them once, making traveling around the area easy. The puzzle content is easily understandable when you encounter it, with key items queued by their descriptions. The puzzle was also rewarding in a not-too-easy, not-too-hard kind of way. Some people might find it too easy, really; I didn't have to resort to hints, and I feel like I do on many "hard puzzle" IFs.

I won't really spoil the puzzles at all, in case you'd like to try it, but I'd give it a recommendation if you're up for something lighthearted and newbie-friendly. It has kind of a fun, dry sarcasm in the writing and I didn't encounter bugs or problems while playing it.

IF Comp 2011: Cold Iron

2011-10-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

This is an interactive fairy story, of sorts.

It's pretty well-written, well-executed, and super short. It ends just as I was getting interested, really.

The game does have kind of a confusing conceit. You start out as one character, a country man who is interested and inspired by folk stories. Then at some point, without much explanation, you transition to a different avatar, who is the person who wrote down said stories. However, this happens only once, and you don't transition back, so I can't say it was all that useful as a framing device. If I had transitioned between the two of them a few more times this would have made more sense.

The end result is a game that feels good, but kind of unfinished. I checked the walkthrough after completing it just to be sure I didn't miss anything, since it really felt like there should be another chunk, but, nope, that's all there was!

IF Comp 2011: PataNoir

2011-10-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

I have time for one more today. There sure are a lot of detective games in this year's comp! Yes, I know I'm not the first person to notice this.

PataNoir is a detective game based on extended metaphors. The game is full of things that have (occasionally forced) metaphors applied to them, such as "his eyes are like a deep blue lake." You can interact with the metaphors like you would with actual objects, and dive in to the lake to see what is there.

Metaphorical things you find can be given to people to change their feelings about you or themselves. If you change someone's facial expression by applying a "warm" metaphor instead of a "cold" one, he'll be nicer to you, and that sort of thing. On the other hand, they can't affect the world otherwise. You can't cut someone with a figurative knife (but you can with the literal one). Switching around peoples' demeanor and the metaphors on objects are the only ways to really proceed in the game.

The game has an in-game hint system, and let me tell you, I leaned on it a lot. At first I thought the game was pretty easy. But later on, I found that the puzzles were kind of tricky and as the stakes raised, they got harder for me to figure out. That bothered me a little, but I'm not sure what the fix is. Between this one and "Earl Gr(e)y" two years ago, I'm convinced I'm just not good at this sort of wordplay style puzzle. I eventually resorted to the walkthrough so I could limp over the finish line in time to see the ending before I had to stop evaluating.

A really nice touch, if you finish the game, is that it implies that your character is just crazy, an unreliable narrator. I couldn't find much reference about the disease it claims you need medication for, but I only did a quick Google about it. My guess it has something to do with hallucinations, which is why you should be taking, but are apparently skipping, your medication.

Pretty enjoyable, that is, if you like wordplay and aren't burned out on noir by this point.

IF Comp 2011: Awake the Mighty Dread

2011-10-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

Now this was pretty cool, a sort of Steampunk fairy tale told from the eyes of a little girl who seems to be dreaming it. I'll spoiler-cut the rest just in case.

Your character here is a little girl. She has a white rabbit on her skirt, so for a second I thought I was due for another Alice in Wonderland story, but this actually seemed to have a unique setting with a steam train and a city full of robots. I like that; it's much easier to simply reference a story than to write your own, though this one did have some shades of Alice and the Wizard of Oz in it in part. Emily Short says it reminded her a little of His Dark Materials, and I definitely got that vibe too.

A big thing that this also has in common with The Golden Compass, along with a child protagonist and a steampunk setting, is that it just sort of ends in the middle. It seems to be part of a much larger and unfinished story. I would say as an intro, it's quite effective, but it's sad that it wasn't a self-contained unit. Perhaps it's just an epic, grand thing that would be too long for a single comp game.

A nice touch in this game is that you seem to be dreaming, but in the dream, if you "sleep" then you get a snippet of the real world, which doesn't seem so bright and cheerful for our protagonist. To return to the adventure, you "wake." This is implemented a bit strangely, with inventory items, but seems to work out OK.

There is also an NPC helper that you can carry with you, Hal the Robot Frog. The game is pretty fair about cuing you about things you can Ask Hal about, so that's nice, though the method you use to get him is a little odd. I didn't read the walkthrough, as I found the game more or less puzzle-free, but I got Hal by typing "Hello, Hut," at which point it said I was talking to Hal (without explaining yet who Hal was).

Also, it seems kind of weird that I just walk off away from the Robot Queen, but I can't talk to her and it's not immediately clear that she's a hostile entity.

Not perfect. But it has potential.

If Comp 2011: Luster

2011-10-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

This one is pretty underwhelming, but I played it for over an hour anyway. It's kind of the opposite of Cana According to Micah. I could tell that one was "good," but it wasn't really "fun," whereas I found this one sort of interesting, but it isn't actually good.

Luster is a basic treasure hunt. Your goal is pretty clear: to get a bunch of gems scattered around the environment. The environment is sparsely implemented, poorly written, and though the game is supposed to be based around puzzles they really are very beginner-level and not super clever at all. The room descriptions are so sparse and contain so little information in the way of environmental objects, that it will shock you how few of those objects are actually implemented.

Also, a default response for x me (boo).

>x me
As good-looking as ever.

>i
You're carrying Letter.

>read letter
You read:
Dear ,

Welcome to *Luster* an interactive fiction story. In this story, you will progress through countless traps and challenges. If you feel stuck, remember to try examining everything and think in new perspectives.

-The Author

Dear who? Who AMMM I? Existential dread!

Other quirky stuff: a battle where you have "hit points" all the sudden. A machine that is necessary to mix two fluids, but which is extremely arcane to interact with ("open machine" doesn't work, "put dye in machine" doesn't work, etc), and a maze, of the "twisty little passages all alike" variety.

I got three out of the required four gems in the story before I decided no, this really was a waste of time. That's probably more than I should've gotten, but I guess I was genuinely curious about the gems, so a few points in this one's favor? (Those points are then subtracted by the addition of a maze.)

Basically it fails entertainingly.

IF Comp 2011: Cana According to Micah

2011-10-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

This is a well-done piece, a retelling of a Biblical story: specifically, the wedding where Jesus turns water to wine, but interactive. The verb implementation is great, there's some nice NPC interaction, clear writing, and multiple paths to victory.

It didn't really grab me much, though, which I blame entirely on the theme. I confess I'm not much of a Bible scholar, and maybe if I was, I'd have gotten more out of it. I leaned on the hints a lot while playing it, but almost purely out of laziness. It can be a little confusing if multiple characters in the same room are named Mary, but, hey, it's the Bible, I guess that's just how it goes.

I would say that it's pretty good, but just not for me. If you're really in to Bible stories though you might want to give it a go.

New Article on Tap

2011-10-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

If you enjoy the writing I've done about games in general, you might enjoy this little feminist editorial I wrote today for Tap Repeatedly! It's about Halloween.

If you don't enjoy that, well, then... stay tuned for more IF Comp reviews a bit later!

If Comp 2011: The Guardian

2011-10-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

I got through this one in about 15 minutes. That, I guess, is if you don't count the five solid minutes I stared at the first room thinking, "What is my goal here?"

The Guardian is a game where you wander across fantasy landscapes while pining for your lost love. The goal of the game is to cross across all of that, pick up an item, and drop it in a place close to the room you started from. I managed to walk exactly to the right place and do the right thing without any digressions or wrong paths. The goal isn't super well-cued by the game, but it does have pieces of broken blue marble in one room and a larger piece in the other, so it made sense to match them, and it's not really very easy to stray off the path that it gives you. The task done, the game said that I won, which felt pretty abrupt. I was left feeling.... "Wait, is that it?"

The game says I scored 90 out of 100 points. That isn't so much through puzzle solving or cleverness. The game just drops big amounts of points on you for doing basically nothing, including entering rooms. I didn't really want to go back for the other 10 points, but I did anyway just for completion's sake and they are also just for entering rooms off of the main "quest."

If I sound unimpressed, I guess I was! The only thing that that seemed to make this a game rather than just something I read, is not having any idea what my goal was when it first fired up. To me not really knowing what my motivation is, other than vague reminiscence, is not interesting. I also thought the prose was a bit purple at times.

I guess it's just really hard to make me care about the past relationship between two kind of non-specific people. However, the game is technically fine.... I might drop the points system, since it really doesn't add anything and in fact confusedly detracts at times. If the game is supposed to be about exploring it feels strange to drop points on you for places you should be motivated to go on your own.

If Comp 2011: It

2011-10-22T15:29:00.000-07:00

So it's kind of unfortunate that I played Six before playing It, since they have a really similar premise. Go and play hide and seek with friends. It, however, has less friends, less cute stuff, and is shorter.

I don't really think it's a spoiler to say that the hiding place of the person you have to find in It isn't randomized, so, once you've found her during a playthrough, find her again, and win. You can wander around and ignore the game of hide-and-seek, if you want, but I'm not sure to what end.

There's nothing obviously broken in the game and the NPCs seem to be fairly smartly programmed. It's just a little unfortunately similar to another game that had more going on.

IF Comp 2011: Sentencing Mr Liddell

2011-10-20T10:56:00.000-07:00

The following review contains spoilers, violence, and bad language.

I'm a big fan of Alice In Wonderland -- the book, that is -- as well as the sequel with which it is often conflated, Through the Looking Glass. Unfortunately, it always seems to lose something in its transitions to other forms of media, and Sentencing Mr Liddell is no exception. It's easy to reference Alice sloppily, so, credit is due: The game at least seems to be written by someone who has read the books, as opposed to someone who just caught a run of Care Bears in Wonderland on the Disney Channel.

I sometimes look over Emily Short's reviews, like most other people interested in the comp, but not past the spoiler space until I've played the game myself. So going in, I knew there was a point in the game where she felt offended, and had to stop, but didn't know for sure what that part would be.

When I got there, I was then pretty sure I knew. Turns out in this game that you have to hit a pig, and this pig is used as a stand-in for your character's two-year-old child. Emily, and others, did not want to be complicit in this act, but saw no way around it. I, however, as I have previously discussed, am a horrible person in video games. So, Sentencing Mr Liddell, I am your woman. Hand me that squealing pig, so I can slap the shit out of it.

Now if you get all the way through the game, the endgame tips tells you there is, apparently, some other way to handle the screaming pig-baby. Given that I had a save right before making that choice (I'm not that heartless), I went back to try the scene a different way. It made sense that this might be a pivotal choice in the game, since the game doesn't start giving you the magic words that allow you to complete it until after you've hit the pig and sent it running off.

But try as I might -- and I did, until my time was up -- I could not find an alternate solution for the pig, and the game does not hint towards one in the slightest. I tried singing to it, as you might to a crying baby, but it was not responsive. I tried hugging it, kissing it, patting it, and any other verb I could think of, but the game replied that the pig was unresponsive toward any affection no matter how persistent I was. I tried handing it off to others, who wanted nothing to do with it. I tried walking back and forth through the cabin, but that also didn't silence it, and beyond a certain point the game would force me to drop it.

I even went back to my hard copy of Alice to see what she did with the pig baby, but this was unhelpful, because she actually just let it go. She first tried to nurse it, apparently, but the game doesn't recognize this verb. I'll admit that passage always confused me as a kid, anyway. Surely Alice isn't old enough to breastfeed the baby, but it's not clear if she picks up a bottle first, and she doesn't seem to have one when she sets the baby down. Either there must be a bottle involved, even though one isn't explicitly mentioned, or else this is some other sense of nursing that I don't understand.

I digress. This is an interesting game if you can get past the child abuse part, but there are some annoyingly obtuse bits like the tea party. There's also a fiddly puzzle where you have to drop all your stuff, leave the train you're on, go collecting again, then go back for your old stuff, but the game doesn't recognize "get all" and makes you pick everything up manually. The word puzzle that the game's end centers around treats "us" and "we" as the same word, but "live" and "life" as two different words, and this is confusing.

So while it didn't, personally, exceed my threshold for protagonist douchebaggery, there were lots of little bits I just wasn't so enthusiastic about. If you manage to figure out how to get a happy ending in this one, let me know.

IF Comp 2011: Six

2011-10-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday was kind of a bucket of fail, for me personally. What does the random game order generator pick for me today?

... Oh. Well, this is quite nice, isn't it? It starts up with some cute art of a girl in a fairy costume, and instructs me that it will utilize music and color. It's got a little "Feelie" map, which you can view inside the game as well as outside. It's so far from the implementation of Vestiges, where almost nothing even worked, that the contrast is startling.

Spoiler tags for the rest:

I really liked it, overall. It's not really a deep premise, just the idea that you have to play hide and seek with your friends, and then that's the end of your birthday party. Each friend is in a costume, and each friend has a different trick you have to use to tag them. If you manage to succeed, you get to play the game as a different girl, the twin of the original girl (who is in a witch costume). Throughout the game, there's little musical interludes and sound effects to keep it entertaining.

I think it might at least partially be designed for kids as well as about them, so I'm a little embarrassed to say it took me a while to figure out how to get Jack, the kid dressed as Spider-Man. It only clicked for me when I realized you could pick up the leaves while he was still in the room they're in, which, maybe is pretty sad if the game is designed for a six-year-old. Because of this, I didn't get all the way through the second sister's game, but what I saw of it was cute and answered my questions about the stuff in the first game that seemed to be strange but unexplained.

Another thing amusing about this one for me personally was the Australia-isms. You put margarine on white bread, then sprinkles, and that's the treat you give kids? Huh. I had to locate an Australian friend to confirm this wackiness. Then he showed me some amazing Australian food commercials.

This game comes highly recommended if you like whimsy and are interested in learning the bizzare ins and outs of Australian children's birthday parties.

By the way, if any Australians read this review so far, "Hide and Seek Tip" is the only way I ever played Hide and Seek as a kid. I didn't even realize there was some variant where you didn't have to tag the other kids after finding them. Make of that what you will.

IF Comp 2011: Vestiges

2011-10-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

Man. Maybe I was too hard on the last two games. This one is a triumph of bad implementation.

Some highlights:

>x me
As good-looking as ever.

Hm, always a good sign.

You can also see a wooden doors here.
>open wooden door
You can't see any such thing.
>open wooden doors
You open the wooden doors.

Right then. "A" wooden doors.

>open altar with shovel
With a satisfying crunching sound, the lid slides off and onto the floor. Inside is a sword, all but glowing in the near blackness. It looks sharp, perhaps sharp enough to cut through even metal...?
You unlock the stone altar.
>get sword
You can't see any such thing.
>x sword
You can't see any such thing.

Setting aside the absurdity of not hiding the "unlock" message, I can't Get Sword until I Open Altar even though the description of unlocking the altar includes the action of opening it.

And then my favorite:

>x tombstone
The inscription is long faded, and the stone looks ready to crumble at the slightest touch. However, you notice a glinting something next to it.
The cat blinks twice and says " Meow."
>get glinting something
You can't see any such thing.
>x something
You can't see any such thing.
>x glinting thing
You can't see any such thing.
>x glint
You can't see any such thing.

Note to the author: here is where I gave up. I would have consulted the walkthrough, but I got an empty file when I tried to download it.

So this is also My First Interactive Fiction, except without any bug-checking... I can understand if you're just trying to learn Z-Code, but please test a game before submitting it to the Comp. I know, I clicked, so I got what I asked for, but the game seemed to have a nice idea in there somewhere.

IF Comp 2011: Last Day of Summer

2011-10-19T17:27:00.000-07:00

Here's another meh one I don't have much to say about. Sure are glad you're reading my reviews today, aren't you?

This one doesn't have any major problems, but sort of feels like My First Interactive Fiction. The puzzles are easy and it's extremely short. It doesn't have too exciting of a character voice or setting.

It's competently executed enough; nothing seemed broken, but it's just nothing special.

If Comp 2011: Return To Camelot

2011-10-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

When I first booted up this game, I thought that it seemed to have an interesting premise. The main character is a detective who was, apparently, sent on a crazy adventure to Camelot, then whisked back to his home world after saving the kingdom! Now having to deal with boring, ordinary reality, how will he cope?

I thought it might be really interesting to explore the premise of someone who gets sucked into another dimension on a magical adventure then just has to re-learn how to live in the regular world and get a job. Only in IF, am I right? ... But, no, it really isn't Return From Camelot, it's just Return To Camelot, and, we'll be going back.

That happens soon enough that I don't consider it a spoiler, and from there, the game sort of played as if it were a sequel to a game I hadn't played before. The premise and setting didn't actually grab me that much, despite fairly competent execution, and, up until the point of "departure" your actions in the real world are on rails. I don't have that much more to say about it, sorry to say!

IF Comp 2011: Andromeda Awakening

2011-10-16T10:03:00.000-07:00

Is it my fault I couldn't figure out what to do in this game? I narrowly completed it in two hours, but only after resorting to the walkthrough when I hit a literal wall.

More after the jump.

This is a game about an apocalyptic disaster. In the tradition of a disaster movie, you play the Guy Who Knows, where you are traveling to the government to report your findings. This disaster is not about to destroy the Earth, but, instead, it's about to destroy the alien planet on which all of humanity now lives.

Andromeda Awakening is a large, sprawling game made up of a lot of rooms you have to travel through. The proper game doesn't start for a few rooms. First, you have to solve a fairly small puzzle about how to get on a train, then the train experiences a disastrous wreck. Once the train has wrecked, you're more free to move about. The game really seems to rush you through these earlier screens, and doesn't really open up until after the disaster. This makes the beginning somewhat rough, but given that the Hero's Journey must first establish the rules of the Ordinary World, it's logical enough to have a short intro before the meat of the thing.

The prose is nicely lyrical in some places, but a little purple in others. (I'm given to understand that some of the bumpiness here is because the game was originally written in Italian.) It employs some awkwardly large object words and awkward sci-fi words on occasion. There's an E-pad which you can "consult" about various confusing terms that you might find.

Once you're underground, the game plays a lot like a traditional video game might play. Its variety of level design includes lots of boiling magma rooms, a cold room with an icicle, and plenty of destroyed computer labs. I believe it would be very lovely in the Unreal Engine, where the occasionally-confusing prose descriptions might be easily converted in to genuine, detailed artwork. Add some cool aliens to shoot or something and maybe a gravity glove like in Dead Space and you'd have a nice vertical slice demo.

At one point late in the game I have to Examine a Parallelepipedon. I have a pretty big vocabulary, but that did not look like a real word to me. Turns out it is, just a hard word to spell and type in to a parser.

That being said, I did not make it that far in to the game without hitting the walkthrough. The bumpy point for me was about an hour in where all I was hitting was dead ends and I just couldn't figure out where to go. What happens is, you get a small computer from a black box, and you have to come up with the idea to put this computer on every blank wall that you find to, I guess, scan for holes? The game doesn't strongly hint that this is how the computer object is used. But I sort of felt bad I needed help here, like this is my fault and I missed something. I really don't know how I feel about this at all, in terms of how to rate the game.

Unfortunately the walkthrough is a slippery slope, and once looking at it an hour in I consulted it a lot more than I would like so that I could see the whole game in the two hour limit. I wanted to know how it ended. It ends, for the record, like the movie 2001, complete with "My God, It's Full of Stars," but minus the floating space baby.

I don't know how I feel about that, either. I guess I feel that the game was middling; it had some strong parts, and was solidly implemented, but at times it's confusing. It represents a certainly valid use of the medium, to replicate a more standard game experience, but that's really not my favorite sort of use of the medium.

On the other hand, if the author might want to pad it out with some aliens and laser combat, maybe a silent protagonist with glasses and a beard, he could have a hit.

IF Comp 2011: Blind

2011-10-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

I've never subscribed to the idea that blindness in and of itself is some kind of amazing superpower. Blindness is part of the power suite of Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, because he was hit by the toxic chemical that fell off the truck and gave him super hearing and touch and echolocation and whatnot. I also created a blind psychic in City of Villains, mostly inspired by the game's amazing variety of different blindfolds in costumes. I am not blind myself, so I can't really claim to identify with what it's like to live with blindness. But the idea that being blind, by itself, somehow makes you a superhero with your other senses has always stuck me as kind of a patronizing cliche.

So I was fully prepared to feel patronized by Blind, this year's IF Comp entry where you play as a blind protagonist. I was surprised that I wasn't. Your character is in fact blind, but this is a pretty interesting use of IF as a medium, since in portraying the protagonist this way it's doing something a standard video game couldn't easily do. In my opinion, doing things graphical games can't do (as opposed to, say, fighting zombies) is a big part of the point of IF and I have to give the author credit for this experiment.

I don't think the rest of my review is terribly spoilery, but I'll cut anyway as a courtesy if you don't want to be spoiled by the rest of the premise.

Aside from the twist with the protagonist, the game is a somewhat-basic horror scenario, solidly executed. There's a few little weird Easter Eggs and apparently a couple different ways to win. I wasn't able to figure out the more complex endings the game hints at, but I still finished it two different ways.

There was one line, early on, that I did wince at, something like "you'll show people blindness isn't a handicap!" which made me think it was going down "blindness is a super power" territory. Mostly however it seems to be a pretty honest portrayal, or at least, as far as I can imagine. I liked seeing lines like "the room sounds small," since, well, yes, that makes sense, if you think about what it means to be able to hear the size of a room, and this is a nice descriptor. Also, having to reverse-engineer how you'd do certain tasks without being able to see them is pretty interesting.

The game offers up a fairly disturbing kidnapping scenario (that's not really a spoiler so much as the opening line), and so it may be a little distressing for some. It's possible to die in the game and you definitely feel a sense of helplessness in parts. I found this effective. It wasn't graphic, but I'm pretty hardened to that kind of stuff and I suppose you'd want fair warning to skip it if the horror scenario, with the restraints and the tables, is going to distress you.

IF Comp 2011: How Suzy Got Her Powers

2011-10-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

I had no technical problems with the game, and it's easy and short.

This game is stated to be part of a larger work, and though there's a couple ways, it seems, to solve the situation presented by the game, all routes lead to the same ending, with a different score. To say much more would be spoilery, but I haven't got a lot more to say about it. It's really short. It's obviously a labor of love from the creator and part of his interactive text game magnum opus in some meaningful way, but it didn't feel like a complete game in and of itself.

IF Comp 2011: The Elfen Maiden

2011-10-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

The title of this one may make it seem like a fantasy game, but the subtitle is "A Comedy of Error Messages." It's about fantasy in the context of an MMORPG, and you play the game as an intelligence resting inside someone's computer.

Edit: Since I played this last, it apparently got a big update, which includes changing the name. So "A Comedy of Error Messages" is now the name of the game. That's interesting.

Spoilers/review:

I liked it! It's very cleverly written. But it might need another pass in a few key areas:

"x me" is one of the first things I like to do in these games, and in this case, I got the default message when doing so. Boo.
The inventory implementation is a little odd. It's clever that you carry your emotions around with you as objects, and can't drop them, but a little annoying that my "sense of uneasiness" bothers me every single round until I finally make it go away.
There's a timed task early on in the game, which will end the game if you don't complete it fast enough. It requires a bit of leap of logic, and the timing on it is really tight - a bit too tight in my opinion for something which isn't necessarily intuitive.
Using compass directions to move around inside a computer is an interesting abstraction, but... kinda weird as well. I understand moving "up" and "down" to change around servers. But "east" and "west"? I guess this isn't really a polish thing, just something I didn't understand.

Now all that being said, I thought the game was cute and fun. I got what I'm pretty sure was the best ending, the three-point ending where you make two individual love connections as the meddling computer. The references to internet memes were entertaining, but the game wasn't over-saturated with them. Some people might find the initial premise of the game homophobic, but I don't think the entire game reads that way, largely depending on what ending you get. And I always like a game with a possibility of multiple endings and some fun little side-tracks to explore.

Second Edit: The game now seems to allow you to choose your sexuality, which might bypass that problem.

IF Comp 2011: The Myothian Falcon

2011-10-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

Short version: I kind of wanted to root for this game, because it tells a good yarn and the setting is interesting, but it's got too many technical problems.

Long version:

I actually liked the setting of this game and the way it's set up. It's a standard noir detective story about an affair and a murder, but set on another planet. The outer space and futuristic elements are introduced gradually, so you get used to the idea of there being green people and teleporters. If you're going to have weird elements in your game setting, this is a nice way of going about it: setting it in a backdrop of a genre that's otherwise more down-to-earth.

I also liked that there's a wide variety of female characters in this game with different jobs and roles in the game. There are male NPCs, but many of the NPCs who fill critical roles are women. You can also ask almost all of them out, as far as I could tell, though only one would actually agree. This is an idea I love for a detective game (or, really, lots of games. Flirt with all the womens!). But, alas, it seems to have come at the expense of women answering more objective-related questions that I would otherwise like to ask them. For example, I can ask my client, Maisy, if she'd consider going out with me, but I can't seem to figure out the syntax for telling her I found out her husband had an affair. Guessing which topics certain people will discuss with you is an exercise in frustration.

I played this game for the full two hours, but wasn't able to finish it. I was really giving it an honest shot at solving it without the help files and walkthroughs, and it seemed straightforward. But when, after about an hour and a half, I realized I hadn't figured out how to end this thing, I consulted the help files in the game, I discovered that a game-critical clue - a matchbook with an address - wasn't even mentioned in the room description of the place it was found, and wasn't located in a particularly obvious place. However, I needed it to move on with the game.

Later, once I got the titular artifact (the method by which you have to do this isn't terribly obvious, and to me felt more like guesswork than real detective work), a critical bug rendered the game still-unfinishable within the time limit. I was trying to show the artifact to my detective partner, Munroe, and ended up handing it to her. She immediately says she's going to go and return it to its rightful place - okay - and then walks off. The Falcon, however, doesn't leave my inventory, so I can hand it to other people as well. I left the bar where Munroe was sitting, and came back to discover she was gone. I couldn't hand her the rest of my notes, and I couldn't figure out how to get Maisy out of jail. Despite that, I could also hand Maisy the Falcon... she would claim that she was ready to give it back, also, but she was still trapped in jail so it seemed pretty unlikely she would do this.

I screencapped a few other weird things, just for fun:

Kind of a pity overall. This game has some real potential to be a fun story but needed more beta testing. I would also maybe suggest an editor to go back over the writing and remove repetitive turns of phrase to give individual characters better individualized voices.

IF Comp 2011: Tenth Plague

2011-10-09T18:36:00.001-07:00

No spoilers on this one, short review. It's a Biblical game, and not the only one in the comp apparently!

All I otherwise have to say about it is that I'm too desensitized for its intended inherent horror to have much of an emotional effect on me. But it's cleanly executed otherwise.

Spoiler tags

2011-10-09T08:34:00.001-07:00

By the way, just a reminder that if you're reading my blog on an RSS reader, the spoiler cuts do nothing. So be careful about that.

If Comp 2011: The Binary

2011-10-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

I actually played this yesterday, but I had to sleep on it because I wasn't sure how I felt about it. My initial impression was kind of lukewarm, but, when I started playing a little I realized that this game had plenty of elements that were really up my alley. In spite of that, however, it didn't blow me away, and I've determined after some introspection that most of the problems I had with it were on the implementation side. Those problems are best discussed beneath a spoiler tag.

The game's story is a bit like Rematch, the eleven-year-old Xyzzy award winner that I love like a brother, if my brother were a puzzle game utilizing a complex text parser. In The Binary you are trapped in a narrow time loop; it repeats itself after a certain number of turns and after those turns pass you must start over to prevent a disaster from happening. You can carry knowledge that you gained on previous trips through the loop in order to utilize it your next time around, and it is necessary to do this in order to win. I really love the concept here and the element of being able to reuse the clues you picked up, which stay in a "mental" inventory of sorts on the left hand side of the screen.

But the game loses me, not because that particular methodology is too high-concept, but because the disaster I'm trying to prevent is also high-concept, and my origin and back-story are high-concept. David Cage said he learned from his game, Fahrenheit, that you get one, and only one, weird thing. Beyond one weird thing, you're losing the audience's suspension of disbelief. So, in The Binary, the weird thing is obviously that I'm trapped in this time loop, and I'm willing to accept that. However...

It's not apparently me exactly who is trapped; I'm a time-travelling spirit in the body of a homeless man, which goes back to the place of origin every time the loop resets. This place is some kind of monastery or floating city in the mountains, where I have flashbacks about my father telling me how time works (four balls on the edge of a cliff). My name may, or may not, be Jonathan. There is someone called that (perhaps the Zach to my York) who occasionally tells me that I screwed up, making it less clear who I am. Later in the game, if you take a certain path, he then totally takes over for you and does things on your behalf, making me wonder why I (who am I in this game exactly?) was ever involved in the first place. Is this like, my lesson and initiation in to the time-travelling monastery? In which case, why would my initiation be some kind of crucial flux point in the universe rather than something minor?

...Because the thing I'm supposed to prevent is an assassination, but it's not entirely clear of whom, other than a man in a parade with a huge hologram. And the huge hologram throws me off. I think that we're supposed to accept the setting as a Blade-Runner-like cyberpunk sort of universe where guys have huge holograms, but since the cyberpunk-ness never otherwise factors in, it's a confusing red herring that a big hologram exists at all. Presumably these aspects of the setting come in to play in prequels or sequels, but if you can't make your game stand on its own and still hold together, maybe IF Comp isn't quite right for it, even if it gets more people to play and talk about it.

Finally, I was kind of disappointed by what I had to do, because it's not really clear that you have to look at the hotel window in round one to set all the events of the game otherwise in motion. I got stuck many times entering the hotel by various means and then not knowing what to do from there. Your character will never open a hotel window from the inside, unless he noticed an open window from the outside, and that seems frustratingly arbitrary after you've determined that there is a sniper in previous time loops. When I finally gave up, and checked the hints area at the bottom, it not only mentions that but tells you the solution for the entire game without ramping it up for you slowly or guiding you to it.

Nice concept, would've benefited from more editing and tighter testing.

IF Comp 2011: Taco Fiction

2011-10-08T22:11:00.000-07:00

I see what you're doing here, Taco Fiction.

By having the protagonist shake a lot with uncertainty, wibbling to himself every time he has to pull out his unloaded gun, you're trying to tell me that he is not, in fact, a complete douchebag, just a desperate guy who is down on his luck and left without another choice in his own mind.

Unfortunately, Taco Fiction, I am a complete douchebag, at least when I play video games. So I robbed the girl at the ice cream shop for all the spare change in her drawer. I then solved the rest of the game and, after checking "Amusing," realized I'd probably locked myself out of the best ending.

Oh well, at least my rent is paid! I will sleep fine tonight!

A fun game, I liked it a lot. The game had a cute voice with lots of cheeky lines. I checked out the hints file after finishing it, and even that has some funny bits.

I noticed one technical problem, which is that if you try to get the dagger while you are outside the locked Honda, the game will state that the dagger is part of the window. My, that was an odd sentence.

IF Comp 2011: Dead Hotel

2011-10-08T20:08:00.000-07:00

Spoilers, in the form of screenshots.

... huh. Really?

Oops, I died. So let's try that again.

Right then.

Oh, I found a gun. So, um...

Great! Sure. That fat bastard!!

Awesome.

There must be some hidden depth to this, some clever bit that I am too dumb or drunk to understand. I guess that wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

But otherwise, let's be perfectly clear. If I wanted to play a game where I fought some zombies, with no drama or pathos - and I don't, I really don't; I am so over it - I would play pretty much every other game that exists, even some that aren't actually about zombies. There is no reason for this one to exist.

IF Comp 2011: Operation Extraction

2011-10-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

So, I figured since I started on the bottom of the games list with the web-only games, I may as well continue that trend and work my way up from there. This particular game then comes up next on the list. At the very top it says there were no beta testers for it, which is kind of like a Hollywood movie that doesn't screen for the critics: not a great sign. One wonders why he'd be so proud of that fact as to put it at the top of the screen like that. Nevertheless, I'll continue.

Potential spoilers:

I think some beta testers would have helped.

The premise here is that a somewhat-typical secret agent scenario, involving extraction of a kidnapped researcher, is happening in the world. You have the opportunity to affect this scenario, but in a very limited fashion, by using text cues to jump around between different parts of the environment. I guess it's a little like Night Trap, except without the panties or controversy.

You can fail the mission, which seems to reliably happen on Turn 46 if you don't change the scenario. It's really not clear why, at first, because I was always observing something else when I got the "Mission Failed" message at Turn 46.

I was able to solve the scenario eventually, mostly by following the various agents around until I hit choice points, then choosing different options from the bottom. To solve the game I spent more time just clicking back and forth between the agents' names, on the left side of my screen, than actually exploring the world as presented, since only the agents could solve the kidnapping. When I finally did win (at the cost of an agent), I didn't feel particularly rewarded by this act, since I didn't have much reason to be invested. The problem with the format is that I have no real reason - as an outside observer - to root for the secret agents in the first place.

An interesting experiment, I guess, but it would've benefited from some testing, and having some characters in it.

IF Comp 2011: The Play

2011-10-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

The first game I played was Deirdra Kiai's The Play. My review of this one will be short and spoiler-free for a few reasons:

It's hard to top the depth of Emily Short's review and the discussion that takes place there about the game thematically (though that will spoil)
I already know I like the author and her previous works so I was kind of primed to like this one
You have no excuse not to play it yourself. It's short, simple, doesn't involve downloading a parser and doesn't involve learning any new vocabulary or typing. Just point and click!

I myself played it three times in a short span, and got three different endings. When I got the ending that satisfied me the most (with just a hint of romance) is when I stopped. But I know there have got to be several more beyond that.

So, in short, a one-room game with multiple endings, a distinct protagonist, and fun NPCs. This is a game I'll probably direct Interactive Fiction beginners to in the future and a fun way to start off the comp!

Time again for IF!

2011-10-08T06:29:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned on Tap-Repeatedly, the Interactive Fiction competition has started up again. I'll post some (probably short, given my other commitments, but who knows) impressions of the new games here, like I did two years ago when I judged. Stay tuned!

City of Heroes Freedom Preview

2011-09-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

Today on Tap I wrote too many words about City of Heroes Freedom. Probably not as contemplative as many other things I've written, just a taste of a game that's kept me occupied for a surprisingly long time.

Edited just to add: I should probably mention I do spoil the end of an early in game mission. I felt it was important enough to discuss but maybe don't read if you're sensitive to that.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out - On Being a Grown-Up Geek

2011-09-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

This week, bloggers all over the internet were encouraged to write blog posts about their geeky hobbies and interests, in a movement called "Speak Out With Your Geek Out." I wanted to participate, but of course I write about something geeky every time I write. I could have, in theory, written a new entry every day on some geeky topic, but, earlier this week, I was too busy:

Teaching a writing class
Getting my car repaired
Playing the Legend of Zelda
Reading and posting in game related and comic book related internet forums
Baking the second apple pie of the fall season
Unwrapping UVs, so many UVs
Having dinner at the bar with co-workers
Doing first drafts of a small variety of video-game-related editorials and reviews
Playing City of Heroes
Cooking general meals and keeping the apartment clean

...engaging in a variety of both geek-related and non-geek-related pursuits.

I'm in a different environment this fall than I was this time last year. I'm teaching general college students, most of whom are not self-described geeks. In teaching games in specific, I had gotten used to being around gamer-geeks almost all of my time, but now I'm spending more time around adults (both younger and older than I am) that don't necessarily share my passions.

Women my age sometimes ask me what I do, and I tell them. What I've discovered is that, when the topic of video games comes up, their first point of comparison is their children - specifically, their sons. I had one woman mention to me that her daughter likes games. The rest of the women mention male children: either, oh, my son really likes those, or, oh, I don't let my boys play them. Our point of comparison is something that I do as an adult that translates to something that their little boys want to do, but aren't allowed to do. The topic of conversation then moves elsewhere.

There's a certain conflation of "geek pursuits" with "child pursuits," and sometimes the line becomes hard to draw. Is the man, or woman, with a home full of comic book and animation art, and shelves of games and toys, an avid, discerning collector, or a stunted child who never learned how to grow up? Whichever it may be, that person is me. Even as a child, I knew I wanted to be a geeky adult, because geeky adults were the cool adults, who liked the things I liked.

But all around the internet this week I'm also finding little pools of disconnect. Is Ocarina of Time not the world of enchantment and wonder I was lead to believe? Should we just give up on Star Wars? ...Am I just getting too old for video games?

My geek students were sometimes puzzled that I really dislike shonen anime. Stuff like Bleach, or Naruto. I find it formulaic, repetitive, and full of padding. Of course, the reason they like it, and I don't, is that it's not for me. That stuff is for kids. ... And, well.... wait, what?

I believe it's possible to hold the opinion that some things targeted at kids can equally be enjoyed by adults, while other things targeted at kids, I just won't like because I'm not a kid. Other people my age sometimes are shocked by just how geeky I am, while others are right there with me. Some adults, however, will always be confused by an adult interest in geek things, because of the strong crossover between geek things and child things. They "grew out of" stuff I feel I'm only now learning how to appreciate. But whatever your case, balance is needed. I believe there is great value, still, in geek-like (child like) things, and also value in having the relationships that an adult has.

Finding the balance is something that geeks like myself still struggle with. Sometimes we even lash out or feel ashamed, justifying to the extreme about why our interests should be valued. But if you find the balance and are comfortable with who you are and what you like, nerd rage isn't necessary. And you can probably find lots of common ground with people who don't have the same interests as you, too.

I've found that a few of my gamer friends this fall are doing fantasy football pools. That kind of surprised me for a little, since I'm used to talking with them about giant robots or video game design. Compared to that, fantasy football is so... normal, so culturally acceptable, such a regular-guy thing to do.

But kind of geeky.

I'm a Contributor at Tap-Repeatedly

2011-09-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

So after my guest editorial at Tap-Repeatedly, I was invited to come back and do more frequent contributions on the site. This is fun for me, because Tap has a great community of people who are super cool!

http://www.tap-repeatedly.com

That is not to say I won't post stuff here too, but any longer editorials or articles will probably end up over on that site instead, so do check it out if you've liked my writing here so far. I may also include previews, con reports, or... actual game reviews, which I've never really written before but I will probably be putting my own personal spin on. Hopefully I'll be able to put up official reviews of whatever game I'm playing at the time. I'm also thinking about doing retro-reviews of some older games I think are criminally under-rated. There may be some surprises there. It should be fun!

Assorted Thoughts While Playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

2011-09-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

I would've bought this sooner if Nintendo had dropped it to twenty bucks sooner. I don't have "Wiimote Plus," though, so I may have to spring for the Gold Edition of Skyward if I get it.
Anyway, Twilight Princess. ...It's kind of Furry, isn't it? With the "Blue-eyed Beast" pet name, and howling instead of using the Ocarina to make songs?
Not that I'm discriminating; some of my best friends are furries.
And other than that, it's kind of Ocarina again, only updated and T-rated. Which is fine; who doesn't like Ocarina?
A re-run from my Twitter yesterday: It's really romantic that Link can ride all night, until the moon sets and dawn kisses the horizon (with a lovely combination of pink and blue light). But doesn't he need to sleep, ever? It would be convenient if there was a bed in his house, or somewhere, so that he could sleep there. Not just for Link's sanity, but because sometimes it's night and you want it to be day. I realized later that this observation about Link's sleeping habits was probably inspired by playing Fallout: New Vegas Hardcore mode and Deadly Premonition more or less back to back.
A related observation. There's a Goron character who will sell you hot spring water. It's of limited use, because when it cools off, it turns in to "regular water." I bought some anyway, thinking, "Well, I'm going out to the desert, maybe I'll have use for water." So just out of curiosity, when I'm halfway through the desert area, and heat waves are rippling all over the screen, I pull out the bottled water. And Link just turns it over and dumps it on the ground! Right on the ground! He practically gave me the finger. Link, you are in the desert: drink the water.
Incidentally, there's a Gerudo Desert, but I don't actually see any Gerudo. Did Gerudo Moses finally come to take them to the Gerudo Promised Land?
Life would be a lot easier for Link if he wasn't mute. Like, instead of having to summon hawks and catch fish and solve all these puzzles he could say: "Hey, Sera, I found your cat; he's down by the waterside."
Except Link isn't actually mute; he's just selectively mute. A little ways in you have to explain to the mayor of your hometown what's up, and the screen fades to black, then fades up. Presumably during that fade Link explained the story of his adventure thusfar. Why weren't you always doing that? Man, you'd have saved yourself so much work.
Of course, no dialog also means I can't flirt with any of the many cute, eligible young women in this game. This is probably a good thing, otherwise I would be going for the Harem Ending. The Girl in Reasonable Armor at the bar would be all mine! And you're next, Fishing-Spot-Canoe Girl! Not Agitha, the Bug Princess; she is ten. But she is totally adorable.
And as a companion, Midna is quite well-executed, isn't she? She's delightfully slappable, especially early on in the game, as if Nintendo finally realized we were irritated by Navi and just ratcheted up the Irritation Quotient by about two-hundred percent. On the other hand, she doesn't interrupt you unless what she has to say is important, and when you do consult her, her context-sensitive clues are actually useful. Best of all, you can tell Wolf-Link is irritated with her, which makes all the difference. When he rolls his eyes and growls at her, I feel like we're in this together.
Though speaking of Midna, why does she offer me the option to turn "back in to a human"? I'm not a human. I'm an elf, aren't I? I mean, there's another word for the race but Link is obviously an elf.
It occurs to me that anything even sort of resembling a human is called a human in this game though. Ilia, the almond-eyed girl from your hometown, is a round-ear, but her dad the mayor has some kind of boar tusks as far as I can tell. Is she a... one-quarter orc? It's nice that the game is equal-opportunity about Half-Orcs and Elves.
And I know they aren't actually called orcs, but the green things you fight are basically orcs, and that's awesome. It is the most "D&D" of Zeldas in that sense. Like when you roll up on an entire pack of orcs, and you're firing arrows at them, and spinning around and swording three at once, and then hijacking their wild boar mounts, well, that just reminds me why I rolled an Elven Ranger.
The game also owes a bit to Shadow of the Colossus. One boss fight in particular is pretty brazen in that respect. Nothing wrong with that though! (Belated edit: wait, I checked, and, those games came out at about the same time? ... really? That is quite a coincidence.)

Tabletop Games I Have Played - Dungeons and Dragons (4th ed)

2011-08-31T12:42:00.000-07:00

I really said I shouldn't be writing, but it is hard to keep me away completely. Today I'm wearing my Half-Elf scented oil, I'm being asked about drumming up a new campaign, and late summer is about to give way to early fall. So let's talk about Dee and Dee; let's talk about you and me. Dungeons and Dragons, even as I talk about tabletop games, is a topic I may have to touch on more than once, because Dungeons and Dragons is really multiple different games, depending on various editions and sub-editions.

So, now my confession: I love Dungeons and Dragons, Fourth Edition.

We roll half-elves, haters

But so many people didn't like it, especially when it first came out, that I feel the need to explain why. I have fond experiences with 3.5 and other editions as well, which I'll discuss in future installments, but I thought it might be best discuss the version of the game I was currently playing. In this case, I'm not editorializing for the uninitiated, and I'm going to assume you at least have some passing experience with how D&D works. If not, you really should give it a try, and the new edition is a pretty solid entry point in to the hobby.

I almost wanted to preface this with an Epic Meal Time Video, just to announce "This one goes out to all the haters." And Fourth Edition D&D really is kind of the "Fast Food Pizza" of D&D editions, isn't it? Like you've got your Crunchwrap layer there, and your Underdark layer here, and maybe you baked the pizza at home but it's still got all fast food parts and toppings.

Actually, now that I think about it, the D-and-D-as-pizza metaphor works pretty well in general. You can have it with as many or as few toppings as you like; you can use old standbys or go for more exotic flavors. You can make all the components yourself, hand-toss the dough and mix the sauces, or you can order the whole thing for delivery and still get a great pie. And having done that, you can eat the pie while playing Dungeons and Dragons, as is tradition.

Fourth Edition is also the most "video game like" of Dungeons and Dragons editions. This is an odd ancestry for such an elder game: a game-design snake eating its own tank-and-spank tail. Dungeons and Dragons begat dnd5. dnd5 begat MUD and MUD begat Diku. Diku begat EQ; EQ begat WoW, and WoW begat... Dungeons and Dragons.

The "videogameyness" is a common complaint for people who don't like the feel of Fourth Edition. But in many ways, D&D4 is also D&D returning more to its old wargaming roots: a tactical miniatures game about dungeon exploration, as in contrast to a storytelling engine. You can have both tactical combat and a solid story, though you'll always have a bias. D&D4 leans tactical, but is also more organized toward pre-ordained stories than "0th edition" was. It has quite linear modules, rather than exploration-based ones, and hero characters are extremely resilient compared to virtually all older editions, meaning you're far more likely to compose a lengthy personal arc. This makes it ideal for simple heroic stories about derring-do, adventures that might be violent or lighthearted, but are some way related to killing creatures, and taking their stuff.

One thing I like about Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons is the simplified skill system. The skill system of 3.5 became a little cumbersome, and it was almost necessary to play it as a sub-game: to take that first level of Rogue just to be sure you had enough skill points to go around, to have that point of Craft: Silversmithing just in case your GM needed you to make a Craft: Silversmithing check. By contrast, D&D4 does away with flavor skills, focusing on a stripped-down list of skills that are almost assured to come up in a game sooner or later. Some people believe this limits their freedom in character creation, by boiling down only a simple list of things that characters can do, but, there's a simple solution for this. If you believe your character should craft silver or weave baskets or cook porridge, there's really no need for a skill roll to do those things. Just include that as flavor text about the character, and then, should it come up, offer to cook breakfast for the party in a casual sort of way.

One thing that's a shame about Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons, however, is the simplified skill system. Drat. It does depend a lot on the Dungeon Master, after all, to decide which "fluff" skills are correct to allow, and designing a Skill Challenge that works with the system but still feels as interesting as a combat encounter has always proved challenging for me. To help out, a few hacks are floating around for this, such as this one from D&D designers Mike Mearls and Monte Cook that suggests a different system of handling basic checks. However, when the game first came out, some people insisted skill challenges were just broken, and early-release Fourth Edition errata related to this system didn't help matters much.

New player races can be cool, though, too

Errata (or "updates," as they are now-called) in fact has been problematic for my groups in general, since many books have undergone major and in some cases quite recent changes. Sure, RPG books often get edited over time, but since D&D4 is trying more than ever to provide a persistent RPG world in which to play (with frequent D&D Worldwide Gamedays, and continuation of Living campaigns), the edits are almost like the patch notes for your favorite MMO, including the occasional sweeping change to how a power like Magic Missile should work.

D&D4 also doesn't provide much in the way of a default setting. Since I use DMing as a creative outlet, and enjoy the process of setting design, this doesn't bother me too much. If you're the sort of person that would rather use a boxed setting I agree that "Points of Light" doesn't give you a lot to go on, and the Forgotten Realms for Fourth Ed doesn't feel great. In addition, Fourth Edition simply doesn't offer many rules for for things in the described setting, if they are not combat. In one case, my players wanted to know how hard it would be to train a baby hippogriff to be a mount, and I simply didn't have that information without resorting to the 3.5 handbooks or making it up myself. I suppose I could've designed a skill challenge around it, but sometimes that feels less satisfying than just playing it out (and knowing how much time that's likely to take). If you're running a module, though, you don't have to worry about this, since basically everything is figured out for you. The modules do favor combat encounters over peaceful solutions in some cases, but that's another game design topic altogether.

So it has some downsides. But just for a home campaign, Fourth Edition pushes some good buttons for me. It's very flexible, allowing easy custom monster generation without much fuss, and many classes and skills can be reskinned easily just by moving around color and flavor text. On the other hand, each class has a job, and is playable right out of the box, which minimizes the need to fuss with a lot of character optimization. During a combat encounter, the different types of combat skills provide good options, meaning that everyone can be doing something different every round, and everyone gets a chance to shine in a particular kind of situation. Designing tactical encounters is fun for the Dungeon Master, too.

So that's why I'm running another Fourth Edition campaign this fall. How about you?

And since someone always asks: no, I haven't tried Pathfinder yet. I hear great things, and I love the people who are working on it. I just haven't managed to fit it in.

I Shouldn't Be Writing

2011-08-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't be writing because I'm doing and following the ComicCon Challenge on GameArtisans. You should check it out.

I also am not playing Deus Ex, because my husband is playing it right now and I don't wanna step on his toes, and any time I do anything else I think "I should be working on that challenge." However, I'm kinda looking forward to it. This just goes along with the general thrust where sometimes I'm slow to pick up a new game.

My "currently playing" is actually Twilight Princess, which finally dropped to a reasonable price. My thoughts: it's basically Ocarina only more extreeme, at least from what I can tell so far.

Educational Games: Don't Make Me Log In

2011-08-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Channel 4 UK does awesome things and one of the things that they occasionally do is fund an educational game. They're usually browser-based games or quick downloadable games like the sex-ed game Privates.

They have a recent game, The End, which is a game about life and philosophy and big questions. The concept is interesting, but the platforming is so dodgy that I didn't get very far in to it the first time I played. I was pleasantly surprised today to boot the game up again, and discover that, even though I didn't make an account, a tracking cookie had stored all my information in a usable fashion and I could continue playing where I left off.

I'm mentioning this to contrast my short experience with Caduceus, a learning game out of Children's Hospital, Boston, that talks about disease. I was immediately taken in by the graphics, the steampunk-style design, and the voiceovers. The game offers me a chance to log in, or just play. Like I always do, I choose the option to just play. I watch several cut-scenes, and complete a more-difficult-than-average matching exercise. Then the game tells me "click here to sign up," and doesn't seem to give me an option to go any further unless I do this. I tried starting over, only to discover that the cut-scenes in the beginning are unskippable, and, no, I do have to sign up after the first activity. I really can't get very far in the game without making an account.

Baby, I'm just not sure I'm ready for that level of commitment.

You are shedding users with this methodology. Trust me. I wish I could find the article that listed the numbers; it's out there somewhere in the list of things I've read about web usability, but searching the internet for things like "increased customers" and "user retention" is just folly.

I have more than a passing interest in games like this, having worked on educational stuff, so I know the reason that this is done is probably because they want to track user behavior and prove people are playing the game. But I also know that an educational game is pretty down low on the list of priorities for most people to actually play, even people who generally look at this sort of thing. So if this is the kind of thing you want to design, you've got to do whatever it takes to keep the friction low, even if that means a nice unobtrusive tracking cookie.

"This Does It For Me" - The Female Shepard Controversy

2011-08-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

This post is about the female Shepard Mass Effect votes, with maybe a little of my comments about video game womens' depiction in general. I almost left a comment on the Rock, Paper, Shotgun thread, then I realized it was getting long, so I'm posting it here.

The story so far: Bioware has decided to give players (like me) who play a female Commander Shepard some voice in the marketing for the upcoming Mass Effect game, by including a female Shepard in some of the marketing materials. There is a "default" female Shepard, but since this is the first time female Shepard has actually been in any marketing materials, they've decided to allow the fans to choose the actual look that she will have. Except, by "fans," they mean, specifically people on Facebook.

I really wasn't going to write about this the first time the vote happened. Plenty of people were saying plenty of things, since the original vote was a bit controversial. I mean it kinda rubbed me the wrong way, but I had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly. It wasn't because the blonde won. I'm actually a blonde (from a bottle, anyway), and I really like the Samus Aran look, so that's fine by me. She doesn't look like my Shepard, who looks older and tougher and has auburn hair, but she'll do for the packaging. It doesn't change the character I get to play in the game.

This Shep looked the most like mine.

So why did I feel weird about the vote anyway? I think it was because, when I was browsing the comments underneath the votes, I kept seeing lines like this:

"I'm voting for this one. 'Cause she looks so cute!"
"Best and HOTTEST one."
"This does it for me."

and of course

"FSILF - Fem Shep I'd Like to F*$&"

Female Shepard is only played by around 20% of the Mass Effect players. It's not possible to tell from the votes alone who actually played as female Shepard. Some of the people voting in the contest clearly played female, but given the stated statistics it's likely that some people voted for a preferred look, but will continue to play a male Shepard. I've taken the names off of the quotes up there, but, if you want to see who said certain things you can just click on FemShep Number Five and see for yourself.

Other blogs have said things like "beauty pageant" and that's a bit too kind. I think stronger wording is needed. For a significant percent of the people who are voting on this, it isn't a "what female Shepard do you want to be" contest. It's a "what female Shepard do you want to fuck" contest.

And... I get that. On some level, I'm with you. Outrage about womens' depiction in video games in feminist circles has often left me kind of exhausted lately. I think complaining about "chainmail bikinis" is really beating a dead horse, and whenever I read an article that's a general "women in games are too sexy" viewpoint it burns me out. There's so many complaints out there about sexy, confident characters whose appearances I actually enjoy. I play a lot of fighting games, and it's not a problem to me that women in fighting games are sexy. Sometimes men in fighting games are also sexy, and playing as a sexy girl can be pretty fun.

This is not even the most egregious of the egregious sexpots I've designed for City of Villains.

On the other hand, sexing up -- or, really, softening up -- Shepard doesn't work for a lot of people, particularly people who play as her. A lot of her default animations in ME1 and 2 are ported over directly from the male Shepard. She sits like a guy, ogles female strippers like a guy, and looks really uncomfortable in a dress. I've heard that they've patched that last part and that there's going to be slightly more attention paid to "feminine" animations for Shepard in the final installment, but I for one am pretty used to pushy, butch Shepard and don't really need her girled up. Her attitude just seems to be part of her character, and it makes her unique.

Complaints about the contest seemed to focus a lot on Shepard's blond hair, where, really, blond hair wasn't exactly the problem. You can see from the comments on "Shepard Five" however that the hair color seems to be a focal point that somehow emphasizes what people didn't like about the contest. Bioware addressed this by having a second vote for hair color. That split is just as predictable as the first was. Male majority voters liked that the soft hair made the blonde Shepard more fuckable. But now that they get to vote on hair color too, they're voting red, with black in second. Nerd guys love redheads. They've been trained to by comic books and cartoons and even without a huge popular vote on Facebook you would know this if, just for example, you ever sat in a car with three men (one of whom is your husband) while en route to a game con and all of them were talking about how blondes really don't work for them and redheads (or maybe black-haired girls) are definitely the prettiest, and blondes just look sort of trashy or dumb and, hello, I'm right here, listening to you!!

Oops, I'm sorry, that got a little personal for a second.

Please vote in the poll for whether I should change my hair color.

Okay, that's a joke, but I am seriously considering it, just because I moved recently so why not? In the mean time, I won't be upset that Bioware puts the Shepard on the package that the male voters think is the hottest, but a little disappointed that a majority vote makes that into the only criteria that mattered.

My Advice to Students

2011-08-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

Today is Monday, and I'm done for a while with teaching classes. This gives me the opportunity to say something I might have been shy about saying when I was still in the middle of teaching. I feel however like it's important to say, and I think there are a lot of teachers out there that would agree with me about it. It's not as game-related as my other entries and is more general, but I feel safe enough putting it here.

This is advice I wish someone had given me when I was in college. I might not have listened. You might not either. But from the perspective of someone who now has two degrees, looking back at what I was best at and what I was worst at, and what I ended up doing with what I learned, my advice to college students is this:

Don't worry too much about your grade.

You're at school to learn to do something. You're at school to have access to equipment and facilities that you normally wouldn't have access to at home. You're at school to meet up with people who can help you to do that and who can create connections for you. Your priority should be to concentrate on that stuff. Your priority should not be to concentrate a lot on a series of letters and numbers assigned to you.

If you do well at what you've chosen to attempt in college, the marks will follow. Or sometimes they won't... sometimes you'll realize that you made a good project, but it doesn't actually follow the rules of the project as set out for you by the teacher. Or maybe you'll realize that you missed an assignment you weren't aware of because you were concentrating on one that interested you. Maybe the instructor will be momentarily frustrated with you, but then life would move on.

If you fail a class, ask yourself why. Is it because you didn't actually learn the material that the class presented, and you'd benefit from taking the class again? Is it because the class honestly didn't interest you, because it's the wrong class for you? Sometimes you have to take a class you don't want to take just because it's on your degree chain. Just suffer through it, do your best, and don't sweat it if your marks are mediocre, if it's not something that you're really interested in. On the other hand, if your entire major is made up of classes you're suffering through, then maybe it's the wrong field for you, or the wrong time for you to be in college.

Remember that no one is making you go to college. I know that bit is hard to swallow, because you might think that, for example, your parents are making you go. But as an adult student, you now have the choice to go or not go. You are, in fact, paying to go. This does not entitle you to a particular mark, but, as we just went over, marks are the least of your worries anyway. This does give you access to the facilities and the people and the opportunity to learn. I've seen a lot of students who realize suddenly that college isn't high school, and therefore they don't "have to" go. The problem is that they should want to go. If you realize that you really, bone-deep, don't want to go, then you should ask yourself who is "making" you go.

Connect with your peers. Other students may be able to help you even more than instructors can. They may mentor you or explain a concept to you that you previously needed help with. And take advantage of everything that the school offers you. If you do genuinely want to go, and succeed, but there is an obstacle preventing you from going, see how your school can help.

And -- and -- don't worry so much about your grade. If you get a bad grade it really isn't the end of the world. It's something you can shrug off and move on from, or, perhaps even a teaching moment that you will remember. On the other hand, if you're also not learning anything, not showing up, and don't particularly care, then please figure out what does motivate you and do that instead.

New Post - Generation Gap

2011-08-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote something, but it's not posted here. It's an article about some of my observations about how gaming has changed between Gen X and Gen Y.

It's posted at Tap-repeatedly.com! Which is an excellent gaming blog full of smart people that you should check out.

What Killed Mega Man?

2011-07-23T20:56:00.000-07:00

Mega Man Legends 3, a DS sequel to a long-dormant sub-franchise of one of Capcom's biggest franchises, was cancelled last week to much fanfare across the internet. While several of Mega Man's friends like Tron Bonne and Zero are in the latest Marvel Versus Capcom incarnation, the Blue Bomber himself is nowhere to be found, with no plans to add him in any incarnation in the newest installment of the series. And (though it is almost certainly not true) rumors abound that the complaints of Mega Man fans at the San Diego Comic Con were squelched by Capcom's unforgiving soldiers. Some people are calling this the death of Mega Man in general, signalling an end to the franchise for Capcom.

Waving his last banner are the fans of the series, who are starting new revival petitions on Facebook, editing Wikipedia to express their anger and frustration, or in some cases simply writing nostalgia-filled memorial articles about the series as it was. Capcom Europe, meanwhile, made a perhaps ill-advised tweet saying that the cancellation of Legends 3 was actually the fault of the fans - that their support was simply not enough to convince Capcom the game was worth promoting.

The truth is, I thought the cancellation of the title was a fairly predictable move. We can come up with a lot of conspiratorial theories as to why this happened. It's possible that Keiji Inafune leaving the company at least caused the Legends 3 project to lose momentum, even if it wasn't a direct cause of its cancellation. Or maybe Superboy Prime did, in fact, just think the game sucked. But the primary reason by my estimation is pure market forces.

The 3DS has not done as well for Nintendo as it may have hoped. Putting a lot of money and development time into an exclusive for an unpopular console, for a series Capcom wasn't sure was a big-seller, was a risky gamble. Sure, Capcom also made bets on Mega Man games for PSP, but these as far as I know haven't done as well as they had hoped, with no plans to continue the Maverick Hunter X or Powered-Up reboots. Mega Man Universe, an experiment in a Mega Man with user created content, is also already cancelled. The most successful Mega Man game in recent years was Mega Man 9, the retro clone of the old games that was designed with the sensibilities of a modern masocore title - the snake(man) eating itself as Mega Man evolved based on titles that evolved based on it. Mega Man 10, by contrast, had less-exciting sales performance, as the sheen of novelty that surrounded "the new retro" had already worn off.

Other than the hardcore Mega Man fans, it's not entirely clear who Mega Man Legends 3 was being made for. The Street Fighter and Resident Evil franchises are doing well for Capcom to appeal to the western audience that they're looking to continue to net. In some cases, Capcom doesn't seem to understand what appeals the most to Americans, but it's fairly sure that, at least where it comes to Americans writ large, the soft, anime aesthetic of a 3D Mega Man handheld is not really "it."

This is my take on it. Among hardcore Mega Man fans, there is a split, based mostly on generational lines. The younger Mega Man fans are members of the Millennial Generation, or Gen Y. They were introduced to the series some time along the middle of the Mega Man X saga, when the games shifted to Playstation and added long FMVs with a heaping helping of overwrought anime drama. The hand-wringing speechification of anime protagonist Mega Man X appeals to this generation, and they fell head over heels for the Mega Man Zero series with its complex stories and long talky bits. They like the anime aesthetic quite a bit and have no problem combining this art style with the idea of a serious story, because they grew up with manga.

The older Mega Man fans, in Generation X, are operating mostly off of nostalgia for the old series. Some of them simply enjoyed the difficult platforming and don't care a whit if the game has much of a story; these are the people who enjoyed Mega Man 9 simply because they wanted to play a game like they remembered from childhood. However, the hardest of the hardcore old Mega Man fans also want the series to have a more serious story. They would just prefer that this story center around the story that they remember: Dr. Light powering up his innocent boy robot to battle the robots of the Evil Dr. Wily. These are the people that listen to The Megas and the Protomen for their darker takes on the tale. However, they aren't as interested in the anime aesthetic that the younger generation likes, and frequently reject the "cute" redesigns of the Powered Up series... in favor of more mature, more "badass" takes in Mega Man artwork and custom action figures.

I am a Mega Man fan, and with my age, I bridge the gap between the Gen X and Gen Y fans. However, I lean toward Gen X just a little bit (which is probably obvious from the way I categorize both camps). As a Mega Man fan, I wanted Mega Man Legends 3. We all did as fans, but just because we want Mega Man, himself, to continue to exist as an idea. The game, itself, was not for us. It was not really for the Millennial fans, who want a more serious, darker story. It was certainly not for the Gen X fans, who want the original Mega Man, and prefer a grittier and grimmer style of art. And it was probably not right for the children that Capcom courted with its Pokemon-lite Battle Network and Star Force series, though, it was for kids if it was for anyone at all. To top it off, the console it's exclusive to isn't a hit. Unclear target market equals unclear sales equals cancellation.

However, Capcom did a strange thing with Mega Man Legends 3, a kind of unprecedented thing. It asked the fans to put their money where their mouth was, and, before the game even came out, aid in its development by submitting ideas to the developers. Fans were asked to submit concepts, and vote in polls about which ones to use. Capcom has done this with previous Mega Man titles (with design your own robot contests), but not quite on this level. It's a good idea in theory, but as these calls to participate were posted on their development site specifically, which didn't get continuous coverage in the game press, it wasn't really easy to find these participation pages unless you were deliberately looking. Early response was good, but then came human nature: fatigue set in as fans were being asked to participate more and more.

As a fan, I did participate in polls, at least early on. I would have participated more directly, but, kept having the sneaking sense that, as a primarily Gen X fan, and an adult, this game was not really for me and I really should leave this stuff to the kiddies. Though I've found the development blogs interesting, I personally didn't need the insight in to the development process because I already understand it fairly well. (I thought "the creation of the heroine" 3D modeling guide was particularly good and useful, and a fantastic introduction for pure newbies to understand the process of character modeling, so I have used it in classes. The comments on that article series are so precious, things like someone wanting the character's UV unwrap "check checkers" as an alternate skin for the character because it looks cool to them.) One thing I did understand about the process that most fans who participated obviously do not is that video games are cancelled all the time. It's actually quite common, especially if there's a feeling the audience/market isn't there. However, since Capcom made the fans so involved in the development process, many of them were shocked and angry by the cancellation and thus the backlash. If you are going to put all your cards on the table, it really looks bad when you fold.

A few years ago, Tomb Raider wasn't doing so hot, and I waxed armchair designer about what would fix it. Now it's on-line to do a gritty reboot that looks pretty fantastic. Transformers, a series that banks mostly on the nostalgia of Generation X combined with a heaping helping of ridiculous 3D explosions, also did a gritty reboot that makes incredibly mad bank at the box office completely irrespective of the poor quality of the actual films. Now there will also be a gritty reboot Spider-Man film. So... Gritty Mega Man reboot, anyone? Or maybe we could reboot it as a real-time strategy, to make it extra contemporary.

Very Fast, Made of Meat

2011-07-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

I started writing this post a few months ago when the Super Meat Boy Post-mortem showed up on Gamasutra, but I never got around to completing my thoughts. Fortunately, the timing of a video post-mortem on GDC Vault gives me another relevant link to share in regard to the game. I actually bought Super Meat Boy when it initially came out - multiple times, as it turns out - but it ended up in my backlog for a little until I got the encouragement to bring it out courtesy Valve's Potato Sack promotion.

Every once in a while you come across a game that is about something. I don't mean "about" something in the Heavy Rain sense, where someone wrote a story, then put a sort of game around it. I mean about something in the sense of creating meaning through the mechanics and dynamics of the game.

Super Meat Boy is such a game.

Why I Bought Super Meat Boy

When I went to PAX in 2009, within my bag of convention swag there was a comic book, drawn with crude little characters and containing a tongue-in-cheek "about the author" section. That section included this photograph.

Since I go to a couple conventions a year, I got the same comic, with photograph, when I later attended GDC in 2010.

My thought at that point was, "Who are these guys??" My second thought was "I will probably give them some of my money."

How the Game Is Played

Super Meat Boy is played with a controller, typically the X-Box 360 controller. Yes, I have the PC version, but if you're trying to play it with your keyboard on the PC you're probably some kind of maniac. The proper hand position for the controller is to place one thumb on either the thumbstick or the D-pad (personal preference here seems to be thumbstick. The D-pad would be more ideal, but the 360 D-pad really isn't very good), and the other thumb draped over the "run" and "jump" buttons in a double-coverage manner. The proper playing motion is to manipulate the run button with the tip of your thumb, while compressing the jump button with your thumb joint in a light squeeze when it's necessary.

The right-handed side of this playing motion, which I will authoritatively state is the only correct one, feels really good to me. That's because that's the same compression motion that I used to get through Super Metroid (after reconfiguring keys) and all the old Megaman X games on the Super Nintendo (Megaman X now available on Virtual Console for Wii owners, if you haven't played it, go go go). In that case your thumbtip is holding down the "charge weapon" button while your thumb joint jumps, but the principle is the same. In Megaman X if you wanted to dash and jump, you either had to double-tap the D-pad in the direction you wanted to go before jumping, or employ the advanced "finger bend" motion displayed below to hit all the necessary buttons at once (yes, I really played the game this way).

In Super Meat Boy that button at your thumbtip (On X-Box controller, it's X, if you were on the SNES, it would be Y) is "run," and you ought to be holding that button down. There are obviously times where you may have to let go of it in order to time a jump more carefully. Those times are much less frequent than you imagine. I discovered pretty quickly that the game is absolutely balls-to-the-wall. If at any point you have to stop yourself, in order to time a jump more properly based on a moving obstacle placement, what really happened there was you didn't do the previous section fast enough.

How Do Games Mean?

Like a lot of people who played it, I don't think I understood the game Braid when it first came out. Jon Blow's annotated playthrough sheds a lot of light on the subject of the game's meaning, so it's a useful video to watch even though it takes a long time.

The game has a lot of prose in it, a lot of this and that about relationships and maybe the atomic bomb. It's really sort of highfallutin stuff and lead to a lot of people calling the game "pretentious," which was probably not the intent. The real way to get meaning out of the game is to largely ignore all that written stuff, or at least ninety percent of it; consider it a red herring or maybe just a series of footnotes. Look instead at what the game is doing with its mechanics and dynamics and how they change from level-to-level. Taken in this way, Braid is a series of poetic vignettes about different ways to look at the passage of time. Does time move forward because we can only observe it doing so? Does time bifurcate the universe, creating alternate timelines with every decision? Why does time move more slowly closer to a singularity? In mechanical terms the game is exploring these ideas the same way the book Einstein's Dreams explored them with prose.

At GDC this year Clint Hocking gave a talk on "How Do Games Mean." Not what do they mean; that, of course, varies, but instead asking the question "what is the thing within a game that gives it meaning?" His argument was that the primary unit of game meaning was its dynamics - the combination of its mechanics and rules that within the game boundary caused something meaningful. Dynamics are distinct from mechanics in that they encompass not just the mechanic itself but how the mechanics work together. The mechanics of Braid are run, jump, rewind time, etc; the dynamics are how these ideas interact with the level design to create puzzles.

What Masocore Is

Going back to the game I'm ostensibly writing about, Super Meat Boy is a member of a subgenre of platforming game called the "Masocore" genre. A masocore game is characterized by having lots of difficult levels, instant death obstacles, and infinite lives in which to explore that space. The only penalty for failure is to try again until you succeed.

Probably one of the earliest experimentations in the genre is the game "I Wanna Be the Guy," a game about humorously subverting the expectations of the platforming genre by hurting you in different unusual and surprising ways. Do those shiny apples look like something you want to collect? Nonsense, they will kill you. Some of them will fall upward to make dodging them more difficult. ...And they're really more like giant cherries.

If I had to guess at the inspiration for more or less this entire subgenre, I would look once again to Megaman, though more specifically Megaman 2 and possibly 3. If I had to narrow it down to one screenshot, it would probably be something like this.

Though you have a life bar in Megaman, the games are known for their clever instant death puzzles. It's so much to the point that I would probably call Megaman 9 itself a masocore game, or at least clearly inspired by the different evolutions of the genre that have happened since Megaman 2. The only thing missing from 9 is the unlimited lives, though with continues and save points the lives are functionally unlimited. I would consider myself a fan of the genre, even if I'm not great at the games. I love Megaman 9, but I'm fairly terrible at it, which is probably a personal failing of sorts.

The Hand of the Author

In Super Meat Boy the mechanics are that you run and jump. You can stick to walls. If you die, start over. The dynamics are that most things in a level can kill you while doing this and for the best experience you should do this as fast and as courageously as possible.

For an example of how this works, here's a screenshot from an early level, called The Sabbath.

It may be a bit hard to see, but you can click to size it up. You're the square thing on the far left. The fuzzy blobs in the darkness are slimes that move around; they are obstacles to avoid as one hit will kill you.

If you weren't very sure of yourself, and you were new to this game, the thing you'd probably want to do is carefully time each jump to avoid the baddies, and then slip down the small hole on the far right. That would be a series of timed jumps, like this.

That would probably work eventually. It would also be wrong.

The moving creatures are timed so that, if you jump immediately, at your full possible speed, you will slide right to the correct spot without any hassle. That looks a little like this.

Don't worry. You'll make it.

Now not only is that a faster way to move through the level, it's also, actually, the easier way. Only one jump, which you're guaranteed to make, is much easier than trying to time many multiple enemies.

The next few jumps of the level work in much the same way. Here's a YouTube of a fast and successful run. Notice how many platforms aren't even needed to make it through the level. Most platforms that are dangerous can in fact be easily skipped. The enemies are timed so that the fastest possible run will also be the most successful run.

Super Meat Boy is a game about courage and determination. This aspect of the mechanics states it well. The braver you are; the more you commit yourself and the more aggressive you are in pursuit of your goals, the better off you will do at the challenges in the game. If you stop, if you wait, if you hesitate or are tentative, you will get crushed. The penalty for getting crushed isn't bad. Just start over. But the fact that hesitation or slow motion is what brings you failure might be seen as the message of the game.

I find this fascinating in parallel with the attitudes of the developers. It really is a powerful message articulated through mechanics. From the Gamasutra Post-mortem: "We couldn't push to spring, and releasing without Microsoft support seemed like suicide, so we went all-in and attempted to do what would take any team four months within two. These two months were easily the worst months of my life. The pressure, workload, and overall stress of development was extremely overwhelming. In those two months, neither of us took a single day off of work, working 10–12 hours a day, every day." In the video post-mortem, Tommy Refines states it a bit more succinctly: "I almost died." "I'd be dead," he says, if he had to port the game to one more console, and he claims he is not joking.

I believe him. But the post-mortem is just an underline under the message that's already in the software. Inherent in the core mechanics is this idea of pushing yourself to the fullest, and being the bravest person you can be. Love deeply. Take the leap of faith. And if you can, have a good sense of humor about it while you bleed, bleed, bleed, all over your work.

(Some pictures in this article are courtesy Google Image Search, with thanks to original screencappers. Some courtesy my own quick fumbles in Photoshop.)

In Further Cthulhu News

2011-07-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Posting here simply because of its relevance to my previous article, indie RPG Cthulhu Saves the World is now available on PC. I have to say I was waiting for this, since when I heard it was coming to PC I decided to give it a pass on X-Box and play it at my desk instead. I wonder if anyone else was in the same boat there.

Anyway, enjoy, despite my substance-free article!

Tabletop Games I Have Played - Call of Cthulhu

2011-07-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

This is the first entry in a occasionally-updated series I'm going to start about different tabletop RPGs that I have played, and my personal tales. There's no particular timeframe I have picked for when I'll write tabletop stuff, but I've played a really diverse amount of tabletop games in various convention and home settings, so I could feasibly write on this topic for a long time. You have been warned.

I'm going to start with a game that I play a lot at Origins, which is the grand old game of Cthulhu. Cthulhu these days seems to have infected popular culture in surprising ways. Since becoming a lovable, public domain Elder God, the Great Old One has been seen in plushie form, heading up his own indie video game, and taking orders from Eric Cartman on South Park. But Call of Cthulhu, the tabletop RPG by Chaosium, was my first exposure to the Mythos, as it wasn't so mainstream back in the days when I was first learning to play RPGs.

And yes, of course someone made a Hipster Cthulhu

Actually, it was one of the first RPGs that I ever played. As a bright, impressionable young college student, I showed up at the annual Halloween meeting of the Bowling Green Gaming Society with no real expectation of what I was getting in to. They were playing Call of Cthulhu Versus the Ghostbusters, and had an extra character. Since Call of Cthulhu is extremely easy to pick up, even for the novice gamer, I played a character who (I struggle to remember but think I am accurate) turned out to be the team nerd a la Egon. (These were original character Ghostbusters, with a franchise business based out of Cleveland.) Even though the Ghostbusters ought to be able to handle a threat like Cthulhu, our novice status in 'busting and the game's punishing rule set left one Ghostbuster incurably mad, and one dead… As for my character, he ended up falling off of an under-construction skyscraper and shattering his spine, but, with his sanity intact he was able to live to tell the tale, even if he would never walk again.

…Good times.

So yes, Call of Cthuhlu can be a brutal, unforgiving game. But it's easy to pick up and play. Most conflict resolution is straightfoward: your character sheet shows your percent chance of accomplishing any task, in a specific set of categories. Since you typically play as an "investigator," an ordinary person with no super powers, your chances to do something are generally small, especially if it falls out of your area of personal expertise. Roll your dice to get a percent under the skill number on your sheet, however, and you can succeed. There are a few extra rolls you might make involving damage and sanity loss and such, but the player doesn't concern with them too much. You'll lose your sanity points now and then, but, if you actually get in to combat, you probably did something wrong. The strongest person you should ever actually be fighting is a cultist who is about at your power level. If you see an Elder God or even one of his mutated minions, you should run. If you can.

If you've played a lot of Cthulhu, there's some common sense rules to survive, if that's what you really want to do. Never read any mysterious books you find; you're better off burning them. Never touch any mysterious-looking objects or artifacts. Don’t go anywhere alone. Don't bother with a gun.

Of course, playing the game to survive makes it a lot less fun, so actually you should ignore the above advice and allow the game to kill your character or drive them insane whenever possible.

I've played the game about a dozen times, mostly in convention settings. Because it's just begging to be subverted by its oppressive horror atmosphere, it's not always played "straight." I've seen Scooby Doo Vs. Cthuhlu and Clue Vs. Cthulhu and The Penguins of Madagasgar Vs. Cthuhlhu. (OK, we played that with a different dice system, but, the concept is still funny, so including it anyway.) This year at Origins I played a few different rounds, but it was always with one or more seasoned vets who understood both the system and how to survive in it. We weren't taking great pains to be no fun, but in the two actual Call of Cthulhu sessions I played (one historical, one modern), it was Slow Pitch Cthulhu Softball, with no deaths, only minor injuries, and maybe a pip or two off the sanity bar.

I was kind of disappointed by one session this year. The roleplaying at the table was fantastic on the part of the players, and the GM was highly prepared with different props, photos, mood music and even an intro video. But the actual scenario left our well-crafted characters with very little to do. Early teases about supernatural involvement in our situation turned out to be red herrings or false alarms. The session culminated in us attending a ritual where the correct action was to simply not interrupt it, then win the scenario. We may have been the first team to deduce this, since the GM just had to half-heartedly admit it was over and we won, then told us with laughter how many previous tables had interrupted it and caused lots of death and carnage. Note to GMs: If the correct action in the finale of your scenario is "do nothing," please consider rewriting your scenario. At best, the players will get annoyed with this a bit; at worst, you're making them look like idiots by trying to trick them in to making the situation worse for your own amusement. Yes, even in Cthuhlu. (Then again, I guess "show up and do nothing" was also how you win Raiders of the Lost Arc.)

By contrast, last year I played in a game where the world was destroyed -- mostly due to our characters' fear, uncertainty, and overall bumbling -- and that was cool and hilarious. I could tell that one guy at the table felt a little upset by it because he really wanted to play the hero. In straight Cthuhlu, though, playing the hero can be entertaining, but is ultimately folly. There are no heroes in Cthuhlu. There is a lot of dead meat.

If I had one complaint about the game from a player standpoint, it wouldn't be its ruthlessness, but that its ruthlessness has an unintended side effect: it takes too long to get to the interesting bits. At a con, a GM will give you a mundane character. Then, likely, you'll play around several hours of this character doing entirely mundane tasks, with no supernatural involvement. The session needs to last a certain number of hours, and the moment supernatural stuff gets involved in a major way it's all going to go to Hell very quickly. From a storytelling standpoint, the boring setup stuff is necessary for contrast. Then again, it's also… you know… boring. Your mileage may vary there.

I know of a few PC game adaptations of Call of Cthuhlu, but I haven't played them. I did really enjoy the obviously-Cthuhlu-insipred Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, on the Gamecube, and I see some Cthulhu inspirations with the sanity system in the very scary Amnesia: The Dark Descent. If you have any experience with the Cthulhu video games and happen to stop by, let me know if they're worth a play!

Ctrl + Alt + Defeat July

2011-07-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

The slick, graphically designed e-zine Ctrl + Alt + Defeat has something to say this month about violence in video games, particularly, within the context of war games. Unsprisingly, I'm not against it. I'm in the article starting on page 17 along with several other smart cookies and some lovely photographs. Check it out.

Video Games Win: Fatality

2011-07-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

Political opponents of video games suffered a blow this past week as the Supreme Court ruled, 7-2, that California's law restricting the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional per the First Amendment.

This ruling is not surprising to anyone who followed the case and the series of appeals that lead us to it. However, some of the coverage of the ruling (such as the above) may not be interpreting it correctly. To understand the nuances of the justices' opinions on this matter, it's worthwhile (if challenging) to read the official court opinion (PDF). Justice Scalia's majority opinion is the most pro-game of the series and, to me, the most logical, as it compares video game hysteria to hysteria surrounding dime novels and other once-new media, compares video game violence to violence in classic fairy tales, and mentions the role of parents and their judgement in restricting what content children experience.

Justice Alito, below him, has an opinion where he backs the majority vote, but for different reasons. It's basically saying: I sort of agree, but. "In some of these games, the violence is astounding." There's points awarded for creative mutilations (this would have been hyperbole a few years ago but is not anymore). And Alito says the studies about their effects are inconclusive... in other words, Alito is in favor of restricting this material, but the California law itself was the problem, not having defined the restricted material clearly enough.

Last night on the Daily Show, John Stewart also had something interesting to say about this ruling.

The Daily Show - Moral Kombat
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I was surprised to see this. This is what prompted me to want to write again about this topic. The Daily Show generally has a tech-savvy, young audience and that audience is probably largely in favor of the ruling. When he cringes exaggeratedly at Mortal Kombat, Stewart is showing an unusually "old man"-like response. (Later in the broadcast he did admit to playing the game and that it is fun. (It is.))

I'd like to say something about the clip they chose to illustrate the level of violence in the game. First of all, though we were verbally warned: they were allowed to show it on the show without censoring it. Second of all, Stewart talks about how it would only be bannable if the woman in question suffered a "nip-slip" while being disemboweled. Fair enough...

You can definitely see Sheeva's nipples while she's being disemboweled, which doesn't change the rating on the game. (This is the kind of observation you come to this blog for, right?) In fact, Duke Nukem Forever (about which I may write more later) is basically wall-to-wall nipples in some portions and only received an M rating. California's law would also have no problem at all with Sheeva being disemboweled in this manner. The law restricts the sale of games that "depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel." I don't see any human beings in that segment of the clip, do you? I see a ninja ghost and a Shokan. Totally legit.

And that in a nutshell is why the law had to be struck down. Because it comes from a place that doesn't entirely understand video games in the first place. Because it has too many loopholes, since it relies on the sticky word "human" which creators of fantasy universes can easily bypass. Even if you feel as if the law does have a right to restrict access to this material, it's going to be next to impossible for any legislature to write a law carefully worded enough to cover all the situations that the common person would consider offensive without leaving any holes. And even if you think there's no justifying the obscene violence in Mortal Kombat, this kind of law can have a chilling effect across other aspects of the media.

The real problem with censorship in America isn't that we're too easy on violence. It's that we're too puritanical on sex, which makes extreme violence the more accessible taboo. The Adults Only rating given out to a very small minority of games is the kiss of death for those titles, unless they were planning on selling the game as a specialty porn game anyway. The difference between "people under the age of 17 shouldn't purchase this game" and "people under the age of 18 shouldn't purchase this game" is also the difference in whether or not the game can be carried in Wal-Mart. I would really like to know what magical thing happens between the ages of 17 and 18 where violence is OK for just one year but sex still is not. (I know that, for whatever silly reason, Manhunt 2 almost got an AO for violence alone, until the takedowns were censored a touch. That seems really odd given the fact that the game showed above is still an M. The AO/M line is really weird, which is a topic I'm sure I'll return to.)

I've said before that I felt we needed games like Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem to keep pushing the envelope, until video games' opponents were so worn down that they had nothing more to say. In the end it was Mortal Kombat - again - that ended up taking that baton and running. And, why wouldn't it? It's perfect because the title has been around for so long, already associated with over-the-top violence and gore for almost ten years. Even someone who knows nothing about video games can understand it. By contrast, Duke Nukem Forever had mainstream controversy prior to its release, but when it actually hit stores, it was only controversial among the video game press. Mainstream media didn't pay attention to it.

Leland Yee, who worked in drafting California's law, vows to keep trying. Some of the Supreme Court justices may back him in his attempts. However, no matter what the Daily Show may pretend to be astonished by, I think this ruling means: it's over. Sexual game content may still prove controversial at times, but it's very inconsistently monitored and mentioned; the gaming press is itself still divided about it. But in the USA, it's too hard to restrict violent content, the laws won't stick, and games are now less of an easy bipartisan scapegoat.

On Tabletop Gaming

2011-06-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

I mostly write about video games here, but I'm actually a gamer of all stripes, and I spent my past weekend at Origins Game Fair in Columbus. I played a variety of tabletop RPGs and several card games.

That doesn't mean an in-depth article yet, but it is a statement of intent. I may end up writing a bit about such games again, or anything else that suits my fancy, in the coming months, if it pleases the audience, or maybe even if it doesn't. I'm pretty sure I at least have an interesting perspective on this topic.

I have a little open time during the month of July and I think my post count may somewhat increase. I'm trying to decide between some different ideas of themed entries that I want to do however. I can be welcome to suggestions as to whether I should stick to video games or write about other games as well! If there are no suggestions I will assume I should do whatever I feel like.

E3: The Winners

2011-06-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

Photo-heavy entry. You have been warned, if you hit the following jump. For the pictures, click the small pictures to enlarge.

So I returned from E3 in one piece, though with ears ringing from all the new-game face-melting explosive hotness. Of course, as everyone knows, there is only really one important thing to discuss after E3, that singular important question which has plagued all of the video game generation, nay, all of mankind, for a thousand years. That is, who WON?

You may see this as a great debate, but to me, there was really no question. The winner is obviously

Jimmy Buffet's Maragritaville Online!

Specifically, they are the winner of the E3 Award for Largest Display Inexplicably Advertising a Facebook Game. Complete with blaring music, and booth babes handing out leis (not pictured).

The ironic thing about Magaritaville is they serve pretty mediocre margaritas.

...Other winners at this year's E3, by my personal reckoning:

The E3 Award for Game Character Most Likely to Make Annoying Young Men Bust Out the Old "If I'm Gonna Stare At An Ass It May As Well Be A Hot Ass" Cliche

Catwoman, from Batman: Arkham City

The E3 Award for Game Boss That Looks The Most Like He Wandered Out of a Sailor Moon Episode

The effete swordsman from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

You know, I thought that I wanted this game, but now that I've actually gotten to play it I'm not really sure. I kind of miss the traditional Zeldas and I feel awkward flapping the controller around to slash my sword when I could just be going on an adventure and letting Link do the athletic stuff. Then again, my favorite Zelda is still "Link to the Past," before it got all 3D and stuff.

Speaking of:

The E3 Award for Game You Thought You Wanted, Until You Actually Saw It, and Now You Aren't So Sure I Don't Think

Kinect Star Wars

I know getting to wave around your hands and pretend you're using a lightsaber is a fantasy that many had, or, at least, thought they had, but I think there is a key component of that fantasy which Kinect Star Wars the Video Game cannot capitalize on. The actual fantasy is: you dream about having a lightsaber, and that you look cool using it.

Whereas you do not look cool playing Kinect Star Wars. Right after this game was announced, I saw the hosts of X-Play kind of half-heartedly explain that this still didn't quite look like the Kinect Star Wars game that their hearts wanted. I don't actually think that particular game can be made to exist. Your avatar looks cool dueling with a lightsaber, which is why controllers work so well. But when you fake-duel with a lightsaber, you just look like the Star Wars Kid.

The E3 Award for Being A Major Wussy Pants

Everyone who stood in line to play Street Fighter X Tekken, but then when they got up to actually play it, just picked Ken and Ryu. By the way, this was almost everybody. My blurry photo here depicts a thrilling Ken/Ryu versus Ryu/Sagat match, the likes of which I have never seen since on my X-box yesterday.

The emcees, of course, encouraged this stupid behavior by handing out prizes to people who had winning streaks, thus ensuring no one would pick an unfamiliar character and risk the chance of, you know, losing or showing off new features of the game.

By the way, internet, the game is called Street Fighter X Tekken - the X is pronounced "Cross." Yeah, that's silly, but so are a lot of other game names, particularly Street Fighter ones. It is not Street Fighter Versus Tekken.

The E3 Award for Hardest Workers

It's a tie! Between

The Gamespot Employees

and

The Dance Central 2 Demonstrators

So, did you watch that Microsoft press conference, where they did the Dance Central 2 demo, and it was joyous and wonderful and looked like the most fun ever? Imagine that you have to do it, all day, for three days in a row. It starts to seem a lot less like fun and a lot more like one of those "ironic punishments" Homer Simpson had to endure in Hell. So, you like dancing and video games? Have all the dancing and video games in the world!! Dance DANCE like it's the last LAST night of your LIFE!

Meanwhile, here is the crew from Gamespot cramped in their little booth. I took a picture just because I found it a bit like a zoo display. It needed a sign that read "Don't Feed the Game Journalists." They were so busy in there hunched over their little computers typing furiously that it was like there wasn't even a show going on all around them. Please forgive how badly my camera flash mucked up this photo. I sort of felt as if I should be covert while photographing this.

The E3 Award for Best Gimmick to Make People View Your Demo When They Didn't Really Care About Viewing Your Demo

Nyko, who invented a device that allows you to operate a Kinect slightly closer to your TV than otherwise normal. The game they were using to demonstrate this was Kinect Adventures, which no hardcore gamer even cared about when it was new. But they were handing out these bright red wigs if you stood in line to play it, and the wigs were pretty cool, so they still had a respectable line.

Yeah, I got a wig too, what of it?

The E3 Award for Most Anticipated Game

Who cares? That is such a silly award and I often fear it does damage to our industry that we value it so highly.

The E3 Award for Most Improbable Anime Breasts

Busty Hearts? I mean is that what we're going with? I guess it's honest but it's also a little on the nose... oh, I'm sorry, it says Rusty, my mistake. Ha ha.

Don't grope our statue, you pervs.

(Note: if you or your friends actually managed to catch a photograph of yourselves groping this statue, as god clearly intended, please make me aware of the existence of said photo. I was not quite brave enough.)

The E3 Award for Loudest Display

EA

The E3 Award for Oddest Request Not to Take Pictures of a Game

Also EA, for Sims 3 Pets. (Not pictured.)

The E3 Award for Dumbest Idea

Whoever it was in the Silent Hill universe that thought it was a bright idea to drive a prison bus full of prisoners toward Silent Hill

The E3 Award for Game That Makes You Wish You Had a Kid

Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster

The 3E Award for Most Fun I've Had Getting My Ass Handed To Me

Dark Souls

The 3E Award for Chinese Achievement in Excellence in the Field of Being From China

These guys (they're from China)

The E3 Award for Most Confusing Press Conference

Nintendo

The confusion in the air was palpable. Is it a console? Is it just a controller? What is this mysterious device? Journalists all walked out scratching their heads. As the conference elucidated little, there was a lot of misinformation floating around the internet in the hours to follow. Video game outlets are a lot more interested sometimes in getting information out quickly than getting it out accurately, and the actual best place to find out what the heck Nintendo is making is to look at the web site that they made for it instead of watching their press conference.

I have touched the device. I shall attempt to explain.

There is a new console, and a controller. The console is capable of HD output, though the only demos that displayed this were non-interactive demos. If you have seen footage of a new "HD Zelda" floating around the net, that was not a game. It was a video, though you can change the lighting in it from daytime to nighttime lighting, and somewhat adjust the camera angles on Link. Let me be clear: it was beautiful, spectacular, but not a game.

The games they do have for the Wii U device are tech demos, for the most part. They are operated with either one Wii-screen-controller, or one Wii-screen-controller and multiple Wii-motes. The device only seems to be compatible with one of the screen controllers at a time right now.

You will need the new console to operate the new controller; the new controller is not its own thing. But the new console will also apparently also use all your old controllers, save Gamecube which no longer seems to be supported.

You might now know all this already now that the info has "shaken out," but since people still can't get "Street Fighter X Tekken" right I figured another explanation was going to be okay.

Meanwhile:

The 3E Award for More Specific Cluelessness About A Game Product

The guy in front of me who apparently represented a major gaming web site and was furiously scribbling words like "Big Mistake" and "Hoop" in to his smartphone while the Atari rep demoed

I get it. You're young. You don't know what Gamma World is. I am sorry that I am so old and crusty. Major Game News Outlets: I promise you that if you decide to hire me to cover this event in the future, I know what Gamma World is.

The E3 Award for Best-Hidden Demo

Atlus, with Catherine

The Catherine advertising blitz was kind of strange. In that everyone who attended the con got a full-color, double-sided Catherine ad shoved in to their lanyard. Clearly some money was spent on promotion. But in order to actually find the game, you had to go off in to a side room off the beaten path from the main convention, in a room that looked for all the world like you wouldn't be allowed in there with an expo-only pass. It's like, they definitely wanted you to know about this game, but weren't sure if they wanted you to play it. I guess I can see why this might be a smart strategy. The game looks super-pretty, but the actual play of the thing might not be everyone's cuppa tea in this shooter-heavy environment.

The E3 Award for Mysterious Lack of Appeal

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City

I thought this sounded pretty cool, so I tried to stand and watch people play it for a while. But strangely enough, I had a hard time looking directly at this demo. It was as if it was some kind of fun-sponge from which fun could not escape, and my eyes kept wandering somewhere, anywhere else. Even my camera got a better shot of some other person's camcorder than the demo. I tried to photograph the demo again later, and

Man what? Oh hey I love Mega 64!

There is a Resident Evil game coming out for the 3DS and it's pretty solid. It goes back to the standard 'you're in a mysterious mansion' setup with some light puzzle solving and exploration. This game meanwhile - at least the multiplayer - I guess the best way I could describe it is "textureless." Some zombies come out, and you shoot the zombies and then some more zombies come out and you shoot at them and oh lordy! Sometimes for variety you throw a grenade at the zombies.

I remember with fondness when Resident Evil walked this line between highly campy and genuinely scary. Like, remember in Resident Evil 2 where you were just surrounded by zombies, more zombies than you could handle, and your only option was to run in fear and cower? This is like that, except you just kill the zombies and then when they are dead kill more of them, with guns which are loud. Perhaps that is an activity that you will enjoy. Who can say. Though, if so, you might want to consider spending a dollar on the already-available X-Box Live Indie Games version of this which has pretty good music.

If you got so far, thank you for reading my E3 photogallery. For another photoessay about the event, please also view this tumblr of a man who had the genius idea to "plank" the expo. That gallery contains many more pictures of booth babes than this one.

I Will Be At E3

2011-06-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving tomorrow!

I'm not the sort of person that really salivates over up-to-the-minute gaming news, so it's a little unusual, but I couldn't pass up the chance to go! I'm going to take in the atmosphere and hopefully see lots of cool people and their cool games. The official outlets will definitely have the more up-to-the-minute news than this little blogger, but if anything cool catches my eye I will write about it here. See you at the show!

What's Social in "Social Games"?

2011-06-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

I never intended to start playing CityVille. In fact, the reason I started playing it at all is a bit of a long story. Let's just say, research.

Truth is I kind of like it - it's been my mild game distraction this week, while I haven't been picking up any of the more recent core titles that cost $60 new. There's just something happy and cheerful about the busy little visual of my growing city, with its teddy bear store and the smiling cactus on the Mexican restaurant.

When most gaming blogs direct attention toward a Zynga title, it's (not always, but) usually to mention how bad they are, or how they are not really games. Game designers whose work I respect and admire have basically flat-out declared games in this sphere as bad-wrong. The two main complaints about Zynga's tycoon-lite structure are that the games are manipulative, and, that they require too much busywork that is not challenging play. Another very common complaint is that one shouldn't call them "social games" because they are not very social.

Now that I think I've played CityVille long enough to find the fun in it, I think I'd like to talk about that a little.

At GDC this year Chris Trottier did a talk called "Designing Games for the 43-year Old Woman" that was given to a basically full room. (Slideshare available here.) The slides are interesting as they examine the design philosophies of the games. "When I game," Trottier says, "I don't want to be bothered - hassled - challenged." To paraphrase a few of her points, busy-mom gamers want to click things that are shiny and make pleasant noises. Busy-mom gamers don't want to have to think or make hard decisions. The thought that ran through my brain after walking out of that talk this year was "...Entire team is babies." These gamers don't actually want to be talked down to... but, yet, you kind of have to talk down to them, while maintaining a careful tightrope of pretending you aren't talking down to them.

So along this vein CityVille is not a challenging game. You get goals to put down buildings. You put down buildings. Some of them increase your money, some increase your population, some allow you to fuel resources to other buildings, etc. If you don't put down the "right" building, no worries, since it still chugs merrily along.

On Being Manipulative

The people in my city were very sad when I took this screenshot. I know because there is a little blue sad-face in the corner of my screen. It stays there, even if the people walking around within the city are smiling bright and happy. If I roll over the blue face, it reminds me. "Your people are very sad."

Why are they sad? Well, my city is too close to reaching its population cap. I have to increase my city's population cap by placing Community Buildings. I have several under construction, but they aren't complete because Community Buildings can only be totally complete if they are staffed by people who are your friends. So, unless I want to pay in-game cash in order to bypass this requirement, I have to bug my friends.

I always have the option to pay in-game cash, by which I mean, the kind purchased with real-world, folding-money cash, to bypass anything. That too, would make the sad-face go away temporarily. For now, it sits, until I manage to complete a Community Building to raise the cap and make my city less "overcrowded."

That's only a temporary measure, of course. If I manage to raise the cap to the point where my people are really happy, as indicated by the green smiley face, new people might start moving in. Then, as they do, the gap between the cap and the total population will close again, causing blue unhappy faces until I either put down more Community Buildings or just start bulldozing crowded apartments.

So, to summarize: unhappy-face, always there looming on the HUD, unless you pay or get your friends' help to make it go away, and then, only for a little while. My husband laughed and laughed when I explained how the little sad-face worked. It's kind of genius. And that still isn't as manipulative as the sad-faced little black sheep that used to show up on my Facebook feed courtesy Farmville players. They're sneaky tactics. I like to think that I'm a little above them and analyzing them from a great height, but I really just succumb to another human pressure. I don't want to increase my population because a frowny face appeared; I want to increase it for the pure sake of increasing it, just as one might in SimCity. It is its own reward... mostly because human animals like seeing bars fill and little numbers that start out as small and then grow in to bigger numbers.

I would just keep on increasing those numbers, rapid-fire, but the game creates a lot of different obstacles to this. I can't just put down buildings forever. Maybe the in-game money goes down, the energy bar goes down, or my population cap is reached (causing frowny faces), and I have to wait. One might interpret this as manipulation, but it also is where the game has its challenge. I know challenge is a dirty word where it comes to a game that's clearly so unchallenging, but the personal challenge you may set for yourself is "how big can I grow my city without spending real-world money on it?" And that becomes a challenge of planning, placement and patience.

On Busywork

But how much of that is just busywork? The What Games Are blog discussed this matter recently, specifically discussing the "harvesting" mechanic in CityVille, FarmVille etc as an example of needless work. So, yeah, when I get my city open, I have to click on stuff to make stuff pop out and then I click on the stuff that just popped out.

Look, when I clicked on my toy shop a toy robot popped out of the toy shop and now I have to click the toy robot.

...Okay, so, that's not really the most fun thing to do.

I used to be fairly enamored with Zoo Kingdom, but now I only visit my zoo every once in a while, and this kind of upkeep is basically the reason. Building my zoo was fun. Maintaining it involves a lot of clicking on stuff, so when I boot up my zoo now I see this:

Lots of little things to do. My American Bison is really upset that I haven't clicked on it in a while, and it's making something way beyond a frowny face. And I gotta water the plants and collect the money from food stalls and muck out the restrooms. I can pay money in-game to make many of those tasks go away, but since doing the tasks is my main source of in-game money, I have to do them eventually. Also, sometimes, my reward for clicking on an animal is that it dies, which is really quite depressing. Maybe best just to let it live in limbo, angry-face or no.

In CityVille, this sort of activity is in fact busywork. But... not entirely. Since I have a limited amount of "energy meter" when I fire up the game, I have to prioritize what's best to do first before it runs out and gets a chance to recharge. This doesn't involve a lot of thought. Obviously, anything with a small window, such as harvesting crops before they wilt, is important to prioritize, while collecting "rent" on a large building can wait a few hours. But there's a small amount of thought involved here that makes it not just mindless clicking on stuff. My 4 PM low-blood-sugar brain will happily confuse that for strategy.

Also, there is a certain pleasant friction to clicking on stuff (and having stuff pop out of it). Trottier likened these little click actions to popping bubble wrap. It could also be referred to as a "Skinner Box Conditioning" type of response, but I think there is something inside of any human that enjoys the simple act of Clicking a Cow and having it make a cheerful noise. Like it or not, that's probably one reason why these games succeed as much as they do, especially with audiences that don't really want significant challenge. When people say things like "these games are only successful because they manipulate you," they may be half-right, but it kind of ignores the fact that clicking on something and having it make happy noises and bright colors is appealing. Building a little world that you made on your own in the process of those hundred little clicks is also appealing.

But It's Not Social

So now I come to the actual topic I titled this post about, which is, the "social" aspect of a "social" game. The category of "social games" basically refers to "Facebook games" or games on a social network, and more specifically it usually means little bar-filling tycoon games like this one. And a lot of blogs argue that it's not social, so it's silly to call them social games.

But, you know, it's social enough.

You see your friends as "neighbors" at the bottom of your city. You can visit their cities and help them, and you often must entreat them to help out with yours. You may get a message that you were made foreman of your friend's factory, or you might see a little icon that represents your friend hopping around sending tour buses to your businesses. Each time this happens there is a small moment of delight, that you are helping that person, or that person is helping you. You are friends being friendly with each other.

And best of all, you're not in much competition. Maybe you're jealous that your friend was able to get a bigger apartment building or is a higher city level, but it's not the highly competitive real-time interaction of shooting at one another or throwing punches at one another. It's also not stressful and time-sensitive social pressure like running a "raid," and it's engineered to be very difficult to cause any undue social drama. (Though, it probably has to someone, because, just about anything that involves more than one person can.)

About the worst you can do is annoy your friends with your wall posts and alerts. Which I might have done this week a little.

But if you'll now excuse me I think it's time to collect the daily moneys from my City Hall. You should stop by and visit some time. It's kind of blissfully dull there, but probably not as outright evil as it's sometimes made out to be.

102 quadrillion men, zero women

2011-05-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

There's a small controversy surrounding the new PVP shooter, Brink. The character customization options are really thorough, and you can have a huge variety of different looks for your character... over 102 quadrillion as the developers boast. That is, as long as you don't want a female. Deep, but male-only customization options were also included, recently, in Crackdown 2, and WWE All Stars: the wrestling game that allows you to create dream matchups of your all-time favorite pro-wrestlers, as long as your favorite pro-wrestlers were not women.

I have complex feelings about this problem. From a pure target market standpoint, the Brink developers probably made the right decision. The kind of PVP-oriented tactical squad shooting that their game is oriented around has a very limited appeal for female players. Female players are a minority in PVP shooters to begin with, because of a variety of factors related to the appeal of competition, difficulty of some to navigate the spaces, lack of free time to invest in getting good, not feeling comfortable in the space due to rude men and shit-talking, and other factors. I know there are certainly women who want to buy and play Brink. But they are going to be in the minority compared to male players of the game.

The typical argument that a developer makes when confronted with a lack of options for female players, is that it's a "matter of resources." It's a basic equation. Why use up 50 percent of your character design resources on what may only be 10 percent of your audience? You're going to get a little pushback from a small section of the game press for not including this option, but this will be brief; what you're after is sales figures and a good metacritic, so being gender-inclusive doesn't really make that much of a dent.

The problem though is that women could be your audience. That's just not what you're choosing. So if a developer says, "We decided not to devote the time and energy in to creating a female option for our players, because it's a matter of resources," they need to confess, and finish that thought with... "...Because we aren't really all that interested in appealing to women with this title." That's already unspoken in your thought. We aren't the target audience.

I get that some things are not for me. Brink didn't appeal to me hugely anyway, purely for gameplay reasons, and now that I know I can't customize a cool woman soldier the appeal is zero.

I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe where Brink only had female soldiers, and no male. Imagine that, but everything else about the game is the same. I think that, from a marketing standpoint, that would be absurd. It would be "that game with the chick soldiers." People would accuse it of being a paper-doll simulator with shooting. You'd have to be a pervert to pick it up.

But then I consider this. It was a huge output of resources for Bioware or Atlus to totally redesign huge singleplayer story games to allow for the possibility of a female protagonist. Not only did this require new art and animations, and voice acting, but it also required new dialog to be written and new game options to exist. They did it anyway. Is this really smart from a marketing standpoint? In Mass Effect, only Male Shepard is used in the marketing materials, and 80% of players play as the male Shepard. This is actually a staggering statistic that suggests they might be fools to even bother with the female option for Shepard. Of course, most people also play Soldier, so maybe it's silly to have other classes. And most people play Paragon, so maybe it's silly to have Renegade options. Reductio ad absurdum.

Or maybe options exist so you can have options. Maybe only 10 percent of your Brink players will want to play as the really skinny guy. He's in the game anyway.

Gamifying Education. Edufying Gamification.

2011-05-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

I'm a teacher of mostly young adults, at the college level. So education is on my mind a lot.

So here's a thing to watch.

(The web site he's talking about that is a riddle sequence is Notpron. With an embed, you're bereft of the link as promised, so, there ya go. Odd name for a game, but pretty cool if you like that sort of thing.)

I will say that I came in to this video preparing to largely disagree. Skeptic on ARGs, Skeptic on Gamification (at least in its current method of largely 'pointification').

But maybe it's the term "gamification" I have a problem with, rather than the idea of injecting some fun, which is the real point of the exercise.

When I was in Junior High there was an advanced program for gifted students, which was called Gateway. Gateway took the place of your normal English and Writing periods, and basically was an advanced English class with additional writing, spelling, and other lessons tacked on. It was for the smart kids only, so, in order to get in you needed to be above a certain reading threshold in prior classes.

You wanted to be in Gateway because it was the most funnest class. (I was, as you can tell by my scholarly use of the phrase "most funnest.") Here is a short list of some of the amazing stuff done in Gateway:

Japanese Lessons, mostly done via a series of kooky videos called "Yan San and the Japanese People." This also included getting to eat Japanese food like seaweed crackers and little dried fish with the eyeballs still on. And writing haiku.
A unit on Ancient Greece, where every group table was a different Grecian city, and we all got points as a city for different activities we did. Sparta, as the "aggressive" city, was like Slytherin and encouraged to cheat for points. We also had to wear togas to class for a month (bedsheets over our regular clothes). (I should probably note that the points had nothing to do with our grade. And in fact Sparta regularly rewrote the points board and at one point "traded" points with Athens.)
The book The Westing Game, only each student in the class played one character, and any part of the story they wouldn't know because they weren't present then was covered in black tape. We read parts in class and acted them out and tried to piece together the mystery during class hours.
Field trips - big ones, weekend trips - every year.

In other words it was the most "gamified" class ever.

Of course that was before we had the idea of "gamifying" things... it was just a cool creative class about the different ways that learning something new can be fun. I sort of remember feeling bad for the middle schoolers that had to take the boring regular English class. The upper level kids were going to learn that much more, that much faster, while they didn't even get a chance to catch up.

But I think I understand why only the "gifted kids" got Gateway. The barrier to entry was because the class structure assumed, a) that you had a certain baseline level of ability to read and understand more difficult books, and b) that you were bought in. Even at the young and impressionable age of 12, there are going to be some students that aren't bought in to the idea of dressing up in togas every day.

I think one of the biggest problems facing teachers today is buy-in on behalf of the students. Maybe it's the biggest problem facing teachers since the beginning of time; I'm not sure, having not done this since then. But it's definitely a problem when you're working with adult learners, and a problem in today's distractable world.

Do you know what is possibly the biggest factor is in a child's ability to read? The amount of books in the home that child grew up in. It doesn't even matter too much if the child was read to; just the idea that books are normal, and likely to be present, makes a child more likely to be a reader as he/she grows up, and continue a lifelong habit of reading. An interest in reading leads to natural curiosity. Natural curiosity is what leads to learning. Learning is not something that can be forced or spoonfed.

That's why the "Wikipedia Game" as mentioned in the video is a great idea... for a student who is already intrinsically interested in reading stuff. Puzzle-solving mysteries and ARGs are a great idea for that student too. The mere presence of a mystery is going to engage a naturally curious person to try and find the solution. But as we get older a mystery becomes somewhat less of a motivational factor, much of the time. We become busier and more impatient, and it's more difficult for us to buy in to a fantasy that's attempting to actively engage us (too much effort, to go through a process to be fooled). That's why, if you're going to input the idea of mystery learning or different "houses" or other cool tricks it works better on kids than adults. If you don't catch them while they're young - real young - you may never get the buy-in that you're looking for. It's too late for any kind of fun game activity to save someone who aggressively does not care about what you're trying to teach them.

I'm more skeptical about the idea of "experience points instead of grades" and other hacks that are very commonly proposed. In fact, I feel the video was weaker for leading with that idea, because it doesn't really add anything new to the conversation. This isn't really adding a game: just reframing assessment in a completely ungame-like way.

The real trick - the thing that nobody is going to do, ever, but which would be an amazing fix - is to get rid of assessment altogether. This is a crazy, hippie, radical notion that is totally implausible, and I understand why we're trying to hack assessment rather than remove it. But think about it this way. In the days of the arcade coin-crunchers, games had scores in them, and the score was how well you did, and at the end you always inevitably lost and left behind a score. Now in the days of longer home games, it's possible to win them, so gradually we started to do away with games requiring something like a score. The victory was in getting to the end of the game at all. Maybe you might get an Achievement along the way, but maybe that doesn't even motivate you. Playing the game and progressing in it is its own thing.

And that's what learning should be. People should want to learn, because, deep down, learning is already fun. In fact some people like Raph Koster would argue that what we call fun happens because you are learning.

And there are so many things to learn. What I want for everyone is to figure out what that one thing that excites them is, that thing that they would learn on their own, without anyone forcing it or gamifying it, and just give them the resources and instruction to learn that thing and help them along the way. If we are treating learning like a boring activity which requires extrinsic motivation, we lose.

Small Changes

2011-05-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

Just a post to mention www.secondtruth.com, my URL that I wasn't hosting a lot on currently, now points here. The old blogspot link also still works.

Experimenting with a new self-portrait - my hair is long again. This sprite is wearing a black tee as I tend to on my days off. If I get ambitious I will rotate the tee. She's based on the cute sprites from an RPG I'm working on lately. More details on game projects as they are fit to release.

I've also updated my link-to section on the right side with some additional stuff from my Google feed. My Google feed has gotten huge, so maybe I'll add everything at some point and break it down in to small categories.

What We Don't Know About Chell

2011-04-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

The Portal games, of which there are now two, have a mysterious and silent female protagonist.

I like her. Even though we don't know much about her.

I should spoiler-cut the rest of this for politeness' sake. It spoils everything.

So here's what we don't know about Chell.

Her Full Name

Lab Rat, the comic written to link the new game, Portal 2, with its predecessor, states her name only as "Chell [redacted]." GLaDOS seems to imply she knows her surname in in-game dialog, but it's never directly mentioned. Chell is probably short for Michelle, but we can't say for sure.

Who Her Parents Are

This isn't necessarily important in the case of a game protagonist. I can think of a lot of game characters whose parents I don't know much about. However, Portal 2 makes this detail important by bringing it up. GLaDOS, in Chapter 3, tells you she's going to introduce you to your parents, then, admits just after that she made this all up. She tells you that you are adopted - jokingly, at first, but then admits later when she's being more honest that this was in fact true. The second time she mentions this, there's less reason not to believe her.

There's a fan theory floating around out there that one or more of Chell's biological or adopted parents are Aperture CEO Cave Johnson and/or his assistant Caroline (the mental template for GLaDOS). However, there's no strong in-game evidence to support this, so I'm not sure I buy in to it.

What we do know is that Chell's father worked for Aperture at one time, because she was brought in at "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day," when she was a child. Her science project was the most amazing of all because she used "Daddy's chemicals." (Enlarge picture to see this more clearly.)

How Old She Is

No way to tell. The '99999' days she spends in suspension (within the game's audio) do not seem to be literal. They seem to be a buffer overflow of some kind. "Take Your Daughter to Work Day" seemed to happen in the 90's at some point, so, if we don't count cryosleep, Chell is somewhere between 20-30 years old during the events of the Portal games, by a general reckoning. The really tricky thing is trying to figure out how long she was out; there is no concrete evidence.

Why She Came Back

In the first Portal, GLaDOS mentions that Chell is "not even a full-time employee." The way it's stated makes it seem as if she is, however, a part-time employee. She may just be a test subject only, or she may have another duty at Aperture we don't know about. Lab Rat indicates that she volunteered for testing at least, and had very little to say about it.

Since Chell's parentage seems to be somewhat important to the story somehow, a logical theory is that her father was killed working at Aperture, possibly during the "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day" incident, and she returned and volunteered herself deliberately seeking revenge. A female character getting revenge for her father is a bit of a cliche, but it does fit what we know, and, we know it was her father who worked at Aperture for sure (even if her mother may have, also).

...Why I Give a Damn About What I Don't Know

Because, while I trust Valve, Chell is a silent female protagonist. From what we do know of her actual traits, which isn't too much, she was almost rejected for testing not because she had some special powers or because of her parentage but because she possesses one of my all-time favorite heroine traits: indomitable will and tenacity.

I want to leave that right where it is. I almost want to preserve it in a cryosleep of its very own. Knowing what I know now about what I thought I wanted to know about Samus Aran, I don't think I want to know any more about Chell. Gaps exist sometimes in narrative so we can fill them with speculation, or with ourselves.

I think I'm not the only person playing games in this era to hold some nostalgia for the past for one special reason: the lower fidelity of older games often invited us to provide our own stories, our own ideas for how things really were in those worlds. I wouldn't trade back the advancements technology has made, but sometimes it's nice to be able to fill in some of the gaps. Thanks to the Portal games for keeping a bit of mystery 'still alive'. At least, for now.

On the Success of Valve's "Potato" ARG

2011-04-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

I'm already on record as ARG-Skeptical.

However a fairly successful ARG seemed to be taking place over the course of the last couple of weeks, courtesy Valve and its "Potato Sack." When I initially became aware of the promotion, my only involvement was to buy the "sack," which contained a suite of indie games at low low prices,because it contained games that I wanted and was going to buy anyway (in some cases, I already had them, so I have doubles. Anyone out there need an Audiosurf?). I just wanted to take advantage of the deal before it disappeared, which is the damn thing about Steam.

Afterwards I became aware that there was an extra hook to it, though it wasn't clear to me what someone "had" to do. Internet paranoia set in. By just buying the pack and figuring I'd fire some games up later, was I "doin it wrong"? Was my lack of free time and concentration on Dragon Age (which I just bought, yeah, the first one, sometimes I'm slow), causing mass internet disappointment?

I researched. A wiki sprang up about the ARG associated with the Potato Sack. The only apparent point of the ARG was to get the game Portal 2 unlocked slightly early for PC purchasers (not a lot earlier, as it turns out). A few lucky "test subjects" also got to play the game early with a surprise trip to Valve HQ.

The ARG consisted of additional puzzles and levels added to the games in the bundle, which must've taken a lot of effort from all the developers and been an undertaking for everyone. It's unclear (at least to me, so maybe someone can fill me in) what relationship exactly doing the bonus levels had to "unlocking" the game, except for the Chosen Few who got to go to Valve. It may just be access to bragging rights, cool Achievements, and swag, though a few people also got free copies of the game for unlocking all the "potatoes" in time. That being said, this is hard-core ARG puzzle solving... I can barely make any sense of, say, this, even though I did check out the "Justine" bonus content in Amnesia. (That link may contain spoilers for Amnesia, by the way. Honestly I can't even tell you.) I do know that this is not an ARG strategy - it's just hacking the game not to find the monster data to make the game easier. ARG strategy pages make more sense if you watch them updated in realtime. Looking at them as artifacts they become strange messes of data that are hard to process in one sitting. The wiki is interesting from a pure outsider perspective in the sense that ARG "puppetmasters" also seem to be playing the game from within the wiki, aware of its existance, at one point writing cryptic messages within the wiki timeline itself.

The core ARG group seemed to develop a strategy of playing the games one at a time. At about 3 PM yesterday, while this was in full swing, I took this screenshot of the "games completed" as per the calculations.

My initial take on seeing this screen was that it looked a like a normal play pattern. I haven't played everything in the Sack yet, but the games that completed first all seem to be fun, breezy light games that the average person would be likely to fire up first out of the set. The omission of Audiosurf from that list, which is fairly breezy itself, only makes sense in the context of it having been out for a while, so a lot of people probably already had it as compared to, say, Kick It.

Actually, however, there was a core group of ARG-faithful playing the games deliberately. Someone in the hive mind got the idea that it was smartest to concentrate the entire group on one game at a time. (I'm not sure if that was actually the optimal strategy or not, but that seemed to be the strategy, and an ARG hive mind is generally good at optimizing strategy so I'll go with them there.) They also got the idea to, again, for whatever reason, concentrate on the breeziest games first, at least it seems. The hive mind would move on to another concentration when its favored game was "close enough," to avoid duplication of game-playing effort (if you see game playing as effort). In the screenshot above, I'm not sure what the hivemind is orienting around, though I did watch a sharp turn toward Killing Floor later that night.

That did create an interesting dilemma for me once I figured it out. Should I play whatever game I want to, because playing games is fun, or, should I play a "productive" game to help out the hive? In the end I played a bit of Super Meat Boy as it was both "productive" and fun. (The games that I would be initially drawn to in the first place are different from the games that would draw the average person, so it was a non-dilemma in the end.)

What I'd love to know is how the hivemind decided which game to focus on, if there was even a strategy there at all. If the goal was to fill as many game progress bars as possible, is it better to concentrate on the "breezy" games first to get them filled more quickly, or is it better to concentrate on the games that people will not play on their own? If I were running the hive, I would've done it backwards from how they picked their strategy. Amnesia (which is a fantastic game) was the last game to fill (though by a narrow margin to Defense Grid). If this was an ordinary play pattern, that's what I would have expected anyway, because the majority of people don't like games that are extremely scary. However, the ARG community probably has the guts to run Amnesia, so they should've done it first, while regular uninvolved people played more lighthearted games unawares. Super Meat Boy, while lighthearted, is really challenging, so it makes sense that people would shy away from that one on their own as well.

So... how successful was this ARG?

I don't have any numbers from Valve obviously. Maybe they will appear over the next couple of days. But, like most ARGs, this was an advertisement, and, as an advertisement, it seemed to be fairly successful. It displayed a clear call to action that is unusual for most ARGs. Rather than "buy our game, after our advertising ARG is over," which is how most of these things work, the rules for the Potato Sack were "buy these games, if you want to play in this meta-game." That had to translate to some wins for Steam and for the developers involved in the bundle, since anyone who wanted to play in the ARG had to spend money up front. As for Portal sales, it may be fairly likely that anyone who was going to play in this ARG would've bought Portal 2 anyway, but it can't hurt to generate a little more buzz around it, and maybe a few people might've been tipped over to buying it on PC because of this promotion.

From a player perspective this was actually stupidly unsucessful at least by one key metric. Namely: it was really quite hard to unlock Portal 2 all that early by the rules in play, and for all the combined effort of possibly thousands of people, they only got the game a couple of hours early. I'm sure a few people noticed that, but, really being able to unlock the main game was just sort of a consolation prize; the fun of the thing was in the effort the players spent to unlock it in the first place, playing different games and solving puzzles. I've never been one for a midnight release and I can just as soon wait until tomorrow to pull open the seal on a fresh game (see my above note re: Dragon Age). But even if I don't get around to Portal 2 this week or next, the metagame is going to roll around in my head for a while.

(...edited to add... wait a second, maybe this game wasn't fun for some people participating seriously. Okay, I'm willing to believe then that playing a game I thought was fun was definitely doing it right after all.)

My Thoughts on Yaoi

2011-04-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Actually the title of this post should read "My Thoughts on ~~Yaoi~~ Christine Love's new Visual Novel 'don't take it personally babe it just ain't your story' Which Everyone is Talking About Lately and Which Contains Some Non-Graphically Depicted Elements of Yaoi."

This is just another one of those short-experience indy games with a story focus that hit the internet and made a big splash. I'm drawn to these lately because someone says "it takes about an hour to play" and, like... I have an hour. I'm drawn to a lot of other experiences that don't take an hour, but, an hour is about right as I get older and busier. For more explanation of what don't take it personally... is about, I'll link to Rock Paper Shotgun's review with pictures and explanations, to avoid repeating content already on other blogs. That's for if you need context. If you need more context, play the game (I'd say plan for an hour and a half, but I was multitasking) and then come back.

Just some random spoilery thoughts below, in bullet-point format rather than a proper essay.

I am the only person on the internet that liked this better than Digital, I guess. Not that I disliked Digital, but I didn't find it as remarkable for some reason.
The art style works well in the context. The art is inconsistent - feels like the work of multiple artists I guess - I just thought the character full-body pictures were stronger anatomy-wise than the cut-scene drawings were. None of them were bad, but the full-body pictures were stronger. I have no idea how art gets created for this kind of game. I assume some of it is stock art and some of it was personal commissions, or maybe it was personal commissions from multiple artists (that's implied by the game's credits now that I think about it).
I'm a horrible person whenever playing a story-focused game. Sometimes that includes, say, Mass Effect. I guess I'm among the rare few that sort of likes when my avatar puts me in a situation that is emotionally uncomfortable. This (I tweeted yesterday) makes me kind of want to learn Ren'py and create a game where that is the entire point. Like maybe you play as the CEO of an evil corrupt chemical company and "moral choices" involve being bad or worse with no middle ground. (The chances of my actually doing this given the other unfinished projects on my stack is quite small. Someday I will just post about my unfinished projects, though I'd prefer to write a post called "I finshed this project!" ... I digress.)
Having said that, though, about being a horrible person in these games, I'm also a very results-focused person. (A moral choice that illustrates my being a horrible person but still results-focused is, for example, the one in Zaheed's loyalty mission in ME2. No spoilers except to say, no, I did not even really pause to think. Then I got Renegade points, and cackled.) At an infamous point don't take it personally asks you if you'd like to look at some softcore porn. You can click on the in-game link to see the picture, but then it is password-protected. Judging from other reviews many people realized they could look up the passwords on the internet in the RL, but it didn't occur to me to do this. I just thought "oh, this probably isn't necessary to progress through the game then" and just moved on.
I have seen a lot of posts on the internet to the effect of "this game had my last name in it!" This game had both of mine; my maiden name was present also. Though that, I believe, is a coincidence, where it comes to my current surname, I may be coming to the paranoid conclusion that the game may be mining this data somehow. If so, genius.

Games for Everybody

2011-03-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

I came here to talk about spiders.

Or maybe I came here to talk about homosexuality but you should stay for the spiders. Either/or.

I should add as a disclaimer that I haven't played Dragon Age. But I'm going to write about what people have written about Dragon Age. I hope that's OK and apologize if anything uninformed slips out. I have basically read a lot of spoilers for this game because I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to it ever.

So now that all the disclaimers are over here's another warning that you may want to stop reading if you are offended by homosexuals or spiders.

I'm loving this post-GDC writeup by Joel Burgess about motivating players in open world games. This is a great wealth of info for how to tackle these design needs, so if you'd like to read that first and then come back here, I'll wait.

In the bottom half of this there is a section called "Goals and Priority." Quote:

When we announced Skyrim a few months back, I was lurking on the forums and saw a speculation thread about spiders. The poster, it turned out, was curious if we’d have spiders as an enemy type in some dungeons, and if we’d include an option to disable them. I thought this was silly at first, but then I skimmed the thread and saw that other people chimed in with the same sentiment.

Some people are deathly afraid of spiders. Or they are just mildly afraid of them. They don't want to encounter them, ever. But they want to enjoy what will likely be a huge, highly-talked-about, open-world game... without encountering the spiders.

Me, I'm weird. I love spiders. Love watching their fascinating motion across webs as their legs crawl all around, passing inside and slipping outside of one another as they effortlessly glide, crawl and sew. I can watch one for hours. Obviously there are people who might feel the same way, and the game might include spiders for those people who think they are awesome. But for the arachnophobic people, spiders would bother them, so, I suppose to accommodate those people we might have a no-spiders option.

So RPS reports that someone on the Bioware forums doesn't like a homosexual character making a pass at him. Because he's a "straight male gamer" and that is obviously not for him. Maybe it bothers him to have a homosexual advance made on his character. He'd rather not encounter that, not see it. So make it like the spiders. I like the comment from someone further down the thread about adding some sort of "gayness slider."

Bulletstorm thought their dialog might offend people, since it's kind of over-the-top, so they included a no-swears option, though you have to dig for it in the options menu. "No Russian" is skippable. The title of my post is "Games for Everybody." Games are for you.... even if you're arachnophobic or homophobic or you don't like swears, or if you're okay with shooting "the bad guys" but not comfortable with a theoretical firing of your weapon in to innocent crowds.

And I get the point but I don't know. I guess I've always been a fan of the idea of games with "teeth," but the truth of reality is that the bigger the game, the more you have to appeal to as many people as possible with the game, which means you have to worry about things that are going to bother people. This is one reason why horror games now are different from horror games of my youth - a bigger audience needs slightly bigger training wheels in horror. Games traditionally have been the opposite of content-conservative, with plenty of games coming out trying on purpose to be as crass as possible to see where they can push the envelope. But they're conservative in a lot of other ways - particularly in the choice of protagonist character and what story that character is put there to tell. And in a world where you're afraid to offend someone, trying new stories with new protagonists is difficult.

Imagine if you went to a movie. And before the movie there was a warning about all the content you were about to see, a big checklist of every button that might possibly be ticked... and then an option to turn that part off. Hm, no, that's a terrible analogy. But maybe I would've wished for that in Cloverfield when I was not adequately warned that the camera was going to make me throw up in my popcorn...

Okay, imagine you went to a theme park. And before doing anything... Well, theme parks sort of do this. The warnings say "don't ride this if you have heart problems or are pregnant." They aren't truly content warnings but warnings about the experience. They can serve two purposes with this kind of warning... they can actually warn people who shouldn't be on the ride, and, they can also build anticipation for what people are about to see and do. If a ride has a sign that says "Warning: you will get wet on this ride," that's one code phrase for "oo, fun!" But everybody might not wanna get on that ride. And there is no "change the ride so I don't get wet" option.

There's an awesome disclaimer in front of many of the Silent Hill games. A screen flashes up with a warning to the effect of "sequences in this game may be violent and cruel." Typically this is overlaid over an image of something violent and cruel happening. It's a warning, sure, but, what it really does is reinforce that you're about to get what you paid for, presuming you knew what you were doing when you picked up a game called Silent Hill.

But Silent Hill is like the water ride. It's not for everyone. Maybe I didn't come to the theme park to get wet today. Maybe I didn't want to see anything violent or cruel today. There is no option to turn off the cruelness. (Sometimes there is an option to change the blood color, at least for enemies, presuming that bothers you.) That's because if you want to turn that off the game isn't for you in the first place.

But Call of Duty, say, is supposed to be a game for everyone. Even if it's not, particularly, the game for me.

So the more mainstream you want to be, as a AAA game, and the more units you want to sell, the more pressure there is to add an option to remove anything that's going to potentially put off a certain percent of your audience. Even if that thing is spiders.

I don't have a particular answer for that conundrum. I just find it something interesting to muse out loud about.

Learning from SWERY

2011-03-04T07:24:00.000-08:00

Attendees from the Game Developer's Conference were all aglee yesterday that Deadly Premonition designer SWERY was giving a translated talk for us about his design philosophy. This is the first talk I'm writing about in this blog, even though there's been a lot of great talks, because SWERY's perspective is unique and must be shared.

Basically he had seven points about how he creates a game that keeps people interested. All the points were great, but, the first point that he incorporated really showed the method to what seemed like madness in Deadly Premonition.

If you aren't familiar, in Deadly Premonition you have to do a lot of mundane stuff. Sleep, eat, shave, and launder your suit - things a person might have to do every day. It would be easy to dismiss this as just trying to over-simulate life, but it turns out the reason that this was designed that way was deliberate. SWERY said, "Games you don't remember when you aren't playing them are already dead." So the mundane activities in Deadly Premonition are designed to make you think about Deadly Premonition when you do these activities later. For example, if you are a smoker, and you light up, you might think about York lighting up. If you are shaving, or eating something that's like something in the game, you're reminded of it. He showed a slide where a little caricature was watching "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," and, because Deadly Premonition mentions that movie, it's going to remind someone of playing his game if they happen to choose to rent that movie. Or maybe they'll want to rent that strange movie because it was mentioned in the game.

SWERY also talked a lot about how you make characters feel real. He didn't word it exactly this way, but it really all seems comes down to specificity. He draws mind maps for his important characters: free-associating different traits that that character will have. He might decide, broadly, "This guy is a bit of an otaku; he likes movies and cartoons." But then he asks himself, what is York an otaku of, and settles on the specific choice of 1980s movies. This makes sense with the age of the character and gives him something specific and cool to talk about. And it ties in to things that he might discuss that will remind you of the game later.

Deadly Premonition is notorious for its lack of graphical polish, but SWERY wasn't bothered by that. He had cool ideas and he wanted to use them, and also said one of his goals was just to use all his ideas while he could. I hope other game developers will be inspired by his character-writing ideas, because Agent York was one of the coolest protagonists to come out of a game in recent memory.

You can see another writeup about the talk (and writeups about many others) at Gamasutra.

GDC 2011

2011-03-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be at GDC starting this evening! I intend to blog a few times from there, but, I also have tweets you can follow at @second_truth. You know, if that's a thing you do. I'm not sure exactly sometimes how best to leverage Twitter, 'cause I am a wordy girl, but I try to keep it interesting.

The Hum-Drum Dullness of Sexual Sin

2011-02-25T12:11:00.000-08:00

This will contain spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas.

I shot the leaders of the Omerta crime family. Shot 'em dead.

Okay, perhaps I'm overstating... actually I roll with Stealth and Speech, so what I really did was talk them in to a room, convince them to shoot at each other, then finish off the survivor with my holdout pistol before quietly slipping out and closing the door behind me.

They know what their crime was: boring me half to death. Attempted murder, as I slice it.

Maybe I had expected too much of Gomorrah, home of the "loosest sluts on the Strip." Walking in to the casino, after a perfunctory weapons check, I saw exactly what I should have expected given the place's reputation. The prostitutes standing outside the casino are a promise of what is to come inside: more prostitutes. This is accompanied with the occasional NPC dialog drops about how nice or not nice they smell and how loose they are or are not. Since I've seen more interesting half-naked video game people in... well, almost every video game ever, the prostitutes fail to elicit any interest in me from a sexual standpoint. They are in fact kind of comical, doing their stationary hip-thrust dances for awed onlookers. Maybe I feel a little bad for them, which is perhaps the intent.

In the spirit of "let's see what happens!" I tried picking up Dazzle, a woman who was standing outside of one of the courtyard tents. My New Vegas avatar is female, like most of my RPG avatars, but, it doesn't matter much. Every western RPG I have played within the last four years that allows any sort of sex seems to make bisexuality the most interesting option for a female protagonist just by default. (Note: I have not tried Dragon Age yet. I hear it is different.) What followed was not a lewd sound drop or a shot of the outside of our little tent but... a whole lot of nothing, except my pockets were a bit lighter after a quick fade to black.

I reset from my last save. May as well keep my caps. I don't know if there's some kind of consequence for having bought Dazzle, later on down the line, but now I don't think I ever will know.

New Vegas is not really alone in this. The sex-for-cash in Fable II failed to entice me for similar reasons. Presumably there would at least be some awkward moaning if I took the men or women on the street up on their sex-for-money offer, but if I wanted that, I have a virtual husband waiting for me at home (and a wife, see above) who is always ready to go. The male prostitutes in Fable are in particular silly, and, seem to be designed to be, but, that doesn't go very far to making purchasing sex tempting at all. It just makes me wonder why anyone would bother.

You can watch a stripper in Mass Effect. This is funny for a couple of seconds, then it just feels awkward. "Does anything happen if you keep tipping?" ask YouTube commenters. Spoilers: no. On the other hand, trying to woo your partner of choice in the Mass Effect series, and establish a relationship, is deeply compelling to me and many.

So I've started to wonder. Is this a moral position that video games are taking? Grand Theft Auto's "beat up a hooker and get back your money" notwithstanding, it seems like the common depiction of sex for money in video games is that it's totally hollow, unrewarding, and there is no reason to ever do it when you could be chasing romance. Are games taking a position on this, or, is it just that, there's no real way to make casual sex narratively compelling, whereas romance actually is? Is the scrutiny and censorship of sexual depictions in gaming post Hot-Coffee having a chilling effect?

Take for example the first Leisure Suit Larry game, Land of the Lounge Lizards. It's actually possible for Larry to lose his virginity very early on in the game to a prostitute. However, even though "lose your virginity" is supposedly the goal of the game, doing this doesn't complete that task. The only way to actually win the game is to score with... well, another woman you just now met, but she's much more attractive than the hooker and you didn't pay her. At least this is probably the most interesting hooker I ever bought in a video game, since you get a humorous censored sex sequence out of the deal (and an unforgettable Game Over if you forget your rubber for this encounter). The LSL games definitely take a position that, despite the protagonist's constant pursuit of sex for its own sake, finding a person you connect with is more important.

That's an overt message in LSL. But it's a covert message in many other games where casual sex itself is simply not made interesting enough to pursue. And, given that sexual content in games is scrutinized much more heavily than sexual content in almost all other media, games are almost forced to make casual sex uninteresting because they can't expand on its depiction.

So I shot the Omertas. Not because they were amoral and I am moral. But because I saw no point to what they do. The story is set in Vegas: of course it includes prostitutes, but it can't really do anything with them.

My sexual encounters in New Vegas otherwise remain confined to one robot, and one man with a nice hotel room whom shortly thereafter I murdered.

Black Widow? A hilarious sound drop about "Charlies?" Hell yes that is compelling. ...Buying hookers not so much.

I found the picture of Eve from this Valentines' Day themed article which is cute and worth checking out.

Template

2011-02-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Had a brilliant idea to replace the generic 'books' background for this blog with a few photographs of my actual bookshelf full of video games, warts and all. Editing them together seamlessly is fairly hard though and the end result is kind of distracting, so I went with this more generic background instead. Lamenting the lack of good "video game" stock pictures that don't infringe copyright and/or burn your retinas off. If this one does, let me know.

Monopoly: You're Doing It Wrong

2011-02-17T06:33:00.000-08:00

So I've been writing about video games mostly. But sometimes I also play board games. I'm particularly fond of Dungeons and Dragons, which, while not a board game per se, has board game variants.

Whenever I tell people this, sometimes I add that there are conventions for board games; there are board game enthusiasts. The response of the average, non-gamer person is "You mean, games like Monopoly?"

...Sure. Except not really.

By all accounts the American obsession with Monopoly is pretty odd. For one thing, it's a "serious game," one of the first games with a social agenda to penetrate the mass market (although nobody thinks about Monopoly that way, by some accounts the original intent was to create a game that showed the problems with monopolies in an economic system and how them driving people to bankrupcy is a bad thing). For another thing, it's not really a great game. It's adequate, but most people who play it then complain that it has problems, such as lasting too long, and taking too long to get interesting. A larger problem with it, which fewer people mention, is that it's an elimination game, meaning that it isn't over until one player remains, leaving early knockouts from the game out in the cold. Maybe they can play Catan while they wait.

Of course, since Monopoly is the first board game people think of when you mention a board game, when you say you like board games, the thought process of the person you are talking to seems to go like this... 1) Board games = Monopoly 2) Monopoly is sort of dull 3) Why would anyone like board games?

People... A big part of the problem with Monopoly isn't Monopoly. It's you.

Zack Hiwiller discusses this on his blog, right about the time I was getting in to regular conversations about it. You can read that to get the gist of what I'm about to say, but, basically: most everybody I know plays Monopoly with two variant rules.

1) When you land on Free Parking, you get "the lottery," which is typically a large sum of money. The most common thing to do here is have everyone who pays an income tax throw that money in to the center of the board instead of the "bank," then it becomes the lotto prize for hitting Free Parking. In my family, we also threw $50 in there to start to sweeten the pot.

2) When you land on an unsold property, and you don't want it, just pass.

These aren't the official rules. Both of these house rules cause balance issues that actually weaken the game. The Free Parking rule allows for an exciting "come from behind" scenario, but this leads to players who should be knocked out of the game to continue to play, which causes the game overall to be longer. Being able to pass on properties means properties are sold more slowly, which also isn't in the rules: passed properties are supposed to be auctioned to the highest bidder.

This is why it intrigued me to learn about the new, electronic Monopoly that is being made without dice or paper money. My number one question about it was "Does it make you play the game by the actual rules?"

Apparently it does. After a fashion. It does seem to enforce the auction rule, which most people don't use or know. (I get why; it's awkward to run an auction without a pure neutral arbiter, and maybe the computer will help with that?) I would also bet that, therefore, it gets the Free Parking rule correct. (There's actually no reward at all for landing on Free Parking. One of the great mysteries I have personally never understood is where exactly that Free Parking "lotto winner" rule came from in the first place, since pretty much everyone seems to play the game with that house rule and everyone who does just learned it from their families. Who started that, and, since they don't understand game balance and actually made a bad rule, are they still alive to be punished?)

Places the electronic Monopoly seems to differ from the standard rule set is that 1) it adds random events, such as auctions or races (according to the NYT article) and 2) It, apparently, does away with one of Monopoly's best and most important rule sets, the ability to negotiate with other players for trade and sale of properties, Get Out of Jail Free cards, etc. Being able to sell your properties to other players is in fact part of Monopoly's rules, and one of the only rules that makes the modified version that most people play playable at all. It's fairly unlikely, after all, that you will just stumble across a perfect Monopoly of three (or two) matching properties while negotiating the board yourself. The "you give me that one and I'll give you this one and fifty bucks" kind of trading allows players to build up their properties without relying on bare random chance.

It will be interesting to see if this new Monopoly does well. In a perfect world, while everyone might own a copy of Monopoly for the nostalgia (mine is Nintendo Monopoly, natch), they would also realize that there are other board games worth their time and might check a few of them out. Maybe they might find a new household favorite. Balderdash, which is very social and a little educational, was always popular in my family, and that's before I knew that they made games in Europe.

Or, I guess you could just play Scene It.

Augh, augh, augh.

Living in the Fridge

2011-02-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

This is part... let's say two and a half, in my short series on the FPS.

I should warn you that this particular entry will contain spoilers for a lot of different various shooters, so if you're worried about being spoiled for "stuff in general" don't read this one. Really it's just a spoiler about this one thing that happens over and over again.

So I teach a class on Level Design sometimes, and in the process of that the students write a little backstory for the game they're designing for. It helps with the idea of environmental storytelling and creating a convincing mise en scene. It seems like since I switched to using the Unreal Engine in this class, and, specified that First or Third Person Shooter is a good game idea to create in this engine, the amount of one particular type of character that students include is up about 50 percent overall.

No, not the heavily masculine protagonist. His dead wife.

My students are predominately male; there's often a female or two, but they aren't the majority. I always wonder if I should introduce the concept of Women in Refridgerators to them before I ask for the storytelling documents, but usually I forget, and then, I have the odd experience of tallying up how many dead wives the shooter designers leave in their wake when I read their papers. Rarely do I get through a class of twenty without at least three dead wives/girlfriends.

Naturally, as a feminist, I want to discourage this sort of thing, but I realize that my being offended by it comes off as heavy-handed. And, after all... it isn't as if this idea happens in a vaccuum.

The trope of kidnapping a woman is almost as old as video games, and not really the trope I'm discussing. If we counted every time a woman was put in danger, period, as putting her "in the fridge," we couldn't have women in fiction at all. So that isn't how I personally define putting a woman in the fridge, especially with regard to these game designs. The trope I specifically see in professional and student FPS design is adding the fiancee/wife/girlfriend for the sole purpose of killing her, to motivate the male protagonist in to action. Maybe she mutates in to a monster first, and then you have to kill her. That's fairly popular.

The FPS is predominately a male power fantasy. One way to grow your protagonist up from boy to man is show that he was able to hold a steady sexual relationship with a woman. However, to maintain the idea of his adult relationship without him seeming penned down by it, she is gone, and he is once again available. It also gives him a motivation to act - to save and/or avenge his wife - which is very straightforward. Sometimes, you can add her in, giving resolution to the character's arc, but Something is Horribly Wrong, which provides a Plot Twist, adds a convenient boss battle, and then moves the wife character off the stage.

Alternately, you can just kill her outright, along with a few kids, and make the arc entirely about revenge.

I'm not saying Max Payne is a bad game, by the way. I'm not saying any of these games are bad. What I am saying is that a lot of students keep reinventing Max Payne despite the fact that they never played Max Payne; that this "invent family, then kill them" story is in the collective consciousness of the young male gamer.

In the context of a male power fantasy I can absolutely see why this is done, why it works, and why we keep coming back to it.

I'm just wondering if we can maybe stop doing it, anyway. Because it's kind of become a standard trope at this point, and now it isn't real new or interesting. Maybe you just need an excuse for a guy to shoot some guys, and that's fine. But the story that cannot be critically examined is not one worth telling.

We discovered, by the way, that there is a female equviliant of this shooter trope in action games with female protagonists: they're usually looking for or avenging their father. Lara Croft and Chun Li are my two easy examples; you might have more. I suppose the reason for this in the case of the female character is, if she were looking for or avenging a husband or boyfriend, she wouldn't be virginal or available enough. I don't mind this story but maybe it's just another cliche we can lay to rest, or, at least, think carefully about before incorporating.

How Could I Make a Man Out of You?

2011-02-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

There's a little discussion on the internet lately about superhero movies. American men aren't men on the screen, casting directors say, so, we need to turn to men from the other side of the pond to play our American superheroes.

Here in the realm of video games, and, specifically, the American First-Person-Shooter, we don't have to deal with getting real actors to play our manly men, so we have less of an issue. Get someone with a great, manly voice, and artists will create the rest of the attitude - body and muscle and lots of manly scenarios for our hero to get himself up in. The world bows down to the manliness of the male lead, who stands up to everyone because the world just happens to revolve around his manly exploits. Like as not, his name is going to be Alex. That's a pretty common one. But it may as well be

Duke Nukem epitomizes this archetype, but he also parodies it; he's totally aware of what he is and has been for over a decade. Whether the audience is aware is a different story, but that's always a risk with satire.

The world of the hardcore gamer is, notoriously, not a terribly safe and inviting place for women. This, I believe, is often due to an incredibly loud group of young male gamers. They make up the majority of "hardcore" gamers by reputation, and, as such, seem to want to ostracize anyone not part of their tribe, which includes women. Witness the new blog "Fat, Ugly, or Slutty," AKA, the reason I don't wear a mike when I play on X-Box Live. Don't witness it for very long, really; it's not a fun read. All you need to understand about it is that it's male gamers acting cool by putting down and/or sexually harassing women who play games.

Now I'll give these guys the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are pretty young, and that in at least some cases they think they are being funny. And they're probably, literally, children, picking on adult women. Adult women are picking back by pointing out that they are, in fact, children, if not literally then at least by their behavior.

If these sort of "get back in my kitchen" comments are being made by men over eighteen, then we have an even deeper problem than I can understand. So here's my thesis. These young gamers have basically two types of men to emulate in their cultural world. And one of those types just happens to be the woman-hating, misogynist douche-bro exemplified by networks like Spike TV. Which of course televises the annual Video Game Awards, such as they are, and finds it necessary frequently to assert masculinity by putting down and objectifying women. When these guys cover video games, these in turn become the kinds of guys that a generation of kids wants to be like when they talk about video games. That makes "video games" the world where men are men, and women get topless and get back in the kitchen.

The other type of men our young men sometimes emulate are the men in anime. Anime protagonists tend to be younger than the protagonists in American media, which young Japanophiles - of which there are now many, many - see as empowering to them. They then want to emulate how their badass, younger heroes behave, which... paradoxically, also tends to warp their thoughts about women, since they start to see them as anime archetypes. They're crazy tsunderes, or perhaps goddesses that need to be put on pedestals and handled with kid gloves because of their magical skirt-wearing woman powers. You don't have to go far on a gaming website to see otaku comments treating women like some kind of strange and mystical other, expressing wonderment and confusion. And, well, again... they're kids, confused, and don't know better, but that's also creepy to adult women.

These two stereotypes of young male gamers are of course exactly that: stereotypes. Not all young male gamers are "douchebros" or otaku. But enough of them are to the point where, collectively, they become a problem for women who might otherwise enjoy gaming communities for their own merits. Sure, kids can enjoy games, but so can adults. Many games are designed for adults, and we are all part of the same community. This is why women frequently seek out to create their own gaming communities: to escape these sorts of problems.

Many young men seem to be using the gaming community as their reinforcement while they find their way from childhood to adulthood. During this period, they need male role models, and, some of the gender roles that they encounter on the way turn out to be less than ideal in that department.

So far, so good. But I started out in this article discussing Splint Chesthair, FPS Protagonist. Why does he appear in games time and time again, but yet, isn't considered a model worth emulating?

Well, because Splint Chesthair can't be you. Splint Chesthair is your dad.

Even when Bruce Willis was badass John McClaine, he was a grown-up guy who had a wife and kids. Now, the action hero is aging, but he's still starring in movies. This may be in some way starting to warp young men's sense of who the action hero is. As what seems like a more recent example, The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves was the lone hero, was in the 90s, not now, and not really relevant to the kids who are playing on X-Box Live. So the action hero is your dad, or else, he's some kind of fantasy hero that will always be etherially older than you even as you round the corner in to age 30. If the protagonist isn't an anime guy, which, in an American game, he isn't, he just seems like an older guy.

And with over a decade out of action, The Duke suits the aging-action-hero archetype perfectly.

However, young men, if you should find him worth emulation, rather than as a surrogate father figure, it still might be a step in the right direction from the guys you see on Spike TV. At least keep this in mind: Women want to be around the Duke.

I'm Here to Kick Ass, Chew Bubblegum, and Elevate the Discourse

2011-02-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

(And I am all out of both ass and bubblegum.)

Admittedly, a truly awkward title, but I also intend to discuss People Can Fly's upcoming Bulletstorm in this article, and I couldn't in good conscience name yet another article something like "The Coming Bulletstorm."

Often I link other articles for background material, but today, I will embed videos. Please be warned that if you watch any of these videos, there are swears, violence, and blurred nudity. If this sort of thing will be offensive you probably don't want to read the rest of the blog entry either.

I had this conversation with other gamers, about Bulletstorm potentially being controversial if the mainstream media should key on to it. And though we can't be sure, I really hope that it does, and they do. Critics of game violence had already been certain that "Beautiful Escape" existed long before it actually did: a game where one gets points for executing more exquisite torture on helpless victims. Along those lines, a high score is awarded in Bulletstorm for more creative and vulgar kills on your victims. This kind of "style" system has been done before in titles like Mad World, but Bulletstorm takes this to another level. In Bulletstorm, point values for doing the same kill style twice are lower, so that one is encouraged to experiment with new ways to kill.

Murder simulators, indeed.

Obviously this is done in a comical, over-the-top sci-fi fashion, with disposable minions and rampaging dinosaurs. The game creators have cited Kill Bill as an inspiration, a movie that uses huge splatters of gore in a way that is in turn an homage to old Hong Kong cinema. But Mortal Kombat in the 90s was also hugely comical and over-the-top, which didn't stop critics from labeling its cartoonish fatalities as the most realistic gaming violence ever conceived.

Duke Nukem also stands the chance of being reasonably controversial (for reasons other than its delayed release date, which has been discussed to death). That trailer above (the uncensored version was shown at PAX) has more censored body parts male, and female, than I have seen in any trailer for a console game release. Sure, Dante's Inferno had lots of breasts, but in the end this game was more controversial for its advertisements. Duke Nukem really stands a chance of raising a stir with its content - its treatment of women where even female aliens are sex objects, its vulgar dialog, and, like Bulletstorm, its intense and gory violence.

This is the same year where the Supreme Court is finally going to tell us whether video games have constitutional protection as speech, or should be regulated as if they were pornography. So this is a great time, the right time, to release games that are going to push that envelope as far as it can go. I've been saying for a while now that, in order to get critics to understand that games really can be for adults, and are a legitimate form of grown-up entertainment that grown-ups can enjoy, they need to follow the path that cartoons followed. They need to release a game that's shocking, vulgar, and a hundred-percent self-aware, to the point where it can't be denied. The game would have to be not only a violent game, but a commentary about violent games, designed to elicit a reaction from its critics that it mocks just by existing. There will be controversy, certainly, but at the end of the day the critics will have to throw in the towel because of this 30-ton gorilla of a thing. Postal 2 almost stood a chance of being this game, but it is too-frequently taken seriously by the critics of gaming as if its message of vulgar violence was sincere. Bulletstorm, Duke Nukem Forever, they also stand a good chance of being this game.

In other words, we do not need, and may never get "Our Citizen Kane." But we do need, and may get, our "South Park: the Movie."

More later.

Global Game Jam

2011-01-29T03:58:00.000-08:00

Just posting to say that this weekend I am organizer for Global Game Jam in Troy, MI. It's going very well so far out here. I'm only organizing rather than participating this time around so I'm looking forward to seeing some amazing games!

I Remain Skeptical About the Power of ARGs

2011-01-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

When I was an undergraduate student in a web development class I experimented with an art site, now perhaps-mercifully gone from the internet, that was deliberately difficult to navigate. At one point, a clue on the site pointed surfers to an invisible pixel that they had to click to proceed; at another, knowing how to view the source of the site was a critical step in the navigation puzzle. Everyone who viewed the project was confused, and, it's safe to say that in a class of twenty-plus students, nobody "got it." Just as well, I figured - this sort of experiment was a high-concept screwup - and I returned to traditional notions of usability.

Turns out perhaps I was just ahead of my time. I could've been designing sites for ARGs, which are often that complicated to navigate, and then some.

What is an ARG Anyway?

The ARG as I know it was introduced to me first by Ofiuco, the first ARG advocate of my acquaintance. I have her to thank for linking me to Cloudmakers which is, at the very least, an interesting read. For those unfamiliar with the medium, ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game. Wikipedia has a big old article, and you know how I love the links, but that article is long so I'll try to define it in my own words. Basically an ARG is a game that is actively directed in real time across multiple mediums. It usually starts out on the internet but integrates some other aspects such as meeting up in person socially to solve a puzzle, or getting a phone call from the game. An early example was Majestic, which was like an internet game, except it also sometimes called you on the phone, and sometimes was threatening about it. It was clever and ambitious and pretty much a giant failure as well.

Majestic shared a certain aesthetic with many other ARGs, which is that they purport not to be a game, deliberately blurring the division between reality and games by invading your life in ways you might not expect a game to do. They in some ways request that you cast off the notion of a game being a game and instead merge it with your real life in many ways. This division, between what is the game, and what isn't the game, is referred to in some texts as "The Magic Circle."

I am making observations about ARGs right now because Jane McGonigal, ARG designer, has a book coming out very soon about this topic: Reality is Broken. No, I haven't read it yet, though I plan to when it's officially released. But I have read Ian Bogost's review of the book, and also this past week, Leigh Alexander's observations about Foursquare, which intersects with ARGs according to McGonigal's thesis. Thus another article from me, synthesizing like a trained academic while standing on the shoulders of giants.

The Three Reasons I'm Skeptical

Now here's one reason I'm skeptical about ARGs having any powerful social influence: Most people, or at least most adults, really like the Magic Circle. They would like for it to stay right where it is. If an adult is playing a game, he or she would like, right now, to be fairly sure of that. They would also not prefer to be playing a game most of their waking time. If they were in fact supposed to be playing a game, because you are doing some behavioral psychology on that adult, you would probably have to do a better job than many designers are doing of hiding the "game" part. Or, you'd have to hide the part where it's supposed to integrate with their real life in some meaningful way, and let that part take care of itself. Many people integrate playing World of Warcraft or Farmville in to their lives in very powerful ways, but the games do not need that as a stated goal of their design. If WoW deliberately stated at some point "now we need for you to attend Blizzcon in costume to make it to the next level, because it's time to integrate this game with your real life," not many people would play WoW past that level.

A huge part of the social function of games is to try out things that would normally be challenging or embarrassing in a "safe" environment. You may not want to become an artist, but you might try playing Pictionary. Improv Night at the local community theater is right-out, but among your friends you might play Charades. The game "made" you exceed your normal social boundaries and thus these things that would be scary are instead fun. Similarly games allow people to act out heroic or villainous fantasies that they would like to explore in a safe way - slaying dragons and punching reporters and so-on without ever having to leave the house. That the Alternate Reality Game seeks to penetrate this circle is actually a big problem with it as a genre. Even avid gamers often return to the Magic Circle for safety. This is why Live-Action Roleplay, where the Magic Circle is blurred more than in traditional roleplaying games, is, while popular enough, still weirder and more niche than its tabletop counterparts. And tabletop roleplay is of course much more niche than standard board games, because it does require more of you as a person than merely rolling some dice.

Another problem with ARGs is the message. A few ARGs are just created for the fun of it, and I guess I would probably say that of the ARGs that exist, the ones created for the love of ARGing seem like the ones I personally would enjoy most. Perplex City, Last Call Poker: these seem to be games to play for the sake of playing games, and generally I am in favor of Games that Are Fun. But I don't feel that ARGs succeed at the other things they are trying to do, which, generally, are either conveying a serious educational message, or viral advertising. And in both cases they either flop, or suffer from "preaching to the choir." A game about The Dark Knight might have been lots of fun, and it got people talking, but you were going to see it (or not see it) anyway. And I find it difficult to believe that anyone who didn't already care about the consequences of a World Without Oil would invest time in the ARG of their own free will. Either you already have an interest in the issue this ARG presents, or, your teacher is making you play it. Why else invest your own time?

Yes, the impact of these advertising campaigns is extremely difficult to measure. But I'll take a wild stabbing guess and say that it's much easier to get people to buy a ticket for a superhero movie than it is to convince them in to walking in to a bakery to pick up a cake left there by one of its characters. The world is surely more mysterious and magical for having these things in them. I'm just saying I'm not sure, as an advertisement, or as a way of advertising a social cause, that it works.

Lastly, I'll talk about the reason I've never actually played in an ARG (whether or not you think that makes me qualified to write about them). Like the web site I created years ago that was deliberately a chore to navigate, ARGs are notoriously impenetrable.

And now, I quote.

Before we try the puzzle, if you look at the source code of the page , alongside the option values of the Style and Accessory of the hat are some very unsavoury terms such as 'plague', 'vapid' and 'death'. We don't know what they are for yet. In fact, in the source code of all the pages, in a META tag called 'earthwatch', there are different words for weather. All of the tags are available here.

Okay, I'll 'fess up here. We [the Cloudmakers] didn't actually figure out this puzzle properly. There are over 350,000 combinations to the puzzle and someone just went and created a program to try all of them out. I know - we're pathetic. It turns out that the correct combinations are:

Flying Hornburg, Blue, Orange, White, Feather

At the moment, we're trying to retroactively work out what this code means.

That's from the Cloudmakers' old site, in response to this puzzle in the advertising ARG, The Beast. One thing you're going to realize about reading about ARGs is that people who play ARGs like to be challenged by difficult puzzles, to the point where it's almost expected that if one creates a puzzle-based ARG, it is necessary for that ARG to build on the logic established by previous ARGs. Though the Death of Adventure Gaming has been greatly exaggerated (an article for another time), this is precisely the kind of incestuous logic in puzzle design that caused its momentary lapse in to a cat-mustached coma. And Cloudmakers is a very early ARG. If you're going to get in to ARGs, you need to already understand a lot of tricks of how the internet and cryptography work, or, else, be willing to learn those things by reading all the ARGs that came before.

This is great fun for some. It is not very mainstream.

So Who Needs Mainstream Anyway

Every problem I've discussed here is essentially another way of framing the problem that it will be really difficult for ARGs to achieve widespread adult popularity. So I can envision a counter-argument: What exactly is wrong with that?

Nothing, I guess. I myself am a fan of many "niche" game styles - Interactive Fiction, Roguelikes, social MU*s. I think the primary advantage to a niche product is the depth with which your relatively small audience engages with it. People made brand new web sites and brand new friends and poured their hearts into solving or even merely enjoying The Beast. More recently, You Shouldn't Have Done That became an ARG that captivated an internet population in an exciting and electric way. These things are absolutely having an effect on the individuals that they touch, providing some magic to their lives, and catalyzing friendships.

But I guess I don't see many essays or books confessing "ARGs are cool and fun, but niche." Instead people seem eager to wax poetical about the time that will come when an Alternate Reality Game of some stripe will sweep from the heavens and change the world. I feel if something struggles to scale up, and to achieve something like mainstream acceptance, then making sweeping changes to social policy is still out of its reach. Today's ARG-makers may have to be content with the observation of one other contemporary scholar. "You can change the world... in a tiny way."

A Thought about "Hardcore Mode"

2011-01-12T14:25:00.000-08:00

I was running a series of what felt like somewhat-routine checks for the New California Republic. Update the comm frequencies at Alpha, Bravo, etc., down the line. Doing this task made me feel again like the "Courier" I was in fact supposed to be portraying.

When I came across Ranger Station Alpha, I did take a moment to pause and gaze in to the space just beyond the camp.

Is that... fresh water? And clean?

Fallout 3 could certainly tell me, a lot, that fresh, clean water was special, but as I'm playing New Vegas in "Hardcore" mode, fresh clean water is actually special. It's pleasant every time I can plunge my head under the spout of a non-radioactive sink and reset that all-important hydration meter. It was worth it, at that moment, to go running down in to the clean lake and stick my avatar's face in it, even if I had to be mindful of the Lakelurk monsters crawling around a nearby shore.

It occurred to me later that the small joy of running in to the lake for a clean drink would have been lost to me if I hadn't been tracking my dehydration meter in the first place. I suppose that this situation is much like the people trying to get more meaning from Far Cry 2 by playing it without dying, or the default "ironman" settings in roguelikes like Nethack that mean every single action really matters. By playing a game in a different way or often a more-challenging way, smaller mundane moments take on new meaning. Risk and reward are heightened, and clean water is special in a way it wasn't before.