Idle Weekend May 27, 2016: We've Been Playing

[Chris]

Idle Weekend May 27, 2016:



We've Been Playing
The Weekenders break with their usual format to discuss the sort of thing most gaming podcasts do: what they've been playing. Rob charts the waters of Uncharted 3 in preparation for A Thief's End, Danielle dives into Overwatch fandom, and everyone is enamored with The Witcher 3 all over again. And spy TV shows. It must be Idle Weekend!

Discussed: Uncharted 3, Uncharted 4, Overwatch, The Witcher 3, Person of Interest, The Lives of Others, Game of Thrones

• Listen on the Episode Page
• Listen on Soundcloud
• Listen in iTunes

[Granny Dragon]

I like it when there is a topic, but you have surely shown that you can just have an entertaining chat about whichever topic comes to your minds.

 

Rob, at least one listener appreciates you pronouncing "Stasi" the right way. And, yes, Life of Others is an incredible film. A film that is different, yet similar in the way it presents consequences of German 20th centruy dictatorships is The Reader based on the book by Bernhardt Schlink and featuring a great cast. If you are interested, I would just watch it. Seriously, don't even look at the trailer.

 

Smashing Pumpkins! Oh man. LIttle trivia: one of their tracks uses the sound of the Doom missile launcher a couple of times.

To me, Metallica and Ultima will always be connected at some level. Listened to them a lot while uniting humans and Gargoyles. While the final game in the series, Ultima IX: Ascension, was a disappointment, I have fond memories of waiting for it to come out. The track I associate with waiting for Ascension is Where the WIld Things Are, also by Metallica. Weirdly, I associated the song with how imagined the game to be, and still do.

[Gamebeast23456]

Regarding the Sicario discussion, I often detect (and struggle myself) with the question of whether a certain piece of media is trying to portray sexism and comment on it, or is just exhibiting unintentional sexism and therefore should be criticized for it. Relating to Sicario, it was my feeling that the treatment of Emily Blunt's character was a way of depicting how the drug war uses, eats up, and then discards innocent or idealistic people. It didn't seem sexist, or at least, it only seemed sexist in the way that the real world of law enforcement often is sexist. Is that good, or praiseworthy, to coldly portray sexism, especially in a culture that is so fraught with it already? How do we label and talk about works that try to address an issue by mostly just portraying it (that is, by giving very little overt authorial input)?

 

I think of the endless Oscar-bait films about race that come out on a yearly basis. These films are often reasonably well-intentioned and inoffensive, but there is rarely any sort of emotional honesty or personal experience thrown into the mix. These films approach racism like an alien might, "One color of human mistreats another color of human, this mistreatment varies from person to person and is also very situational. Isn't this odd?" A film that treats the subjects of Sicario exactly the same (a government that operates with high amounts of secrecy and very little oversight, how bureacratic rules are only seen as annoying trivialities on the way to a goal, how the citizens of Mexico are treated like fodder from the perspective of the law and the criminals, how easy it is to justify torture and war crimes when you get caught up in a heroic or self-important narrative, etc) without any of the visual style, suspenseful writing and editing, and powerful, impressionistic story progression might just be seen as trite and didactic, telling you all about how the Drug War 'really is' from the creator's perspective. 

 

This is rambly, and I'm not sure if I settled on a great point. Good show. I personally really enjoy the format that you guys normally bring with pretty-focused topics of discussion spurred by recent events, and then the mail and recommendations. I also enjoyed this 'What Are You Playing' format this week. 

 

Also, fuck man, Overwatch is so great. I've never had so much fun and felt like I belonged in a game as much as I have with this one. 

[inmostlight]

I totally agree, I think one of Sicario's points was how Blunt's character was just a pawn, and one of the reasons they picked her was because they thought she could be easily manipulated.  

 

And a pedantic aside: "Asha" was renamed to Yara in Game of Thrones tv because it was too close to "Osha" in pronunciation.  I kind of agree with that change, especially for viewers who never read the books.

[FlyingNorseman]

My most prominent memory of a game being tied to music is when back in the day I played Darklands and had Amused to Death by Roger Waters basically on loop.

[aoanla]

I've caused contention here before, but since it's relevant: I do think part of the problem with the "walking simulator" issue is that people are assuming that something that's interactive must necessarily be a game. Rob's issue with Everybody's Gone To the Rapture (which, I would argue, is shared with Dear Esther) "really actually being mostly about traversal" is key to this - essentially, you're traversing an environment, in which there's "narrative" which plays when you encounter it. The only reason that anyone calls this a game is that the environment that you're traversing is virtual, rather than physical. If it were in physical space, you'd call it Environmental or Promenade Theatre (like Thumbs favourite Sleep No More), or an Art Installation. 

So, perhaps, we should call Everybody's Gone To The Rapture "software theatre", which would also neatly stop people who think that "game" is somehow an badge of quality, rather than a simple descriptor of a kind of interactive media from being able to complain about it "not being a game". 

(Afterall: as the letter you responded to noted, the qualities that are valuable in "walking simulators" are explicitly those qualities which are not often prized as a game, but are prized in theatre and art, so why try to shoehorn them into a context which doesn't want to appreciate them?)

[andrewdoull]

Let’s talk Person of Interest. (Mild spoilers warning: I talk about thematic concerns, and divulge some character arc conclusions in general terms. More important warning: I make a lot of unsupported generalizations in this essay. I don’t necessarily want you to agree or disagree with them – I’m more trying to paint a picture of where my headspace is at).

 

I grew up a nerd, in a time where being a nerd was an isolating experience. I didn’t feel particularly isolated – there were plenty of people to play Dungeons & Dragons at school with, and I was onto the nascent Internet pretty early on, as my Dad ran a BBS for the local Commodore 64 user group. But I always had this sense of “otherness” – that what I was doing wasn’t part of the mainstream culture – but you could easily attribute this feeling of otherness to the process of being a child, then a teenager.

 

It became clear to me as an adult, that there was a transformative social experiment going on with our lives facilitated by the twin new technologies of financial derivatives and the Internet – in short, the nerds were taking over. And with the advent of Facebook , it was equally clear to everyone else that the nerds had won. We were now the mainstream cultural force  – modulo something about sports – and the last ten years has seen a complete takeover of film, and transformation of vast areas of television and literature. There’s another essay or even a book to be written about this (if there hasn’t been already), but let’s just say that “nerds now own narrative” and leave it at that for the moment.

 

How does this relate to Person of Interest? Because as Jonathan Nolan and Greg Nolan have said this season the ultimate bad guys in PoI are Mark Zuckerburg and Isaac Asimov. That is to say, they are us.

 

(If you don’t believe me, there’s a speech that Harold Finch makes at the end of the first episode of Season 2 where he lays his cards on the table of why he designed the machine the way he did. And it’s clear that the thing that actually terrifies him the most is himself.).

 

But at the same time, Person of Interest is written for us. Mr Robot is the only other show on television that cares about the technology of computers as much as we think we do: Person of Interest has about as realistic cryptography, AI and hacking as makes sense to show on television, and if you start rolling your eyes at something particularly outlandish (especially in season 5), it is likely that you are wrong and the PoI writer’s room has been doing more research than you have. One of the real pleasures of watching Person of Interest in near real time is that they are often as close to or ahead of the bleeding edge technology concerns of the day than the mainstream media (my favorite is the buffer overflow exploit in If-Then-Else although there is an interrogation scene the next episode which under 30s will appreciate much more than I can).  Person of Interest predicted Edward Snowden, not the other way around.

 

The most unrealistic thing that Person of Interest portrays is the public actually caring about a massive state run surveillance program. And that’s where I think Person of Interest loses the nerd narrative: it cares about heroes in a way that we have been taught to distrust. It celebrates flawed individuals who genuinely want to redeem themselves – whereas we celebrate stories without heroes (Breaking Bad), or with selfish heroes who are more concerned with discovering who they are (Mr Robot).

 

Person of Interest cares about redemption so much that up until season 4, every “big bad” also redeems themselves. And not just in the last minute quip or sacrificial act that PoI does so well, but in having a reason for doing what they are doing, and being ‘right’ about their reasons.  Season 4 and 5’s biggest misstep is losing sight of this: there are at least 3 villains in these seasons who deserve a flashback story but don’t get it, which is doubly annoying in that 2 of them are thematic shadows of other characters rather than fully developed characters in their own right. If you have difficulty getting any of the season 4 villains, look around and try to figure out what else in the story their relationships are analogous to.

 

Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have tried to get someone else to watch Person of Interest over social media. I would have written a blog post similar to this essay, and relied on an aggregator site like Slashdot to pick it up and amplify it. These days, I could slowly build an audience by podcasting (don’t get me started on how Patreon breaks things) and I know it’s possible because I’ve done so. But I’ve also discovered that it’s very difficult to get your audience to follow you – I’ve gone from game modder, to board game modder to hopefully boardgame and RPG designer, and most of the audience I’ve built are still only happy if I talk about roguelikes. So instead, I’ve gone to someone I hugely respect, and begged them to get them to experience and then talk about this thing I love from their slightly taller soap box.

[juv3nal]

I haven't watched any of the current season, but there's an interesting article about the cancellation of person interest on buzzfeed which makes it all sound a bit mind-boggling given it was still posting decent audience numbers. Edit: to be clear, the article explains why that's the case, but that the system is rigged in such a way that this kind of situation develops is messed up in the first place.

[andrewdoull]

What's even crazier is that Limitless was cancelled after one season and most of the issues highlighted in the article you linked to don't even apply.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I liked the topicless episode. Though I'd like if you talked a bit longer about individual games, it felt like a series of appetisers instead of digging into any particular games. That might just be a side effect of having a lot of games to be fair, since you don't normally take this approach.

[rharwick]

So, unsurprisingly, I guess, I disagree about being overleveled in The Witcher 3. I turned the difficulty up once I got overleveled because I thought it made the story better. That Geralt can kill these monsters at all is what's extraordinary about him, and he does it by means of exceptional swordsmanship, potions, and signs. And once you outlevel the content sufficiently, you stop needing to use all but one of these. And when your approach becomes completely identical, each fight, the rest of Geralt's job--investigating the monsters--is just pointless busywork. 

 

Or to use a concrete example, there's a boss early in the first DLC that Geralt isn't really able to get a handle on before he's thrown into the fray. If I were vastly outleveled for it, that would have made it indistinguishable from any other monster Geralt fights. Instead, I was up against the wall, experimenting with my vast arsenal, trying to figure out what would work best, and genuinely terrified that I was outmatched. (Now, admittedly, I had the benefits of reloading that Geralt does not have. Still, in the fiction, this boss should absolutely not have felt like a garden variety Archgriffin or what have you.)

Sure, some people prefer easier game experiences. But I just don't think it being easier is actually reflective of who Geralt is meant to be in the world. 

[rharwick]

(Afterall: as the letter you responded to noted, the qualities that are valuable in "walking simulators" are explicitly those qualities which are not often prized as a game, but are prized in theatre and art, so why try to shoehorn them into a context which doesn't want to appreciate them?)

So I think I agree with 80% of what you say here, but I think your last statement merits some unpacking.

Primarily, I would like to know what having traversal/interactivity adds to the theatrical experience of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Is it interesting to find the story pieces in a different order? Does digging through the different nooks and crannies of the world expand your viewpoint? Do you get to make choices that impact the story? Or are you just moving from trigger to trigger? This is a sincere question, since I haven't played it.

To follow on that, I wonder whether that interactivity makes up for the necessarily limited nature of actual performance in video games. The tech's getting better, but it still falls well short of real physical actors in most cases.

Second, you talk about not lumping these interactive theater pieces into the wrong context, but I think they invite that comparison by nature of the medium they choose and the marketplace on which they sell their goods (the PS4 online store, in the case of Rapture.)

And along those lines, I have watched plenty of narratively-inclined individuals struggle with navigating in 3D space in a video game. So they would be unable to enjoy interactive theatrical story-telling for want of a skillset that is primarily possessed by gamers. So, I wonder what the value is of using a medium but not taking advantage of that medium's strengths to enhance your story, while also potentially alienating the audience that would be most receptive to your story.

This is not meant as a trap or a trick. I think that there are many so-called Walking Simulators that do use interactivity well to enhance their story (Firewatch, for example), and there are plenty of games that don't incorporate much if any interactivity into their storytelling. (Yet, in that case, it's easy to see how the games themselves need to be interactive.)

Ultimately, it's no skin off my back what sort of game or interactive experience people want to make, but it strikes me that some good feedback on the use of the medium could be missed in the rush to defend every so-called Walking Simulator as a genre unto itself. I think you don't need to add combat or puzzles to build a narrative that is meaningfully interactive, and I think that's a discussion worth having.

[aoanla]

Sure, but "meaningful interaction" does not a game make - I explicitly referenced Promenade Theatre because it precisely is telling a narrative, whilst also allowing the "audience" to interact (via traversal, looking over the shoulders of the actors, exploring the space of the performance - often Promenade Theatre is designed around this, such that dependant on your choices in where in the space to be during different parts of a performance, you have different interpretations of the piece). This interaction is "meaningful", but it's not necessarily the kind of interaction which gives you a game - your agency is deployed differently, and can't influence the actual outcome of the performance, just your personal experience.

 

Everybody's Gone To The Rapture doesn't manage to develop this level of sophistication - although you can't influence the result of the narrative in any way, you can potentially miss bits of narrative, but can't (IIRC) really miss the important aspects, and I don't think you could reasonably manage to have a significantly different interpretation to someone else. (If we consider Her Story as software narrative, then it definitely does achieve this - people sometimes strongly identify with whichever of the multiple possible interpretations they settle on, dependant on the ordering in which they uncover clips.)

 

I take your point that "navigating virtual spaces" is a skill which needs to be learned*, but there are certainly 3d virtual spaces which claim not to be games (Second Life, being the most famous). It's not clear to me if this is an argument that "things that have virtual spaces are games" (which I would reject). I'd argue that there are distinct advantages to virtual spaces - you can construct environments and staging which would be infeasibly expensive, or physically impossible, to construct in reality, for example - which justify their use, even if there's a learning curve to interacting with them. (That learning curve might decrease if VR actually becomes more mainstream, potentially - much as it became easier to experience movies (and people learned how to interact with them, and not duck when the image of the train was heading "straight for you") when they became more widespread, and then actually entered the home.) I think that the creators of "walking sims" aren't necessarily making that decision on those bases though - mostly it's about accessibility of tools which exist for them to create their narrative in: most creators of "walking sims" either have a background in actual computer games dev, or in game mod development, so their skills in creative software are aligned with the tools which exist for creating virtual spaces in computer games. (Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone To The Rapture could equally have been implemented in the virtual spaces of Second Life, for example - although it might not have gotten the media attention if it was.)

 

There are certainly problems with the way in which we make available, curate and discuss creations which involve virtual spaces - the lack of many "mainstream" outlets for things which don't "call themselves games" is definitely a cultural issue, but I don't think the correct sticking plaster is to simply decide that we're going to call "everything we want to talk about" a game. (Ironically, perhaps, Steam actually doesn't limit its own marketplace to games anymore...)

 

 

*actually, I'd go further and argue that "navigating virtual spaces" is a skill that needs to be learned multiple times - I'm pretty competent at navigating a 3d space with a mouse and a keyboard, but with a modern controller I'm mostly hopeless. I recall a discussion either in Idle Thumbs or Idle Weekend about whether "tank controls" or more modern camera-relative controls were easier to use; whilst experienced navigators often find tank controls limiting, they seem to be easier for novices to grasp, for example.

[rharwick]

I think you're answering an argument I didn't make, but that may be my fault for lumping several different questions together or not fully explaining my thinking. Allow me to clarify (hopefully.) 

I don't think that everything that features meaningful interaction needs to be categorized as a game. On this point, I think we're in agreement.

I do think that anything that eschews a more traditional narrative form for an interactive one ought to make meaningful use of interactivity. I think we may also agree on this, but somehow you came away from my post thinking that I thought meaningful interaction = game. I really don't care what you call it. I don't have a problem with calling them games, actually, because I'm fine with shredding the limited definitions of "game" on offer and including all manner of interactive entertainment. But if someone doesn't want to do that, I don't care--so long as they are open to seeing the value in interactive non-games.

My point about virtual spaces was not as clear as I'd like. It was not about categorization, but about context. Context doesn't make Rapture a game, but it does make it more likely to be compared to games. That's relevant solely to your question "why try to shoehorn them into a context?" I am saying that it's not the critics who put them in a context, but their creators' own decisions about how to build them and where to sell them that results in inevitable comparisons. It's an audience mismatch, and it's an uphill battle to redefine your genre if you're going to say "well, I don't want to be judged as a game, but I'm going to take exclusivity money from the world's largest console manufacturer and try to sell my limited-interactivity narrative as a game on their marketplace." I think there are friendlier places to release, and I think your audience for this sort of thing expands if you go 2D instead of 3D, mobile or PC instead of console, etc. I don't think you need to make a game, therefore; I just think you shouldn't be surprised if people are confused about how to talk about what you have made.

My final point was, again, just that even if the people criticizing your interactive entertainment are largely criticizing it on the basis of its success as a game, they may still have valuable feedback to give about why it falls short as a piece of interactive entertainment to begin with. You may find that they like interactive storytelling fine, but didn't think it was used well and don't know how to articulate that complaint except in relation to games (because that's literally the only other place they've encountered interactive storytelling.) But in general I think creators dismiss criticism of their work with "you just didn't get it" at their own peril. It could be true, that they're not your audience, but you don't know until you dig into the substance of the criticism.

Anyhow I intend to play Rapture for myself soon, but I didn't own a PS4 until recently, and it debuted on Steam during a time when I was already playing catch-up with The Witcher 3, which also has some interesting narrative design elements, some of which are pulled with great success out of these sorts of "follow the trail, hit your mark" narrative experiences.

[chummer]

i'm a big fan of listening to other things while playing games and while i strongly associate ska music with with N64 games, i think my strongest song association happened when i was playing the original Fallout. this was in 2010 and since i hadn't played any PC games from the 90's, i was going through a lot of them. i was also dating a girl who was really into Radiohead and had given me a mix of their stuff. whenever i hear 'Idioteque,' i still recall traversing deserts and mutant-filled hallways.

 

speaking of traversing, the walking simulator talk had me thinking about whether genre and form names should be represnetative of what they are. for instance, someone who knows nothing about 'magical realism' would probably be able to discern what the genre is about, but someone who knows nothing about 'house music' probably couldn't tell you anything about it. 'metroidvania' has often been derided as a genre name, but i feel that it at least gives information to those who have a particular context with video games. to get at the point of the reader's letter tough, while i don't think organically created names are always good, i'm generally in favor of them and calling it a 'walking simulator' or 'secrets box' or 'software theater' (though i love those last two) still won't change the attitude of those deriding it (who i think was the target of the reader's concern).

 

that said, calling a video game a 'secrets box' is very beautiful and evocative and i want it to be called that. i also like the idea of calling a Call of Duty 'software theater.'

[Salacious Snake]

Whenever I hear Terrible Lie by Nine Inch Nails, I'm transported back to sitting on an orange shag carpet, playing Syndicate on a CRT. I can feel the Jaguar controller in my hands.

[aoanla]

I think you're answering an argument I didn't make, but that may be my fault for lumping several different questions together or not fully explaining my thinking. Allow me to clarify (hopefully.)

 

It's probably mine: I'm used to a more antagonistic response, so I might be reading some criticism into your original paragraphs which is not there!

 

I agree with pretty much everything you've said, other than that I do kinda care about the games thing, because I do think that a lot of the "X is a game" thing comes from a conscious or unconscious conflation of "this is part of my thing and therefore is good" which I don't think is particularly helpful. (Plus, I'm old enough to remember when Sim City was released, marketed specifically as a "software toy", not a game, soI think that shapes my perspective on definitions - I really dislike the apparent underlying assumption from a lot of people on the "X is a game" side that "being software" seems to weight something more heavily into being a game than not being software.)

 

to get at the point of the reader's letter tough, while i don't think organically created names are always good, i'm generally in favor of them and calling it a 'walking simulator' or 'secrets box' or 'software theater' (though i love those last two) still won't change the attitude of those deriding it (who i think was the target of the reader's concern).

 

Yeah, I know, but part of the point of "software theatre" as a term, for me, is that it sidesteps and attacks that to an extent - someone who thinks that calling something "not a game" is somehow an insult deserves to have it gain critical acclaim for "not being a game", and thus have the basis of their value system weakened more fundamentally.

 

(I also kinda agree that, ironically, given their proponents tending to be, stereotypically, the kind of people who insult "walking simulators", the Call of Duty games are becoming quite software theatre like themselves... )

[Rob Zacny]

Regarding the Sicario discussion, I often detect (and struggle myself) with the question of whether a certain piece of media is trying to portray sexism and comment on it, or is just exhibiting unintentional sexism and therefore should be criticized for it. Relating to Sicario, it was my feeling that the treatment of Emily Blunt's character was a way of depicting how the drug war uses, eats up, and then discards innocent or idealistic people. It didn't seem sexist, or at least, it only seemed sexist in the way that the real world of law enforcement often is sexist. Is that good, or praiseworthy, to coldly portray sexism, especially in a culture that is so fraught with it already? How do we label and talk about works that try to address an issue by mostly just portraying it (that is, by giving very little overt authorial input)?

 

This is a good point, and I think it's a complementary argument to one that another listener linked on Twitter: that Sicario intentionally uses elements of sexual violence to underscore the nature of the war that Kate finds herself fighting. And it does make me want to reassess the movie with these points in mind.

 

On the other hand, there is a broader context that makes me uneasy with this arc, whatever themes it is expressing by stripping Blunt's character of her power and independence. As much as I am starting to realize this may have been the skillful expression of the film's subtext, in the end I just watched a movie where a strong, proud woman is abused by her colleagues for two hours, and then assaulted and coerced into submission. Which I don't think can help but also carry an implicit, "no place for a woman in this man's world" meaning, intended or not. That the woman ends up being the symbol of civilization, of order, and the men represent violence and vengeance is a restatement of some tired themes. That it's done well here does earn it some points (I mean, it's why I really liked the film and will watch it again). But I also think that deeper meaning only goes so far when you've created a movie whose store culminates in the psychic shattering of the heroine.

[unimural]

A more freeform Idle Weekend was an enjoyable and interesting listen. I hope you won't entirely give up on the topical discussions, but I'd rather you have a freeform discussion instead of force yourself to discuss a topic that you either feel you can't do justice to, or just aren't into on any given week.

 

Yeah, I know, but part of the point of "software theatre" as a term, for me, is that it sidesteps and attacks that to an extent - someone who thinks that calling something "not a game" is somehow an insult deserves to have it gain critical acclaim for "not being a game", and thus have the basis of their value system weakened more fundamentally.

 

I'm happy with the walking simulator term. I like such games a lot, from Proteus to Davey Wreden/William Pugh stuff. I do find it tiresome that the discussion around these games often degenerates into a discussion about definitions. If using the term "walking simulator" or "software theatre" gets us past this point, I'm glad. If that's not enough, I hope someone comes up with the term we can all use. Even if it's Emergent Presecribed Exeperience or epee. Or Narratives' Management, nama. It'll happen eventually, and then we can just discuss the things, instead what the thing can be called.

 

I haven't played Rapture, but for me often a big draw of the "walking simulators" is the walking. Especially making the traversal fit the environment. Miasmata is probably my favourite of these. Miasmata does have a fair number of mechanics, but it also has the best walking. You move at fairly realistic speeds and you have to estimate if the ridge is to steep for you to not fall down. All of us can walk, but we still stumble every now and then when walking in rough terrain. The other mechanics also support this, and indeed the experience evokes a lot of the same unconscious decisions we make when traversing a natural space.

 

Firewatch, I think, achieves some of this with the environment interactions: the ledges, the navigation and even the distant but ever present threat of fire. Even something like Stanley Parable kind of does this, merely through it's environmental design. Evoking and distorting two familiar navigation spaces: office indoors and games. In Stanley Parable the navigation is snappy and linear, serving the narrative content. Firewatch, Proteus and Miasmata all invite you to look at the horizon, climb higher to get a better view, to learn the land and enjoy that process.

 

Assassin's Creed is also pretty close to being a decent walking simulator. If only I could remove all the hud elements and remove all the mission triggers and collectibles. That's would be a good game. It is a shame AC has no interest in the really rather wonderful places they've created, instead opting for the spectacle. But traversing virtual spaces is fun. More games, or namas, should celebrate that.

[aoanla]

(I should say, I'm only unhappy with "Walking Simulator" because it downplays the importance of narrative to a lot of things categorised this way. Ironically, Rapture actually mostly gets criticised because the walking is too slow, and people feel impeded in experiencing it, so...)

 

[Edited to note: I also don't think that things have to be a member of just one category of thing - it's pretty clear that things can transcend boundaries and be stronger by it. There's definitely a continuum in modern entertainment software between "things which are purely narrative" and "things which are purely game" (and "things which are purely non-narrative art", for that matter), and describing something as "software theatre" does not mean that it can't also have gameish or other elements.]

[Valorian Endymion]

I often remember about playing King´s Bounty on my Sega Genesis, when I hear Jethro Tull - Thick as Brick, and far a while (I don´t know exactly why) I thought that King´s Bounty battle theme was similar to a actual part of Thick as a Brick ( think is around 3 minutes, when they start sing that part "see there is a son in born....").

 

There is some jpop/jrock music, which reminds me of playing Ragnarok Online.

[Salacious Snake]

I got some hot Zarya Tips'n'Tricks coming your way, everybody (especially Danielle).

This may not be news at all, but it took me awhile to catch on, so I figured I'd put it out there since it wasn't directly mentioned on the podcast. The trick to her is that whenever she blocks damage with one of her shields (either her personal shield or the one she projects onto teammates), her weapon gets more powerful.

There's actually a numerical value from 0 to 100 seen on the reticle, or you can just go by how big the energy wad is on her gun model:

The value depreciates over time, so you have to keep blocking to keep it up. It's a great way to encourage being a team player!

The difference in effectiveness is so pronounced that I'm not sure it's worth fighting at all at the start of the match; this creates an interesting sort of arc, where you play as a support early on, and then suddenly you can just rip everyone apart. Couple a fully charged weapon with her Ultimate (the vortex thing that sucks everyone together into one spot), and you can really do some damage.

[images stolen from the internet]

[marginalgloss]

Just thought I'd echo the other comments here and say that I really enjoyed this week's episode for being free from the usual topic-led discussion. I also liked that it wasn't so much focused on things that have been happening in the video game community lately; sometimes I feel that this aspect has led the previous podcasts to be centred around 'Issues In Games Journalism' in a way that I find a bit wearying. There's a tendency for those discussions to become circular, oblique, and inward-looking, and they're probably only going to be of interest to a small sub-category of players who are interested in the comings and goings in an even smaller circle of writers and websites.

 

But perhaps that's just me, and I really hope that doesn't come across as grumpy or unappreciative. I think I'm always going to enjoy a commentary which actually engages with the substance of a thing itself, rather than engaging with the meta-commentary around the thing. Like: I've been really interested to hear about why Rob didn't get on with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture*, but I couldn't care less whether somebody describes it as a 'Walking Simulator' or not. It's an adequate bit of highly contextual shorthand which gives a player an idea of what to expect from a game, but at the same time it tells you nothing at all about the content of the game, or its quality. 

 

(Is there more to it than this? Other art forms have had such terms for hundreds of years, and there seems to be a tendency for game critics to re-invent the wheel in this regard. Hasn't it always been established that terms for genre don't imply qualitative judgments? If I go to see an opera described as bel canto, for example, I know it's probably going to feature singing and music in a certain style developed from a certain cultural and historical context; but at the same time, I know nothing at all about what exactly it's going to sound like because the term encompasses a wide range of possibilities. And those two words might be spat with disdain or pronounced with pleasure, but the merits of that judgment exist independently from the work itself.)

 

* - even though he's completely wrong about it, as with Alien: Isolation and Dark Souls. But that's just, like, his opinion, man. 

[aoanla]

(Is there more to it than this? Other art forms have had such terms for hundreds of years, and there seems to be a tendency for game critics to re-invent the wheel in this regard. Hasn't it always been established that terms for genre don't imply qualitative judgments? If I go to see an opera described as bel canto, for example, I know it's probably going to feature singing and music in a certain style developed from a certain cultural and historical context; but at the same time, I know nothing at all about what exactly it's going to sound like because the term encompasses a wide range of possibilities. And those two words might be spat with disdain or pronounced with pleasure, but the merits of that judgment exist independently from the work itself.)

 

I'd argue that the "more to it" is about the history of how much seriousness "Video Games" have been treated with by "traditional" criticism. I'd say that there's a certain undercurrent of "defending video games" in both the "this isn't even a game" and the "this is definitely a game" responses to media like Everybody's Gone To The Rapture. (And I'd say that they're both wrong, for basically a related reason to you: that not being part of a genre is never a pejorative.)

Compare, for example, to the situation in genre literature - the SF&F writing community is pretty used to the asymmetry in classification of works depending on how much "quality" the "serious literature critics" ascribe to them. (Works that serious critics like are almost never "SF", as are works by authors who serious critics consider to be serious - see the whole thing with Iain [M] Banks, who wrote both in and out of genre and equally ranked his works in both, to the apparent confusion of the Critics.) [Edited to add: and in the converse direction, there's things like the Sad Puppy movement, etc, who want to police what's "allowed inside" the genre to match their own preferences.]

[clyde]

As someone who has never seen or read or played anything Game of Thrones related, but who still has a curiosity due to its use as a touchstone for gamer-culture, your talk here was helpful. Danielle seemed to compare it, action-movies, and horror-movies to sports and y'all seemed to imply a sensibility that prioritizes a sense that violence-may-potentially-happen-or-is-happening. All of a sudden, a lot of my lack of taste for all the listed things seems related. Instead of action-movies, horror-movies, and plot-driven stories that constantly threaten violence, I prefer pieces of media that prioritize transporting me to another place and/or allowing me to hang out with likeable characters. I'm a sucker for aesthetics and campy personas that have been pushed into theatrical absurdity. Examples would be a certain set of hobbyist games (especially Unity rooms), and 16-episode korean romantic-comedies.

Recently on either these forums or on the unofficial Idle Forums Slack-channel, a few members helped me question my avoidance of spoilers. What I began to realize is that spoilers apply to plot-driven narratives or sports-like competitions. Those concerns don't really apply to the types of media I actually consume. I know that the two main characters are going to eventually hook up in my romantic k-dramas. I typically prefer the play-throughs of hobbyist games after my initial one. I'm realizing that as my tastes have changed (largely dependent on questioning the valuation-systems by which the media I am seen as the typical market for is appreciated) I have some residual concerns and valuation-systems that do not really apply to the stuff I now enjoy the most. Great episode.