Chris

Idle Weekend March 4, 2016: Soft Spots

Recommended Posts

Idle Weekend March 4, 2016:

881__header.jpg

Soft Spots

Idle Weekend invites you to a judgment-free zone where the hosts reveal their gaming soft spots. You know, those juicy indulgences that will always call to you, whether it's the fashionable (or acclaimed) thing of the moment or not. For your intrepid hosts, those siren songs may include cyberpunk, weird horror, learning new places, and, naturally, The Witcher 3.

Discussed: ANATOMY, Dust City, Curtain, the works of Kitty Horrorshow, The Witness, The Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Mafia, Scourge of War, The Witness, Lost Girl, Offworld Trading Company, Defragmented, Southern Cross, Batman (Grant Morrison comics)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I am pretty sad to see both Danielle and Rob having reservations regarding Danielle's initial criticism about The Witness not relating enough to skills that are applicable in the real world. While I see why some people are upset about this claim, personally I have felt similar things about other games (I haven't actually played The Witness, but I get the feeling that the debate has expanded its scope to games in general). I think it is absolutely legitimate to criticize a piece of media for its negative possibility space, because this is something that actually affects the experience one has of the game.

 

I think any discussion about a game has to be based on the understanding that whatever the source of the game's success is, there will be some people who will care less about that aspect of the game, and will be bothered be other aspects which you may consider irrelevant or negligible parts of the experience.

 

Imagine if Danielle's criticism was about the graphics of the game - even if The Witness has pretty much universally praised graphics, most people would take it as obvious that different people have different aesthetical preferences, and the issue wouldn't even be raised.

 

It seems to me that as game criticism starts diving deeper into what makes games tick (beyond surface level properties like graphics), people expect it to produce a universal conclusion which will be relevant to all people, regardless of their past experiences and preferences – despite there being no logical reason for such conclusion to exist.

 

If you found Danielle's comments objectionable, I think the more productive thing to do would be to explain how you approached The Witness in a way that allowed you to get out with a positive experience. Some people expect games that require a lot of learning to teach some skills that have use outside the game, that is a fact, and it is also a reasonable expectation as far as I'm concerned. Instead of trying to deny the legitimacy of these expectations, which in turn means denying the entire life and experiences that made people form this kind of expectations, why not simply share what other aspects of the game, which these people may have paid less attention to, actually shine?

 

My point is - if someone had some experience in a game, you can debate what that experience stemmed from, but not deny the conclusion that the person had drawn about the game based on the experience they had.

 

To be clear, it might be that Danielle actually changed her mind about this issue, I'm not denying that. But I do think that the backlash for her criticism of the game was unwarranted.

 

I'm really sorry if that came off as rambling, I'm having a hard time putting my thoughts into words. Also, I really didn't mean this to be so rant-like - I am genuinely confused about this issue.

 

Regarding the works of Kitty Horrorshow - they are great, and I think that each one gets further away from both the horror tropes and the video game tropes that were common in her first games, to form a much more personal and cohesive experiences. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Whenever this discussion resurfaces once a week I immediately start thinking about recent games that have taught me some skill (or something) that is applicable in real life. The only one I can come up with is Kerbal Space Program, and even then I doubt that I will ever be part of the space industry. (Rest of the discussion drifts out of focus as I continue going through the list.)

 

For the record, I agree both that each game requires you to learn its own language which is often of little use in real life, and that people are free to look for real life applicability in their games.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Regarding The Witness, I think part of the issue for me is misplaced expectations based on the presentation of the game. On the surface, The Witness is very much reminiscent of Myst--a large fantastical space filled with puzzles. The implication, at least to me, is that there's some hidden meaning to uncover; some underlying message. However, I think the fact of The Witness is that there is no underlying meaning. It's simply a large space filled with puzzles, and the space exists to serve two purposes: to provide the player with the enjoyment of discovering the puzzles, and to provide the opportunity for greater diversity in terms of puzzle design (audio puzzles, puzzles that key on environmental cues, etc). This is cool, but because of my prior experience with games like Myst, The Witness ended up feeling like a weirdly empty experience. I expected a hidden message and so wanted a hidden message and when I realized that it was just puzzles for the sake of puzzles my interest waned, despite my really enjoying puzzle games in general. Coming from Braid, which was practically dripping with meaning, this took me by surprise. And while I should have been pleasantly surprised because I hated Braid specifically because of the message built into every atom of the game, the dissonance between my expectations and reality turned out to be a problem.

 

I did want to mention one thing regarding games and mental health, which is Lone Survivor. My impression on playing the game was that it's about schizophrenia. The main character has psychotic episodes throughout the game, and you're left exploring a world where you have no idea what's real and what's not. I don't know that the game is explicitly about this, however, because of the misnamed "schizophrenic" achievement. Like the author, or at least whoever created that achievement, doesn't seem to understand what schizophrenia is about. I'm curious to hear if others have played this game and what they inferred about its meaning. Assuming I'm right about the topic, I think the game is a really interesting if fantastical exploration into a facet of mental health that is often horribly misrepresented in video games.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The reason people are even having the conversation of whether the Witness is teaching a skill is because the game is exactly about how video games teach concepts and how people learn them. You generally don't think about it with other games because that's not what other games are about. The specific skills taught in the Witness aren't particularly useful unless you're pursuing a degree in certain branches of mathematics, but I'd say just directly addressing the concepts of learning and problem solving is what makes The Witness and other puzzle games fun and interesting.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The reason people are even having the conversation of whether the Witness is teaching a skill is because the game is exactly about how video games teach concepts and how people learn them. You generally don't think about it with other games because that's not what other games are about. The specific skills taught in the Witness aren't particularly useful unless you're pursuing a degree in certain branches of mathematics, but I'd say just directly addressing the concepts of learning and problem solving is what makes The Witness and other puzzle games fun and interesting.

 

I agree. I think the fact that the game makes you address this head-on at all is already more "useful" (I guess?) than the majority of most games. Not that usefulness should be a rubric for the value of a game, but if it's being used as one, I think The Witness comes off much better than average!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I don't know - it might be true that in that The Witness is in fact teaching useful skills more so than the average game, I don't know because I haven't played it. It is also very probable that, as you say, the expectations people form of the game are different because of its subject matter. But personally I've felt similar expectations of pretty much every particularly challenging game I've played - and I think that there absolutely is a reason to discuss whether a game meets those expectations.
 
Of course The Witness isn't held to the same standards as any other game in regards to what it teaches, because it requires much more time and thinking than most games. I don't think anyone is debating that. But I think that it is perfectly reasonable to criticize the game in relation to these different standards, rather than on a more "leveled" playing field with other games, because regardless of their cause, these expectations do inform the experience people have with the game.
 
Games that stick closer to teaching skills that have clear applications irl do exist, and I think that for some people, including myself, they do offer an experience that is, intrinsically, better than that of games that challenge to master systems that have no relevance outside of the game.
 
Examples would be SineRider, Euclid the Game, Else Heart.Break(), Hack ‘n Slash, CodeSpells, TIS-100.

 

Should we maybe move the discussion to another thread?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Pretty much every game teaches skills that are generally useful in real life. I also haven't seen anyone mention games specifically designed for teaching. America's Army is an obvious example, as it's a FPS intended to teach various basic skills to soldiers. But then there are simulators of various kinds, etc. And that's just in the video game realm. If we expand the definition to be games in general, a huge percentage of learning is gamified because games are an effective learning tool. In medical school there are games involving diagnosing patients, for example. In addition to the interview with Lizzie Stark that I posted a thread or two ago in this forum, there's an interview with Jason Morningstar in the same series where he talks about games he's developed as teaching tools for the medical industry.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Delighted to hear that Rob's been enjoying Morrison's Batman and Robin (I ran and got my laptop as soon as he started talking about it). I agree totally that Irving's art in the final volume just doesn't fit that well, and the ending isn't perfect, but it's still my favorite comics run, hands-down (and really what got me into reading comics at least somewhat regularly). I'd be interested to hear what he thought of the other parts of the storyline that weren't discussed on the show (The Black Glove, Final Crisis, etc.) if he's read them. Worth looking up is the Klarion storyline in Morrison's meta-series Seven Soldiers of Victory, which reteams Morrison and Irving but on a very different story, and I think Irving's art works much better there.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Danielle, please talk about Lost Girl.  The lady is deeply, deeply enamored with that show.  And yeah, it is trashy, but it's like the best kind of fun trashy.  I haven't watched all of it, but I've probably caught about half the episodes with her and it's certainly fun enough to sit down and watch.  

 

Trashy urban fantasy is the lady's goto guilty pleasure, but the more she's got into it, the more she has convinced me that it has value in a lot of interesting ways.  As a genre, it's one that focuses on women characters, women relationships, women getting shit done.  I'd argue moreso across the board than most other genres right now.  It also tends to be created by women.  Lost Girl's creator is a woman, and the vast majority of the episodes were written by women.  A few years ago I would have had a reaction a lot more like Rob's, but now hearing that reaction, it's disappointing to me that we do have this genre that's being created by people and creating the kinds of characters we lament not existing in other media, but it's so easily written off. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Double Post!

 

 

Oooo, Majesty talk (even if it was very brief)!

The original Majesty is easily one of my favorite games ever, and I would make a pretty strong case for it to be considered one of the best games ever made, certainly deserving of a top 10 spot in a list because of the uniqueness of its design and the excellence in execution.  In an alternate universe, it sits along side the likes of the original X-Com, System Shock 2 and Half-Life in reverence for old games in my mind.

Rob, for what it's worth, it didn't really hit a dead-end within its own development.  Majesty never got a followup from the original dev, but the property eventually ended up in the hands of Paradox.  Paradox farmed out development to 1C.  Unfortunately the 1C team used an existing engine that had never been designed for the kind of emergent, self-directed units with distinct personalities and goals that Majesty's design calls for.  Ultimately they just couldn't emulate the AI of the original, and so the sequel feels bland in comparison because heroes overvalue the bounties a player can place and they do not seek out goals on their own well, which breaks the simulation/in-direct control element.  Some other elements of direct control were also implemented, like being able to create parties (parties would kind of naturally form in the original).  One of the most fun hero classes in the game, Gnomes, were completely eliminated likely because of AI issues.  Gnomes in the original had one of the more complex AIs (they and the dwarves were the only two units who could pursue every major action available), but the gnomes were particularly hyperactive and ADHD.  The Dwarves were also dialed back and some of their abilities were removed, again likely related to the difficulty the engine had with trying to emulate the original's AI. 

 

There's just a litany of issues with the sequel, most of which can be tracked back to engine limitations.  It was less a design failure or dead end, and more a poor match of engine to design goals.  The sequel also lacked a free-play mode, which is one of the things that made the original have such long legs.  Paradox has gone on to make a number of games in the Majesty world, but none of others have ever attempted to replicate the design of the original, instead spinning off into more established genres. So for us fans of the original, we're still waiting for someone else to pick up the reins where the original left off, because a proper iteration or exploration of the ideas in Majesty has yet to be explored. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Talking on soft spots... I had one, which changed overtime, for long time I was very in the western rpg aesthetics and "realistic" visuals, but now I am much more in the jrpg spectrum of the aesthetics and visuals, often finding the late western rpg visuals and over "realism" not so good (and a bit boring, specially when get too much in the over realism), save for expections such as games like The Witcher, Warhammer Fantasy, Mount & Blade and old school rpgs, such Might & Magic, Wizardry, ect....

Another soft spot of mine is games where you have lots of characters, like in your typical tatical jrpg or your normal jrpg, specially if they had cool visuals and interact with one another and have those slice of life things , if a game have this, even if isn´t very developed, chances is that I will like it (examples would be games like Shining Force, Last Remnant, Disgaea, Valkyria Chronicles, FF Type - 0, ect....).
 

Also, there was game that was much based on you giving order to people (much like Majesty in a certain degree), which acted on their own,  Evil Genius, which much as the name suggest, put you as James Bond style of super villian to build a base,. You had to give order to your minions and hope for the best. However, despite the clever setting and concept, I didn´t find it so good, because often you had to perform very specific tasks, specially to avoid the good agents which invade your base, but you couldn´t really on your minions unless you watch them like a eagle (so while you could not give them orders direct you still had lots of micro management to perform), which get boring really fast (since there is a limit until you yelling at the pc "I am surrounded by idiots!" like a Bond villain stop begin funny).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think my soft spot is courtroom drama. Big thanks to the podcast for getting me into The Good Wife, I started watching it on Netflix and it's fantastic! More recently I've been playing Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. I'm a longtime fan of the AA games but time I played one I was 17, and coming back to it now makes me realise how ridiculous and cheesy it all is. But I still love it! It's silly in an endearing way, and I'm saying that as someone who has no interest at all in anime. Even though I now know they're using the word "Objection" totally wrong I just love the dramatic courtroom battles, and those games do such a good job with the animation and audio to make the arguments seem exciting.

 

I got sidetracked and never got too far into it, but Aviary Attorney came out on Steam recently and it's basically an indie Ace Attorney game with fancy French animals instead of people and a Wondermark-style aesthetic of cut-outs from a 19th-century illustrator. What I played of it was really well written and I really want to get back to it this coming weekend.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here's another Witness opinion. Whoo!

 

Every game requires you to learn its language, but also some languages are easier to learn than others based on their proximity to languages you already know and the kinds of instruction available to you. In the kind of genre framework that most games exist in, these languages often have a lot in common with each other: the syntax generally works the same and most of the vocabulary goes back to a shared ancestor. There's always some exceptions and idiomatic constructions you need to pick up of course, but what this generally means is that the first time you dive into a particular genre there will be all sorts of new stuff learn and any time after that you can draw on what you already know in general about "games like this".

 

The Witness doesn't really do that. It's definitely an advantage if you already know how to navigate a 3d environment, but most of the game is entirely its own logical language, that you painstakingly intuit from environmental clues and feedback and then never use again in any game ever. This kind of disconnectedness is a nice way of making sure the experience is roughly the same no matter how experienced of a player you are, but it also feels like Jon Blow's way of arrogantly pooh-poohing game literacy as a stupid thing that won't get you anywhere when faced with a real challenge.

 

So I do think it's fair to complain about The Witness' somewhat selfish demand to master a skill that is not transferable to anything else in life (like other games). If Portal amounts to a few classes with a robotic-sounding language coach and Crusader Kings is equal to reading a textbook on your own, The Witness feels like one of these linguistic exercises where you try to draw conclusions about the grammar of a fictional language based on sample sentences.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think my soft spot is courtroom drama. Big thanks to the podcast for getting me into The Good Wife, I started watching it on Netflix and it's fantastic! More recently I've been playing Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. I'm a longtime fan of the AA games but time I played one I was 17, and coming back to it now makes me realise how ridiculous and cheesy it all is. But I still love it! It's silly in an endearing way, and I'm saying that as someone who has no interest at all in anime. Even though I now know they're using the word "Objection" totally wrong I just love the dramatic courtroom battles, and those games do such a good job with the animation and audio to make the arguments seem exciting.

 

I got sidetracked and never got too far into it, but Aviary Attorney came out on Steam recently and it's basically an indie Ace Attorney game with fancy French animals instead of people and a Wondermark-style aesthetic of cut-outs from a 19th-century illustrator. What I played of it was really well written and I really want to get back to it this coming weekend.

 

The funny thing is the use of the word "Objection!" is one of the less egregious things the series gets wrong about court proceedings. But it is totally in line with the whole courtroom/procedural drama genre that is probably the worst possible way to learn about how the legal system works.

 

Steven Soderbergh's TV series, K Street (I believe he did that for HBO?) is probably the first and only work of fiction I've seen where it was like, whoa, this is actually how lawyers talk (I haven't seen The Good Wife yet though which several people have said is more realistic compared to the standards of the genre).

 

Also Aviary Attorney is amazing! Personally, I think it is quite a bit better than the Phoenix Wright games.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I remember reading that Phoenix Wright is in fact very accurate of how unbalanced courtroom battles can be in Japan

 

The Ace Attorney series is based on the Japanese legal system, which is not an adversarial system (where an impartial third party like a jury determines the verdict and the judge is usually an mediator) but an inquisitorial system (where the judge is an active participant in the investigation and determines the verdict).  Think of it as the difference in style between a murder trial and contesting a parking ticket.  Obviously you wouldn't convene a jury for a parking ticket, you'd just argue in front of a judge who then decides whether or not you have to pay.  In Japan the format of a trial would be closer to the parking ticket than the murder.  AA exaggerates this of course but its a significantly different system than what most of us are probably used to. 

 

At least that's how I understand it.  I've never been in a Japanese court before (or an American one for that matter).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I remember reading about how the game compared to the real Japanese legal system years ago, I recall that it's unrealistic in all the ways you'd expect but accurate in alot of ways you wouldn't expect. The system is apparently almost comically biased against the defence and if the prosecution decides to take a case to trial it's because they know they'll win it. There were some adverts in Japan for the AA games starring a famous defence attorney, who'd gained celebrity status in Japan because in his 20 or so year career he'd won three cases.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not familiar with the Japanese legal system specifically, but I assume it is similar to the legal system in most non-English speaking European countries, civil law (in contrast to the common law system that English speaking countries use). The main difference between the two systems is that precedent set by prior legal cases are extremely important in the common law system whereas in the civil system judges have more leeway to disregard precedence (this is a good feature of the common law system I think), and juries are much less common in civil systems (this is mostly a good feature of the civil system, especially when it comes to criminal cases).

 

However I would still describe the civil system as adversarial. Lawyers still abide by similar professional ethical codes where maximally pursuing their client's interest trumps nearly all other considerations. Crucially, it wouldn't be the defense's job in a criminal case to not only prove their client's innocence (or at least cast heavy doubts), but then also discover the actual guilty party, which is a typical setup of a Phoenix Wright scenario. The civil system also has similar rules about submitting evidence (i.e. no surprise witnesses, or dramatic reveals).

 

That being said, the point about the defense not necessarily being afforded Western standards of due process is well taken. I've been involved in submitting evidence for disputes in civil cases in Asian countries, and the amount of evidence needed for a successful judgment has always felt a bit lighter compared to what would be submitted in a European and U.S. dispute.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That first mission in the original Mafia must surely be one of the hardest first missions in any game ever. In fact, the game as a whole was unbelievably hard, even back then. It wasn’t just that there was no quicksave or regenerating health, or that the guns were extremely deadly, or that your AI companions would always get themselves killed; it was also that the cars were modelled to be accurate to period vehicles, and almost the first thing you had to do in the game is escape rival mobsters while driving a taxi that handles like a barge. I’m sure a lot of players never even got past that opening sequence. 

 
Still, I think I must have played that game to completion at least two or three times back in the day. They really did have some insanely ambitious set piece mission design for an open world game. Even now the sound of Django Reinhardt sends me into a daydream about it…
 
Which brings me back to Rob’s point about those moments of grand coherence in games, which are probably my softest spot too. As with his example from GTA IV, it’s something that occurs as a seamless confluence of music and visuals and plot and systems – everything that makes video games a unique medium. My most recent example of this is one particular moment in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture where -- well, it sounds like nothing much when I write it like this, but -- you go into a new area
. If you've played it, you might know what I'm talking about. There was something about the sudden juxtaposition of sound and movement and music and light and setting that just completely destroyed me, and I had to put the controller down until the song was over because I couldn't see what I was doing any more.
 
I am not sure I 'learned' anything from that experience except that video games are sometimes very good.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I just listened to the part where you discussed my email on the cast (thanks!) and felt I had to clarify one point: Rob, I'm not saying you shouldn't have had that discussion -- quite the converse, I want more conversation: I'm saying that there was, as I mentioned, an unwarranted leap in the reasoning which left a gap. That is, I think there was a conversation that wasn't being had about why The Witness is infuriating, intriguing, etc, due to the facile analysis of it being 'like learning'. 'Like learning' is a great stepping off point, but raises a whole lot of questions about how we regard and value learning and how that relates to games! I understand you only get an hour of casting, but that's why I found it frustrating, anyway.

 

Also, related to the weekly topic of 'soft spots', I wrote a short piece a while ago about how sometimes the things we find really appealing in a work of art are simpler and more straightforward than we like to admit. I also wrote about the role of frustration in game design and gameplay a bit ago, which is maybe relevant to the witness discussion. I don't normally link my work this much but Idle Weekend discussions have a strange tendency to coincide with stuff I've written about!

 

Anyway, back to listen to the rest of the cast now while I make egg salad.

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