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Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

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The second is you can use your tracker presumably after the first time to find an option deer with a collar up north to confirm they are part of the research project.

 

If you find the dead elk you can push through some nearby bushes to find a pretty sweet mixtape. 

 

 

Had a buddy welcome me home everyday.

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Sometimes you think to yourself "did I miss something? I feel like the end asks a lot of the player to put it altogether themselves" and the answer is yes, yes you did miss something. You didn't find the bunker and it's actually kind of impressive you managed to put as much together as you did.

I watched my boyfriend finish his playthrough this evening. It was cool to see some different dialog choices made. Also seeing the bunker answered a lot of the questions I had.

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--In my playthrough I kept thinking that the twine-ish intro went way more different places than I guess it does; that my dementia backstory was just one of many possible.  It seems like it's always that though I guess.

 

I've been slowly cataloging various things in Firewatch, here's a Twine of the intro sequence:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26101/Firewatch%20Intro.html

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26101/Firewatch%20Intro%20Source.html

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Tom Chick's review can rather uncharitably be boiled down to "It's not a game."

 

It's a much smarter argument than usual, but it is far too prescriptive about what sort of experience a game must be, or what sort of story a game is allowed to tell.

 

That's not to say that there isn't something missing from Firewatch.  It does not, as Chick points out, give the player agency in a way that video game players are accustomed to.  It does not have multiple endings.  It does not allow the player to influence outcomes.  The problem with Chick's complaint is that this is quite clearly deliberate.

 

The player can only observe and interpret the story, but the story is about observation.  I mean, go maybe go read the title of the game again, you know?  Maybe it's more than just a literal description of the setting?

 

Now, there's an definitely an argument to be made that the game fails to execute.  If it had been more explicit or convincing (I don't have quite the right word here) then the complaints would be more along the lines of "the symbolism of wildfire doesn't quite work; the conflagration in Henry's life is in in the past and growing more distant, not spreading to engulf things that previously seemed safe."  Perhaps what the game lacks is self-confidence, but then this is a first game from a new company, and there is a theme of uncertainty in the story itself that might be undermined by more deft, direct presentation.

 

Or maybe it's just the UI.  The first thing I do when I start a game is open up the options menu just to see what's in there (usually it's merely a wad of video-card gibberish, alas).  In this one I saw the options to turn off waypoints and map markers and carrots dangling from strings, and promptly did so-- if the game gives you the option to turn them off, then you don't need them.  That might have made the game just that much less gamey, just enough to make me want to think about it in other terms.

 

The story itself is about the limits of communication, about misinterpretation, about there sometimes being no joy at all in learning the truth.  

 

It's about not knowing what to say, or what another person is trying to say-- a short story or a movie or a comic book could have conveyed that sense of being at a loss for words, but the the game's radio and sparse dialog options... aren't they at least an attempt to do that more effectively, more immediately?

 

Again, there's an argument to be made that it doesn't work; I personally tend to loathe dialog trees in games, and they're so pervasive that anyone who plays games regularly is completely inured to them, and unlikely to notice any effect that the technique (or mechanic, if you must) might have on the experience of the story, or the themes.

 

And this is story with themes.  Tom Chick seems to understand that; what he seems to miss is the effort, effective or not, to use the medium of a video game to amplify those themes.

 

OK, that's my problem with Tom Chick's review.  

 

I do have criticisms of the game, e.g. "Ned Did Everything" is a bit Deus Ex Machina when the bulk of character development was on Brian, Brian's death was telegraphed but not in the good way, Delilah's voice acting (or perhaps her script) didn't work for a character who reflexively lies to the police, and yeah, I'm still thinking about the symbolism of the wildfire, which is at the heart of the thing, and I'm just not convinced it works yet.

 

But dear god, I'm not going to push the thing away and say "Bring it back to me as a novella, and then maybe I'll think about it in literary terms."

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Tom Chick's review can rather uncharitably be boiled down to "It's not a game."

 

It's a much smarter argument than usual, but it is far too prescriptive about what sort of experience a game must be, or what sort of story a game is allowed to tell.

To me it seems like the opposite is true: his argument is "Firewatch is a game, and that fact plus the choices made about how to execute it makes it at odds with the story it's trying to tell."

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As I said, "uncharitably," no?

 

I'm not sure how you draw the lines between "X is not a game," "X tries to be a game but isn't," "X should not have tried to be a game," etc.

 

I mean, the "not a game" complaint isn't often leveled at things that aren't video games, is it?

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As I said, "uncharitably," no?

 

I'm not sure how you draw the lines between "X is not a game," "X tries to be a game but isn't," "X should not have tried to be a game," etc.

 

I mean, the "not a game" complaint isn't often leveled at things that aren't video games, is it?

I don't find it hard to draw a line between "X is not a game" and "X is a game, which means it's poorly suited to convey idea/story Y."

The "not a game" complaint is usually used as a method to deligitimise an experience that doesn't fit the shoot mans to level up mold. I don't believe that's what's going on here.

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"X is a game, which means it's poorly suited to convey idea/story Y."

 

I honestly don't see how this is logically distinguishable from "According to my definition of Game, Games are not allowed to convey idea/story Y; thus the thing trying to do this is not a game."

 

You clearly do see a distinction there, though, and that's fine.

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I honestly don't see how this is logically distinguishable from "According to my definition of Game, Games are not allowed to convey idea/story Y; thus the thing trying to do this is not a game."

I believe the distinction is in the fact that I don't assume symmetry. The fact that a spoon is poorly suited to cutting doesn't mean that you can't cut something with a spoon given enough effort. Suitability to a given task does not have consequences for what category that thing is in. So, Firewatch is a game to me, and it does some things very well, and others less so. One of the things it did not do very well for me was allowing me to assume the role of the main character, which made it (again, to me) poorly suited to convey the experience I think it was trying to convey. This does not make it 'not a game.'

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That makes sense.

 

For what it's worth, I very much disagree with the idea that this game is trying to convey something that can't be conveyed unless I am allowed to assume the role of the main character, but then I think we have entirely different ideas of what this game tries to convey.

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I'm conflating my own problems with Tom Chick's there a bit so it's making things muddled, apologies. I was trying to explain why 'poorly suited for its story' does not equal 'not a game' for me, but using my own complaints to illustrate this.

As for what the game's trying to convey - mostly I believe it's themed about running away not solving your problems - instead you carry them in with you. All the weird shit happening in the game ultimately comes from people's fucked-up heads. The problem for me with this is that I'm frequently being pulled out of Henry's head by immersion-breakers like him saying things that don't fit the Henry I've started to construct in my head. My mental space diverges too much from the fucked-up headspace the game tells me Henry's in. Contrast again to Gone Home where I was curious and worried exactly in sync with Katie.

I'll say I don't agree with Tom Chick that the Firewatch story could never have been conveyed in a game, but I do agree that this game did not convey it very well to me.

Don't take me wrong, I really enjoyed my time in this game, I just wish it had worked better for me.

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I do have criticisms of the game, e.g. "Ned Did Everything" is a bit Deus Ex Machina when the bulk of character development was on Brian, Brian's death was telegraphed but not in the good way, Delilah's voice acting (or perhaps her script) didn't work for a character who reflexively lies to the police, and yeah, I'm still thinking about the symbolism of the wildfire, which is at the heart of the thing, and I'm just not convinced it works yet.

 

But dear god, I'm not going to push the thing away and say "Bring it back to me as a novella, and then maybe I'll think about it in literary terms."

As soon as you find Brian's backpack and find out his dad and he vanished I started assuming they were dead. Then when I found out he had PTSD I assumed he was the one fucking with stuff, until the transcripts show up. I am kind of glad I was on the right track in terms of who done it, but Ned's attempts at miss-direction totally worked on me.

Edit: Also holy shit that intro. Did not expect to have so many feels right away, but they kind of smack you in the face with dementia. I do like that my assumptions about Henry running from a divorce were wrong.

Edit Edit: Did we ever learn what Henry's job was before being a firewatcher? Because I was annoyed at him being a dick about moving for her career.

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Don't take me wrong, I really enjoyed my time in this game, I just wish it had worked better for me.

 

And I wish it had worked better for me, too.  As mentioned, I don't think the game quite closes the circle when taken on its own terms.  I'm open to being persuaded otherwise, though.

 

Oh, and I definitely don't think the game is about irresponsibility, or running away, or even about carrying your problems with you (Henry certainly does this, but I don't think that's what the game is about), so yeah, we've got totally different ideas about what this thing is trying to say.

 

A wife with progressive dementia isn't a problem you can solve, is it?

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Hahaha, I ran around for like ten minutes trying to find the source of those goddamn bells. When I found the cave later I was so relieved to learn I wasn't just hearing things. PHEW.

 

I'm slowly going through the thread, but yeah, I did this exact same thing and it was driving me and the lady crazy trying to figure out where they were. 

 

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Oh, and I definitely don't think the game is about irresponsibility, or running away, or even about carrying your problems with you (Henry certainly does this, but I don't think that's what the game is about), so yeah, we've got totally different ideas about what this thing is trying to say.

 

A wife with progressive dementia isn't a problem you can solve, is it?

I didn't mean to imply that it's about solving problems, more about dealing with them. I think the way the game's problems are largely caused by overreactions and unresolved issues does speak to this idea.

Please share your interpretations, I love talking about this game.

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I don't know if it was intentional, but having the characters start to build up a complex conspiracy then to have the real answer be more mundane is a great way to create players who will build their own wild theories about what happens. Which is pretty much how conspiracy theories happen in real life.

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I read over on reddit a comment from Chris to the extent that the game is partially meant to echo a kind of adolescent experience where you have a brief experience that while it's going on seems super important and central to everything, but in the context of the rest of your life ends up just being a blip, ships passing in the night.

I think part of my lack of engagement with the story may be that this is not an experience I'm familiar with. Perhaps it's just that I've had a nonstandard life in this respect, or perhaps it's that it's just more f an American thing, where people move around a lot more and make this sort of experience more likely. Regardless, it's interesting.

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I read over on reddit a comment from Chris to the extent that the game is partially meant to echo a kind of adolescent experience where you have a brief experience that while it's going on seems super important and central to everything, but in the context of the rest of your life ends up just being a blip, ships passing in the night.

 

 

That makes a lot of sense to me, and matches with my own interpretation of the game. 

 

 

Ultimately, I'm left feeling very unsettled by Firewatch.  Which isn't a criticism, I think that's one of the potentially intended things the game is designed to make you feel.  Ultimately Henry and Delilah are both selfish people, and really not very good people.  Delilah would rather people come to harm, even die, than deal with minor inconveniences in her life.  She doesn't think of it that way, until Brian actually does die.  But her actions throughout the game reinforce that (not reporting the girls, not getting the hiker list, not reporting Ned or his son, even after they disappeared).  At the end, I asked her to wait, to hold the helicopter until I could get there.  And of course she didn't.  Because even staying in the relative safety of her tower, with the helicopter waiting, and keeping a vocal lifeline thrown out for her friend who was scared, surrounded by fire and just learned that he had been sharing a forest all summer with a crazy, stalker hermit was too much for her.  It was the final indictment of her character.  Henry was no more to her than any of the other strangers who moved through the park.

This leaves me with a very empty feeling about much of the game.  Not just that my actions as a player were meaningless, but that the heart of the game was hollow.  There wasn't a relationship.  Which I think exploring a relationship like this is an interesting and worthwhile endeavor.  But it bugs me because the effect of that is it sapped the life out of the rest of the game for me.  

Ron and Dave's story is a reflection of Henry and Delilah, it's foreshadowing.  Dave thinks they are friends up until he needs someting from Ron, when Ron makes the boundaries of the relationship very clear, that he's not the kind of friend for things like that.

 

 

Edited to add: The lady pointed out that in addition to the "ships in the night" element, it's also very reminiscent of a lot of Internet friendships, that aren't ever quite as real as other friendships in meat space.

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Edited to add: The lady pointed out that in addition to the "ships in the night" element, it's also very reminiscent of a lot of Internet friendships, that aren't ever quite as real as other friendships in meat space.

Oh, yeah, Chris also confirmed that it's correspondent to MMO relationships, like in Cybele.

I wonder if my lack of response to Delilah (by which I mean I never felt I built up any kind of meaningful relationship with her) was intentional in this way, meaning to refelct the kind of superficial, temporary relationship I've never really gone in for.

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I guess I'd have to replay the entire game to confirm this, but I didn't see any mementos of Brian in Ned's hideout.  Were there?  He took everything from the teens, but Brian's hideout is untouched.  Ned obsesses over the details of others, but not his own.

 

It was also really sad to read Brian's plans for retrieving his backpack.  It's an elaborate method that avoids any and all rope climbing.

 

 

This leaves me with a very empty feeling about much of the game.  Not just that my actions as a player were meaningless, but that the heart of the game was hollow.  There wasn't a relationship.  Which I think exploring a relationship like this is an interesting and worthwhile endeavor.  But it bugs me because the effect of that is it sapped the life out of the rest of the game for me.

 

That's a great take on Delilah.  Though I wouldn't say there was no relationship—it just means that the special connection she claimed with Henry was just another thing she could abandon.

 

And you can keep hope alive!  Henry can be a big ol' sap and invite her to Boulder.  She'll never come; if your wife is with her parents she won't even want you in Boulder.

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There was a birthday card, a photo, and uh... something else. I forget what the third thing was. Immediately on the right once you get in the bunker.

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