Chris

Idle Weekend February 6, 2016: Playing at World's End

Recommended Posts

Idle Weekend February 6, 2016:

860__header.jpg

Playing at World's End

In a slightly tardy Idle Weekend (sorry!), our hosts ponder what makes apocalyptic video games so damned entertaining. Is it their artful graffiti? The heroism at the end of the world? The gank-or-be-ganked mentality that comes with every helicopter landing? Then weekenders also find inspiration in the unlikeliest moment: after four hours of staring at one puzzle in The Witness. Plus, more on game reviews, Steam, and a whole lot of Rocky.

Discussed: The Division, The Witness, The Last of Us, I Am Legend, Steam, The Expanse, The Flash, Arrow, Gravity Rush Remastered, Creed, Rocky, Rocky III

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Rob's problem with the enemies in The Division sounds like the exact same experience I had. I saw a bunch of looters looting an electronics store, so I killed them all and proceeded to loot the store. I think The Division has a problem in general with being an RPG with a realistic setting. If those looters were goblins and the electronics store was a crypt, you wouldn't think twice about taking all the gold because that's what you do in an RPG. But when you have real people in a real world setting it's hard to justify abstract mechanics. It's also why it's a bit weird to have these distinct factions like Looters and Cleaners (the garbage men turned hazmat pyromanics) because in reality, people and groups aren't that easy to classify. And RPG mechanics are all about classifying things and putting them into neat categories.

 

Although as for them being criminals from Rikers Island, the radio host you hear in the Dark Zone saferooms does say something to the effect of "90% of the people in Rikers were only in there for stuff like possession, it's the other 10% I'm worried about". So at least someone on the development team noticed the issue.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris' note about the rest of the cast being about boxing movies seems a poor choice to me.   No doubt it was well intentioned.  It broke up the flow of the discussion  (though rewinding a bit helped with that).   It condensed the remainder of the podcast into something less than it actually was, inviting me to chose based on incomplete information.   Sure the topic was boxing movies, something I would normally take a pass on, but included Danielle's inside insight and an evaluation of the arc of the Rocky movies (and Rambo movies) that I hadn't considered.  It was worth cutting against my impulse, which was "boxing movies, boring and irrelevant" to hear a different or at least more nuanced point of view.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Rob's problem with the enemies in The Division sounds like the exact same experience I had. I saw a bunch of looters looting an electronics store, so I killed them all and proceeded to loot the store. I think The Division has a problem in general with being an RPG with a realistic setting. If those looters were goblins and the electronics store was a crypt, you wouldn't think twice about taking all the gold because that's what you do in an RPG. But when you have real people in a real world setting it's hard to justify abstract mechanics. It's also why it's a bit weird to have these distinct factions like Looters and Cleaners (the garbage men turned hazmat pyromanics) because in reality, people and groups aren't that easy to classify. And RPG mechanics are all about classifying things and putting them into neat categories.

 

Yeah, the story is a problem with The Division. There's been an apocalypse, and to set the world back on track it's your job to go into NYC and murder everyone who was too poor to have an exit plan! Also, being a silent protagonist in this game just doesn't work for me at all. I played a black woman in the beta, and having to stand there while a bunch of white people argued about plans and then conclude by telling me to go kill more poor, sick folks was... yeah. Not great. Though I didn't really expect much given the premise of the plague (it's a virus that infects and is transmitted via paper money).

 

The Rikers thing bugged me as well. I've friends who spent time on Rikers Island. Misrepresenting them as the worst of the worst just didn't sit well with me. However, I was fully on board with The Warriors-ing of different factions. I only wish they'd gone further and told me to go fight The Baseball Furies or something.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Sheesh, at least when most post-apocalyptic games invite the player to imagine themselves going out into the world and mowing down everyone who seems suspicious they at least have the decency to code them as zombies or whatever.

 

I'm not really sure what they should have done instead. Maybe just... not made a game that takes place in a real city that also needs to support roaming around and murdering people indiscriminately as a gameplay mechanic. I feel a bit grossed out even when science fiction or fantasy settings posit that certain kinds of people are just inherently Bad (Orcs are chaotic evil!), but it's like ten times worse in a near real-world setting like The Division has, where your factions of generic mooks are based on real people who actually exist in the world right now (Rikers inmates, poor New Yorkers, etc.)

 

And yet from the way it's described in the show and from the screenshots and videos I've seen, the setting looks so gorgeous and detailed? I think, more than anything else, I wish that somehow video games could support building worlds with this level of budget and graphical fidelity behind them in games where your main mode of interaction is something other than shooting people with a gun.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I wish the Will Smith movie was just named something else (the way that earlier film versions were named different things, like Heston's The Omega Man).  It made it so hard for me to like that movie, because it mostly (except for the alternate ending kind of getting it) jettisoned the core idea of the book, of the last man on earth as a real life Bigfoot, a mythical monster who stalks the day, who the real survivors of the plague warn their children about.  He's the villain, the monster.  And the dawning realization of that on both him and the reader is the best part of that story.  It also means that the name of the movie is completely meaningless, as it is the clue of how the story will twist at the end.

Okay, nerd rant over.

 

Edited to add: Oh man, I commented before the discussion was done.  The Walking Dead comment about how individuals become so valuable in a post apocalyptic world is the idea that I Am Legend is turning on its head (the last man is actually a great danger to society continuing, but that's an impossible thing for him to consider until the very end).

 

No the nerd rant is really over (unless something else sparks another thought on this subject). 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Chris' note about the rest of the cast being about boxing movies seems a poor choice to me.   No doubt it was well intentioned.  It broke up the flow of the discussion  (though rewinding a bit helped with that).   It condensed the remainder of the podcast into something less than it actually was, inviting me to chose based on incomplete information.   Sure the topic was boxing movies, something I would normally take a pass on, but included Danielle's inside insight and an evaluation of the arc of the Rocky movies (and Rambo movies) that I hadn't considered.  It was worth cutting against my impulse, which was "boxing movies, boring and irrelevant" to hear a different or at least more nuanced point of view.

That definitely was not my intention, but I take your point, and I'll be more careful about this kind of thing in the future for sure.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Rob's problem with the enemies in The Division sounds like the exact same experience I had. I saw a bunch of looters looting an electronics store, so I killed them all and proceeded to loot the store. I think The Division has a problem in general with being an RPG with a realistic setting. If those looters were goblins and the electronics store was a crypt, you wouldn't think twice about taking all the gold because that's what you do in an RPG. But when you have real people in a real world setting it's hard to justify abstract mechanics.

 

Realistically, with the way D&D and most D&D-derived settings often characterize goblins, etc, it should be just as gross to indiscriminately murder them and take all their stuff? They almost always boil down to sentient tribal creatures that are trying to eke out an existence somewhere, but are otherized by more established groups in the fiction. You might also get a line or two about how orcs are all vicious and evil and you shouldn't worry about killing them indiscriminately, which is equally uncomfortable once you unpack it. It's just brought into sharper relief when the same dynamic is applied to the real world in The Division.

 

The theming in The Division seems really weird in a lot of ways. The dark zones are a super cool idea mechanically, but are all the other looters that you can betray/be betrayed by supposed to be other Division agents? And the Division is basically a plainclothes government sleeper cell, from what I can tell?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Rob's "The mythology of the superhero" struck me as the best summary of why so many long-term comics fans dislike Snyder's portrayal of Superman. Snyder is taking Superman and giving him Batman's moral stance and mythology.

 

Asher Elbein has a great piece on the Atlantic summarizing DC's confusion about Superman as well, and neatly states Superman's ethos: "He’s an immigrant driven not by tragedy but by an unshakable sense of right and wrong and a desire to fix the world for the less fortunate—a battle that can never end." Which, incidentally, was not what we saw in Snyder's Superman, and not where it's going as Snyder is drawing heavily on The Dark Knight Returns for the next movie.

 

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/the-trouble-with-superman/435408/

 

Getting back on episode topic, I'm loving the CW's Flash. Corny parts, yes, and suffering from superpower amnesia like all comic book shows, but there are great moments in there.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Rob's problem with the enemies in The Division sounds like the exact same experience I had. I saw a bunch of looters looting an electronics store, so I killed them all and proceeded to loot the store. I think The Division has a problem in general with being an RPG with a realistic setting. If those looters were goblins and the electronics store was a crypt, you wouldn't think twice about taking all the gold because that's what you do in an RPG. But when you have real people in a real world setting it's hard to justify abstract mechanics. It's also why it's a bit weird to have these distinct factions like Looters and Cleaners (the garbage men turned hazmat pyromanics) because in reality, people and groups aren't that easy to classify. And RPG mechanics are all about classifying things and putting them into neat categories.

 

Although as for them being criminals from Rikers Island, the radio host you hear in the Dark Zone saferooms does say something to the effect of "90% of the people in Rikers were only in there for stuff like possession, it's the other 10% I'm worried about". So at least someone on the development team noticed the issue.

 

From what I've been able to gather, we (the division agents) are actually the second wave of responders. So the JTF was overwhelmed, they call in The Division, and then those agents disappear. They're off the grid, are they dead or carving out their own niche in an apocalypse, or top level agents are working in conjunction with the terrorists who spawned the disaster, or they are the terrorists. People are starting to formulate their own stories, but it seems entirely plausible that this, the most Black of Ops, is painting people who thought they were in it to save lives as pawns (or knowing conspirators) of government cells bent on shutting down the disorder by absolutely any means necessary. Basically, it's totally up in the air right now and I fully embrace the idea that The Division is absolutely not on the side of the people. Even if the overarching messaging for them is restoring order, we're the bad guys.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Danielle talking about how solving puzzles in the Witness felt an awful lot like programming made me think of Zaktronic's TIS-100 which took that insight about puzzle games to its logical conclusion by creating a puzzle game where you are solving problems by writing assembly language code. If you have any knowledge at all of the basics of programming then I think it is worth checking out! If nothing else you'll probably get a kick out of the instruction manual the game comes with.

 

I think the review as buyer's guide is inevitable as long as the criteria in evaluating a thing is "did you like the thing?" That could be useful information, but it also might not be. To move away from that sort of evaluation it might be better to approach a piece along the lines of, "what is the presentation of this thing like?" Then you get more immediately into the substance of what a thing is doing differently, what's special or thought provoking about it, etc. etc.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Something in the discussion of The Division got me thinking about The Maze Runner. The first book is just this crazy scenario where you're trying to figure out what's going on, but as the series progresses it develops into an apocalypse story. More interesting however is the prequel that was release a few years ago: The Kill Order, which starts at the very beginning of the apocalypse and gets to the point where they future is pretty well set. This is the kind of apocalypse story I find most interesting. The one where things start out okay, and then things start to fall apart as people desperately try to cope with society crumbling around them. Anyway, great conversation. And if you're looking for a few nights of entertaining reading, the series isn't half bad.

 

[edit]

 

On the subject of whether video games should be fun vs. interesting... I think we have to move past a point where video games are considered entertainment to a point where we recognize that video games are actually a medium. With this in mind, I think it's important to note that, as a medium, what's effective in video games is different from what's effective in movies or books. It's still fairly common to make video games into basically movies, to their detriment, but part of that may be because we haven't seen the Citizen Kane of video games yet. The techniques are still being developed. Also, like books and movies, video games as a medium means that hey, they don't all have to be fun and that's fine. The can be designed to evoke certain emotions, even negative ones, to make the player think, or even to learn about a subject. How do you objectively score a Hitchcock film vs. a highschool driver's ed. video vs. a war documentary vs. Terminator 2?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The trick element on apocaliptic and post apocaliptic stories often is that while the process that lead to it is often the most interessing (as it explain how thing there it also explain how people are dealing with it) thing is also the the most negated (you can see this in the average bad zombie story, wheren suddenly zombies and everything is gone). Dark Souls and Bloodborne, however get this right, there is a whole process of how thing got where they are, with a step by step "progress", with bad (where they speed how bad things where going) and "good" decisions (that often just delay thing a bit) begin made at each one, that make the whole thing more natural (as another exemple, think how in the narrative of the fall of the Roman Empire, you got not just "bad" emperors, but "good" ones which where kind trying to keep thing together, even if half of time they just made it worst, and how this make the narrative more interessing).

 

On the subject of Goblins and Raiders, in think, in my humble opinion, the different is in the theme and what it propose/intention to be, the goblins in the cript, unless otherwise said, aren´t doing, or pretending to, a commentary on something, unlike the raider in the division appear to be.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So English is not my primary language, but I can understand it just fine. Well enough to listen to Idle Thumbs and Idle Weekend (2 of my favorite podcasts!). Even if I occasionally don't recognize a word or a phrase, I can usually figure it out through context.

 

However, I haven't been able to figure out what it means when Danielle adds "ass" to the end of random words. It's usually Video game-ass, which I took to mean a pure "Video game-like" game. Like the opposite of an experimental indiegame.

 

But in this episode she said athletes are cheesy-ass people, and now I'm just confused. I know what cheesy movies are, but what does it mean to be cheesy-ass?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So English is not my primary language, but I can understand it just fine. Well enough to listen to Idle Thumbs and Idle Weekend (2 of my favorite podcasts!). Even if I occasionally don't recognize a word or a phrase, I can usually figure it out through context.

 

However, I haven't been able to figure out what it means when Danielle adds "ass" to the end of random words. It's usually video game-ass, which I took to mean a pure "video game-like" game. Like the opposite of an experimental indiegame.

 

But in this episode she said athletes are cheesy-ass people, and now I'm just confused. I know what cheesy movies are, but what does it mean to be cheesy-ass?

 

"Ass" as a suffix functions as a basic intensifier, like "very," although in some regional variants it's also used to convert a pejorative adjective into a noun, like "dumbass."

 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ass

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So, two things: thank you for convincing me to finally see Rocky. I'm not into sports and I tend not to be interested in movies about them but Rocky was a hell of a movie even so. And while it's certainly about boxing, there's so much else around that, all of which is smart and characterful and human. I really enjoyed it. I may yet watch one or two more (and Rambo, for that matter) so I have a better context for Creed, though I doubt I'll get through the whole series.

 

Secondly, I am also a fan of stories about the transition into apocalypse and I think one of the best recent takes on that is Ben H. Winters' novel The Last Policeman and its two sequels. It's a straightforward apocalypse - an asteroid (or possibly comet, can't remember) is going to directly impact Earth and while the result will vary to some degree depending on where exactly it hits, it'll kill a huge number of people right away and alter the ecosystem to the point that Earth will no longer sustain human life. So the story is about how people are dealing with the increasingly near proximity of their certain death - in the protagonist's case, he fixates on doing his job as a police detective in a world where solving crimes and keeping law and order are becomingly increasingly irrelevant and his social support structures are fraying and collapsing.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Enjoyed this podcast very much. I've only watched the Giant Bomb quicklook of The Division, and it looks very impressive but somehow also totally Not For Me.

 

I wonder if there's something else they're keeping under wraps at this stage, and at some point the virus will mutate and the endless guys in hoodies will turn into fast zombies or Hulk-esque monsters or werewolves or vampires. Or will it just be military jocks vs guys in hoodies forever? 

 

So English is not my primary language, but I can understand it just fine. Well enough to listen to Idle Thumbs and Idle Weekend (2 of my favorite podcasts!). Even if I occasionally don't recognize a word or a phrase, I can usually figure it out through context.

 

However, I haven't been able to figure out what it means when Danielle adds "ass" to the end of random words. It's usually video game-ass, which I took to mean a pure "video game-like" game. Like the opposite of an experimental indiegame.

 

But in this episode she said athletes are cheesy-ass people, and now I'm just confused. I know what cheesy movies are, but what does it mean to be cheesy-ass?

 

English is my only language but for some reason my brain's first instinct has always been to read the '-ass' as being attached to the following word, not the preceding word. I guess this is because using a suffix as a modifier in that way is not so common in English. So I end up wondering about 'cheesy ass-people', 'big ass-burger', etc.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Enjoyed this podcast very much. I've only watched the Giant Bomb quicklook of The Division, and it looks very impressive but somehow also totally Not For Me.

 

I wonder if there's something else they're keeping under wraps at this stage, and at some point the virus will mutate and the endless guys in hoodies will turn into fast zombies or Hulk-esque monsters or werewolves or vampires. Or will it just be military jocks vs guys in hoodies forever? 

 

God I hope not. Games with zombies are played by me in spite of their inclusion.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ok, I'm just going to start commentating on old episodes, I like the idea of having waves of new idlers adding their thoughts.

On the topic of smaller games exploring the not-having-to-be-fun-niche: I think smaller games are a natural fit for them, and not just because big companies can't take the risk of making something that isn't entertaining. I just don't know how long you want to keep playing games that at a basic level are not fun to play. If a game wants to make you experience something or make a point, I think that after that has happened it loses a lot of replay-value, though this might be a failure of my imagination here. And if you look at movies that are interested in this, they rarely last more than 3 hours, which still counts as a very short game. This also seems like something best experienced in one playthrough, which naturally limits the "right" length.

Relating to Rob's point about haute cuisine: I sometimes feel that parts of modern, abstract art have done the same thing, leaving behind a vast majority of people who can't understand it. Though I'm way out of my depth here.

Also, some good Danielle bars from this episode:
I have not dipped my toes/into either of those
This weekend I also saw Creed/finally finally, it's ridiculous it took me so look to see it

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now