Chris

Idle Weekend July 23, 2016: Early Accessification

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Idle Weekend July 23, 2016:

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Early Accessification
This weekend, Danielle and Rob ponder what it is to be a "finished" game in 2016. What hath Early Access (and its ilk on other platforms) wrought for the world of games? Are strategy games particularly well suited to this new world, or are they... just for boys? Elsewhere, Rob is enjoying the beauty and subtle brutality of Tour De France, while Danielle, a reviews editor, enjoys a show about reviews.

Discussed: Endless Legend, Stellaris, Sunless Sea, Don't Starve, The Tour De France, Review

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Don't get me started on professional cycling! It's probably one of my favourite things in the world and I'm always happy when someone has any reaction to it that's not "it's really boring".

 

So the central mechanic that generates the strategic component to cycling is how much energy you can save by riding behind another cyclist. Inside the peloton, you're spending 30-40% less energy than at the front, because overcoming air resistance is where most of the power goes at those speeds. That's why a team leader needs other guys to "pace" him: not because they need encouragement (though they might!), but because having other cyclists to punch a hole into the wind for you is super useful. That's also why breakaways are normally doomed to fail: you have a limited number of cyclists sharing windscreen duty compared to the peloton, so the average energy expenditure for those guys goes way up. 

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I'm a woman and I play strategy games, although generally not RTSes. But I can think of a few reasons why standard strategy games might not appeal to women. I don't expect this to be true of all women, or all of these reasons to apply to any given woman, but the sum total of them could explain why more women don't seem to be interested. And again, I'm an exception here, so I certainly acknowledge they exist.

1. Lack of character focus. Playing as a nation, or as an arsenal, rather than as characters. It doesn't take a lot to change some strategy games into RPGs, if you make them character-focused, and I'd expect you'd see more women take an interest. 

2. Subject matter. These games tend to focus narrowly on war and domination. Why don't women generally take an interest in this? Partly because they're not socialized into it. Maybe it's because women don't get to fantasize about being war heroes; when war comes, we have to clean up the mess. Maybe it's because again, army-scale war is abstract, rather than personal. Maybe it's because war is just one subject, and there are a lot of other facets to history.

3. Time. Strategy games tend to favor people (men and women) with a lot of spare time to learn something complex and abstract. I would say that generally women have less free time than men, as most women still end up shouldering more of the burden of home life and caretaking.

4. Women are not socialized to believe that they can be good at abstract thinking, and then they are not welcomed into those spaces when they try. Not coincidentally, science and math fields are male-dominated.

5. General inaccessibility. An RPG can still be compelling even if you're not all that interested in sci-fi. I'm not sure a wargame about supply lines in WWII can still be interesting if you're not actually interested in the minutiae of WWII.

But yeah, I obviously can't speak for all women, and I don't share most of these objections. These are just guesses.

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Speaking of, I would be very interested in a stream where Danielle and Rob try out a bunch of strategy games.

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I agree with just about everything Rob & Danielle had to say, along with poster rharwick, about the lack of women in the strategy game scene. I have two simple points to add.

 

1. I can't help but notice that people have a habit of defining strategy games in a way that just so happens to exclude subsets that women happen to play. Even the author of the email sort of excluded games like League of Legends and DOTA, which in my mind are 100% hardcore strategy games. I think city builders are also a subset of strategy games that people tend to think of as strategy games with an astericks. And I don't know the percentage of women playing a game like City Skylines, but I'd be willing to bet money that it is higher than the % of women playing the latest Slitherine title. We can debate why certain games get regarded as not "true" strategy games, but I think the result is that certain games that women are playing ended up getting excluded from the conversation about strategy games generally.

 

2. When I think of strategy games that have resonated with women I know, I think of games like Civilization or Concrete Jungle. The shared common feature is an interface and art style that is inviting and very newcomer friendly. However strategy games are pretty famous for their unappealing (to put it mildly) interfaces. For people already deep into the genre perhaps that's not a problem, you learn to deal with a game's shortcomings. But when that audience is already male dominated it means the opportunities for women to get into the genre diminish. To turn things around I think you'd need more games with a polished presentation. But as mentioned most strategy game developers are working with pretty limited budgets so this isn't something that can be easily fixed. And the issues with how women are socialized would still remain a problem.

 

Rob's description of the Tour de France was beautiful. One of these years I'm sure I will get into it!

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I agree with just about everything Rob & Danielle had to say, along with poster rharwick, about the lack of women in the strategy game scene. I have two simple points to add.

 

1. I can't help but notice that people have a habit of defining strategy games in a way that just so happens to exclude subsets that women happen to play. Even the author of the email sort of excluded games like League of Legends and DOTA, which in my mind are 100% hardcore strategy games. I think city builders are also a subset of strategy games that people tend to think of as strategy games with an astericks. And I don't know the percentage of women playing a game like City Skylines, but I'd be willing to bet money that it is higher than the % of women playing the latest Slitherine title. We can debate why certain games get regarded as not "true" strategy games, but I think the result is that certain games that women are playing ended up getting excluded from the conversation about strategy games generally.

 

For what it's worth, I totally agree that city builders and the like are a segment of strategy games (and anecdotally I know more women who play those than other flavors of strategy game) but I don't think I'd put DOTA or LoL in there. A game where you control one single avatar and are essentially ONLY micromanaging feels like it's basically just an action game from an atypical perspective. The only thing those games really have in common with strategy, to me, is that they were originally mods of strategy games, and you look at them top-down, but both of those feel incidental to me. They can also only be played as extremely intense team-based multiplayer games, which are their own beast at this point given esports emerging as an entire category.

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I've been enjoying base management games a lot. When I play base management games, I personally am aiming to make a doll house. With my characters in their organized little home. I love Dwarf Fortress for this reason. I mean listen to Chris's game play of Rim World, he was playing a doll house game for all intents and purposes. And this I think is a very good thing.

 

The games I've managed to hook my girlfriend on have all been base management style games in a light hearted fantasy setting. Kingdom for Keflings, Raw Fury Games' Kingdom, Terraria, Fable and Fable 2, and played Fable 2's real estate market in detail. Fable 2's real estate mini-game was awesome, What a great aspect of that game. I could never hook her on Minecraft mostly due to the FPS POV. However, she really enjoyed Skyrim, for the fantasy setting, and the crafting and gathering of materials. Civ 5 also hooked her for a few weeks. Most surprising she got really into XCOM Enemy Unknown. She also really enjoyed the Simpsons phone app for a while, not a robust experience at all, but essentially a base builder. 

 

It is exciting that Rim World is making the dynamic stories aspect of Dwarf Fortress so much more accessible. However, both these games still have a strong military focus. It's just easier to make a fun game that has this sort of focus. But all I really want is a game where I can recreate bucolic English period piece drama. Dwarf Fortress meets Jane Austen.

 

I have been hoping for a long time that these genres will evolve into Sit Com and Period Piece simulators. Strategy during peace time.

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I've been enjoying base management games a lot. When I play base management games, I personally am aiming to make a doll house. With my characters in their organized little home. I love Dwarf Fortress for this reason. I mean listen to Chris's game play of Rim World, he was playing a doll house game for all intents and purposes. And this I think is a very good thing.

 

The games I've managed to hook my girlfriend on have all been base management style games in a light hearted fantasy setting. Kingdom for Keflings, Raw Fury Games' Kingdom, Terraria, Fable and Fable 2, and played Fable 2's real estate market in detail. Fable 2's real estate mini-game was awesome, What a great aspect of that game. I could never hook her on Minecraft mostly due to the FPS POV. However, she really enjoyed Skyrim, for the fantasy setting, and the crafting and gathering of materials. Civ 5 also hooked her for a few weeks. Most surprising she got really into XCOM Enemy Unknown. She also really enjoyed the Simpsons phone app for a while, not a robust experience at all, but essentially a base builder. 

 

It is exciting that Rim World is making the dynamic stories aspect of Dwarf Fortress so much more accessible. However, both these games still have a strong military focus. It's just easier to make a fun game that has this sort of focus. But all I really want is a game where I can recreate bucolic English period piece drama. Dwarf Fortress meets Jane Austen.

 

I have been hoping for a long time that these genres will evolve into Sit Com and Period Piece simulators. Strategy during peace time.

 

I totally agree and I always wish these games had less of a military focus. But based on my experience with RimWorld, if you intentionally choose the starting settings that deemphasize combat, there is actually almost no fighting against other humans. It does happen occasionally, but I've ended up in far more tough situations while hunting animals for food than I have battling raiders or the like.

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Yeah, I would agree with Rob, that unlimbering guns in Ultimate General Gettysburg, much be a bit too much, but in some cases, it kind worked - at least visually, in Total War, it was fun and a bit immersive to see (also there never was too much canons so it didn´t became annoying), but one case it such feature, might be need, at least visually, was in cossacks and some other RTS, where canons and other stuff move at such absurd speed that became just ridiculous to see. Cossack was quite hilarious, specially, since canons and bombards don´t had sprites for the crew, so you suddenly see 200 bombards moved by ghosts at light speed.

Unlimbering and limbering can be a good term between, not having to painfully watch your canons moving at slow pace or having them moving too fast.

On the subject of Early Acess and continuous upgrades, I think, the trick lies in good planning, most of the not successful stories all ways sound a bit like a mix between lack of planning (of the long term upgrades, and how much are you willing to go on) and a underestimation of the genre in question (people often think that a game like minecraft,dwarven fortress and survival games, are "simpler" to do, so it is easy to over promise/feature creep). With rising costs and the overall complexity of games, having a good long term plan could be a good idea to avoid trying to do everything at once that would risk a lot of feature creep or development cycle of hell.

Danielle comment about things begin removed, yeah it does happen, but it is never worded in such way, as it mostly like lead people in confusion or straight to torches and pitchforks, but I do remember see a lot of times, with careful wording, systems begin remade for better simplicity/design.

On the final subject of woman audiences and strategy games, I humble opinion, I do wonder that maybe on thing that does happened was the lack or the poor coverage of strategy games (sure today is much better). For many people (and I mean both men and women) the face of strategy game still things like Starcraft/Warcraft, the first begin, RTS does already have the stigma which surrounds them and often drive people way or Civilization, which, maybe due is turn-based nature, the mostly like to really draw people from the outside, despite might been more complex/abstract that the other two. But all others used to be (and some times often still) tread as  "niche/obscure too complex" games despite not begin as such (and I mean in a tone that doesn´t conveys a difficult with the said game, but rather a dismissal look upon it), or aren´t covered (which is understandable, give the large amount of game today, the small amount of hour or personal available).

 

I do agree that maybe character or narrative driven strategy games would have a higher appeal, just remember games, such as Final Fantasy Tactics and many other strategy jrpgs (or even vn and other related games which features some strategy layer), which might enjoy a relative higher audience with women (I guess, but I could be wrong), even Sengoku Basara or Dynasty Warriors and even period drama pieces about conflicts (such as the Sengoku period) often also enjoy this (and again, all of them often are character and narrative driven).

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For what it's worth, I totally agree that city builders and the like are a segment of strategy games (and anecdotally I know more women who play those than other flavors of strategy game) but I don't think I'd put DOTA or LoL in there. A game where you control one single avatar and are essentially ONLY micromanaging feels like it's basically just an action game from an atypical perspective. The only thing those games really have in common with strategy, to me, is that they were originally mods of strategy games, and you look at them top-down, but both of those feel incidental to me. They can also only be played as extremely intense team-based multiplayer games, which are their own beast at this point given esports emerging as an entire category.

 

Man, I just don't agree with that at all. But I don't want to get into a long argument about that so I'll just say that if you talk to any pro DOTA player they will call DOTA a strategy game, and if you talk to any pro CSGO player they won't call CS:GO a strategy game even though undoubtedly CS:GO has a lot of strategic qualities. And that, at a bare minimum, is probably a meaningful consideration when trying to determine whether something is an action-y strategy game, or a strategic action game.

 

But regardless, my point remains the same that people will exclude certain things as being strategy games ("there's no base-building!", "you only control one unit!", "you play it on your phone!", etc.) regardless of whatever strategic qualities the game has (and I totally get it, I've rolled my eyes over the years at various things Tom Chick has proclaimed to be strategy games), and that makes the space smaller than maybe we should regard it, and the audience similarly smaller, and as a result even more gendered.

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(and I totally get it, I've rolled my eyes over the years at various things Tom Chick has proclaimed to be strategy games)

 

That's the thing I miss most about Tom appearing on 3MA. Sure, it was meant as a joke, but I liked the constant, subtle pressure it provided on what exactly a strategy game even is.

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Man, I just don't agree with that at all. But I don't want to get into a long argument about that so I'll just say that if you talk to any pro DOTA player they will call DOTA a strategy game, and if you talk to any pro CSGO player they won't call CS:GO a strategy game even though undoubtedly CS:GO has a lot of strategic qualities. And that, at a bare minimum, is probably a meaningful consideration when trying to determine whether something is an action-y strategy game, or a strategic action game.

 

What actually makes DOTA a strategy game though? Is it just that it's top-down like strategy games usually are? If CSGO also has a lot of strategic qualities but isn't a strategy game, what is the actual distinction there other than top-down versus first-person perspective? Just about every game or sport involves strategy in some form or fashion.

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Action Real-Time Strategy!

 

Jokes aside, I actually dislike the idea that Dota is a strategy game. I also dislike genres, because they cause these kinds of weird arguments, but I recognize that they're helpful.

 

But for me, strategy is pretty much inseparable from "managing large numbers of things", whether those things be armies or buildings or whatever. Dota might have a lot of similarities in perspective, and even control scheme, to traditional strategy games, and it may be super complex, but at the end of the day it's five people vs five people (Meepo, etc. notwithstanding).

 

Maybe that's a bad way of categorizing this type of game, but hey.

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Wasn´t Tom Chick which once said that to something begin a strategy game, all that was need was the manipulation of time, space and resources? It´s a vague concept, but works very well and allow games such as The Sims (which does have a higher audience with women) and even Dota/Lol to join in.

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What actually makes DOTA a strategy game though? Is it just that it's top-down like strategy games usually are? If CSGO also has a lot of strategic qualities but isn't a strategy game, what is the actual distinction there other than top-down versus first-person perspective? Just about every game or sport involves strategy in some form or fashion.

 

You just do a lot of the same things in DOTA that you do in other strategy games. Like, if you look at a typical Euro board game what a player is typically doing is building up an economic engine, and then, at some crucial point, converting that economic advantage into taking points/objectives. DOTA works the same way. In a game like Twilight Struggle there are different zones of the map that a player is trying to control at any given time, and their relative importance shifts as the game progresses. So to with DOTA. I could go on and on. The actual distinction is the amount of weight that is emphasized on the strategic qualities of the game. CS:GO has strategic elements, but at the end of the day the most important aspect is how good is your team at clicking on the heads of the characters that make up the opposing team. Clicking on things in DOTA is important, but not nearly as important as all the strategy stuff.

 

Strategy games are very heterogenous (which is why they're great!), but that means that things are necessarily fuzzy and so you have to consider slightly subjective criteria like weight rather than hard and fast rules. If you want to look at sports and card games you can see some fit into the idea of a strategy game much more neatly than others. Strategy is much more emphasized in soccer or basketball than in pole vaulting. Poker and Bridge are easier to understand as strategy games compared to War.

 

So I don't think I can point to any one thing in DOTA and say this is what makes it a strategy game. But the overall feel is much more like a strategy game to me than an action game. When I look up the stats for a game I play on a site like yasp.co I'll see I typically have the lowest actions per minute of any player, and yet it is still easy for me to have the highest impact as well. My ability to play the game well has nothing to do with having the best twitch reflexes. Making the better decisions wins the games.

 

Another important criteria for me is what is the heritage of the game? Part of the reason I feel perfectly confident calling Gone Home and Firewatch games is because they are things made by game developers. I think of Gone Home as an immersive sim even though it doesn't have any combat and isn't set in a derelict spaceship or whatever because I know the qualities of immersive sims were important to Fullbright's design sensibilities. So the fact that DOTA is a Warcraft 3 mod is actually very important, rather than some incidental aspect. Its ideas and inspirations are very much from the strategy and RPG space.  The way the game is iterated and improved upon is done in the way that a strategy game developer would iterate and improve upon a game.

 

Does it do everything a strategy game does? Of course not, but no such game exists. But I still fail to see how it doesn't belong to one of the many branches of the strategy game tree.

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Action Real-Time Strategy!

 

Jokes aside, I actually dislike the idea that Dota is a strategy game. I also dislike genres, because they cause these kinds of weird arguments, but I recognize that they're helpful.

 

But for me, strategy is pretty much inseparable from "managing large numbers of things", whether those things be armies or buildings or whatever. Dota might have a lot of similarities in perspective, and even control scheme, to traditional strategy games, and it may be super complex, but at the end of the day it's five people vs five people (Meepo, etc. notwithstanding).

 

Maybe that's a bad way of categorizing this type of game, but hey.

 

I get that a lot of people associate managing large number of things with strategy games, and that's definitely an important subset of strategy games. But there are plenty of board games that people think of as strategy games that don't involve managing large number of things so to me its an insufficient way to categorize things.

 

And I think it's okay for people to think of games like DOTA as something else because hey it is this super weird thing that is doing a lot of different things, but I also don't think there's any good reason to insist it isn't a strategy game either.

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As a rule I don't play early access games. I do occasionally back something on Kickstarter, or I might even buy some early access games. But as long as the game hasn't had a proper release I won't play it. It's mainly a question of time. There's a ton of wonderful games, way more than I have time to play. If I had more time, I might dabble in some early access stuff. As things currently stand, I'd much rather play some finished product than a work in progress.

 

I do suspect some games suffer from early access, but some games might never get where they are going if not for early access, so I don't mind the phenomenon so much. It does mean I miss out on a lot of the discussion, but I'm willing to pay that price. Especially as many early access games a such long, grindy, iterative games. It is addictive stuff.

 

I do also think that feature asphyxiation is a thing, Paradox being one of the worst example. CK2 and EU4 have been expanded to a point where it is quite a mess, the whole kind of being less than its parts. I'm also rather worried that Stellaris will never reach a good place, as the starting state is a bit too much of a framework of a game, with especially the sector system just kind of being there and looking for its form. I just don't have to faith that they can rework the game as much and as freely as is needed. It's more like a wonderful prototype than a good design.

 

That said, the worst example of this is possibly Dwarf Fortress. The feature undead. It's not the same thing, as all of that craziness is planned, at least on rough level, and the vision is always Toady's. Yet, the community loves it, even if they don't direct it as much as with some other games. In general, there are silly people, to whom the pleasure they get from hitching the cannons is worth any damage to pacing, usability or focus. The grandeur of the DF's simulation, and the mere concept of the ability to Rube Goldberg the living daylights out of everything causes serotonin to flood my brain. And while I die a bit inside when I get a new wave of immigrants and have to micromanage 30 new dwarves, I also love it. And I am incredibly grateful for it. Even if it means that most people will never want to join in.

Edited by unimural

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I really liked this episode - I had never heard of Review, and now I'm interested, although Googling for it is tough... - and I especially liked the discussion about women and strategy games. In addition to all the stuff people in the thread have mentioned, I think it's worth bringing up (or maybe reiterating, since it got a bit of airtime on the cast) the idea that a lot of it maybe has to do with the fact that there aren't a lot of women who play strategy games. Like, it's a vicious cycle: various features make strategy games unappealing for women, few women play them, and the fact that few women play them makes them hostile places for women, gives devs few reasons to cater to women, and sends the message to women that there's nothing there for them. The Playscape: LA episode with... Rachel Sala, I think? talked about this a bit. They went over the question of how to get more women at Glitch City, the LA space where game devs hang out and work, and the guest was saying that one of the big issues is that if there aren't any women there already, that's a big red flag for women considering it.

I think the entire answer must be some complex of everything everyone's mentioned and probably some other stuff too, and it's also tough to know exactly when we've figured it out, if we in fact have figured it out. It's such a perplexing question about such an unfortunate state of affairs.

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Try googling Review with Andy Daly (or Forrest McNeil, the main character Andy plays). That's how I usually find it.

 

I watched the first season a while ago and it gets dark. I kinda didn't have the energy to watch more.

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If you liked Review and want to jump down the Andy Daly wormhole, I highly recommend the Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project.  There's only 8 episodes but they're so wonderfully insane.  (And then if you want to keep digging, you can find many of the same characters on old Comedy Bang Bang episodes, usually with Jason Mantzoukas.)  Just like Review, they get kind of dark -- a lot of Satan worshipping, murder, and suicide played for laughs.

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