there is a history of American temperance literature that Carousel slots
into nicely. Temperance literature, very briefly, aimed to convert the
drunkard from his destructive ways and onto a path of righteousness and
bourgeois productivity. In many cases this was through tales of the
(female) children of these intemperate men taking the brunt of their
violence and, through the power of their innocent acceptance in the face
of this onslaught, their weathering of the storm, allowing these men
the chance of redemption. It would seem that a broken and powerless man
is in need of an unflinching and unarguing object for his patriarchal
control in order to be rebuilt as a man of action. The drunk is drunk
because he has been denied, or has forsaken, the mantle of authority
that a man must wear: alcohol is a way to avoid responsibility and for
the family patriarch the first responsibility is ownership of the women
(and the as-yet ungendered boys) of his household./.../
When, in Bioshock: Infinite, then broken drunk Booker DeWitt batters down the
doors of a castle that he himself built in another life to rescue his
own daughter, trapped there in an asexual stasis it is not the chaos of
imagery and symbolism that it at first seems, but instead a direct
descendent of the form of rehabilitation pioneered by temperance
literature.
/.../
Perhaps unsurprisingly then the piece of
Infinite fan media that most makes sense to me is Zone’s Biocock:
Intimate, which collapses the erotic tension inherent in the game and as
Maddy Myers says ‘comes … a lot closer to offering me the version of
Elizabeth that I wanted to see than BioShock did,’ one who ‘speaks,
moans and calls the sexual shots.’
/.../
In Zone’s game, the
protagonist, this time a disembodied cock rather than a disembodied gun,
as if there is a real difference, is still Booker, making explicit the
incestuous undertones of the source game while neither remarking on them
or judging them.
/.../
Ken Levine, Bioshock’s lead creator, keeps telling
people to stop sexualising Elizabeth because he views her as a daughter.
But I cannot for the life of me imagine why he thought a young woman
would neither develop or be the subject of a sexual gaze, especially
when, as I keep saying, the story that is told in Infinite is the story
of her sexual awakening and her emergence from the cloying constraints
of a father who wants to own her and use her as a replacement for his
wife, with all of the sexual labour that that implies.
/.../
It is
a fairly common mechanism of patriarchy that violence against women is
framed as being bad, by and for the understanding of men, on the premise
that ‘you wouldn’t want this to happen to your daughter,’ that a victim
is ‘somebody’s daughter.’ Fundamentally what this says is that men can
apparently only view women as an object in relation to a man, not as a
person in their own right. The non-daughter is an acceptable site for
your sexual fantasies because she is not owned and spoken for. Female
sexual awakening is therefore posited as a process by which a man
separates the bond between father and daughter, destroying the tower and
building a new one to encase her and protect her from the sexual
fantasies of other men.
/.../
as an industry and a society we will
continue to seek our redemption in the arms of those we have wronged,
whose job it is, like the little sisters of the original Bioshock, to be
used to fuel our monstrous rages and to accept our caresses and desires
when we break down and wish for forgiveness. We will continue to expect
these women to save us with their love.
[I
love how pieces like these can put something in a larger context and
enrich my understanding of something which didn't make as much sense
before. It's interesting how I even come to appreciate Bioshock Infinite
more in some twisted way, even if it's flawed in its execution and in
using this idea of temperance without my having seen them putting it in
brackets or providing self-reflexivity.]
§
we see Fragile Dreams trying to reconcile modern Japanese life with traditional Japanese thought. However, looking at the game on a
character level complicates the aesthetic. These ways of seeing the
world are not natural, as Seto (the game’s protagonist) must spend the
entire game learning to appreciate the beauty that arises from a
fleeting reality.
/.../
For Japanese aesthetes, the most beautiful
arts would blend into the greater world around them. Anything that
announced its presence was considered simple, boisterous, and to be
avoided.
/.../
in terms of mono no aware, the best way to bring out something’s beauty is to remind us of its inevitable change or passing.
/.../
as
long as technology does not supplant the feeling of change and being in
nature, it’s capable of functioning within Japanese aesthetic theory.
/.../
Over
the course of the game, Seto finds various broken items amid the
wreckage. When he takes those items to a bonfire, he finds out what they
are, and hears a short story regarding the item’s last owner. There’s a
consistent message running through these stories: one of unfulfilled
desire. The protagonists of these stories regret making choices they can
never fix, or they feel scared after having something valuable taken
from them. They realize that their lives are short, and Seto sees that
their worries outlasted them.
/.../
The game relays most of these
narratives through some object the owner confided in. They intended to
relieve their pain at least a little bit, but all we see is their
emotional pain; we rarely see any kind of resolution. Therefore, the
objects fail to serve their intended purpose of consoling their owners.
The cell phone’s story displays this quite poignantly: while her intent
is for the world to remember her, the tragic irony of her situation is
that she leaves us nothing by which we can identify her. We don’t know
her name or any details about her life, and it’s unclear if Seto can
even access those details. All her story illustrates is how insufficient
her possessions are for satisfying her wants, even if she can never
know that.
§
If Fragile Dreams uses its environments to celebrate Japanese aesthetics, then it uses Seto, the protagonist, to complicate them.
/.../
he’s so pre-occupied on his loss that he’s unable to draw a connection
between the impermanence of life and its being valued in the first
place. Any mentions of impermanence at this point in the story reveal Seto’s
negative thoughts on the matter. For example, he opens the game with the
words “At the end of a summer that was all too short” (tri-Crescendo).
On one level, these words indicate his wishes that the summer had
lasted longer. Yet on another, they connote loss. This is a consistent
theme throughout Seto’s opening narration, implying that he can only
perceive change and passing on painful terms. We might also draw
connections between the youthful connotations of summer, Seto’s
adolescence, and the death of his caretaker.
/.../
if we interpret the old man’s death as an opportunity for Seto to
appreciate life’s transience, then we must also interpret the
possibility of survivors as an opportunity for Seto to deny that very
same transience.
/.../
Seto’s denial is best illustrated through his interactions with Ren, a
silver-haired girl who appears to Seto very early in the narrative. She
runs from him the second the two meet, and he only gets brief glimpses
of her throughout the story. He follows her by the drawings she leaves
in her wake, and when the two finally cross paths, it’s only for a short
period of time. While the story uses these facts to code her character
with impermanence and uncertainty, this isn’t the meaning that Seto
reads from her. Upon first meeting her, he remarks, “On my journey
through the world, all the people I thought I saw slipped away like they
were just a mirage. But that girl… her cheek was warm to the touch” (tri-Crescendo).
So for him, Ren represents life and stability. She is the anchor
against which he can verify his own experiences as real. Yet the irony
is that is in worrying about whether his experiences are real, he fails
to appreciate them for what they are.
/.../
the time he spends with other people shows him how it’s possible to
appreciate things for their temporary nature. The first person to show
him this is PF, a robotic assistant that Seto attaches to his back. The
two grow close to each other as they explore the underground mall in
search of Ren. However, their journey together is very brief: at the end
of the day, PF’s battery drains, effectively ending her life.
/.../
Where the old man struggled to share his most intimate with regrets
with Seto after knowing him for fifteen years, PF has no problems
telling him about how much she loved talking with him, despite only
knowing him for a day.
/.../
The two themes that emerge from Seto’s time with PF — death and its relation to mono no aware —
carry throughout his encounters with other people. Chiyo demonstrates
this the best by bringing the two into focus for him. When the two
characters meet, Seto initially sees her as the ghost of a bratty little
girl who demands that he does the impossible. But as he continues to
fulfill her requests, he eventually learns the reality of the situation:
she is an old woman on her death bed. Chiyo leaves Seto with these final remarks:
"The day will come when your journey will
end as well. Your greatest adventure will be over and you will make
your way home. However, your journey will not be complete. The days will
still go on for you. One after another they will pass, until you’ve had
enough of the monotony. No new discoveries will await you. You’ll watch
the sun rise and set. That’s all your days will have to offer. That’s
the moment when you’ll realize the truth. The sunbeams, the wind rolling
over the tall grass, the idle chit-chat with friends…These were the
gems of your life. Then your heart will be carried off by the gentle,
caressing breeze and it will sparkle like a jewel, fade, and grow cold."
/.../
her own life suggests that mono no aware could be a psychological
state of being rather than something inherent in life’s experiences.
She was able to view the same natural phenomenon (sunrise/sunset) at
least twice in her life but have greatly divergent reactions to them at
different times. In her youth, she viewed the sun’s movement as a dull
monotony. It is only on her deathbed that she can finally appreciate it
as a liberating event. That realization didn’t come to her in a moment;
she had to cultivate it over an entire lifetime of thought on the
matter. In relaying her message to Seto, Chiyo helps him through the
process of appreciating life’s transitory nature, and hopes to shorten
the time necessary to learn it.
§
Silent Hill 2’s architecture, along with its iconic blend of fog and darkness, is its main antagonist.
/.../
Oddly
enough, this unnerving dysfunction stems from the game’s sense of
order. It has an obsession with the well-ordered spaces of institutions,
taking the player from an apartment block, to a hospital, to a prison,
and finally a hotel. The symmetrical ground plans for these locations,
found on the game’s various maps, seems to have been pulled wholesale
from life, rather than created for use in a videogame. In order to
become functional spaces in a game where exploration is key, these maps
have then been hacked into, with entrances blocked off and walls smashed
through. The divisions, functions and even internal logic of the game’s
architecture is subverted, room by room. The game constantly forces the
player to turn back on herself at a dead end, to check again and again
the map, and try to connect its straight and true lines with the
decaying masonry around them.
/.../
The descents of Silent
Hill 2 are many. It is no coincidence that the game’s protagonist, James
Sunderland, begins his journey at a rest stop high above the town, and
must descend into it. This marks a preoccupation with downward gestures
that recurs throughout the game, from elevator rides, to climbing into
your own grave.
/.../
In the final third of Silent Hill 2
the player arrives at the top of a staircase. Its not the first
staircase in the game, or even the last, but it is the beginning of
something. Projecting down into darkness, it marks the start of the
game’s most exhausting descent.
/.../
This is where Silent
Hill 2’s architecture reveals itself as a psychological construct. Up
above, in the town, ordered spaces stand in a struggle with the onset of
decay, but here, as you tread ever deeper, the subconscious takes over.
§
the beauty of P.T. is not in its basic looping structure, but they way in which it plays and experiments within that structure.
/.../
In semantic terms, the game’s corner is analogous to the classic ghost-story phrase “and then.”
It is the architectural equivalent of the shock reveal, articulated
through a 90-degree turn. It’s an ancient story-telling trick, holding
information back until the last possible second, but P.T.’s twist on it
is to do so without speaking a word, performing its repeated reveals
through the clever manipulation of space. Sometimes these reveals are
red-herrings, showing you the corridor you expect to see, but in the
world of P.T. even this is a cause for concern—if the corridor hasn’t
changed, then something else has. It’s worth nothing that almost
everything that happens, from bloody fridges to generic horror graffiti,
happens on the other side of that corner. After every repetition the
first task is clear—walk. This is the way the storyteller has you in her
grip. “She entered the corridor,” P.T.’s storyteller says, “walking
cautiously, unsure of what might be waiting for her. As she reached the
familiar corner she paused … and then …”
/.../
The clock,
the phone and the radio, all three sources of information, are carefully
spread, each given its own alcove. The front door is the only door that
never opens, an escape to an outside world hinted at but never allowed.
At the end of the corridor lies a short set of steps, meaning that for
each loop you must descend a little further down. This descent is
carefully offset by the balcony that hides in the darkness above the
entryway, imbuing in the player the distinct feeling of being watched.
These precise architectural features, twisted through an elegant play of
light and shadow, are laid out with precise intelligence.
/.../
Agency
is non-existent—instead, choreography reigns supreme. P.T.’s scares may
follow well-worn horror iconography, but they don’t require it to
function. Instead they rely on the corner and the corridor, the room and
doorway, the bright and the dark. This—the idea that horror exists as
little more than a series of spatial arrangements, presences and
absences—is truly P.T.’s greatest trick.
§
Eventually, every genre, every media, has its Ulysses. I don’t know if Kentucky Route Zero is Ulysses. It’s certainly allusive: a structurally
complex, confusing, the brilliant and beautiful episodic point and click
game by Cardboard Computer in which a host of characters embark on a
seemingly meaningless and mythical journey through the finance and
poverty ravaged landscapes of rural Kentucky. Regardless, writing about
KRZ is not “easy”. Partly because of its episodic nature, and partly — I
think — because of its dense and almost Beckettian allusiveness, its
semantic density, KRZ seems to escape ready comprehension and
understanding. Its mechanics (the word we often descend on to describe a
technical process) are both simple (literally, “point and click”) and
alarmingly diffuse (navigating, by symbols, the Zero itself). Meanwhile,
its ‘story’ – the fabula itself – is slippery, and the formal framework
around which it is arranged is complex. It’s perhaps the hardest ‘text’
– not simply ‘game’, but text, product, artefact (see? Even finding the
right category word is tough) – that I’ve ever tried to write about.
/.../
Maybe
we’re not properly equipped to write long-form about video games —
especially those games which excel in their own obscurity and
strangeness — and are not used to it, or are standing in the primordial
sludge of it.
/.../
For KRZ, and games like it, it might be best to think with the rhizome in mind. You build your theory as you go.
§
[SOMA]
These days, when we talk about being
human, we’re more preoccupied with defining humanity in opposition to
machines and advanced AIs. We want to reassure ourselves that we have
something more than an uncanny android who looks like us, acts like us,
speaks like us, and is better than us at almost everything. It’s as if
we know our feeling of superiority is dwindling. Taking the Aristotelian
definition to its extremes, perhaps we could say that modern-day
machines, as purely rational creations, are even more human than us.
/.../
In trying to preserve the core of what
it means to be human, it’s easy to forget that this core immediately
changed when coming into contact precisely with what we’re defining
humanity against. The very existence of machines has already changed our
concept of what it means to be human.
/.../attachment to the body as an
imprescindible part of one’s identity, both in a positive and in a
negative way, is one manifestation of that excess that is unique to the
human. We also have have
Catherine, the exception who accompanies the player for the best part of
the game but who lives in a chip attached to Simon’s Omnitool. I don’t
think the game explicitly says why she doesn’t go mad like everyone else
who suffered a similar fate, but I believe the answer may be found in
her strong sense of purpose. /.../
Catherine is the most liminal figure
in this world in which every barrier is being broken. A human mind in
purely mechanical hardware, she is driven by a very specific purpose,
and, like a machine, she evaluates the world purely in terms of utility
towards that purpose. But what she wants to achieve is precisely the
recovery of a space in which to be human. As such, she is driven by a
concept of what human life means as opposed to the mere survival of
biological functions, a concept that the WAU never understood.
/.../
The machine ends when there is no clear objective left to achieve.
The human, as we have seen, begins with the excess: the reality of being
left behind when the objective has been achieved and disappears. It’s
the reality of being alive when there is nothing left to do, a reality
in which the body remains in its irreducible, useless materiality.
§
Showing posts with label soma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soma. Show all posts
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Crit Links 16/1
Things of Beauty: Super Smash Bros. as Spectator Sport
§
Into the Black: On Videogame Exploration
§
Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time on SNES
§
Game Writing Pitfalls - Lost Opportunities in Games - Extra Credits
§
Ingenious Solutions in Video Game Design: A Long-form Analysis
§
WIRED by Design: A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun
§
Classic Game Postmortem: Loom
§
Get Anticipated - The Final Bosman
§
What if you could talk to the monsters? The Wuss Mode: Monsters Won’t Attack mod for SOMA [official site] doesn’t quite allow you to hold conversations with the denizens of Frictional’s latest creation but it does prevent them from chasing you around the place until you die. I’m excited to try this because it might just improve the game significantly, simply by focusing on the fact that fear does not need to be followed by violence and death.
§
“One of the weirdest / saddest design exp I had: [Bioshock 2] playtesters carefully loot every container for hours, then report hating every moment.”
- Zak McClendon, Lead Designer on Bioshock 2
/.../
I was a moth to the dull flame of the hidden packages of GTA III (Rockstar, 2001), pieces of virtual tat that simply add one to a meaningless counter. I continued to burn rubber for hour after hour until I had found every last package. They’re just one example of the now ubiquitous collectible. Today I’d like to introduce the collective noun for the collectible: a fucking plague.
/.../
thank God for those first-person secret box games dubbed “walking simulators”. At least there aren’t any items to hunt, right? We don’t need rewards for our activities! Oh reallllly?
/.../
Will O’Neill, who wrote Actual Sunlight (2014) and provided words for Planet of the Eyes (Cococucumber, 2015), tweeted that he walked an entire football pitch in Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015) hoping to trigger a scripted response but there was nothing. He felt the game was forcing him to do tedious things for fear of missing out. O’Neill is not the only one to feel like his time is being squandered by these games. But when players who are into walking simulators complain they have no reward other than walking – you know something has gone wrong. It’s our old friend the overjustification effect: once you wrap an incentive around something people enjoy doing, it performs a weird kind of alchemy that transmutes the fun into drudgery, into work.
/.../
When I played Fuel, it was easy to concentrate on the driving and forget about those paltry liveries and vista points because they were too sparse, but the scrum of missions and sidequests and collectibles had come to define GTA more than its cityscapes. I had hated GTA: San Andreas, with prior GTA experience convincing me to conquer everything – but San Andreas was overwhelming and I was left dejected.
Yet all I needed to do was forget about the objectives and collectibles.
All I needed to do was get in a car and drive.
§
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” says the pick-up artist. “I’ve just got more game than you,” says your roommate who wears too much cologne. Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in our web-obsessed culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns out this connection is less superficial than you might think.
/.../
According to Tinder CEO Jonathan Badeen, Tinder uses a variation of ELO scoring to determine how you rank among the site’s userbase, and therefore, which profiles to suggest to you and whose queues your profile shows up in. Invented by physics professor Arpad Elo to determine rankings among chess players, ELO assigns ranks by judging players’ presumed skill levels against each other.
/.../
The result is a system where your ranking is more determined by how you compare to other people rather than personal stats. The system has since been adapted for use in football, baseball, and even videogames such as League of Legends and Warcraft. So when translated to Tinder, the algorithm can be understood on a basic level as one where who you match with determines who the app shows to you. Get matched with those with a high ELO, and the site will start populating your queue with the people Tinder as a whole finds more desirable. Get matched with those sporting a lower ELO, and the site will only show you people who don’t get as many matches from high-ranking users. Your ELO is determined by the supposed desirability of the people who think you’re worth dating.
/.../
So if you want Tinder to think you’re cool, you need to match up with a greater number of popular users and fewer unpopular users.
/.../
Essentially, the key isn’t how many people find you attractive, but which people think you’re worth dating.
/.../
What if higher-ELO people match with you, but you’re actually interested in the type of people who normally have lower-ELO ranks? Just because other high-cheekboned and full-lipped ELO titans aren’t interested in them doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be. You might even be driven away by traits that Tinder as a whole finds more attractive. But because the high-ELO community has deemed you worthy, your queue will be filled with them while the type of people you’re actually interested in remain out of reach.
/.../
Dating is often framed as a competition, where one has to strive to attract as many people as possible. In this context, it might make sense to use a system born out of competition to rank which “leagues” people fall into. But the end goal of dating is one of the biggest cooperative endeavors people can take on together. Which raises the question: Is a system born out of a war game like Chess really the most appropriate way to judge compatibility?
§
What gives Homesickened its gut punch is that, ultimately, it is a story about trying to go home, but how, for many of us, we can never really do that again. It’s a story about loneliness, isolation and the consequences of putting more value in things than in the people around us. The ironically wistful reproduction of CGA DOS conventions is, after all, the earnestly resigned sigh too heavy for the software designed to render it.
§
Blow says he designs puzzles to be "first and foremost a representation of an idea, non-verbally." Rather than just being a tricky thing for a player to solve, he wants each puzzle to say something to the player. He does this by actually writing out a sentence for each puzzle.
/.../
Here's where Blow reveals The Witness' greatest trick: It's not only that he's not scared of players getting stuck, but that getting stuck is actually a key part of the process. It's a requirement to the feeling he wants the game to create. "I try to make puzzles in The Witness as simple as they can be," Blow says. "You just don't get it. It's not only that you don't get it, but you don't feel like there's anything to tell you how to get it. It's as much of a brick wall as possible, with no red herrings or anything. So eventually, when you manage to stick your head through that brick wall and see what's past it, it's the most magical.
§
Critical Switch: Winter 2015
Zolani Stewart - Bernband 14:50
Austin Howe - Party Size in JRPGs 07:36
Austin Howe - Dead Sun 10:24
Zolani Stewart - F-Zero and The Language of Space 10:50
Austin Howe - Rest In Pain 15:19
Zolani Stewart - Petrichor 07:57
Austin Howe - BBSD, Ludocentrism, Abstract Themes 06:09
Zolani Stewart - An Intro to Minimalism 15:10
Austin Howe - Republican Dad Mechanics 07:37
Zolani Stewart - Mirror's Edge: The Landscape of Sound 09:15
Devon Carter (Guest) - JRPGs and Simplicity 11:20
§
Critical Switch: Summer 2015
Austin C. Howe - Shovel Knight and Interrogation 07:27
Zolani Stewart - Expanding Interactivity 13:30
Austin C. Howe - FFVII and Jazz Standards 09:40
Austin Howe - Intro to Game Design and Drama 09:15
Crit Switch Podcast! 26:55
Heather Alexandra - Procedural Generation in Game Design 08:25
Zolani Stewart - Menus and UI 04:05
Game Design and Drama: The Resistance Curve 09:06
§
At the end of disc one, Squall and Friends face Edea on a parade float in Deling City. After the fight, when Edea seems defeated, she conjures an enormous ice shard and propels it through Squall’s chest. Squall stumbles back and falls off the platform. He sees Rinoa above, reaching to him as he falls. Squall closes his eyes and dies. The entire remaining game time, from the beginning of disc two to the second half of the ending movie, is a dream.
§
Leigh suggested that it might be fun for us to do a letter series as I played, combining her nuanced understanding with my fresh eyes to explore just what it is that makes FFVII the game it is. I agreed, and we started to write.
§
What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution: the changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive. Rather than imagining games as a community of chosen people whose integrity must be protected, everyone must take a broader view of the form and the multitudes it already contains.
§
Those who dwell in the Friend Zone are not imprisoned by the object of their desire; they are imprisoned by desire itself, always entreating them to chase their own tail. The walls they build and occupy play host to a thousand doppelgangers, each wearing the mask of one person. They think they hate the person, but they hate only themselves. They think this person imprisoned them, but they must have imprisoned themselves.
/.../
Reading as I am in the year 2015, I must describe K’s behaviour as rapey; I must say he’d fit right in amongst the denizens of The Friend Zone, nestled snugly between the Nice Guys™ and the Creepers. It’s possible that his actions appeared dashing in the eyes of the book’s 1915 audience (as well as the eyes of the Internet Man). Regardless, the plot confirms for us that they were unwelcome and inappropriate, since Miss Burstner vanishes into the woodwork following the evening’s events.
/.../
My work on Friend Zone prompted me to read it as an elegy for the Internet Man, delivered 100 years before the fact. Like the Internet Man, K has exploited his station: lorded it above anyone he could, believing this to be his birthright and purpose. Like the Internet Man, K is too busy chasing tail to comprehend the shape of his crimes. His verdict is as much about big inscrutable forces as it is about a peculiar personal failing; it plays out neither with K’s complete consent nor fully against his will.
§
Ethan Carter's final cutscene is a story unlock, whereas Verde Station’s last scene is a total shocker that does not, in itself, answer the big questions. HOWEVER. Both games refute the lazy pejorative “walking simulator” albeit in different ways.
/.../
an interesting distinction between Ethan Carter and Verde Station. The latter is much more authoritarian about gating progress, yet the former more inviting to the explorer-player, save for the endgame. Which is the better game? The question is how you like your mysteries spun. If a player figures out the story in the first few minutes, then the player is consigned to watching pieces move into assigned positions - and this is one of the reasons why Gone Home gates progress through the story.
/.../
I’ve yet to see environmental storytelling as coy and understated as Kairo, although that game confused many of its players, because Verde Station still needs to rely on lore in the form of handwritten notes scattered around and messages stored on terminals. But it might be better to see Kairo as a special case because I’ve previously discussed how limiting it is to tell a story in a dead world. Certain messages are corrupted a little too conveniently, so the world feels like a puzzle authored just for you as opposed to a real situation you’re trying to make sense of.
§
[The Talos Principle]
human race perishes but, in its dying moments, initiates a long-term computer simulation in which it is hoped a sentient intelligence will evolve to carry on the torch of humanity... but the simulation itself is frightened to die. But it’s much more than that. It’s a story of individuals pulling together to “save the world” and what exactly that means. It’s a story of a species facing the end with dignity. It’s a meditation on what it means to be sentient. It’s a story of programs desperate to understand the strange prison they are born into and the “god” that presides over them. And virtually all of this is told through text, some with a conversational component.
/.../
“I was actually trying really hard to avoid retelling the same story,” he explains, “since I really hate repeating myself, but everything kept evolving into that direction, perhaps partially because Croteam enjoyed The Infinite Ocean. I think some of the mistakes I made in my first few drafts came from trying to avoid similarities. What I ended up deciding was that if The Infinite Ocean is a game about an AI becoming a god, Talos is about an AI becoming human.”
§
The saddest aspect of the QR texts is that as you move further towards the end of the game, they thin out, making it clear how many programs never made it through and the world grows more cold and lonely. Rather than the Garden of Eden, the simulation is both purgatory and graveyard – many of the child programs fall into depression or go mad.
This ethical aspect of the simulation is never made explicit, although Gehenna does sail much closer to these particular rocks. Elohim continues to iterate from one child program to another, attempting to find the program that will finally defeat the simulation and thus be the candidate for upload to physical hardware. But many of the AI already seem to be self-aware and these programs are being put through mental torture. I’m not sure the creators of the Process, Alexandra Drennan and her team, thought this far ahead, as if they assumed only the successful AI would feel anything at all. But they were trying to save humanity and these abused children were the inevitable price.
/.../
“I always intended for a certain amount of ambiguity there. It's the messiness of the story – how the simulation was made out of disparate parts, how it malfunctioned in odd ways, how maybe the very malfunctions ultimately helped it succeed – that makes it human to me. Elohim is part of that. He's supposed to be challenged, yes, but he takes that too far, out of desperation, out of fear. To the player's character Elohim is just a test, but to himself the whole God thing is more than an act, it's his whole reality. Maybe he endangers the entire Process by his actions. Maybe he actually does a better job than intended by accident. Maybe underneath it all he always knows how it's going to end, no matter how much he denies it. To me, that messiness and ambiguity is a more realistic reflection of how we deal with these things in the real world.
“I should probably also point out that there are deliberate references to Jesus and his moments of doubt in Elohim's lines, another syncretic element of the story, another retelling. There's a reversal of roles at the end, God in his doubt submitting to man: let your will be done. The end of the game, in many ways, is about Elohim's moment of humanity, a kind of precursor to the humanity about to be realized."
§
Into the Black: On Videogame Exploration
§
Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time on SNES
§
Game Writing Pitfalls - Lost Opportunities in Games - Extra Credits
§
Ingenious Solutions in Video Game Design: A Long-form Analysis
§
WIRED by Design: A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun
§
Classic Game Postmortem: Loom
§
Get Anticipated - The Final Bosman
§
What if you could talk to the monsters? The Wuss Mode: Monsters Won’t Attack mod for SOMA [official site] doesn’t quite allow you to hold conversations with the denizens of Frictional’s latest creation but it does prevent them from chasing you around the place until you die. I’m excited to try this because it might just improve the game significantly, simply by focusing on the fact that fear does not need to be followed by violence and death.
§
“One of the weirdest / saddest design exp I had: [Bioshock 2] playtesters carefully loot every container for hours, then report hating every moment.”
- Zak McClendon, Lead Designer on Bioshock 2
/.../
I was a moth to the dull flame of the hidden packages of GTA III (Rockstar, 2001), pieces of virtual tat that simply add one to a meaningless counter. I continued to burn rubber for hour after hour until I had found every last package. They’re just one example of the now ubiquitous collectible. Today I’d like to introduce the collective noun for the collectible: a fucking plague.
/.../
thank God for those first-person secret box games dubbed “walking simulators”. At least there aren’t any items to hunt, right? We don’t need rewards for our activities! Oh reallllly?
/.../
Will O’Neill, who wrote Actual Sunlight (2014) and provided words for Planet of the Eyes (Cococucumber, 2015), tweeted that he walked an entire football pitch in Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (The Chinese Room, 2015) hoping to trigger a scripted response but there was nothing. He felt the game was forcing him to do tedious things for fear of missing out. O’Neill is not the only one to feel like his time is being squandered by these games. But when players who are into walking simulators complain they have no reward other than walking – you know something has gone wrong. It’s our old friend the overjustification effect: once you wrap an incentive around something people enjoy doing, it performs a weird kind of alchemy that transmutes the fun into drudgery, into work.
/.../
When I played Fuel, it was easy to concentrate on the driving and forget about those paltry liveries and vista points because they were too sparse, but the scrum of missions and sidequests and collectibles had come to define GTA more than its cityscapes. I had hated GTA: San Andreas, with prior GTA experience convincing me to conquer everything – but San Andreas was overwhelming and I was left dejected.
Yet all I needed to do was forget about the objectives and collectibles.
All I needed to do was get in a car and drive.
§
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” says the pick-up artist. “I’ve just got more game than you,” says your roommate who wears too much cologne. Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in our web-obsessed culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns out this connection is less superficial than you might think.
/.../
According to Tinder CEO Jonathan Badeen, Tinder uses a variation of ELO scoring to determine how you rank among the site’s userbase, and therefore, which profiles to suggest to you and whose queues your profile shows up in. Invented by physics professor Arpad Elo to determine rankings among chess players, ELO assigns ranks by judging players’ presumed skill levels against each other.
/.../
The result is a system where your ranking is more determined by how you compare to other people rather than personal stats. The system has since been adapted for use in football, baseball, and even videogames such as League of Legends and Warcraft. So when translated to Tinder, the algorithm can be understood on a basic level as one where who you match with determines who the app shows to you. Get matched with those with a high ELO, and the site will start populating your queue with the people Tinder as a whole finds more desirable. Get matched with those sporting a lower ELO, and the site will only show you people who don’t get as many matches from high-ranking users. Your ELO is determined by the supposed desirability of the people who think you’re worth dating.
/.../
So if you want Tinder to think you’re cool, you need to match up with a greater number of popular users and fewer unpopular users.
/.../
Essentially, the key isn’t how many people find you attractive, but which people think you’re worth dating.
/.../
What if higher-ELO people match with you, but you’re actually interested in the type of people who normally have lower-ELO ranks? Just because other high-cheekboned and full-lipped ELO titans aren’t interested in them doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be. You might even be driven away by traits that Tinder as a whole finds more attractive. But because the high-ELO community has deemed you worthy, your queue will be filled with them while the type of people you’re actually interested in remain out of reach.
/.../
Dating is often framed as a competition, where one has to strive to attract as many people as possible. In this context, it might make sense to use a system born out of competition to rank which “leagues” people fall into. But the end goal of dating is one of the biggest cooperative endeavors people can take on together. Which raises the question: Is a system born out of a war game like Chess really the most appropriate way to judge compatibility?
§
What gives Homesickened its gut punch is that, ultimately, it is a story about trying to go home, but how, for many of us, we can never really do that again. It’s a story about loneliness, isolation and the consequences of putting more value in things than in the people around us. The ironically wistful reproduction of CGA DOS conventions is, after all, the earnestly resigned sigh too heavy for the software designed to render it.
§
Blow says he designs puzzles to be "first and foremost a representation of an idea, non-verbally." Rather than just being a tricky thing for a player to solve, he wants each puzzle to say something to the player. He does this by actually writing out a sentence for each puzzle.
/.../
Here's where Blow reveals The Witness' greatest trick: It's not only that he's not scared of players getting stuck, but that getting stuck is actually a key part of the process. It's a requirement to the feeling he wants the game to create. "I try to make puzzles in The Witness as simple as they can be," Blow says. "You just don't get it. It's not only that you don't get it, but you don't feel like there's anything to tell you how to get it. It's as much of a brick wall as possible, with no red herrings or anything. So eventually, when you manage to stick your head through that brick wall and see what's past it, it's the most magical.
§
Critical Switch: Winter 2015
Zolani Stewart - Bernband 14:50
Austin Howe - Party Size in JRPGs 07:36
Austin Howe - Dead Sun 10:24
Zolani Stewart - F-Zero and The Language of Space 10:50
Austin Howe - Rest In Pain 15:19
Zolani Stewart - Petrichor 07:57
Austin Howe - BBSD, Ludocentrism, Abstract Themes 06:09
Zolani Stewart - An Intro to Minimalism 15:10
Austin Howe - Republican Dad Mechanics 07:37
Zolani Stewart - Mirror's Edge: The Landscape of Sound 09:15
Devon Carter (Guest) - JRPGs and Simplicity 11:20
§
Critical Switch: Summer 2015
Austin C. Howe - Shovel Knight and Interrogation 07:27
Zolani Stewart - Expanding Interactivity 13:30
Austin C. Howe - FFVII and Jazz Standards 09:40
Austin Howe - Intro to Game Design and Drama 09:15
Crit Switch Podcast! 26:55
Heather Alexandra - Procedural Generation in Game Design 08:25
Zolani Stewart - Menus and UI 04:05
Game Design and Drama: The Resistance Curve 09:06
§
At the end of disc one, Squall and Friends face Edea on a parade float in Deling City. After the fight, when Edea seems defeated, she conjures an enormous ice shard and propels it through Squall’s chest. Squall stumbles back and falls off the platform. He sees Rinoa above, reaching to him as he falls. Squall closes his eyes and dies. The entire remaining game time, from the beginning of disc two to the second half of the ending movie, is a dream.
§
Leigh suggested that it might be fun for us to do a letter series as I played, combining her nuanced understanding with my fresh eyes to explore just what it is that makes FFVII the game it is. I agreed, and we started to write.
§
What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution: the changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive. Rather than imagining games as a community of chosen people whose integrity must be protected, everyone must take a broader view of the form and the multitudes it already contains.
§
Those who dwell in the Friend Zone are not imprisoned by the object of their desire; they are imprisoned by desire itself, always entreating them to chase their own tail. The walls they build and occupy play host to a thousand doppelgangers, each wearing the mask of one person. They think they hate the person, but they hate only themselves. They think this person imprisoned them, but they must have imprisoned themselves.
/.../
Reading as I am in the year 2015, I must describe K’s behaviour as rapey; I must say he’d fit right in amongst the denizens of The Friend Zone, nestled snugly between the Nice Guys™ and the Creepers. It’s possible that his actions appeared dashing in the eyes of the book’s 1915 audience (as well as the eyes of the Internet Man). Regardless, the plot confirms for us that they were unwelcome and inappropriate, since Miss Burstner vanishes into the woodwork following the evening’s events.
/.../
My work on Friend Zone prompted me to read it as an elegy for the Internet Man, delivered 100 years before the fact. Like the Internet Man, K has exploited his station: lorded it above anyone he could, believing this to be his birthright and purpose. Like the Internet Man, K is too busy chasing tail to comprehend the shape of his crimes. His verdict is as much about big inscrutable forces as it is about a peculiar personal failing; it plays out neither with K’s complete consent nor fully against his will.
§
Ethan Carter's final cutscene is a story unlock, whereas Verde Station’s last scene is a total shocker that does not, in itself, answer the big questions. HOWEVER. Both games refute the lazy pejorative “walking simulator” albeit in different ways.
/.../
an interesting distinction between Ethan Carter and Verde Station. The latter is much more authoritarian about gating progress, yet the former more inviting to the explorer-player, save for the endgame. Which is the better game? The question is how you like your mysteries spun. If a player figures out the story in the first few minutes, then the player is consigned to watching pieces move into assigned positions - and this is one of the reasons why Gone Home gates progress through the story.
/.../
I’ve yet to see environmental storytelling as coy and understated as Kairo, although that game confused many of its players, because Verde Station still needs to rely on lore in the form of handwritten notes scattered around and messages stored on terminals. But it might be better to see Kairo as a special case because I’ve previously discussed how limiting it is to tell a story in a dead world. Certain messages are corrupted a little too conveniently, so the world feels like a puzzle authored just for you as opposed to a real situation you’re trying to make sense of.
§
[The Talos Principle]
human race perishes but, in its dying moments, initiates a long-term computer simulation in which it is hoped a sentient intelligence will evolve to carry on the torch of humanity... but the simulation itself is frightened to die. But it’s much more than that. It’s a story of individuals pulling together to “save the world” and what exactly that means. It’s a story of a species facing the end with dignity. It’s a meditation on what it means to be sentient. It’s a story of programs desperate to understand the strange prison they are born into and the “god” that presides over them. And virtually all of this is told through text, some with a conversational component.
/.../
“I was actually trying really hard to avoid retelling the same story,” he explains, “since I really hate repeating myself, but everything kept evolving into that direction, perhaps partially because Croteam enjoyed The Infinite Ocean. I think some of the mistakes I made in my first few drafts came from trying to avoid similarities. What I ended up deciding was that if The Infinite Ocean is a game about an AI becoming a god, Talos is about an AI becoming human.”
§
The saddest aspect of the QR texts is that as you move further towards the end of the game, they thin out, making it clear how many programs never made it through and the world grows more cold and lonely. Rather than the Garden of Eden, the simulation is both purgatory and graveyard – many of the child programs fall into depression or go mad.
This ethical aspect of the simulation is never made explicit, although Gehenna does sail much closer to these particular rocks. Elohim continues to iterate from one child program to another, attempting to find the program that will finally defeat the simulation and thus be the candidate for upload to physical hardware. But many of the AI already seem to be self-aware and these programs are being put through mental torture. I’m not sure the creators of the Process, Alexandra Drennan and her team, thought this far ahead, as if they assumed only the successful AI would feel anything at all. But they were trying to save humanity and these abused children were the inevitable price.
/.../
“I always intended for a certain amount of ambiguity there. It's the messiness of the story – how the simulation was made out of disparate parts, how it malfunctioned in odd ways, how maybe the very malfunctions ultimately helped it succeed – that makes it human to me. Elohim is part of that. He's supposed to be challenged, yes, but he takes that too far, out of desperation, out of fear. To the player's character Elohim is just a test, but to himself the whole God thing is more than an act, it's his whole reality. Maybe he endangers the entire Process by his actions. Maybe he actually does a better job than intended by accident. Maybe underneath it all he always knows how it's going to end, no matter how much he denies it. To me, that messiness and ambiguity is a more realistic reflection of how we deal with these things in the real world.
“I should probably also point out that there are deliberate references to Jesus and his moments of doubt in Elohim's lines, another syncretic element of the story, another retelling. There's a reversal of roles at the end, God in his doubt submitting to man: let your will be done. The end of the game, in many ways, is about Elohim's moment of humanity, a kind of precursor to the humanity about to be realized."
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Some sound and video for a late Halloween.
§MONSTERS OF THE WEEK
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 1): Valtiel - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 2): The Yellow God - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
Pyramid Head. (Silent Hill 2) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
The Butcher. (Silent Hill Origins) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
SOMA: The Philosophical Zombie - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: A Freudian Nightmare - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§OTHER VIDEOS
Until Dawn - Observations on Interactive Drama Design - RagnarRox - YouTube
Errant Signal - SOMA (Spoilers) - YouTube
Places of Horror - The Secrets of Scary Settings - Extra Credits - YouTube
5 Annoying Things HORROR Games Need to STOP Doing - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill 2 or (The Genius of Hidden Player Choice) - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill & Konami - Did You Know Gaming? Feat. Matt & Pat of Super Best Friends Play - YouTube
Tokens of Memory: Sanitarium - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§PODCASTS
Moving Pixels: The Music Machine
Moving Pixels: The Fall
Moving Pixels: The Swapper
§
Ontological Geek: Horror and Asylums
01:36 – Mashup of Thief music by Eric Brosius
05:20 – Horror and horror music in Games (Amnesia: the Dark Descent, et al.)
27:35 – Asylums in games (Outlast, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Batman: Arkham Asylum, et al.)
1:34:26 – Roundtable discussion (Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Dark Souls, To the Moon)
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 1): Valtiel - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
The Gods of Silent Hill (Part 2): The Yellow God - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
Pyramid Head. (Silent Hill 2) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
The Butcher. (Silent Hill Origins) - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
SOMA: The Philosophical Zombie - Monsters of the Week - YouTube
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: A Freudian Nightmare - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§OTHER VIDEOS
Until Dawn - Observations on Interactive Drama Design - RagnarRox - YouTube
Errant Signal - SOMA (Spoilers) - YouTube
Places of Horror - The Secrets of Scary Settings - Extra Credits - YouTube
5 Annoying Things HORROR Games Need to STOP Doing - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill 2 or (The Genius of Hidden Player Choice) - RagnarRox - YouTube
Silent Hill & Konami - Did You Know Gaming? Feat. Matt & Pat of Super Best Friends Play - YouTube
Tokens of Memory: Sanitarium - Monsters of the Week - RagnarRox - YouTube
§PODCASTS
Moving Pixels: The Music Machine
Moving Pixels: The Fall
Moving Pixels: The Swapper
§
Ontological Geek: Horror and Asylums
01:36 – Mashup of Thief music by Eric Brosius
05:20 – Horror and horror music in Games (Amnesia: the Dark Descent, et al.)
27:35 – Asylums in games (Outlast, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Batman: Arkham Asylum, et al.)
1:34:26 – Roundtable discussion (Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons, Dark Souls, To the Moon)
Monday, December 30, 2013
Critical Christmas
§GAMERISMS
Simon Parkin kicked off an energetic discussion this week with this piece written for the New Statesman. In it, Parkin contends simply and emphatically, that the term ‘gamer’ has become too charged to reclaim, and the idea of a ‘gamer community’ is a non-starter. “If you love games,” Parkin says, “you should refuse to be called a gamer.”
http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/12/15/december-15th/
§
What is the usual canon of games for gamers? I want to add onto what Simon seems to be implying: not only do we need to stop the stereotype perpetuated by assuming people who play games are ‘gamers’ at our events and in the representational aspects of our games, but we also need to interrogate how, even if all of these were solved, games assume a certain kind of player is playing it.
/.../
When games like Candy Crush Saga or The Sims are brought up, it’s only because of the profit they’ve made and not why they are great models of design. For instance, imagine if video games took to The Sims as a model to iterate on instead of Halo or GTA III. Maybe 60-second loops of fun and player agency wouldn’t be so central?
/.../
To classes with mostly non-gamers, students found my game as a new way of engaging with a person, building empathy. They adopted a bit of my mentality and viewed the world in my perspective. The point for them wasn’t to necessarily accomplish anything, but to understand. It’s because my goal was to say something personal to the player, and if someone doesn’t view games as something for communication, they are not going to engage with it that way. It seems to me that gamers are more likely to dismiss artistic expression in games than non-gamers.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-meritocracy-of-video-games/
§
Mortal Kombat 4 showed an attempt to communicate something beyond the shock and gore that was characteristic of the series, and it paved the way for a group of PS2 games that took themselves just a little more seriously.
/.../
One of the most significant things about Mortal Kombat 4 is how it de-prioritizes the spectacle event, as it doesn't communicate spectacle but solitude.
/.../
Through a formalist lens that prizes "good design" above other forms of expression, Mortal Kombat 4 would be seen as simplistic and unsatisfying in its disregard for balance, but it gains a key expressive element.
http://fengxibox.blogspot.ca/2013/12/on-mortal-kombat-4.html
§MINDZ
Can Bullet Hell Games Be Meditative?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY-45DjRk_E
§
We need to be able to show the difference between madness and malice, because ideologies spread in a way that madness doesn't.
http://madnessandplay.blogspot.se/2013/12/getting-shot-at-in-all-my-guises.html
§
This is why Depression Quest is not simply an “empathy game” that MAKES you understand depression, and why it is something more valuable.
http://videogamesoftheoppressed.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/depression-quest-and-active-empathy/
§THE REST
The Five Foundational Design Pillars Of SOMA
1) Everything is story
2) Take the world seriously
3) The player is in charge
4) Trust the player
5) Thematics emerge through play
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/12/the-five-foundational-design-pillars-of.html
§
Extra Credits: Incentive Systems and Politics (Part 2&3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu5QZmPG8zk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X2es__Wtuk
§
Learning to Run: Part 2
http://www.electrondance.com/learning-to-run/
Simon Parkin kicked off an energetic discussion this week with this piece written for the New Statesman. In it, Parkin contends simply and emphatically, that the term ‘gamer’ has become too charged to reclaim, and the idea of a ‘gamer community’ is a non-starter. “If you love games,” Parkin says, “you should refuse to be called a gamer.”
http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/12/15/december-15th/
§
What is the usual canon of games for gamers? I want to add onto what Simon seems to be implying: not only do we need to stop the stereotype perpetuated by assuming people who play games are ‘gamers’ at our events and in the representational aspects of our games, but we also need to interrogate how, even if all of these were solved, games assume a certain kind of player is playing it.
/.../
When games like Candy Crush Saga or The Sims are brought up, it’s only because of the profit they’ve made and not why they are great models of design. For instance, imagine if video games took to The Sims as a model to iterate on instead of Halo or GTA III. Maybe 60-second loops of fun and player agency wouldn’t be so central?
/.../
To classes with mostly non-gamers, students found my game as a new way of engaging with a person, building empathy. They adopted a bit of my mentality and viewed the world in my perspective. The point for them wasn’t to necessarily accomplish anything, but to understand. It’s because my goal was to say something personal to the player, and if someone doesn’t view games as something for communication, they are not going to engage with it that way. It seems to me that gamers are more likely to dismiss artistic expression in games than non-gamers.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-meritocracy-of-video-games/
§
Mortal Kombat 4 showed an attempt to communicate something beyond the shock and gore that was characteristic of the series, and it paved the way for a group of PS2 games that took themselves just a little more seriously.
/.../
One of the most significant things about Mortal Kombat 4 is how it de-prioritizes the spectacle event, as it doesn't communicate spectacle but solitude.
/.../
Through a formalist lens that prizes "good design" above other forms of expression, Mortal Kombat 4 would be seen as simplistic and unsatisfying in its disregard for balance, but it gains a key expressive element.
http://fengxibox.blogspot.ca/2013/12/on-mortal-kombat-4.html
§MINDZ
Can Bullet Hell Games Be Meditative?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY-45DjRk_E
§
We need to be able to show the difference between madness and malice, because ideologies spread in a way that madness doesn't.
http://madnessandplay.blogspot.se/2013/12/getting-shot-at-in-all-my-guises.html
§
This is why Depression Quest is not simply an “empathy game” that MAKES you understand depression, and why it is something more valuable.
http://videogamesoftheoppressed.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/depression-quest-and-active-empathy/
§THE REST
The Five Foundational Design Pillars Of SOMA
1) Everything is story
2) Take the world seriously
3) The player is in charge
4) Trust the player
5) Thematics emerge through play
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/12/the-five-foundational-design-pillars-of.html
§
Extra Credits: Incentive Systems and Politics (Part 2&3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu5QZmPG8zk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X2es__Wtuk
§
Learning to Run: Part 2
http://www.electrondance.com/learning-to-run/
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