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Idle Thumbs 252: Jonathan Bro

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Jonathan Bro

This week we take a look at harbingers of our dark future that are not only available today, but can be controlled with an Xbox 360 controller. We dive into the final release of SUPERHOT and become sweat-soaked, tool-assisted killbots for reasons too convoluted to bother with, and chase that down with videos of a new silent robotic BigDog, and its encounter with a very agitated normal small dog.

Games Discussed: SUPERHOT, Transistor, Braid, Doug Dug, NBA 2K16, Spaceteam (Card Game)

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Since the test subjects were instructed by researchers to follow the robots, their loyalty to the robots might just be their loyalty to the researchers, in disguise. In that case this is just the appeal to (human) authority bias that's already well-established. A more organic study would have people just happen to run into the robot, with no prior instructions on what to do. Then it would try to persuade them to do stuff.

I didn't read the paper though so I might have missed something.

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Since the test subjects were instructed by researchers to follow the robots, their loyalty to the robots might just be their loyalty to the researchers, in disguise. In that case this is just the appeal to (human) authority bias that's already well-established. A more organic study would have people just happen to run into the robot, with no prior instructions on what to do. Then it would try to persuade them to do stuff.

I didn't read the paper though so I might have missed something.

 

I believe there were cases where the researchers told the subjects flat-out that the robots were malfunctioning. But I also didn't read the study itself, only a summary, which was already a mistake!

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Here's that video.

 

And here it is about a year ago, getting kicked around the office. Still has a few bees.

 

I'm playing through SUPERHOT now, and I agree that some of the narrative is just a bit hard to swallow. Some of that may be because it uses some cyberpunk tropes that I'm quite familiar so they feel a bit obvious. However the gameplay itself is gold, it feels just as good as it looks. I feel like I'm Christian Bale in Equilibrium:

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My experience with board game rules impatience is sort of the opposite of Jake's. The following has happened more than once, with the same guy in my board game group: He is teaching us a game, and forgets a detail about a rule. He decides to make something up instead of pausing to look it up, and then unbeknownst to everyone else, we play a hastily house ruled game, probably not having as much fun as we should have, and then later (perhaps months later!) someone finds out the rule we've been following is wrong.

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I thought Jake's point about how the tactical pause works in Super Hot compared to Transistor was on point. One of the many frustrations I felt with Transistor was that what you could do in real time combat was so underwhelming compared to the turn based tactical executions that combat in that game devolved into a couple of turn based moves, followed up by running around stalling for time until the meter filled up that would allow me to do more turn based moves. That ended up feeling like a real design failure to me.

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There's a certain warmth that comes to the podcast when Jake's pleased by something that was said. It's apparent even when he's not talking, as I discovered when Chris said, "Jonathan Bro," and I could almost literally hear Jake beaming for the next thirty seconds. It's okay, I was laughing, too.

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I thought Jake's point about how the tactical pause works in Super Hot compared to Transistor was on point. One of the many frustrations I felt with Transistor was that what you could do in real time combat was so underwhelming compared to the turn based tactical executions that combat in that game devolved into a couple of turn based moves, followed up by running around stalling for time until the meter filled up that would allow me to do more turn based moves. That ended up feeling like a real design failure to me.

 

I don't disagree about the substantive part of your argument here, except what you see a "design failure" I see a successfully executed design.

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I know most people felt much more positively about Transistor then I did, so fair enough, I can live with having an outlier opinion. But having the basic interaction of the game feel tedious and clunky = design failure in my mind. If it works for other people that's great, I just didn't enjoy it, and I wouldn't play another game that copied that mechanic.

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I think the problem is that it wasn't just boring to run around evading enemies, it was easy. In turn-based games you tend to make your move knowing that your opponent will get a chance to strike back at you on their turn, and so you have to plan your moves accordingly. In Chess, you know that taking your opponent's piece might leave one of your pieces exposed or open up a gap in your defence, so you either make a move that doesn't leave you exposed or you make sacrificing a piece part of your larger strategy.

 

In Transistor you don't have to account for that nearly as much because when you're not planning your turn the game moves in real time, so your only real concern is ending your turn in a position where you can start running away. To use a stupid analogy, it's like making your move in Chess, but instead of your opponent getting a turn they only get to chase you around the room for eight seconds and try to hit you with a stick.

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Regarding the reader question about history in games I think the reader, and everyone else, might enjoy History Respawned, a video series analyzing how history is depicted in games with experts in relevant fields: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyx1mPZXobOxCyzO2CwmDZA (covering games like Assassin's Creed, Crusader Kings, Fallout 4, Red Dead Redemption, Shogun, etc)

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I think the problem is that it wasn't just boring to run around evading enemies, it was easy. In turn-based games you tend to make your move knowing that your opponent will get a chance to strike back at you on their turn, and so you have to plan your moves accordingly. In Chess, you know that taking your opponent's piece might leave one of your pieces exposed or open up a gap in your defence, so you either make a move that doesn't leave you exposed or you make sacrificing a piece part of your larger strategy.

 

In Transistor you don't have to account for that nearly as much because when you're not planning your turn the game moves in real time, so your only real concern is ending your turn in a position where you can start running away. To use a stupid analogy, it's like making your move in Chess, but instead of your opponent getting a turn they only get to chase you around the room for eight seconds and try to hit you with a stick.

 

The game throws a lot of enemies at you that are difficult to avoid though. Men, Fetches and Young Ladies are all pretty tough to get away from. You really do have to have a plan for avoiding them.

 

Sclpls, I actually think your opinion is the more common one. Probably no game makes me feel crazier than Transistor, because it seems like everything that worked for me about it didn't work for other people. It makes me feel like we played different games.

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I wish more levels in Superhot played like intricate puzzles. There were definitely levels where you had to execute a set of actions to survive the initial scenario, but towards the end of the story the game leaned more and more on enemies just spawning all around you. I especially disliked the last three proper levels because they took away an interesting mechanic that they had introduced only moments earlier.

 

I hope Superhot will get a scenario editor at some point.

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There's a certain warmth that comes to the podcast when Jake's pleased by something that was said. It's apparent even when he's not talking, as I discovered when Chris said, "Jonathan Bro," and I could almost literally hear Jake beaming for the next thirty seconds. It's okay, I was laughing, too.

 

Agree 100%. Jake is one of my favorite podcasters because I can always tell when he's smiling.

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doug dug sounds like mr driller, which was originally supposed to be dig dug 3. in many of the games it includes the main guy from dig dug as a playable character.

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Speaking of tossing flowers, here's a super weird university project I worked on a bunch of years back:

 

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Sclpls, I actually think your opinion is the more common one. Probably no game makes me feel crazier than Transistor, because it seems like everything that worked for me about it didn't work for other people. It makes me feel like we played different games.

 

Count me as one who agrees with Sclpls, except for calling the design a failure.  I think the design was fine and executed exactly as they intended, it just wasn't one I particularly enjoyed.  I knew going into the game that I would probably end up liking Bastion more because it fits my playstyle better (and I was right) but I can definitely see what about Transistor appeals to people like you.  I'm just bummed I wasn't one of them.  I did love everything else about the game though, Supergiant has such great art and sound that I will always enjoy their games on some level.

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While talking about Superhot, Nick mentioned speedrunning the game and how he thought the community might react to it with stuff like unskippable segments and being forced to quit the game to advance.  I can say that those things are more common than he might realize and the speedrunning community tends to take them in stride.  There are a lot of games with unskippable cutscenes that are commonly speedrun.  Some runners actually like this because it gives them short breaks during what is otherwise a fast paced activity.  And of course there's the work put into the routes to get around the cutscenes entirely if they can.  With regards to quitting the game, this is also not uncommon.  Some routes for games incorporate doing exactly that on purpose (two I can think of off the top of my head are Ori and the Blind Forest and Minecraft).  I can see why these things would bother Nick on subsequent playthroughs but in the speedrunning community it's par for the course.

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Count me as one who agrees with Sclpls, except for calling the design a failure.  I think the design was fine and executed exactly as they intended, it just wasn't one I particularly enjoyed.  I knew going into the game that I would probably end up liking Bastion more because it fits my playstyle better (and I was right) but I can definitely see what about Transistor appeals to people like you.  I'm just bummed I wasn't one of them.  I did love everything else about the game though, Supergiant has such great art and sound that I will always enjoy their games on some level.

 

Yeah, I definitely see this. That's kind of what I was saying too: I think that was exactly what their design was going for.

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While talking about Superhot, Nick mentioned speedrunning the game

 

Also, to Chris's point about designing with speedrunners in mind: I don't think smoothing things over completely is a great idea, partly because it would mean giving up on interesting mechanics or entire genres that are considered unsuitable for speedrunning (RIP autoscrollers) and partly because a certain amount of friction probably makes runs interesting in the first place. But speedrunning still seems like a valuable source of design insight. Because runners repeat levels and sections so frequently to perfect them, they essentially hold a comically oversized magnifying glass to the tiniest speedbumps in your game, and I think in a lot of cases these annoyances are things regular players also notice but don't necessarily know how to communicate. Things like platform cycles not matching up perfectly, or the game pausing to tally your score for a level with no way to skip or speed it up.

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