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Idle Weekend February 12, 2016: Mad Skills

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Idle Weekend February 12, 2016:

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Mad Skills

The Weekenders welcome longtime friend Tom Chick to the show to talk about how skill matters in our ability to understand games. Can we ever truly "get" something we're terrible at? Do some games give us an ego boost that we should consider in reviews?

Also this week: XCOM 2 gives Rob the howling fantods, Danielle yells at empty rooms in The Witness, and Tom has strong opinions about Lords Managements.

Discussed: Homeward: Deserts of Kharak, XCOM 2, StarCraft 2, BioShock 2, Massive Chalice, The Witness, Victoria, Firewatch, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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Tom's comment about Lords Managements being RTS games without the macro was kind of interesting. From my perspective it isn't so much that the macro got removed so much as it got integrated into the micro of the game in the form of the economy being tied into last hits rather than buildings. But the overarching concern of the player is still basically the same as a RTS -- anyone playing the these games at a high level of competition has to know certain timings. In a RTS you have x number of workers producing y amount of gold, which allows you to build buildings and units a at the 5 minute mark, b at the 10 minute mark, and c at the 15 minute mark. In a LoMa you have hero x, who can get y number of last hits by the 5 minute mark which will give you z gold which allows you to hit a particular timing window for a particular item. And I would argue that sort of stuff is just as important to the "meta" as what heroes counter other heroes. I find the most important stuff in a patch update for these games is not the changes made to the heroes (which is what most people obsess over), but all the boring details like changes to the map, how tough towers are/how much damage they dish out, and how much gold a creep gives when it is killed because those changes have a huge impact on the pace of the economy and what different heroes are capable of accomplishing at different moments in time.

 

The XCOM 2 difficulty thing is interesting. I also thought it was ridiculously hard when I started playing (on whatever normal difficulty is called). Because the design is so similar to the first game I think it is easy for returning players to convince themselves they should know how to play the game without having internalized the changes to the design. I'm about 20 hours in at this point, and I'm only finally feeling like I finally have a handle on how to play the early game, and I'm starting to appreciate a lot of the changes now.

 

One other aspect is there is a lot more randomness in this design. So the game never has the smooth curve of Enemy Unknown. This was something a lot of people complained about when EU was first released, that Firaxis had smoothed away all the rough edges of the original X-COM design which removed the low lows, but also removed the highest highs. This game kinda veers back towards that roughness, and it has generated a lot more exciting moments for me compared to the first game, but also a lot more infuriating moments that make me want to rage quit. On balance though I think I'm pretty into it.

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Wow, the criticism that The Witness only teaches you how to play it and doesn't relate to the real world is so weird. Ignoring the fact that I can't see this argument as a criticism (and even less as a criticism about The Witness in context of other video games), it's just not true. Most of the game is about identifying constraints, realizing their implications, and solving problems by satisfying these constraints. Isn't that something every human being needs to do on some level on a daily basis? Especially Danielle agreeing with Tom was weird after she said the game helped her overcome a programming problem.

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Didn't really understand the criticism on The Witness. Aren't most games tutorials that teach you how to play that game? Mario is a jumping tutorial. Dark Souls teaches you how to be good at Dark Souls. Tetris shows you how to stack blocks and Guitar Hero teaches you how to play plastic instruments. These are all essentially useless skills, but we learn them anyway because it's fun. Can't that be enough? I'm not sure why people expect The Witness to be more than just entertaining. If you don't enjoy it, doesn't that just mean you don't like these types of puzzles?

 

Interesting episode otherwise. I'd never heard Tom Chick before, and I really liked some of his insights. I'll have to start reading more of his stuff.

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Actually, I was struck by Danielle's remark that the enjoyable part of The Witness was learning how to solve the puzzle (i.e. the rules of the puzzle) whereas actually sitting down to do them feels like drudgery.  That felt spot on to me and there is no greater example in the game than the desert ruin area.  I won't spoil the solution, but figuring out how to solve the first puzzle in that area was really gratifying.  Solving the next 30 puzzles that use the exact same gimmick was not.
 

 

Didn't really understand the criticism on The Witness. Aren't most games tutorials that teach you how to play that game? Mario is a jumping tutorial. Dark Souls teaches you how to be good at Dark Souls. Tetris shows you how to stack blocks and Guitar Hero teaches you how to play plastic instruments. These are all essentially useless skills, but we learn them anyway because it's fun. Can't that be enough? I'm not sure why people expect The Witness to be more than just entertaining. If you don't enjoy it, doesn't that just mean you don't like these types of puzzles?

 

Interesting episode otherwise. I'd never heard Tom Chick before, and I really liked some of his insights. I'll have to start reading more of his stuff.

 

 

I understood the criticism as saying that those other games have more stuff going on in them (story, non-deterministic solutions, etc.) whereas The Witness is really just puzzles about puzzles.  I would compare it to The Talos Principle which was also exclusively a puzzle game, gameplay wise, but included a narrative with light philosophical musings and character dialogue.

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On the subject or learning something from a game - well, I could say that playing Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World, helped me a lot to learn english, in fact so much, that even once I got had english classes, I never need to worry about them and could easily get a very good grade (but I got to say, that this classes themselves wheren´t that good or hard, but still the game helped me a lot).

 

Now on lacking a skill to enjoy something, I am not good at all with fighting games, but I do enjoy a lot BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, which I play mostly because of the wacky stories and characters. Funny thing, BlazBlue does have a "stylish" control set, where controls where made very easily to input (specially the combos which where reduced to a single button) which helps a lot if you are in just for the story.

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Didn't really understand the criticism on The Witness. Aren't most games tutorials that teach you how to play that game? Mario is a jumping tutorial. Dark Souls teaches you how to be good at Dark Souls. Tetris shows you how to stack blocks and Guitar Hero teaches you how to play plastic instruments. These are all essentially useless skills, but we learn them anyway because it's fun. Can't that be enough?

I would add to paradi6m's point that most other video games teach you to be good at video games of that genre, at least to some degree. The Witness, because it focuses so strongly on rather specific versions of rather few types of puzzles, does kind of only teach you to play The Witness.

 

I sort of disagree with iax's point about the Witness teaching general problem solving. Puzzles in general, I think, do not do that. They encourage focus and detail-orientation. They can develop various thinking skills, and at least for me The Witness most certainly did challenge my visual thinking. Not sure how generally applicable any of that is, but I'm sure it does help at least in many other puzzle games. But because puzzles are very much discrete problems with prescribed solutions, they kind of lead to poor problem solving habits. In real life problem solving is much more about resource management and optimization strategies, where as puzzle games teach you to beat your head against the wall until you break through.

 

This doesn't detract my enjoyment of the Witness at all. I like wasting my time, and I like wasting my time on puzzles. I am a bit ashamed to admit it but I have sudoku app on my phone which I sometimes use.

I'm not sure why people expect The Witness to be more than just entertaining. If you don't enjoy it, doesn't that just mean you don't like these types of puzzles?

I do kind of think that The Witness does a lot to make you question, or feel, that it is not mere entertainment. I absolutely think that it is, and I kind of suspect it doesn't have nearly as strong educational or edification goals as people feel it does. But can you blame people when the game is filled with audio clips containing philosophical ponderings on the nature of knowledge. Or James Burke.

Interesting episode otherwise. I'd never heard Tom Chick before, and I really liked some of his insights. I'll have to start reading more of his stuff.

 

I wish there were more Tom Chicks around in the field of games criticism. Even when I think he's wildly missing or misinterpreting something, it is still very easy and useful to appreciate his point of view, because they are so often well thought out.

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I sort of disagree with iax's point about the Witness teaching general problem solving. Puzzles in general, I think, do not do that. They encourage focus and detail-orientation. They can develop various thinking skills, and at least for me The Witness most certainly did challenge my visual thinking. Not sure how generally applicable any of that is, but I'm sure it does help at least in many other puzzle games. But because puzzles are very much discrete problems with prescribed solutions, they kind of lead to poor problem solving habits. In real life problem solving is much more about resource management and optimization strategies, where as puzzle games teach you to beat your head against the wall until you break through.

 

I've never said it teaches general problem solving as in it's fully applicable to every real life problem out there, nor did I say the game has strong educational goals. It does however teach, or at least let you exercise and improve solving problems based of fundamentally mathematical and physical constraints. I think you have a very narrow view about what "real life problem" means, how can you be wondering whether e.g. visual thinking is generally applicable outside the game?

 

Sure, most of the really difficult real world problems are of course much more complex and you have to apply some other type of thinking than in The Witness. But we do live in a reality with lots of mathematical and spatial constraints and we do encounter problems related to these facts in our daily lives, a lot of people (engineers, programmers, partially architects etc.) do that for a living. And I think saying that puzzle games teach bad habits is absurd, you could say that about everything as every type of thinking or skill can be harmful when applied in a wrong context.

 

(Also "beating your head against the wall until you break through" is definitely not an experience I had with The Witness and I think it's specifically constructed in a way to discourage that even when it does allow it. But yes, some puzzle games can be like that.)

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I understood the criticism as saying that those other games have more stuff going on in them (story, non-deterministic solutions, etc.) whereas The Witness is really just puzzles about puzzles.  I would compare it to The Talos Principle which was also exclusively a puzzle game, gameplay wise, but included a narrative with light philosophical musings and character dialogue.

 

So if the statues had been NPCs or the tape recorders were audio logs by some ancient imaginary civilization, that would have made the Witness a better game? Personally I don't think so. I mean, point taken on the desert ruin area. That wasn't very fun (I also really disliked the puzzles in the bamboo forest... if you can even call them puzzles), but most of the rest were very enjoyable to me. Solving them was easily its own reward and I never felt like I needed some extra motivation to keep going. But I guess not everyone felt that way.

 

 

I would add to paradi6m's point that most other video games teach you to be good at video games of that genre, at least to some degree. The Witness, because it focuses so strongly on rather specific versions of rather few types of puzzles, does kind of only teach you to play The Witness.

 

Isn't that true for any game that's the first of its kind? Not that I expect The Witness to start a new genre, but still... it seems unfair criticism. (Besides, even if a game helps you become good at other games, it's still essentially a useless skill ;) ).

 

But can you blame people when the game is filled with audio clips containing philosophical ponderings on the nature of knowledge. Or James Burke.

 

 

That's a good point. I think it's likely Jonathan Blow did hide some "deeper meaning" somewhere in those audio clips and statues, but just like with Braid I didn't need that to enjoy the game. Alot.

 

(For reference: I finished The Witness, but didn't solve all the "extra" puzzles. So there might be a secret ending I haven't found yet).

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Pathalogic is a game where you can play as one of three characters in a russian town in the early 1900's. Each character has different mechanics in terms of how they heal themselves with one being a modern medical doctor, another trained in folk healing and the third being a faith healer of sorts. Each has a different relatioship with people in the town especailly the faith healer who most of the town distrust. Whats even more interesting is you effect the other/meet the other two characters you don't pick for a particular play through.

 

I kinda reminds me of Vampire bloodlines Masquerade where one of the type of vampires you played talked nonsense while another looked so non-human you couldn't be seen by humans and had to travel from place to place through the sewers.

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That's a good point. I think it's likely Jonathan Blow did hide some "deeper meaning" somewhere in those audio clips and statues, but just like with Braid I didn't need that to enjoy the game. Alot.

 

It's good to hear that the "deeper meaning" in The Witness is more subtle than in Braid. I *loathed* Braid because of how heavy-handed the message was right from the opening cinematic. It was a real War Games moment for me. "Wow, my character is a total dick. I guess the way to truly save the girl is to quit the game now?" I didn't get more than 15 minutes into the game before uninstalling it. That said... despite my conviction that I wouldn't do so I just picked up The Witness. I really really like puzzle games, and Danielle's travails with this game have really warmed me to the idea of playing, for whatever crazy reason. If I can do this and also skip the parts where JB lectures me on highschool-level philosophy and morality I expect I'll have a fun time.

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If I can do this and also skip the parts where JB lectures me on highschool-level philosophy and morality I expect I'll have a fun time.

 

Should be easy enough. Just skip the hidden audio clips the same way you could have skipped the books in Braid. I'm surprised that the story actually prompted you to uninstall the game. Be very careful with those audio clips in The Witness, I guess.

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To be fair, a lot of my issue with Braid was that the story subverted the core objective of the game. You're supposed to do the tropey thing and save the girl, then surprise! you're not actually saving the girl, you're the bad guy! What a twist! But that twist was obvious from the opening cinematic, and so I felt that by playing at all I was actually doing the wrong thing. Since the story in The Witness seems to be entirely orthogonal to the gameplay, I don't foresee myself having as much of a problem with it this time around.

 

[edit]

 

Okay so this is a pretty great game so far. Top moment--walking away from the computer and thirty seconds later my 5 year old cheers. Turns out she solved a puzzle by herself.

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So if the statues had been NPCs or the tape recorders were audio logs by some ancient imaginary civilization, that would have made the Witness a better game? Personally I don't think so. I mean, point taken on the desert ruin area. That wasn't very fun (I also really disliked the puzzles in the bamboo forest... if you can even call them puzzles), but most of the rest were very enjoyable to me. Solving them was easily its own reward and I never felt like I needed some extra motivation to keep going. But I guess not everyone felt that way.

Having listened to most of the recordings in the game, I would say it would indeed be better if they were about ancient alien civilizations.

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Okay so this is a pretty great game so far. Top moment--walking away from the computer and thirty seconds later my 5 year old cheers. Turns out she solved a puzzle by herself.

My 5-year-old is really enjoying the game as well. Especially nice is just going around exploring when the puzzles get too hard. One of her other favourite games is Proteus, this scratches a similar itch except prettier and with bonus puzzles.

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Having listened to most of the recordings in the game, I would say it would indeed be better if they were about ancient alien civilizations.

 

I would say it would be better if they didn't exist at all.

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The thing I have wanted most in Bioware type games is a forcible split of the party, that lets you play all the characters. I try to get everyone in, but I think like most people I stick to favorites. That would also probably let them get a little more mileage out of their writing if they knew all characters would be in play.

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I really enjoyed this episode.  I think this phenomenon of enjoying things you're "good at" even extends to things like boardgames:  I feel that my experience of U.S. Civil War (new game by Mark Simonitch) was improved by the fact that I won my first game, because it felt like a game that I could "understand" rather than something that defeated me the first time and that I might never master.

 

As far as The Witness goes, I felt like the underlying issue was the panel's unstated unease with the idea of games as "worthwhile" pursuits.  It felt like even when you were trying to downplay the idea of "learning skills" from games, you were assuming the existence of some sort of "ideal" game pursuit, such as one that taught you organic chemistry. (And while Danielle brought it up in the context of medicine, as a physician, I'm not sure what benefit I would get from a game that taught organic chemistry :) )  I recall Erik Wolpaw's comment that Tom mentioned recently on one of his podcasts, that when the apocalypse comes, the thing that shooting people in video games will have taught us is how to shoot people in video games.  I'm just waiting for the day that people are comfortable saying, "I enjoyed playing this game, and that's all the justification I need."

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As an aside to the Baldur's Gate note, I feel like jRPGs do a fair amount of poking at the player as main character tropes.  Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross both have pretty milk toast main characters, but over the course of the story really subvert the player as main character thing.  Final Fantasy 6 is another example of a game that never truly gives you a main character, and has one of the most stellar ensemble casts, maybe partially because of that.

And MGS2 is a pretty famous example of a video game being aware of and breaking the player as main character understanding.  I recently read Driving Off the Map after hearing Austin Walker and Heather Alexandra talk about it.  Remembering my experience with that game while reading the article was a fun and revealing exercise.

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It was so great to hear Tom Chick on this podcast, even if it made me blanch when Danielle said "hate-fucking" in front of him. He's such a passionate and articulate voice for the medium, a reak pleasure.

 

I think the spread of "bland protagonist" as a conceptual staple of pop-culture storytelling has spread beyond video games, so it's not necessarily a sign of immaturity or shallowness in video games as a medium. The majority of anime, for example, have a total cipher as the lead character, because it's important to the creators that the audience has a point of guaranteed insertion into the web of relationships between the show's other characters. Even in TV, we have characters like Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead start out as patient, vaguely moral do-gooders and often stay that way for several seasons before the sheer weight of accumulated drama forces them to grow some personality and some flaws beyond "cares about everyone a bit too much" and "doesn't fully appreciate the necessity of violence."

 

Actually, a show that I've been watching that plays a little bit with the ubiquity of blandness is The Last Kingdom, a BBC series based on Bernard Cornwell's historical fiction about the Danish invasions and the rise of Wessex. The main character there, Uhtred, presents in his looks and his low-level actions like your typical handsome, moderately ambitious, justice-loving protagonist, but he is actually impetuous, impatient, and prone to anger in ways that actively harm him and those around him.  It's quite hard to watch, until you get your head around the fact that he's not going to be flawless just by virtue of being the show's protagonist. In general, The Last Kingdom is a masterclass in having characters who believe different things without some of those things being depicted as dumb and having them act against their own interests in believable ways without being pointlessly self-sabotaging. That makes me like it a lot, because my bar for historical fiction, especially from the medieval period, is whether the majority of characters believe in God and whether that belief is pilloried—a surprisingly high bar, as luck would have it.

 

Make sure to invite Tom back! He's always welcome as a voice in my ears.

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Talking about games with many protagonists, I suddenly remembered about Mike Singleton´s works, specially the - Lords of Midnight. The game was a mix between a rpg and a wargame, released in 1980, the main idea was somewhat much like in the Lord of the Rings The Two Towers, where you have several characters spread in a world working to complete a quest. In case of Lords of Midnight, you have to coordinate several characters to destroy the Doomdark´s crown.

In fact, if memory don´t fail me, I remember reading about a whole (but maybe small) genre of games based in the similar idea, there was at least, that I could remember, a Lord of the Rings and one based in the legend of King Arthur. I think both or more where from SSI.

Another game, where you did control several characters, was a very ambitious adventure game for Apple II called Below the Root. It was based on a book of the same name, begin a history about the conflict between two group of people, one which lived in the Sky Tree and another which lived in the ground, begin the ones the tree represed their emotions (to the point they even use words like death) adn where vegetarians and had psi powers, and the ones the ground which instead try to live with their emotions, didn´t had psi power but eat meat (the game and I guess the book had this strange concept if a character from the sky tree eat meat he or she could lose their powers) and know metal work. In the game you did choose on character but you did also need to coordinate efforts with others to save the Sky Tree and make sure there is peace between the two groups.

 

I was very young when I saw the game for the first time, I couldn´t understand it back there since I didn´t know english at that time, only stuff my father would explain while I watched him playing, also at that time, the graphics and that style game amazed me, for some reason I remember seeing the game in a old monochromatic monitor (this one which where green and black) and thinking it look amazing and the concept that you would you would walk in such huge world entering and leaving places was impressive to me. However, when I tried to play it several year later I did not find it so amazing.... the controls where bad and the graphics in color look bad.
 

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For me one of the first multiple-character/PoV games to spring to mind during that discussion was the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, especially the nuclear bomb scene. Although the multiple points of view didn't do much to illuminate things as far as different perspectives goes, it did let them pull off a character death to great effect.

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Great podcast. Always nice to hear from Tom Chick.

 

On spectating fighting games: I am a perennial incompetent at FGs. They are typically aggressively unwilling to teach you how to play them properly, so they really have to be taught, I feel. I have spent some time trying, and I cannot master the timing of even simple combos in Street Fighter 4. All respect to those who can manage the execution required under the pressure of competitive play.

 

I love watching high level play, though. I may never understand all the nuance at play, a grasp of the fundamental principles is all I need to appreciate the spectacle and the genius that good players display. FGs have the intricate positioning elements of chess, the gambling and mind-reading of poker, all at the speed of fencing. Each character has a certain position they want to be in versus that of their opponent, and certain options from each position (with better positions having more, stronger options). Each player has to predict the option their opponent will pick to be able to execute a correct response in time. Safe pokes and pressure are used to manipulate the position of your opponent, and the state of their mind.

 

I thoroughly recommend watching some SFIV games from the Evo tournament. SFIV is a clean, easy to read game devoid of huge combo strings (like Marvel vs Capcom, say). You'll quickly pick up the flow of the game, even if you miss the specifics. I don't think it takes that long to reach a point where you can be entertained, and dig a little deeper and you can see some of gaming's great artists at work.  

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For me one of the first multiple-character/PoV games to spring to mind during that discussion was the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, especially the nuclear bomb scene. Although the multiple points of view didn't do much to illuminate things as far as different perspectives goes, it did let them pull off a character death to great effect.

 

I thought about that as well, and then my brain immediately countered that none of those people were really characters so much as cameras into the vignettes Infinity Ward wanted to tell. Very effective, and something that's not used frequently in games, but not really character storytelling.

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Although the character switch only happens in the DLC, the multiple perspectives in Dishonored resulted in some very powerful storytelling. I am excited to see what they do with this in Dishonored 2.

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