TychoCelchuuu

New blog post, featuring (among other things) this gem:

...? I'm not really sure Eddie Murphy could've included a bit about how we should obviously chop off the hands of thieves in Raw without it being a joke. Pretty much nobody has believed that for hundreds of years.

Not even close. In addition to the stuff Merus points out, think about tolerance of other religions and cultures, women speaking their mind, rock music, men with long hair, catching a thief and not chopping off their hands or putting them to death, witches, women wearing pants...

So check this out. It's nothing surprising or amazing if you've paid attention to, for instance, Steam achievements, but it's timely because Ken Levine just committed studio seppuku so he can make video games that you can play three times without getting bored. People barely even play through a game once, and Levine (who is far from alone) wants the game to hold up on repeat playthroughs. But is this a goal that game developers should have? We can divide the issue into two questions. First, should a narrative be something such that you can experience it multiple times? I think the answer here is obviously yes: books and movies can be good no matter how many times you read and watch them, and there's no reason games can't be like this. But... games are so long, most of the time. We're not just talking about Gunpoint, which has a fun little story you can experience again when you replay the game later. We're also talking about BioShock Infinite (which is on the short end of these sorts of things), which takes you hours and hours to get through every time you play it. If 2001: A Space Odyssey were 9 hours long, would anyone want to rewatch it? Or even want to finish it? Because it seems like not everyone wants to finish games like The Walking Dead. The second question is whether the narrative should change when you go through it multiple times. By their very nature, most games have a narrative that varies at least a bit. Even a straightforwardly linear game like Infinite has stuff you won't see if you don't look around, diaries that you might not find, lines that Elizabeth might not say if you don't rodeo her near the specific item, etc. This looks like an even sketchier idea in a world where lots of people don't even beat your game once. Alpha Protocol got slammed in reviews by people who would probably have been blown away if they played it four more times. Are these reviewers just idiots (idiots like the rest of us)? Or is this Alpha Protocol's fault for having a stupid goal in the first place? Who cares if your game is different the third time through if nobody makes it through the first time? I think this tweet by friend of the show JP "The Breton" LeBreton sums up one view pretty well: https://twitter.com/vectorpoem/status/437628277344047105 What we want are choices that matter, right? So when someone say "you can replay my game three times," this means our choices matter in one of three ways, because they had one of three results on the story. So is this the value of things like branching narratives? They imbue choices with meaning? That tweet is just a tweet, so it can't be very detailed, but I think saying "non-canned" is not the best way of putting it. Sometimes choices with "canned" results can be really interesting. The Walking Dead understands this, I think - people give it shit about how if you replay the game, it turns out a lot of the choices you make just bring you back to the same location, but that's beside the point. What matters is what set of choices you make, not whether someone making different choices sees something different. In the context of The Walking Dead, those choices matter a lot to the narrative, and although if you look at them from outside the context of the narrative, it seems less impressive, that's not really important. On the other hand, though, Alpha Protocol is such an amazing game because choice is everything in that game. You can play it five times and get a completely different narrative all five times. This isn't just a choose your own adventure game, it's a fundamentally different way of making a game. But this brings us back to the elephant in the room, which is that a lot of people never see this stuff. One thing you might say is "fuck those people." Books aren't written for people who stop reading halfway through, movies aren't shot for people who turn them off or leave the theater, and games aren't made for people who play halfway through Portal and say to themselves "welp, I guess it's just test chambers forever, might as well peace out." Game narratives should be about what they can be, not what people tend to experience when they play them. On the other hand, I think there are good reasons people don't beat games. Games take a long fucking time. Portal, a short game, is longer than every movie except, say, Sátántangó. Alpha Protocol, a fairly short game, is still five to eight hours per playthrough. BioShock Infinite takes longer, Deus Ex takes longer, and holy fuck can you imagine playing through Dragon Age enough times to see all the differences between the various origins? Don't game developers need to get over themselves and realize that getting someone to play a game once through is a coup, let alone getting them to play it multiple times, and the effort should be put into something like what The Walking Dead does, which is making the main narrative compelling even if the branching is limited, rather than adding a lot of branches that people are never going to see? My personal opinion is that it's a mistake to divorce the narrative from the systems. (Levine fucked up Infinite by doing this, I think, so I'll be interested in seeing if he fucks up his next game.) When I think of games I want to replay, I don't think of Dragon Age or The Walking Dead. Dragon Age is a slog and The Walking Dead is a story that happens, once, and I'm not interested in seeing it again, especially because I'd have to sit through the game again. Games I want to replay are Deus Ex and Pac-Man. Why these games? Because they're fun! And in replaying Deus Ex because it's fun, you discover all sorts of interesting narrative branching that you don't find in Pac-Man. That's okay for Pac-Man, of course, but it's also great for Deus Ex. What we need are games that are fun to play through multiple times, because these are the games that can support the weight of divergent narratives being bolted on to them. But in some sense this is a very unsatisfying solution. Games with the complexity of Deus Ex can handle branching narratives, but only to a degree. It takes a more locked down game like Alpha Protocol to branch for real. Maybe the solution is to make something as fun as Deus Ex with the narrative of Alpha Protocol. That would be hard. But perhaps it's the holy grail of replayable game narratives. Maybe The Breton is right. Maybe replayability has nothing to do with it. I've admitted as much when it comes to The Walking Dead - can I admit as much when it comes to a game that branches much more? Can I leave those branches unexplored and be happy with the choices presented to me in the narrative because I could have done otherwise? I don't know. That to me sounds like playing through Alpha Protocol once. The more a narrative varies based on what you do, the less impressive it is on a single playthrough. Another solution is just to make games shorter. I mean, Jesus Christ. Does every game have to be 8+ hours? This is why I love Twine games. You can branch the fuck out of your Twine game and I don't mind, I can play it again to see the other branch. I wish that were the future of games. If I want to play a game for 80+ hours I'll play Titanfall or BF4. If you're trying to tell me a story there's no excuse to take 8+ hours to do that shit. Figure out what's good about your game and pack it into a few hours. Will this work? I can picture AAA studio heads vomiting explosively at the thought of sinking millions of dollars into a two and a half hour game. BioShock Infinite would've benefited from being one quarter the length, but that wouldn't have cut its budget by one quarter. Can games with production values far in excess of Twine games ever cut their play time down to something reasonable? I think so. Gaming culture right now thinks short games are the worst thing in the world, and there's not enough of a market to make them sustainable, but I think this can change. You can dump millions of dollars into an effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster and nobody complains when it's only an hour and a half. (People get antsy if it's too long!) Games can be like this. It'll take a change in gaming culture - games will have to stop being made for teenage boys with too much time on their hands - but we're already fucking there! Remember? This post started with an examination of how lots of people don't finish these fucking games already. Game developers need to catch up to this. Once they stop making 8+ hour games for people who stop playing after 4+ hours, that's when we're going to see some seriously good stuff. And that's also when gaming is going to get even more popular. Because right now, one of the biggest barriers to entry for gaming is how if I want to show someone a masterpiece like, say, Deus Ex, they need 20 to 40 hours to sink into that. And that's fucking nuts. Nobody who isn't already a gamer wants to do that. So I show them Twine games instead. There's nothing wrong with that, but I yearn for a future where I can show people narrative games with all the shiny graphics of BioShock Infinite without knowing they're never going to slog through the couple of hours it takes to even meet Elizabeth, let alone the 8+ it takes to make it to the end. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I remember one other thing about this episode. During the discussion about biased journalists and the cabal, Chris raised the point that the people who could actually buy off journalists are the ones who can fly them to the desert to shoot guns and then give away glass tommy guns full of alcohol. Chris said something like "that's what's weird - for some reason, nobody ever complains about that" or something similar. Really, though, do you think it's weird, Chris? Are you giving people who complain about this shit that much credit? Because I agree that if people thought logically about potential sources of bias, and were really hoping to see journalistic integrity upheld and bitching when it seemed like this wouldn't happen, then yes, they'd complain about EA flying journalists out for a magical retreat and not about a few people on Polygon being friends with a few people on Idle Thumbs who are friends with Steve Gaynor. But the people who complain about this shit obviously aren't clued in people who are keeping a sharp eye out so that journalists are held accountable. They're immature bigots who self-identify as gamers and see Gone Home and other indie games as a threat to a medium that they want to always be about shooting, forever, and they couldn't give less of a shit if journalists get to drive an Abrams tank because they have no problem with Battlefield 6 getting a 9 out of 10 from IGN whether or not the review is biased. What they want to keep from happening is Gone Home and stuff like it being praised. That's why nobody ever complains about your tequila tommy gun.

My impression was that most of the writing in Thief was Teri Brosius and another person who I can't recall right now but who is interviewed in those podcastrs sclpls linked, not Ken Levine. At least, I think that's how it was.

I think it's interesting that Chris talked about how this modern generation is weirdly pop-culturally omnivorous, such that we walk around constantly making references to pop culture and so on. I'm not really sure this is, as he claims, a recent phenomenon - if you go back a thousand or so years and read St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, or a few hundred years and read Milton or Montaigne, you'll realize that these motherfuckers also can't go a paragraph without making a reference to something (the Bible or Aristotle or other philosophy and religion for the first two, basically everything for the second two). I think maybe the impression that this is a new thing is just that for a while, this whole "reference other stuff" culture was entirely confined to the people with education who could read (and fucking memorize) all this shit in Latin and Greek and so on, whereas nowadays, since culture can be pop culture in addition to "high" culture, more people can do the reference thing (and it's more obvious to us when they do it because we don't need to know about what Aristotle said to realize a reference is being made). The discussion about Polygon's style guide and the NYT style guide was fun. I really like thinking about (and listening to discussions about) writing that are reflective in these sorts of ways. Tom Francis has an article sort of about this and I swear some other person (Kirk Hamilton, or Evan Lahti, or some other friend of the show?) had another really interesting one about game reviews. I wrote one for my own review site and putting into words the sort of things I think about how I write reviews was really interesting. I teach writing to college students, in the context of writing about great works of literature in the Western canon, and for a lot of the students (who are mostly engineers and pre-med and so on) it's often a real struggle to get them to appreciate that writing is vastly complex and encodes all sorts of assumptions and tropes just by virtue of saying one thing or another. The sorts of cliches the Thumbs were talking about are just the most easily noticed tip of the iceberg. Language is such an intricate, complex, amazing thing and it's painful that game reviews usually make a fucking hash of it for all sorts of reasons. (I'm glad that Polygon is trying to combat this a bit.) I really liked the talk about Eddie Murphy's bigotry about homosexuals. I can't remember if someone in the podcast said it or I was just thinking it, but I love the idea (and I find it really crucial) that in the future we're going to look back on the sort of comedy we do today and see discordant stuff just like we look back at Murphy and see discordant stuff. I think understanding this and realizing that making comedy, even edgy comedy that's informed by (and even driven by) socially progressive viewpoints, doesn't automatically insulate you from saying vile, awful shit that you'd realize is vile awful shit if you could go into a future where oppression isn't as bad and the group you're saying vile awful shit about actually has a voice. I tend to think of myself as a pretty funny person, and I make a lot of really edge/dark/potentially offensive jokes, but I like to think that I never (or rarely ever - we all make mistakes) "punch down," which is as good a way of summing up the issue as any. We need to be really cognizant of who we're attacking and dismissing and potentially hurting when we make jokes, and make sure we don't make the sort of jokes that people will look back on in 20 years and say "holy shit." To do that, though, you really need to be on the forefront of understanding discrimination and racism and sexism and ableism and so on in society, and you need to be acutely aware of your privileges, whatever they are. This is the ultimate irony, I think, of the people (including the many infesting this thread like a bunch of racist roaches) who think they're fighting on the side of comedians when they take on "social justice warriors" like Danielle or myself or many other regulars here. They think that comedy needs to be protected against the evil forces of opinionated naysayers who want to keep it from making all the choicest jokes about minorities or whoever, but in reality that's the last thing comedy needs. What comedy needs is to be like Eddie Murphy's 80's standup minus the shit that 20 years later strikes us as vile. (Actually I guess it's 30 years - holy shit it's 2014.) The way to protect comedy, to let it thrive and to have it serve as a vehicle of real social change and entertainment we can wholeheartedly enjoy without hurting anyone and without perpetuating social problems that we ought to be fighting against, is to be cognizant of the sorts of issues in precisely the sorts of ways Danielle and the other Thumbs often are, and to get shouted down by a bunch of misandry mooks every time you try to bring up the problematic aspects of something is just to ensure that the thing remains problematic and some day becomes a toxic remnant of how awful we were to each other rather than an all time comedy classic. I was tremendously gratified to hear Danielle say such nice things about my game review site (it's "awesome," she says!) and I think I detected pride in Chris' voice when he talked about how it came from someone on the Idle forums. So yeah, I'm pretty great. Also Danielle I emailed you about being featured as a Subjective Reviewer of the Month and you didn't get back to me so uh, please do that.

Oh, well, it's fine if other people say it's satirical in that they're making the claim based on what they've read. The issue is going around saying "a guy from the Idle Thumbs forum started it as a joke," because that moves past "I think it's a joke" and straight up says "it's a joke." If one person says "I think it's satirical" and then another person says "that came from the Idle Thumbs forum" that's totally fine.

Hey wait a sec I just checked my sent mail list and I emailed Danielle about being featured as a Subjective Reviewer of the Month a couple weeks ago, and she hasn't gotten back to me. Did she mention that on the podcast? Because of the four people I emailed she's the only one who hasn't responded.

Dammit.

Alright which one of you is Rufus? You can't go around the Internet telling people it's a joke! That ruins the joke!

With respect to the BioShock Infinite review, the site has been dubbed "Objectively a pile of objectively pretentious bullshit that objectively conscientiously avoids mentioning any of the stuff that people objectively enjoyed the most about this objective game. Objectively speaking." over at the illustrious "Forumopolis."

Better install TFix too.

Oh, you mean the hit single "(Ain't Nothing Cuter Than) Two Snails A'Kissin'"?

What the heck kind of people have last names like "Chris," "Jake," and "Nick?"

I don't think "kill all men now" is super radical, I mean that's basically what video games have been asking me to do since DooM.

OH WHAT THE FUCK I haven't listened to the latest podcast yet! BUT NOW I MUST. THIS IS AMAZING. JonCole, I don't see how what I wrote is in error. Can you explain what you mean? That many of the guns kill with two to four bullets is compatible with the fact that a gun kills in one bullet.

What.

What's the point of taking away the weapon someone is using to attack you if they can go find another weapon? Why bother disarming attackers, ever? They'll just go find another baseball bat or whatever.

That means a lot to me.

Chris and I and a few others had this conversation about Sim City in the Sim City thread starting on this page. As you can probably tell I come down strongly where Paolo does on these issues, generally.

These are great. Blizzard's April Fools jokes are consistently tremendous.

"Gone Home is not a (very good) game (mechanically)" is very different from "it's not a game." Mechanically I'm more or less lukewarm on the game - it doesn't do anything very wrong or very right, I'd say, apart from allowing you to flip around the empty cassette tape boxes, which is cool. I think the game is mechanically sparse and closer to a visual novel than some other games, and that it's worth talking about whether this is a good or bad thing for it and for games in general, but I've never seen anyone aside from dipshits claim that the game isn't actually a game. Nobody I respect has ever tried to exclude Gone Home from consideration as part of the medium by definitional fiat.

Now that I'm a bona fide hobbyist video game reviewer I've started to think more about reviews (and criticism, which I lump into the "review" category when the criticism is specifically about one game, basically) and reviewers. I don't really read a lot of reviews. For games I think I'll like, I wait until they go on sale, or preorder them if they're multiplayer games. By the time they go on sale I have a pretty good idea of what they're about and I don't need to read many reviews (maybe just Rock Paper Shotgun and one other, or whatever). I do, though, have some favorite reviewers, but while thinking about this I realized that my favorites don't really write a lot of reviews (or at least not many I've read). I like Ian Bogost, but I can't remember reading any reviews of his besides Gone Home and Proteus. I like Tom Bissell but ditto for Spec Ops and Dishonored. There are also some reviewers I like who I read more reviews from but who I basically often or always disagree with, which is pretty weird: I like James Allen because he reviews games others don't and Tom Chick because at least he says what he thinks and he thinks interesting things. As for more prolific reviewers, though, aside from the people at Action Button Dot Net, the Idle Thumbs crew, and Campster, I can't even think of many people whose names (or Internet Brands) come to mind when I think "cool reviews." Cara Ellison for sure, and... I don't know. I feel like I pay attention to games writing, generally: I read Good Games Writing, for instance, and much of what Rock Paper Shotgun links in its Sunday Papers. So this makes me think either not enough people write interesting reviews consistently, or more likely, I just am not paying attention. So, I turn to you folks. Who are your favorite game reviewers? We have our Reading About Games thread for just general games stuff (which I feel like I have much more of a handle on), so please only post things that can (at least broadly) be considered as games reviews. I want to read some good ones, and more importantly find some people who I can keep an eye on.

What younger and more avant-garde critics? I've never seen any legit critics say that Gone Home isn't a game. The people leading the charge are just a bunch of dipshits on the Internet who are scared of gaming turning into something other than a refuge for misogynistic homophobic teenage boys to shoot each other and teabag each other and call each other faggot over and over. They hate "art" and games with a message and games that address issues that women or minorities have and games that aren't about killing and games that try something new and break from established, comfortable modes that they understand and enjoy because new things scare them.