Hermie

This is great! More intellectual gaming discourse in one place.

Yup, I was floored too. What an experience. Journey conveys more information with a single camera tilt than Skyward Sword does with a full hour of throwing words at you.

Hey Rodi, if you want to post this on The Gaming Vault, let me know. It's a small site where we write for free mostly to get experience, but it's still a nice platform to publish stuff on. =)

Yup, achievements, like most things, are what you make of it. You can scoff at them, you can treasure them, or just ignore them. Like Mike suggests, an achievement can be a good thing to remind you of a memory connected to game. Just like the airplane ticket I keep in my drawer, it's inherrently useless, but it's a symbol of the first time I met my girlfriend. In the same way, the final achievement in The Saboteur might be worth 50 arbitrary points in a mediocre game, but to me it's a signifier of many hours spent in company with my very best friend, when we lived together in a flat for a short time. Just because the original conceit behind achievements was stupid, doesn't mean you should feel bad for caring about them.

It's definitely going to be a challenge, but that's why it's fascinating to me. This thought initially struck me once I got out of the tutorial dungeon when I first started the game. I ended up wandering off and picking flowers for a while. Then I came to the first town and went around talking through a small love triangle. This got me wondering if I could actually enjoy myself in the game doing just this. For the most part, Skyrim seems like a fully realized world, and Todd Howard was bragging at previews about the towns having their own economy. But can you actually live as a peaceful, regular citizen of Skyrim? I'm gonna try to stick as close to the original game as possible, without mod tweaks.

I've started a pacifist character, that will hopefully end up in an article. So far I haven't hurt anything, but I've taken to bringing around a bodybard that can deal with random bandits and wolves. I've been using wards, healing and fear so far, as well as voice of the emperor. But I'm still looking for a way I can actually go out on adventure without bringing anyone or killing anyone. Any hints for other spells and such to make this easier? I started the Mages College, because it seemed the most tranquil storyline so far, but even in the first quest they threw undead at me. I ran straight out of those ruins. =( I'm having fun just crafting and alcheming, as well as trying out different merchants, who was what and at what price etc., but I'm curious to how long it will last.

I'm with Kroms, I got so invested in the characters, so by the end, the last choice was extremely hard. It became a "Should vs. want" choice for me, rather than black or white. I played through Ghost Trick on the iPad, and that version is great, touch controls work well, and it's nice to see the smooth art style on a big screen. I got completely hooked by the writing, and I love that even the smallest character has a funny quirk.

This is a me: https://twitter.com/#!/hermanlilleng

I have so many things to do this week but all I really want to do is make a Wizard N'Gai photoshop.

I like being excited rather than cynical about games too, and I try to avoid assuming the worst, but this kind of thing makes it hard sometimes. For me, it's not as much about the fact that there's DLC, but more about the attitude EA takes towards it. "Here's the game, aaaaand HERE'S how we're gonna make extra profit from it." Maybe it's because it seems so... dispassionate? It's a very naive thing to request engagement and passion in such a corporate context, but this kind of presentation seems to actively go against the stuff we actually love about games. I have no doubt that the team at Maxis either are super stoked to be making another one of these, or is stoked because they grew up with these games, and is now lucky enough to make the next one. But at least expose me to some of this passion, or show me what the actual game looks like, before telling me "If you give us more money, you will get a French firetruck!".

This sounds like an amazing interview waiting to happen.

I also hope he doesn't look like the guy people thought he was before:

Yeah, he does those at home, apparently just to kill time. I like Giant Bomb for several reasons, and one of them is because they go straight against conventional wisdom regarding internet content. I'm part of the student TV, and there's a lot of talk currently about how to adapt our content to be more web-friendly, i.e. shorter and faster. While it's true that most people surfing the internet do have extremely fleeting attention span, Giant Bomb single-handedly proves that you can produce long-form, niche content, be it text, audio or video, as long as the quality and entertainment is in place.

Great comic! I was just gonna check it out, but got caught up reading it until I suddenly reached the end. Always a quality sign in fiction. I now want and intend to read the rest of your comics. =)

I'm sorry:

Isn't most gaming hardware sold at a loss? I'm very intrigued by the idea, though of course, everything is in the execution. What would they call it, though? I'm going with "Pipe".

You guys should throw some of that Idle Thumbs money their way, I'm sure EA would appreciate the help from such a big name in the industry.

Far Cry 3.

I'd forgotten that Kickstarter was the website with the little scissors at the bottom. Klick them.

Damn, I missed being the one pushing it over 100 000, but still, now pledged. PS: $100 000.

Pff, hypocrites, Germans do the exact same thing in Scandinavia. Also Belgians are nice. They make good beer, chocolate, and comics.

Hey, I just noticed that noted former games journalist and current PopCap unicorn, Jeff Green, linked a cool blog about Planescape mods: https://twitter.com/#!/Greenspeak/status/173910402734882816

Ignored.

Good point. I definitely didn't mean to generalize that much, but rather trying to think of why games such as the examples mentioned are heralded more as opposed to cut-scene heavy games. But you are very correct in that quality has a lot to do with it, and it's definitely not "wrong" to have a lot of non-interactive storytelling, just "a choice". (I never liked the concept of "tl;dr" anways, and this is why <.<) Question: is a loading screen a "cut-scene"? They cut away from the game, are usually non-interactive, and more often than not, they convey information. They're not part of the written narrative, but they are definitely part of the experience of playing a game.

Warning, this might get long. TL;DR: Players don't like to get information passively handed to them, because the game is not supposed to function without their agency. I've been thinking about this subject a bit lately too, primarily because I've been learning about cognitive film theory in school. Crash course, in psychology, film/literature theory, sosiology, and other related fields, the theories of "message" usually start out with the thought of "a message is sent out and delivered directly to the brain of the recipient". This makes sense as a basic assumption, but it treats the sender as all-powerful and the reciever as a blank slate that takes the information as a blank slate that doesn't filter at all. The cognitive turn within humanities is that of focusing on the reciever. Let's use film as an example. Whenever you watch a movie, you bring your own emotion, knowledge, experience, and sensory capabilities into your watching of the film. Someone who say, knows the twist of The Sixth Sense, will watch the exact same movie as someone who doesn't, yet will read completely different information from what is being presented. Each experience is unique to you, and the movie doesn't get formed by M. Night Shyamalan, but rather in the moment you register the sound and images and process them with your mind. So, video games. If a film is formed when audio-visual information meets your mind, I would posit that most video games are not only formed by the same way, but also from when the game environment meets player input. (Note: by "environment" I don't just mean game world, but also system, passive stuff such as cut-scenes and voice-overs, and other things that are presented to you) This is an obvious, but still important thing to consider, because without player input, the game will probably stop telling its story sooner or later, and just stand still. By thinking of storytelling this way, you can also include non-written games such as Minecraft, where the narrative ends up being "he built a cave, but then a creeper blew it up", etc, because it's a result of the intersection between player and environment. Here comes the part that actually ties in to the discussion: I believe that the frustration some people get from cutscene-heavy games, is the fact that they remove your chance to input, and instead feels more like they are treating you like the "blank slate" where they can just deliver information towards. I also think this is why games like Bioshock and Half-Life are heralded more for having a slightly different approach to basically the same thing. They often leave information in the literal environment, for the player to discover (or not) by themselves. They still write and consider it carefully, but instead of acting as all-mighty narrators that inflict the information upon you, they allow you to play a part in discovering it. I could go on, but I think I've hit my main point, at least. Disclaimer: I have read no video game academia, so my points may be A) obvious, and completely wrong. This is purely born out of reading film stuff, then considering how it applies to games.