Steve

I appreciated this piece, though I do feel like it comes at things from an angle that I think of as a flawed conceit. The argument is sort of, "I wish this were a different game." I see this kind of approach to criticism sometimes, and it always seems misguided. It is a bit of a "why can't you talk to the monsters in Doom?" line of questioning. Well, because it simply isn't that kind of game, period. In Gone Home, the entirety of your interactive role is that of an active observer. Its premise is that the entire story takes place in the past, and that your role is to methodically explore an unfamiliar location, looking for bits & pieces of the story to reconstruct as you encounter them. I feel like a number of the arguments here are describing a different game-- one where the story is primarily about the player character, and happens more in the present tense, and that the player has more control over the course of events, or more active inputs into determining what appears next onscreen, or expressing hypotheses into the game and having it respond to them. These are all explicitly and intentionally Not What The Game Is About. Just like Doom is not about talking to the monsters, nor does it profess to be or imply that it should be. I do very much appreciate her thoughts on her emotional reaction to the ending of the game-- I absolutely agree that "it made me cry" is a bullshit qualitative metric, and does not validate any piece of entertainment. You can make the audience cry a lot of different ways, and a lot of them are crass, manipulative carnival tricks that should not be celebrated. Shitty art can make you cry and great art can awe you without appealing to your base emotions. The tears are irrelevant-- though I do hope Emily felt there was some legitimate value in seeing something recognizable and human from her own life mirrored in the game.

Oh yeah, these are definitely great. Highly recommended. The one with Ken was really earnest and warm and I enjoyed the hell out of it. Need to listen to some of the others...

I feel like this would be tough, though is I'm sure achievable-- but my expectation would be that you'd end up wrapping back around to the "what actions are being performed by the player that are interesting" thing on your way to making a successful version of what you're picture. Papers Please, for instance-- I don't know how that game emerged, but I could totally see it starting from the idea of "I want to make a game about the security state and the inhumanity of border crossings" and making its way to "so what you do is you're a border crossing agent and you have to move documents around and compare them and decide whether to let people through or not..." etc. I don't think any approach is just universally untenable, but I think it is always important to consider what makes the player's interactions interesting for something to really end up successful.

Okay I think I will!!

I'm going to reply to a couple of things here just to clarify author intent, not that that matters to interpretation.

I'm still reading this thread! I have a pilot for my helicopter so it's fine!

https://www.idlethumbs.net/tonecontrol/episodes/tom-bissell Tom Bissell: author, critic, video game writer. What was his path to authorhood? What inspired him to write the video game-focused essay collection Extra Lives? And how did he end up in Cliffy B's lambo? The writer of Gears of War: Judgment (and a number of unannounced upcoming games) tells all. Also this month, Steve is joined by co-host Michael Abbott of the Brainygamer blog and podcast! Savor his dulcet tones. GAMES!

Best forever. This is super rad. Love the PDX heart sticker!! Thanks again for sharing. So best.

More trip reports please. These posts are my favorite! Thanks for gifting the game!

As you note, a lot of this is systemic to how the studio is run/works with writers, as opposed to being on the writer themselves. It sounds like Tom had the exact right outlook for the particular assignment he had; I think you'll find his involvement in the stuff he's working on now (once it's announced) is a much different arrangement.

Whoa! You were there? Wacky!

This is fucking awesome to hear. So glad you guys are into it! Yeah talking with Tom was fantastic, with all his diverse background in lit/criticism/games.

Thanks so much! Yeah winning two VGX awards is bonkers. Now me and Jake and Sean are all Spike VGA buddies.

Yeah I really enjoyed hearing Clint's reasoning on that, and it makes total sense. Players do things to get a reaction-- even a punishment (like the animals going berserk and trying to kill you if you shoot them or something) is a reaction, and will encourage the player. In an interactive frame, when the player takes an action and there is zero reaction, they no longer have any reason to repeat the action.

Just for reference, I find THIS discussion far less fascinating.

FYI, I think this discussion is fascinating, and why I love the Idle Thumbs forums. Sorry for mostly being a lurker, but thanks so much for the in-depth & thoughtful exchange you guys have going.

Yeah I agree. I'm not sure what it was-- the balancing of how long it took for guns to jam, or the fact you could unjam them during combat, or the fact your ability to maintain them wasn't tied to a stat/resource, or what... but it definitely felt a lot less bad in Far Cry 2. Also maybe because it fit in with the world more: everything breaks/degrades/must be repaired in FC2 (cars, boats, buddies etc.) so it fits. Also I guess guns feel less permanent in FC2-- if your gun jams you can just ditch it and pick up another one back at your weapon storehouse later, whereas when your upgraded shotgun in SS2 broke, you were basically screwed until you could scrounge a repair tool to fix it.

All of our bodies are slowly dying, so it only stands to reason.

What I'll say is that I believe the requirement here is to make it more difficult/costly/skillful to knock out the enemy in the first place. Basically put the challenge and strategy before engaging the enemy instead of after. I think I mentioned this on the cast, but something like knockout darts being very rare, or sneaking up on an enemy to choke them out being difficult, or the actual knockout action taking a long time and leaving you vulnerable, etc., makes the initial investment in going non-lethal the tradeoff, instead of "I have to kind of ambiently remember that that guy will wake up at some later date and screw me over." Knockouts are permanent in Thief for instance. Their example is pretty much ideal imho.

I'll try and make sure eps 5 forward are louder, and tighter stereo. 4 (Clint) is already uploaded but I have yet to upload future ones so I'll see what I can do.

Yeah! For me that was really important. For my own sanity if nothing else. You know you're going to be hanging out with these people a LOT, for a long time, and have to want to share that headspace. I've been really happy to see comments by people saying that they wanted to hang out with Sam, or wished they could have had a friend or little sister like her, just because I feel like it at least means I succeeded in creating that kind of character that I was hoping for.

Thanks man! Yeah, that is actually part of my motivation for making the cast-- when I was first realizing I wanted to make video games, I read some GameSpot profiles of notable game developers, and a lot of it was about how they were just normal dudes who had no idea what they were doing at first, and just had to figure it out, and try, and then ended up doing awesome stuff. So I try to get that into the cast as much as I can. Thanks for listening!

Thanks! I was worried maybe actually I made it dumb garbage. I'm hoping it won't be like, a full year or whatever between cast appearances next time.

Yeah I think a big part of that was that they had multiple creative teams working on separate projects at the studio simultaneously. So Craig worked as a level designer on Blood, and became the lead on Shogo and NOLF and FEAR, but then AVP (except for a bit by Craig) and Tron and Condemned were all by separate teams at the company. I think their having less of a cohesive identity is probably a result of that, though all their games I think did play to their core strengths of atmospheric first-person action/story experiences overall.