14/4

No Place for Hideo


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Sometimes when I play with someone new to games, they’ll ask me ‘How did you know that was the solution?’ and the answer is simply because I’ve been here before. On the surface it looks like skill, but in reality it’s a sign that we’ve learned to be obedient. A lifetime of playing games has taught us to be followers, and it is now a major factor in slowing down innovation and experimentation in games.
/.../
Researchers in Copenhagen and New York have both looked at building point-and-click adventures with replayable puzzles that redesign themselves each time you play, for instance. Others have looked at giving RPG characters emotions that affect how they behave in battle, protecting their loved ones, becoming distraught if they see close friends die.
/.../
`Core’ gamers are a tamed breed – companies know how they think, what they want, and how to make them feel like their needs are being met. They are the people who never ask why a door can’t be opened, they never ask why Mass Effect characters can only die in cutscenes, they never explore the same conversation tree twice expecting new dialogue. At the start of this piece I talked about playing with people newer to games, or the people who are routinely made to feel embarrassed for playing ‘casual’ games, and how it can seem that they make strange decisions that break the conventions we would never dare to. This is not a reflection on them for playing without preconceptions – it should be a reflection on us, as people too entrenched in what games are to be able to think about what they could be.


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The desperate situation in which the denizens of Hyrule found themselves seems to be a result of their own belief. They waited for a hero when none were forthcoming, dooming themselves with blind faith. Despite enacting this same familiar fairy tale journey, Wind Waker takes this warning to heart. It’s a fairy tale against fairy tales, showing reverence for received stories even as it warns that they should not be blindly trusted.
/.../
The final scene shows Link and Tetra (back to her old piratical self) embarking on a journey to find a new life and new land among Wind Waker’s endless seas. Link rides on his old red boat, but its magic is gone. It’s still a vessel but no longer a guide binding him to a predetermined path. This time, Link’s in the lead, and the stories these kids tell will be their own.
/.../
By letting go of the past and its recurring players, the King, our storyteller, breaks the recurring Zelda cycle and frees them from its grasp.

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This is the nine most popular posts on Electron Dance.


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Errant Signal - Life is Strange (Spoilers)


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Romance in Games - Can We Play with Lasting Relationships? - Extra Credits


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Made-up Game Awards

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Resogun Post Mortem Part 1


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Extra Credits - Four Realistic Predictions - What the Future Really Holds for Games


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Mario 3D World Review


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From Bioshock to Portal, twenty-first century games have emphasized the antagonistic relationship between the player and the game world that that player occupies, indicating the illusory nature of player choice and decision making in gaming.
/.../
Device 6, of course, certainly has its own own unique vibe among the sea of “games about games.”
/.../
This may be the ultimate solipsism of video games, the promise that each one of us can be a hero, that each of us is, in fact, Prince Hamlet, whether we chose to be or not, as we save the world or the princess, thanks in part to our own unique effort—an effort taken on by hundreds and thousands of players who feel uniquely chosen themselves. And that’s the rub. That’s the recognition that Device 6 provides the player and that differentiates it from the other “games about games.”


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Although I had been interested in EVE and its stalwart community prior to reading about what has come to be known as “gaming’s most destructive battle ever,” it wasn’t until I saw game-maker CCP erect a physical monument in Reykjavik for those lost in battle that I got hooked. That was the first time I had seen any physical commemoration of an in-game event by any game company.
/.../
This white paper, subtitled "A Comparative Analysis of Real Structural Social Evolution with the Virtual Society of EVE Online," enumerates the ways in which the development of a social infrastructure within New Eden mirrors that of “real-life” civilizations. In the analysis, the authors credit the need for the Council of Stellar Management since the political development of the society of EVE has surpassed the point of tribal and stratified structures, reaching a point of complex social hierarchies and government institutions that designate a civilization status.


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A Brief History of Graphics

27/7

§DESIGN

Sequelitis - ZELDA: A Link to the Past vs. Ocarina of Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOC3vixnj_0

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Extra Credits - The Fighting Game Problem - How to Teach Complicated Mechanics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_xG1Yg_QoM

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Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - Game Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE

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Design Club - Portal: Test Chambers - Tutorial Mechanics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_AsF3Rfw8w

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Design Club - Mark of the Ninja - Stealth Games and Visual Cues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vJNqseX-rs

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Extra Credits - Choices vs Consequences - What Player Decisions Mean in Games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iklM_djBeY

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Let's Talk About Boring Upgrade Systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR-EuyU2hb8

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Errant Signal - Civilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBlEscMLjy0


§MISC VIDEOS
Can We Ever Stop Toxic, Racist, & Abusive Gamers?? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yvISdKG7Ng

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Why Do People Do Sick and Twisted Things in DayZ? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3B2s-wswcM

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Extra Credits - The Waiting Game - Why Weird Games Become Cult Hits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptk93AyICH0

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Why is SEX So Terrible in Videogames? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vASCpg8TetY





§MISC ARTICLES

Zelda: Sales Numbers in Context
http://www.zeldainformer.com/articles/zelda-sales-numbers-in-context#.U7qOVbGA91S

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If “Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen and soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts,” as the age-old sports quote playfully asserts, then Call of Duty is an adult game played by children and Super Smash Bros. is a children’s game played by adults.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/melee-masterpiece-melee-demon/

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Lovecraft’s protagonists are always men of learning, the brightest sparks of all that we have built; their understanding makes their fall so much the greater.

The terms used to illustrate this dark realization are many. The scholar Timothy Evans (in his essay “A Last Defense Against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft”) describes the structure with reference to the tropes of a detective story, in that the Lovecraftian narrative “leads not to a solution (like a detective story), but to a realization of the illusory nature of truth and the unknowability of the cosmos.”
/.../
In this vein, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an almost textbook Lovecraftian horror. The creeping darkness that hounds the cultured protagonist – remember, he is an archeologist – is a profoundly alien and horrifying presence.
/.../
But Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a very different beast.
/.../
What A Machine for Pigs presents us with is moral cosmic horror – that the universe, despite the walls and roof of laws and morals and the illusion of progress, is a ravenous and bloody place; that the world’s turning is predicated on suffering; that time and time again, despite whatever moral window-dressing we put up to improve the decor, we cannot bleach away fresh bloodstains.
http://gamesarenotart.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/a-machine-for-pigs-and-cosmic-horror/

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A secret box is a game which is built around some form of content and challenge is trivial or absent. The emphasis is on conveying moments or ideas to the player rather than testing the player's abilities.
/.../
So screw your “walking simulators”. I've got a mountain of secret boxes over here that I'm anxious to explore.
http://www.electrondance.com/screw-your-walking-simulators

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Hollywood needs a love story. It’s hard to imagine a film like Her without one. But love stories assume not only that direct, sensual connections between beings is possible, but that such relations are our ultimate goal. Mountain imagines Her as if the film been titled It instead. It offers a subtler version of what a life attached to unfamiliar things might feel like. Not comfort or intimacy, but estrangement and confusion, mixed with curiosity and wonder. But most of all, while Her depicts a future on an alternate timeline we must struggle to believe, Mountain reminds us that we need not wait to commune with things. They’re everywhere, overwhelming us, sticking to us, piling up around us. And they are here not to save you, nor to destroy you. They are just here. What if that were enough?
http://bogost.com/writing/mountain/

Crit Shit 18th december

§SWEDISH
Lösningen är inte att göra våldet i äventyrsspel mer realistiskt och känslomässigt laddat. Lösningen är att inse att det går att göra äventyrsspel utan att vada i blod. För någonstans måste spelutvecklare lära sig att konflikt sällan är lösningen på ett problem. Det brukar snarare vara orsaken.
http://www.blogemup.se/?p=16065
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”Proteus” är nämligen, precis som ”Bioshock Infinite”, ett spel som ställer sin värld i centrum. Men till skillnad från ”Bioshock Infinite” gör det en poäng av att inte låta någonting komma mellan världen och spelaren. Alla system som normalt tävlar om din koncentrationsförmåga är helt bortstrippade."/.../
Bioshock Infinite” vill vara ”Proteus”, men istället reducerar det sin värld till en kuliss ju längre vi spelar. Det blir aldrig någonsin bättre än den magiska, första blicken av Columbia. Det ger oss en glimt av någonting vackert och egensinnigt och sen låter det oss slösa bort resten av vår tid med att hänga i krokar, åka linbana och skjuta ihjäl människor.
/.../
Ett verk som ”Bioshock Infinite” borde inte vara designat för folk som vill leka. Det borde vara spännande och intressant snarare än roligt. Utmanande intellektuellt snarare än spelmekaniskt. Bärande på sjukdomsinsikt istället för beroendeframkallande feedbackloopar. Det borde problematisera sina karaktärer istället för att förvandla dem till svartvita stereotyper. Varför förutsätter man att spelare inte är mottagliga för sådana värden i spel? Varför antar man att de är dumma, naiva, knappt läskunniga, ständigt på jakt efter en stunds förgänglig underhållning? Varför tror man att de inte klarar av att inse storheten i Columbias värld om de inte betraktar den från ett vapensikte?
http://www.blogemup.se/?p=16010


§CLIPS
Incentive Systems and Politics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa-vQ0L77LY

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Errant Signal on The Stanley Parable
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiCLKmEAa1I
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The Importance of Modding
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvNzj0GVMDI

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Interviews with people from the business
http://criticalpathproject.com/

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On Contrast
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apyzYGPAqSw




§METAL GEAR SOLID
Let's Analyze Metal Gear - The Hexagon Motif
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn9dfDheSSo

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Metal Gear Rising is, politically and philosophically, absolutely 100% a Metal Gear title, and it’s enthusiasm to show that it is makes it possibly the most thematically blunt Metal Gear ever made.
http://hapticfeedbackgames.blogspot.se/2013/12/quick-notes-on-metal-gearrising-how-you.html




§GONE HOME
I began to query my experiences in order to disentangle the strange contradiction of a company making the kind of game that I dearly want to be made, but that I could not enjoy in its intended form. I wanted to know what made my first experience of it so unpleasant, and why it never quite worked for me as a narrative. This investigation turned out to shed light on some wider issues of interest.
/.../
My problem with Gone Home is related to the literary versus genre divide, except in games we must deal with both functional genres (FPS, adventure, RPG) as well as fictional genre.
/.../
Indeed, it is by waving the flag for this ideal that the game tries to convince you it has something challenging to say about its moral precepts, which alas it doesn’t since it never seriously engages with its ‘opposition’. The game (knowingly?) relies upon you sharing its values for its narrative appeal – which would be what you’d expect in most genre fiction. It’s a long way from what is expected in literary fiction, though.
http://blog.ihobo.com/2013/12/gone-home-and-the-constraint-of-genre.html




§THE LAST OF US
Uncharted is adolescent, TLOU is adult, say they.

In truth, TLOU is naught but a grown up Uncharted.
/.../
To top it off, your short-term ludic goals are supplemented with long-term activities in levelling up Joel and his weapons. And true to form, their thinness fail to conceal their purpose at distracting you from the game’s insecurities.
/.../
The writers of Naughty Dog still live within cutscenes – this is where the bulk of the plot occurs, where the characters most vividly interact. TLOU, like Uncharted, divorces narrative from gameplay, as mandated by the idiom: here is a shooting segment, here is a puzzle segment, here is a walking segment, here is a cutscene.
http://normallyrascal.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/the-ladder-of-us/

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In depth on The Last of Us Part 3: The Highlights and Low Points of the Narrative
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvZLnpBA1mM

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[The Walking Dead & The Last Of Us]... are works of Neo-Romanticism.
http://complicatethenarrative.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-romantic-dead.html






§DESIGN
The worse things in a game can become, the better it feels when you beat it.

And then I wonder why I don’t want to play more Dishonored. And I think the reason comes from Arkane’s own admission that the game is a power fantasy. In some ways, games are better when they are – and this is a peculiar-sounding phrase – a vulnerability fantasy.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/23/games-are-best-when-things-go-wrong/

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I'd argue that Metro 2033's failure to communicate it's intentions not only doesn't hinder its point, it *is* the point.
/.../
If Bioshock is trying to make the point that unchecked greed leads to the destruction of the thief as much as the victim, it only supports this up to a point. The player consumes just as much Adam and ammo following the selfless route as the selfish. Metro 2033 looks good in this light: quieter, more meditative, waiting patiently for you to learn what you've been doing wrong all these years. It's a game that could only have come from an eastern European development culture whose holy grail is absolute simulation as opposed to absolute cinematic integrity, where implementing ideas that a player may never experience is not a failure but the defining characteristic of interactive media.
http://exitwarp.blogspot.se/2010/10/novus-homo-thoughts-on-metro-2033.html




§QUEER
Would it Matter if Master Chief Were Gay?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPVjgTG1Rqg

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Looking at Dys4ia, LIM, Howling Dogs, and Mainichi, the differences in design is so apparent, that being developed by queer women is the least interesting thing about them. Yet, that’s how they are packaged, and the only time they are allowed to be highlighted.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/not-a-monolith/


Society has taught us that the female voice is the most trustworthy.
/.../
Cara Ellison already breached this topic last year in her article “Mother’s Legacy: Engendering AI in Video Games,” stating that the terror stems from an instinct to see the female as the mother, the fear coming from seeing your mother as your “own worst enemy.” “Videogames use this idea of the controlling mother figure to play with us, to scare us,” she stated. “She’s meant to be caring, protective and helpful but she often turns out a bitch from hell.”
/.../
When we hear GlaDos in the beginning of Portal, we have to listen to her. We trust her despite the seedy undertones of her tests, and when she ultimately betrays us, we are let down and disturbed. SHODAN is the same way, especially in System Shock 2, when she uses the voice of one of the female survivors to lure you to her lair and gain your allegiance. You’ve been manipulated both times into believing that this voice is your chance for survival when in actuality, it doesn’t care about you.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/articles/glados-stanley-parable-and-evil-female-ai/





§OTHER
What this discussion highlights is the strange inter-disciplinary space we now find ourselves within, where each research domain has its own specialty but where the mythologies that are effective within each domain can be different without contradiction.
http://blog.ihobo.com/2013/12/neuromythology-for-game-design.html





§BONUS
HULK BELIEVES WE DON'T WATCH MOVIES JUST TO SIT THERE AND HAVE THE "BELIEVABILITY METER" GO UP AND DOWN. WE DON'T WATCH FILMS TO AVOID BASIC TRUTHS IN THE NAME OF THE CONSTANT SEARCH FOR THAT INDESCRIBABLE "SOMETHING ELSE". WE WATCH FILMS BECAUSE THEY FEED OUR SOULS. THE CINEMA OF MORALISM HAS ALWAYS HAD REAL VALUE TO US AS A CULTURE.
/.../
MEANING CLOUD ATLAS IS AT ONCE HIGHLY STYLIZED GRANDEUR, BUT IT TRULY MANAGES TO FEED YOUR SOUL. HULK KNOWS THAT SOUNDS FLOWERY. HULK KNOWS THAT THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE MAY FEEL THE EXACT SAME WAY...

YOU JUST HAVE TO EMBRACE THE CONCEIT.
http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/08/fantastic-fest-review-cloud-atlas-david-foster-wallace-and-the-cinema-of-mo/