Idle Weekend February 21, 2016: The Right Way

[Chris]

Idle Weekend February 20, 2016:

The Right Way

Is there a right way to play, or are video games the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of the entertainment world? Are you doing it wrong? Are WE doing it wrong? The Weekenders investigate. On the way, they encounter Sherlock Holmes, shrieking YouTube streamers, and one very pissed-off alien named Frankie the Xenomorph.

Discussed: The Witcher 3, Alien: Isolation, Layers of Fear, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Tyke: Elephant Outlaw

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[Nappi]

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and playing games the right way. I bought the game recently and have played it a couple of times with different people. Both times we unanimously decided that we should play the game as a team and not against each other. So we would decide which lead to follow together, discuss our theories freely, and only play against Sherlock's par score. I can't imagine enjoying the experience nearly as much, if I had been competing with the other people.

[Problem Machine]

Wrote this email in response to the show before the discussion topic went up:

I just got finished listening to the February 12th and 20th episodes, where you discussed the idea that The Witness teaches skills that have no application outside the game, and said that if you were going to spend time learning things you wanted them to have some worldly application, and it seemed to me that the thought process kind of made an unwarranted leap. Every game requires you to learn its language: The momentum and jump height of Super Mario Bros, the tricky angles and timing for rocket jumping in Team Fortress 2, the specific units and their application in Starcraft, and so forth, and these skills very rarely have any direct application outside the game. I haven't played The Witness for financial reasons, but it seems implausible that it's asking more from you in terms of self-education than any other game of equivalent difficulty -- in fact, the degree and rigor of self-education required could be considered to be what defines the difficulty of a game, or perhaps vice versa.
 

Do you think it's the presentation that seems more didactic, or even pedantic, that made the game's challenges feel like 'learning' rather than overcoming a challenge in a more naturalistic way? Or is it the nature of the challenges themselves, that they represent an uncommonly complex set of ideas which require an approach more akin to actual study than the more casual learn-by-doing tack that other games tend to favor?
 

I'm taking an even tone here, but I'll be honest: this line of discussion upsets me. I'm working on developing a game now, and I'm not designing it to teach you how to do your taxes or build a table or cook a turkey, but I still want to believe that it can be a worthwhile experience. This idea that games teaching you a skill you can't use is a waste of time is an unsightly echo of puritanical ideas of all literature being essentially frivolous because it's not real. I find it shocking and even, perhaps, disingenuous to hear this idea given credit on a podcast about video games. Am I way off base here? Is there something I'm failing to grasp in this discussion?

[juv3nal]

This idea that games teaching you a skill you can't use is a waste of time is an unsightly echo of puritanical ideas of all literature being essentially frivolous because it's not real. I find it shocking and even, perhaps, disingenuous to hear this idea given credit on a podcast about video games. Am I way off base here? Is there something I'm failing to grasp in this discussion?

 

I think The Witness maybe "feels like work" in a way that other games don't that particularly elicits that "it should be teaching me something I can use elsewhere" reaction. I think where you might be off base is reading that reaction (and primarily I see it as an emotional reaction although admittedly it could be read as a rational one as well) as a blanket indictment of all games in general.

[Problem Machine]

I think I addressed that in my second paragraph, but my point is that without that specificity, which I didn't hear anywhere in the conversation, that is a blanket indictment of all games

[parrythrust]

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is maybe the best Xmas family get-together game I ever played.  And, yes, we totally played it wrong.  We just tried to solve everything together.  Somebody read the papers etc.  We only played it once and then lost the game, or half of it.

 

The only thing that would be close is early Trivial Persuit.

 

Whenever I see a Sherlock Holmes game title, I'm hoping the experience will be like CD.

[billt721]

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is maybe the best Xmas family get-together game I ever played.  And, yes, we totally played it wrong.  We just tried to solve everything together.  Somebody read the papers etc.  We only played it once and then lost the game, or half of it.

 

The only thing that would be close is early Trivial Persuit.

 

Whenever I see a Sherlock Holmes game title, I'm hoping the experience will be like CD.

 

Good news! I haven't actually played the re-releases and have no idea if they actually hold up, but they were fun in the early 90s as one of the first CD-ROM games that my neighbor had. 

[parrythrust]

Good news! I haven't actually played the re-releases and have no idea if they actually hold up, but they were fun in the early 90s as one of the first CD-ROM games that my neighbor had. 

That's great!  Will 100% be grabbing those.

[Nappi]

I played most of Crimes and Punishments and enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it never really felt like I was solving the mystery myself, just visiting every location, inspecting every object and exhausting all the dialogue. Eventually, I would be left with only one probable explanation. The best moments in the board game are those where you are not quite sure how to proceed because there are either too many or too few leads to follow, with some clever red herrings added to the mix.

Regarding relaxing games. I like listening to podcasts, but I have found that if I don't busy myself with something else while listening to them, I will start to browse the internet. Eventually, I will find an article or a video which makes me stop listening. My best bet is to listen to podcasts or albums while walking, making food, cleaning my flat, or playing a video game that is not too intensive and does not require a lot of verbal stuff. Games like Cities: Skylines and Civilization are excellent in this regard, but not always very relaxing. The Witness was good too, but I finished it already. Last week I decided to try out American Truck Simulator after finally deciding that it probably wasn't a joke, and god damned if it isn't just what I wanted. Driving between cities is very relaxing but just demanding enough to keep me focused. Best of all, listening to music and podcasts is a perfect fit for this game, because that is exactly what I would be doing if I was driving a real car. (Of course, early on I took a huge loan to expand my garage, buy a new truck and hire a worker, and for a while there, I was worried that I would have to be worrying about money all the time. Luckily everything turned out fine.)

Regarding RTS games. I like RTS games in theory, but in practice often find them too overwhelming and/or frustrating. I don't mind micromanaging – in fact, I quite like it – but I find chaoting situations where I have to juggle multiple units fast too stressful. Company of Heroes is probably my favorite RTS of all time, but I would probably have hated it, if it hadn't let me pause the game and issue commands at my own pace. This allowed me to execute beautiful schemes that I wouldn't have been fast enough to carry out otherwise. The game was still intense as hell at times, but because of the pause functionality, the challenge was in outwitting the enemy and not keeping up with the action without constantly stumbling and falling over.


Also, I'm glad that The Witness never felt like work to me, or seemed like it was tapping my read-Russian-masters resource pool. There is about 0% chance that I would have been pursuing, let alone achieving, anything significantly more worthwhile in the 25 hours or so that I spent on the game had I not bought it.

[Gormongous]

I found this episode of the podcast more than a little frustrating, mostly because the discussion about the "right" way to play a game (a not-good way to frame a discussion about anything, really) went so frequently to the well of "artistic intent" as the assumption of optimal experience and because it ended up with a consensus that advocated for uncritical, even passive conformity to that intent. There was barely any acknowledgement of the perks of playing a game in any way other than "the way it was meant to be played" and none at all of the fallibility of the author within their own work. I mean, Rob got close when talking about how some gamemasters tend to react negatively when their party goes off the rails in their RPG campaign, but then he doesn't take the final step of concluding that a GM who's not prepared for their party to go off the rails is not a very good GM—likewise, an open-world game that has no provision for a player experiencing a narrative element out of its intended order is not a very good open-world game, at least from a storytelling perspective. A counterpoint to almost everything Rob and Danielle said: virtually all of my most memorable and most relatable gaming experiences have come from at least a partial violation of artistic intent.

 

I also wasn't thrilled that Rob and Danielle both sprung headfirst into advocating the professionalization of leisure (why aren't you accomplishing something in your free time, says a capitalist society that only validates certain activities as a means for achieving happiness insofar as they produce salable skills) but that's an issue for another day.

[Cbirdsong]

Man, I have thoughts about Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and 'playing it wrong'. Rob is correct that going after Holmes' score is not the way to have the best experience, but doesn't jump to my conclusion: the structure of the game is bad. I feel like if trying to play a game optimally causes it to break down, at best it's not properly tuned, and at worst it's broken. I've had a ton of fun with SHCD, but if you try to play the way the rules encourage you to play you will have a far less satisfying experience than if you just luxuriate in exploring and discussing the case. It would be a far better game if you simply removed the whole scoring aspect and was simply a series of interactive mysteries you try to solve. I still really like it. It produces unique experiences you won't find anywhere else in gaming at the same time that the structure as-written totally undermines creating those experiences.

 

 

I mean, Rob got close when talking about how some gamemasters tend to react negatively when their party goes off the rails in their RPG campaign, but then he doesn't take the final step of concluding that a GM who's not prepared for their party to go off the rails is not a very good GM

 

 

It's not always the GM's fault. If a tabletop RPG isn't designed thoughtfully, it can be fairly cumbersome to improvise encounters on the fly. This is absolutely the case with D&D/derivative games, which is likely what Rob was playing since D&D/derivatives are basically the entire tabletop RPG market. Making encounters is extremely time-consuming, encouraging the GM to push the players back on the rails. A good GM can account for it and make it feel like you were never really on rails, but in my opinion the fact that a game isn't improv-friendly is a huge problem when the promise of the format is "go anywhere, do anything! It's totally freeform!" 

[Gormongous]

It's not always the GM's fault. If a tabletop RPG isn't designed thoughtfully, it can be fairly cumbersome to improvise encounters on the fly. This is absolutely the case with D&D/derivative games, which is likely what Rob was playing. (D&D is basically  Making encounters is extremely time-consuming, encouraging the GM to push the players back on the rails. A good GM can account for it and make it feel like you were never really on rails, but in my opinion the fact that a game isn't improv-friendly is a huge problem when the promise of the format is "go anywhere, do anything! It's totally freeform!" 

 

You're totally right, but I believe there's a difference between player anarchy that comes from players choosing to kill an important NPC (a good response to which even a good GM can't really plan) and player creativity that comes from players finding alternate solutions (for which there are plenty of tools, both formal and informal, at a GM's disposal and the ability to respond to which is half of what makes a good GM in the first place). I'm sympathetic to a less-experienced or less-talented GM getting caught off-guard by either, but it still makes them a not-very-good GM in a certain light, just like an open-world game that has no contingency for you discovering the third-act enemy fortress is not a very good open-world game in a certain light.

[eRonin]

I love RTS games and I've sunk over a thousand hours into StarCraft 2. I like that the game requires me to be doing something constantly but it definitely can be an exhausting experience. If anyone is interested in the co-op Archon mode (or the other co-op mode), I'd definitely be keen to play! 

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think I addressed that in my second paragraph, but my point is that without that specificity, which I didn't hear anywhere in the conversation, that is a blanket indictment of all games

I think the sentence is totally unspecific but the actual discussion of the Witness is about how it's a very difficult puzzle game where the entire experience is a racing learning process. It sounds like the pleasure largely comes from the satisfaction of a job well done, rather than any other reward, and that the Witness doesn't have a smooth gamified difficulty curve that eases you into it.

To me this does sound like the Witness is comparable to just learning any other skill. (difficult, not a smooth experience, and rewards are mostly about accomplishing the thing itself). By contrast I'd challenge your examples. TF2 and Mario are very fun games without having to learn difficult intricacies. I've played over a thousand hours of TF2 and don't know how to rocket jump, but I still enjoy it a lot. TF2 is just a smoother difficulty curve that rewards me all along the way, it's not demanding much out of me.

[Jordan A]

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is maybe the best Xmas family get-together game I ever played.  And, yes, we totally played it wrong.  We just tried to solve everything together.  Somebody read the papers etc.  We only played it once and then lost the game, or half of it.

 

That's not wrong though, I don't think. Playing competitively or in teams is an option but it's a cooperative game.

[Problem Machine]

I think the sentence is totally unspecific but the actual discussion of the Witness is about how it's a very difficult puzzle game where the entire experience is a racing learning process. It sounds like the pleasure largely comes from the satisfaction of a job well done, rather than any other reward, and that the Witness doesn't have a smooth gamified difficulty curve that eases you into it.

To me this does sound like the Witness is comparable to just learning any other skill. (difficult, not a smooth experience, and rewards are mostly about accomplishing the thing itself). By contrast I'd challenge your examples. TF2 and Mario are very fun games without having to learn difficult intricacies. I've played over a thousand hours of TF2 and don't know how to rocket jump, but I still enjoy it a lot. TF2 is just a smoother difficulty curve that rewards me all along the way, it's not demanding much out of me.

Take a game like Super Hexagon: To play Super Hexagon is to be learning the skill that is Super Hexagon and not much else. In many ways it has even less in the way of explicit reward than The Witness does, since it's impossible to truly complete it. And yet the idea of someone criticizing that game for not training an externally viable skill is kind of ludicrous. To do so would be to challenge the core idea that games can be a worthwhile activity at all, which is a reasonable challenge to make if you want to make it but not a reasonable assertion to sneak under the radar as axiomatic, especially in the format of a video games podcast.

 

You're talking about difficulty curve here, but what does that have to do with whether a game is teaching a skill or not? That sounds like more of a matter of methodology than of results. Is the issue that The Witness wants you to learn but doesn't want to teach? Then make that criticism! Is the issue that The Witness requires a big investment of intellectual rigor for what feels like a too-small payoff? Then make that criticism. But saying it's teaching you a skill that you will never use, something fundamentally true of all games, isn't a criticism of The Witness, it's a criticism of the idea of video games -- and, by extension, any activity that isn't purely aimed at productivity.

Edited February 23, 2016 by Problem Machine

[Gamebeast23456]

RE: the ongoing Witness chat. I find myself agreeing a lot more with the reader who pointed out how the game has inherent value in pushing people to do and learn in a way many people may feel more comfortable generally not doing. I will admit that personally, I'm a fleeting liberal arts, linguistic guy. I will try to read fairly difficult books, I will spend lots of time analyzing and thinking about literature and film and music, but I invest as little time into solving logic or mathematic puzzles as I possibly can. That is, until I got into The Witness.

First of all, I'm really bad at this game. I've put roughly 4-5 hours in (I don't have the exact number because I played a lot during a move where I didn't have internet for a few days, so the synching got messed up.) I've completed 105 puzzles. I have zero idea if my puzzle completion rate is good or bad, I would assume it's probably on the lame side. However, I am extremely proud of the progress I've made so far, and hope to keep making, because I've done it all by myself, and it has forced me to think in a way I rarely would if not for this game. While I could sit down and work out Sudoku puzzles or enroll in some mathematics community college course or something, and maybe that might ultimately be more beneficial, The Witness has made me do something I generally wouldn't and feel good about it. I like it.

Also, there's no better chill game, in my mind, than Euro Truck Sim 2 or now, American Truck Sim.

[parrythrust]

Good news! I haven't actually played the re-releases and have no idea if they actually hold up, but they were fun in the early 90s as one of the first CD-ROM games that my neighbor had. 

So, I got "Mummy's Curse".  Everything about it that's a 90's computer game is not "fresh" or "fly". (Is that what the kids were saying?)  But working your way through the mystery is still fun.

 

Edit: You could do lots worse for five bucks.

 

Edit 2: I could very well see it being redone all in stills in the style of the old Strand Magazine illustrations. 

[WickedCestus]

I agree with Problem Machine here, and I'd like to add that what's valuable about learning and acquiring skills often isn't the actual knowledge or the skill, but the way it was acquired. In elementary and high-school, we spend most of our time learning things that we forget a few years later, but what is important is that we are learning the very process of learning, which will allow us to acquire new knowledge easily later in life and become adaptable. So, when I spend time learning the intricacies of Mario's jump, or the logic of the puzzles in The Witness, what I'm doing (aside from having fun, which is of course the main thing) is training the parts of my brain that allow me to make connections and acquire new knowledge, some of which might actually be useful to me later. 

 

For example, as a kid I learned the name and type and abilities of every Pokemon in the original 151. While this actual knowledge didn't help me, I do think that practice helped me a lot when it came to learning languages and new words later in life.