Jake

Idle Thumbs 212: DMCA Dad

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Idle Thumbs 212:

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DMCA Dad

Lies are told, governments fall, goats are visited, flatulent messages are decoded inaccurately, secrets are conveyed in whisper and then forgotten, and E3 is predicted with unprecedented precision. Adventure, thrills, titillation await.

Games Discussed: Sunset, Escape from the Werewolf Village, The Witcher 3, Camp Grizzly, Witness, The Magpie Collection

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Is Witness in Games Discussed "The Witness" or is it a Commodore 64 version of the Harrison Ford film?

 

I'm hoping it's the recent board game release from the Sherlock Holmes guys.

 

 

EDIT: Yes!

 

Also, the conversation about using Valve's tele-feel technology so that Sean can feel Jake's hands on the controller went very differently from my first impulse. Behold, that tech in action:

 

ghost-o.gif

 

And the "combat tutorial" with Snippy the Crab in The Witcher 3:

 

giphy.gif

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Ah-ha, that's what Sunset is about.  I saw a lot of people excited about it when it came out but I'm still too Bloodborne-obsessed to look into most other games right now -_-

Feel better, Chris!

 

Edit: Whoa!  Sunset's logo is amazing.  

 

Edit2: Regarding the email about the impairment mid-game thing.  Fear Effect for the PS One.  One of your playable characters loses an arm.  No more dual wielding pistols for him! New reloading animations.  Other things I can't remember.  I do recall very much feeling the loss of that arm.

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Tthe Sony SweatGlovetm will only work with the PS3, in this the Year of the PS3.

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I like how no-one noticed the mis titling as "Brothers: A Tale of Two Cities" instead of 'Two Sons'.

I think Jake was accidentally talking about an EA Presents.

(though it may have been the emailer's goof)

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It's actually pretty likely that the one escape puzzle was deliberately designed to give the answer "FARTING" when decoded incorrectly. A lot of puzzle events will use a secondary "incorrect" answer as a clue to a larger meta-puzzle, or even just as little jokes or misdirection (which is probably what happened in this case). You should ask Kevin about MIT puzzle hunts sometime.

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I like how no-one noticed the mis titling as "Brothers: A Tale of Two Cities" instead of 'Two Sons'.

 

Damnit, I came here to say just that.

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"Witchered the Third" was truly inspired.

 

Is Geralt really pronounced with a hard g?  I thought it was like "Gerald" with a t, but perhaps I've only ever seen it in print.

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Brothers is great, and everyone should play it, but I have to disagree with the thought that it involves a mid-game character disability.

 

As was said, each brother has their own abilities and limitations that requires them to cooperate. Little Brother can't swim, Big Brother isn't as nimble, etc. When Big Brother dies, Little Brother makes his way home, backtracking through earlier areas that have been changed and truncated for narrative brevity. At first, there's nothing that would normally require Big Brother to be there. As the game comes to the end, though, suddenly there are a few obstacles that need Big Brother's abilities to pass. After realizing that you can't get past them, a player tries using the Big Brother's controls and Little Brother finds that he is now able to do those things. Those abilities are never taken away from you when you are actually in a situation that normally requires them. It's more about Little Brother pushing through his grief and finding the strength to carry on through the memories of his brother.

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Witness sounds like a really cool game and very similar to Hanabi, the best co-op game ever. I'll need to check this out.

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I was almost 2 when my mom had my younger sister. When they brought her home I asked if they could "take her back to the hospital store and get a brother."

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Spaff's Monkey Island site (or, as its creator apparently preferred that it be called, SPAFF'S MONKEY ISLAND PAGE) went down long before ArchiveTeam started crawling Geocities for sites so all we have is a 2001 Internet Archive scrape.

 

Unfortunately because the images weren't cached and the site seems to have been composed almost exclusively of images very little has been left behind. We can determine from the image names, though, that the title image was flanked by a pair of dancing monkeys. It was also apparently a member of Murray's Web ring. Appropriately the "Give Me a Monkey Site!" button on the latter website linked to Mix'n'Mojo on the second try.

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212 is already in my music rotation frequently, so hearing it preceding an episode of Idle Thumbs would go undetected for a bit and then freak me out a lot.

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Oh man good find, kinda. :)

 

I think i have some of the imagery somewhere, suffice to say it was pretty terrible. 

The main logo was made in MS paint. I did make some of my own GIFs though of the dancing monkeys and stuff, so you know, not all terrible ;)

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I liked the point Sean was making about game accessibility. There was some debate on twitter and game design blogs a couple of months ago that came down to this "alt games" vs. "indie games" ideological divide. I didn't fully comprehend the debate at the time, but Sean's point feels like a very cogent defense of the "indie game" camp. It is difficult enough to get people to check out a game like 30 Flights of Loving that I feel really moves the needle forward in terms of game possibility space. So I think keeping things accessible and fun makes a lot of sense. I get the "alt games" argument that reaching the biggest possible audience doesn't need to be a goal for developers, and that's completely valid, but I also feel like a lot of creative people have a desire to make things that feel culturally meaningful, and that's pretty human, and if so accessibility should absolutely be a goal.

 

To expand on one thing Danielle was talking about with the Witcher, one thing that I think works really well in that game is so far every single quest or mission you go on is in service of providing more detail to that world, which is not something you see in a lot of open world game designs where at a certain point the game just has you go on a bunch of fetch quests and collect 150 widgets. So I feel like the game can get away with throwing kind of goofy, left-field stuff at the player and still retain a very grounded feel just because the developers really put in the work into building the world out via the game systems.

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I liked the point Sean was making about game accessibility. There was some debate on twitter and game design blogs a couple of months ago that came down to this "alt games" vs. "indie games" ideological divide. I didn't fully comprehend the debate at the time, but Sean's point feels like a very cogent defense of the "indie game" camp. It is difficult enough to get people to check out a game like 30 Flights of Loving that I feel really moves the needle forward in terms of game possibility space. So I think keeping things accessible and fun makes a lot of sense. I get the "alt games" argument that reaching the biggest possible audience doesn't need to be a goal for developers, and that's completely valid, but I also feel like a lot of creative people have a desire to make things that feel culturally meaningful, and that's pretty human, and if so accessibility should absolutely be a goal.

 

I'm on the other side of this! Some of the best films I've seen -- even some of the best jokes I've seen in film! -- are incredibly offputting if they're not your thing. People like Wojciech Bakowski and Sylvia Schedelbauer make very inaccessible movies, and they're amazing, unique artists with very distinctive voices -- and they're okay that they're never going to make a wildly successful Hollywood movie because that's not what they're trying to do. I don't think pushing people to create accessible work is the right framing since it kind of seems like a way of pushing people towards homogeneity. I think encouraging people to inspect the choices they make in the creative process and ask themselves why they make them is a better framing. If you're making your game this arcane, cryptic thing, why is that? If you're doing it because you want to be cool to the alt games crowd or because people liked this other game and it was kind of cryptic, that's probably not a good choice to make. If you're doing it because that's what you want to make or it's the way you want to present whatever it is you have to say, that's exactly the choice to make. But pushing people in either direction, or even saying "this approach is better," isn't something that sits well with me.

 

Everything is culturally meaningful on some scale. You don't have to make a massively salable product for it to be a cultural object. Sometimes all you have to do is make a little thing about how you feel in a moment and present it in a way that you know how, and let it resonate with the people it's going to resonate with. If you want to engage that 15 year old who's just starting to get to find the words and ideas that feel right to him and it's important to you that she be able to find and understand what you're making, then make that thing. If you want to make something else, then make that. Both mean just as much, but they'll mean it to different people.

 

And since I couldn't find anything on YouTube by either of those filmmakers, have an excerpt from Encounters With Your Inner Trotsky Child from Jim Finn, a 90's new age self-help style short. Kind of inaccessible, but pretty fun.

 

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I'm not sure if you've had a chance to listen to the podcast or not, but I don't think there's any actual disagreement here, and maybe I just stated things poorly in my post. Sean explicitly stated that he wasn't trying to tell people what to do. Part of what I found so frustrating about that debate was it was presented in such strong either/or terms, and so I ended up tuning a lot of it out.

 

As I said, I think if you want to make a game that might only reach 15 people, that's great! But if people want to reach a larger audience that doesn't just make them the new version of the AAA companies as some people on the alt gaming side sometimes presented things.

 

The main takeaway I got from what Sean was saying was that games are not movies. As long as someone isn't blind and/or deaf, you can watch any movie in the world from start to finish. The same cannot be said about games. As a result, questions of accessibility require a little more care when it comes to games.

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Random game goat anecdote, in Skyrim there was a mission modeled after the Hangover where you got drunk, then had to retrace your steps.  One of the steps was to get a farmer's goat back that you had stolen and then sold to a giant.  I was trying to reclaim the goat being all sneaky, but as soon as I touched the goat to signal it to follow me, the giant roid raged out.  So me, the goat and my elfen archer companion all take off running across this field with an angry giant chasing us, slow catching up.  I turn back to check on the goat just in time to see the giant slam his club down on both the goat and my archer companion, trampolining them both a mile up into the air (a glitch that could sometimes happen).  I was like, "Welp, this missions fucked and now I have to find a new companion."  Then the giant took back off after me.  I barely made it to town in front of it, where it proceeded to rage and kill multiple guards/townsfolk before it finally lost aggro and wandered. off.  I'm just standing in the middle of this muddy road, dejected about having blown a cool mission AND lost a companion.  And then, on the horizon, I see my archer trotting towards me without a care in the world.  With the goat just a few steps behind him!  I don't know how far away they got bounced, but it must have taken them a good 10 minutes to make it back to me.

 

Moral of the Story: Goats make every game better.

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The main takeaway I got from what Sean was saying was that games are not movies. As long as someone isn't blind and/or deaf, you can watch any movie in the world from start to finish. The same cannot be said about games. As a result, questions of accessibility require a little more care when it comes to games.

 

Yeah, I think the Thumbs have made the point on a previous 'cast or two that while you can get though a "difficult" film by just sitting back and letting it play, it's much harder to push your way though an awkward or off-putting game because there's so much more engagement required just to get from the beginning to the end.

 

And I agree with Sean that it seems much more likely someone will be willing to engage with difficult content if the gameplay mechanics are fun and rewarding.  And gamers seem much more willing to put up with weird, less-accessible gameplay mechanics if the content is immediately rewarding.  Trying to do both pretty much limits your game to people who seek out weird and unusual game experiences for their own sake.

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Appropriately the "Give Me a Monkey Site!" button on the latter website linked to Mix'n'Mojo on the second try.

 

I am so disappointed that they didn't go for "Show Me The Monkey."

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The main takeaway I got from what Sean was saying was that games are not movies. As long as someone isn't blind and/or deaf, you can watch any movie in the world from start to finish. The same cannot be said about games. As a result, questions of accessibility require a little more care when it comes to games.

 

Maybe! I don't know, maybe I should go back and listen to that section again, but it seemed like he was saying that film could be difficult because film has such a history and a cultural foothold that the language of it is more universal and understood, but games didn't have that kind of cultural cachet so they should couch their messages in more accessible (which I read as homogenous, either in mechanics or themes) ways?

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