Jake

Idle Thumbs 205: LPBs and HPBs

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Idle Thumbs 205:

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LPBs and HPBs

Imagine your dream LAN. Sit back and really picture it. If your dream LAN is one where the snacks are artisanal, the soda water is gently flavored, and the wifi's always free, you may be a dad, but who cares with a ping this low?

Things Discussed: Captain Forever Remix, Pacapong, Dota 2, Alien vs. Predator, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Psychonauts

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To be fair, all N64 games were ugly.

 

EDIT: Sorry, I don't mean to pick on Jake. It's just that I did a hundred percent run of Mario 64 less than a week ago when it hit VC and I feel it absolutely holds up.

 

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talk about dota lans is eerily aligned to my own experience

 

we have been doing Dota LANs for +/- 12yrs now and used to have 10 people show up for dota1 full team stack which was great.  Except getting everyone with varying OS', setups, winXP silly networking etc. it was an easy an hour setup prior to getting people up and going

 

Now...with adult lives...we usually pull a consistent 5 or a rare 6th for the awkward 3v3.  My brother hosts and has a closet full of cat6 cables, power strips, and a larger router only used every few months for this exact purpose.  We usually order pizza, but I like the idea of an adult meal to not feel like human garbage the next day.

 

Closer related still - we've had LAN days (usually with too much beer) where easy lose a dozen games - but when playing for all day it doesnt feel so bad.  My wife is also expecting this fall and I suspect i have 1 - 3 of these events left before it becomes a major hassle to put together

 

 

The same-room interactivity is great and produces some of the best goofs. I feel like it is a lost event for young people these days, even going over to a friends house and playing a game together locally is a lost event.  I think lan/local games will be a (small) pillar of my parenting encouragement

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Yeah, I understand why the Thumbs don't like lore, but I love it. Of course, bad lore is bad lore, but good lore is wonderful. I'm the kind of person who spent ages just looking over the lists of characters in the back of the Song of Ice and Fire books.

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When you really think about it, the filmography in the footnotes of Infinite Jest is basically lore.

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It's not that Mario 64 is ugly but that was a contributor when it was new. It has just never grabbed me the way Mario games before or after it have.

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Weirdly, playing Mario 64 on Wii U VC the other day just made me want to play Super Mario Sunshine again.

 

Bring that to Wii U Nintendo, thanks.

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My reference to facial hair in my email was actually about a reader mail from last episode.

 

Here is the YouTube link that has t= in it: 

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It's really interesting that Sean offers a critique of lore by comparing it to a bad history class, and then Jake gets so close to offering a defense of lore by talking about how a history class should be. I honestly see "good" lore serving as thick description for characters, actions, and events. The lore in Psychonauts is the history of the camp that gives context to the current characters' actions so that anyone, even someone who has never attended a summer or boot camp, can understand what it means to be part of the Psychonauts. I think a lot of games fall down with their lore because their characters, actions, and events exist to give context to the setting and the plot, which is probably a natural although not necessary consequence of a writer-led philosophy of video-game storytelling. If you've made the decision to read all of the books in Skyrim, you're playing the game and experiencing the story to understand what they're talking about, because the flow of knowledge doesn't go the other way. It's really the difference between a game telling you how bad a guy in order that you kill him, even if you have your own reasons, and a game letting you kill a guy for your own reasons in order for you to find out how bad he was. Hopefully that makes sense?

 

In real life, among teachers and professors who know and care, teaching history is about helping students to identify individuals and processes, and then about helping them to understand the narratives and consequences in a series of events through those individuals and processes. It's not too different from telling a story in a video game, allowing students to invest in the themes and systems that they see as important, but a lot of people teaching history obsess about names and dates like some video-game writers obsess about lore. It's probably inevitable then that, just like "names 'n' dates" is a pejorative term among my colleagues for the rote teaching of history, "lore" is becoming a pejorative term for the thoughtless insertion of information into a fictional narrative.

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Going on a bit of tangent, but it's interesting to me how the "names 'n' dates" complaint has such clear analogues in other disciplines. In mathematics, people complain about rote arithmetic. Linguists complain about teaching the "rules of grammar." Kind of points to how screwed up our education system is.

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If Favre's Oeuvre was the title of this episode, I would strongly consider making a twine game full of weird French loanword puns for that jam. You deprived yourselves of this.

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Oh man Nick is on the cast! I love when Nick is on the cast and in the intros! I have never mistaken anyone's voice on the cast.

 

Thanks Gormongous for defending history class. Because guess what history class is awesome and I have never been a person who actively devours backstory in games. It is very strange to me that the Thumbs have a distant view of capital-L Lore when they create such story-heavy narrative driven experiences, because I find the hard break between lore and backstory is basically just a subjective line that's been drawn. I thought the arguments in the cast were internally consistent, and yet they still seemed to jump back and forth across what I perceived all your lines to be.

 

 

The Wizard Jam is in Idle Banter so that people who weren't actively using the dev subforum could know about the jam!

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Gosh, I remember well the feeling of invincibility that came with getting a fast broadband internet connection before they were common. Being an LPB was fun. Combine that with the performance benefits of a Voodoo Graphics card (plus possibly being able to see enemies through water if the server was using "vis'ed" maps) and woof.

 

It's neat to me how the whole LPB/HPB thing means something different depending on the type of game you're talking about. With a peer-to-peer situation like Starcraft, where things need to be in lockstep across all players, the HPB was the one to be feared, because it meant you were all going to have a stuttery, slow game experience.

 

In an asymmetric server-client deal like Quake, the LPBs were Neo and the HPBs were drunk toddlers in the same arena where time is constant.

 

Current console shooters are in a weird middle ground that generally works out, but can be abused in weird ways.

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At Sean's LAN party, who duct taped themselves to the ceiling?

 

(SANFRANDADLAN, 1000s of Dads packed into Moscone)

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I can remember playing XWing vs Tie Fighter and I believe anything below either 250 or 300ms ping showed as green next to the leaderboard. A quarter of a second of latency was a prime internet connection.

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The "Lore" that always gets to me is the long text intro filled with names, dates, events that have little or no context and might not even matter in the game (bonus points for made up day and month names for extra confusion). The Oblivion intro is only about a minute and a half before you get control of a character. I am having trouble thinking of a really heinously long explanatory intro (probably because I stopped playing JRPGs :) ) But I know I have read paragraph after paragraph of confusing history before ever getting close to gameplay. 

 

I think there is also style choices in how you introduce lore to the player. Sort of a spectrum between assaulting them with required novellas, sprinkling it around the world in books, flavor text and dialog, and having the story being totally optional.

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The Oblivion intro is only about a minute and a half before you get control of a character.

 

Yes, and this minute-and-a-half of narration is a bad thing while me reading Cyrodiil history for hours on a wiki is a good thing.  Your Oblivion character is just some cat/elf/lizard/human person who runs around stealing sweetrolls and shooting fireballs.  Patrick Stewart's narration about the oncoming end of the Third Era means nothing to your immediate goals of escaping prison and running around.  It's just some dude telling you that this game is meant to be epic.

 

Your second paragraph is a great description of this—I think as long as designers have that spectrum in mind lore can be healthy for everyone except obsessives like me.

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Yes, and this minute-and-a-half of narration is a bad thing while me reading Cyrodiil history for hours on a wiki is a good thing.  Your Oblivion character is just some cat/elf/lizard/human person who runs around stealing sweetrolls and shooting fireballs.  Patrick Stewart's narration about the oncoming end of the Third Era means nothing to your immediate goals of escaping prison and running around.  It's just some dude telling you that this game is meant to be epic.

 

Your second paragraph is a great description of this—I think as long as designers have that spectrum in mind lore can be healthy for everyone except obsessives like me.

 

Re Oblivion: It introduces who he is and hints at the main quest that you will be set on when Emperor Patrick shows up in your prison cell. I agree it isn't directly applicable, to your situation, but long intros rarely are. I think Morrowind did pretty much the same thing. Part of the issue with having a more descriptive intro is that your character in TES games is a blank slate, Skyrim was the first one to even say where/why you were arrested. The intro to your characters in Oblivion would be "You are in jail" because everything else is decided by you.

 

I prefer lore that I can experience or not at my leisure which is why I like the lore in TES games. It also helps that their lore is interesting, there is all kinds of lore I wouldn't touch in the Assassins Creed series. I can barely stand the required cinematics. I also love when lore is build in game series since its fun to know the background of things introduced in new games. One thing that drove me nuts about Final Fantasy game lore is that they build these really complex worlds you will never return to, so there is less of a reward for learning the lore since a sequel will not expand on it.

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The last shitty game I worked on was an iOS/PC game and the company hired some guy with terrible spelling and grammar to write paragraphs and paragraphs of lore for the characters. This was just a dumb League of Legends style turned based game, so the characters were just shells of things people may like. Having a bunch of idiotic backstory written for characters I created after the fact was bizarre and cringeworthy. It was even more useless because this writer guy was hired full time while the company was hurting for cash.

 

I asked in a meeting before the guy was hired why the lore was important and basically the owner just said, "Well you've gotta have Lore." Then they all had multiple meetings and e-mail chains arguing over what the lore actually was and all of this backstory over this dumb game wasting tons of time. I guess that's all those managerial types can do in terms of "work," booking pointless meetings to argue for hours.

 

So after that bitterness, Jak and Daxter really wasn't a very good game, I think I made a thread about it like 5 years ago. It had some charming parts but the controls were crap. Then Jak 2 is even more of a mess of open world junk and incredibly unforgiving platforming and combat. However I love Jak 3, now that's a great game with a fun story and lots of neat little minigames and well made platforming levels. Jak X was an even more fun and well designed cart racer. It played so smooth. I can definitely tell the missing link between Crash Bandicoot and Uncharted.

 

Also Jake's goatee reference for those that don't want to dig through archives was a general feeling of grossness of the existence of goatees. This started because of the Double Fine news posts of Jake and Spaff at the offices in 2001 when Jake actually sported a goatee. There was a bit of self depreciation there.

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I just remembered that League of Legends has "lore" and I take everything I said back fuck lore forever but history is still cool.

 

It is really fun when the Lord react to each other in the game with non game-specific interactions, though. I'm officially torn.

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