Idle Thumbs 307: What Remains of Idle Thumbs

[Jake]

Idle Thumbs 307:

What Remains of Idle Thumbs
As the old saying goes, "When the Chris is away, Jake and Nick will play... the demo to Prey."

"Specifically," the saying goes on, "the demo of the 2017 version of Prey, not the previous Prey or its demo, or the other two demos for unreleased Prey games." The saying is unpopular and fails to convey how good the Prey 2017 demo is. We're joined by James Spafford to talk about exploring creepy old houses, the experience of skiing down a hill with no one else around, and, yeah, some more Zelda.

Discussed: What Remains of Edith Finch, Prey (2017) Demo, Steep, The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

 

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[I_smell]

Yesssss nobody else commented yet, now I can jump in on the narratology / ludology discussion and be the first person to say "DWARF FORTRESS" !

 

Dwarf Fortress, Rim World or Crusader Kings 2 are each a pile of systems that are basically made to generate stories. You could say the same thing about other system-heavy games, but these are especially focused on communal relationships, so their stories have a lot more to chew on than "I fell out of a jeep, and a grenade rolled down a hill and I blew up".

There are games where real-world social dynamics emerge too, like in EVE Online- but then you have to start asking "What counts as a story?"

 

In terms of strictly pre-authored, written narrative that is also systemic, I guess the ceiling on that is something like The Stanley Parable, which is a dense choose-your-own-adventure book you interact with by jumping around a 3D space in the Unity engine.

So I think Dwarf Fortress and The Stanley Parable both use different methods of trying to make a game that is all-systems and all-narrative at the same time.

[AnthonyJohnBulcao]

Hi there friends from head phone land, for the past 6 months or so I have been listening to you guys while i'm working (building hydroponic systems) or working (painting scenes from retro video games) and I must say that you are some of my favorite people to listen to and you make me laugh quite often so THANK YOU.  I was going to type a long ass message about an experience I had last night randomly watching a small section of Edith Finch on the PS4 live app thing....but I decided that would take too long and be too hard to explain.  So let me just say....that baby in the bathtub shit was unreal.  

Thats it.  

Idle Thumbs fo life.....

Love,

Anthony

 

PS If you would like to have the 8 year old version of yourselves mind blown, check out my paintings.   http://supervideo gameland.tumblr.com

 

 

[BigJKO]

I bought Prey after listening to this cast and the game did not disappoint. It feels exactly like playing System Shock 2, with the art deco design from Bioshock. It's majestic and scary and fun. I hope you guys will talk more about it on later casts.

 

OH! And also, are you going to put the latest ruination cast on the podcast feed? I found out I can listen to audio-only versions of the twitch streams, but for some reason it wouldn't load the last Ruination in the twitch iOS app..

[Jake]

8 hours ago, BigJKO said:

I bought Prey after listening to this cast and the game did not disappoint. It feels exactly like playing System Shock 2, with the art deco design from Bioshock. It's majestic and scary and fun. I hope you guys will talk more about it on later casts.

 

OH! And also, are you going to put the latest ruination cast on the podcast feed? I found out I can listen to audio-only versions of the twitch streams, but for some reason it wouldn't load the last Ruination in the twitch iOS app..

 

I think we forgot to post it but we will. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think part of the complication with the authored vs. systemic narrative discussion is that it's easy to only think of systems as being fun based game mechanics. Assuming that systems have to be based on physics, crafting, shooting etc. 

 

Night in the Woods is narrative adventure game platformer ish thing. It doesn't contain puzzles really, just a lot of people you can go around talking to, making small choices about whether to spend your day with X or Y person. It has a lot of pre authored narrative content, and minimal systems that are just like branching paths.

 

However I did develop a somewhat unique story in it. The gameplay has a very rote daily loop where you can just walk up in the morning, go downstairs and talk to mom then head out for the day. After many days of this, I felt like the mom conversations were getting rote. So I went straight outside instead of talking to her. I stopped outside and felt kind of bad, so I went back in. Only to then have a very volatile argument over some tension that had been bubbling under the surface the whole time. To me, this is a good mix of the pre authored narrative of that conversation and the systemic choices that allowed me to make a routine, break it and then reverse my decision to discover something much more impactful than I expected. The system was very minimal, but it still enhanced the emotional story that played out, and if the mom conversation was just a cutscene it wouldn't have been the same. 

[feelthedarkness]

The thumbs have this amazing gift in taking something I'm really excited about (as an old person who doesn't get excited about much) and talking about it in a hilarious way, that makes the thing sound  absurd. I've really enjoyed every game Chris Avellone has written or designed, and since he (I think) was the lead on Prey, I've been anticipating it. Of course the discussion is "this is nonsense fun game and you can float out into space as a banana." 1 luv. 

[DoctorDake]

Nick neglected to mention the most important part of Steep. Canonically, the mountain you are skiing down and slamming your body into is alive. You can activate missions where you follow a glowing light down the mountain and the mountain will speak to you about its history and the importance of nature and/or the sick tricks you were pulling on it (I admit I stopped paying attention to the soothing voice in favor of figuring out how fast I could slam into a tree).

 

Living mountains. GOTY.

[Problem Machine]

Nick doesn't care about lore

[SL128]

6 hours ago, feelthedarkness said:

The thumbs have this amazing gift in taking something I'm really excited about (as an old person who doesn't get excited about much) and talking about it in a hilarious way, that makes the thing sound  absurd. I've really enjoyed every game Chris Avellone has written or designed, and since he (I think) was the lead on Prey, I've been anticipating it. Of course the discussion is "this is nonsense fun game and you can float out into space as a banana." 1 luv. 

____________________________________

I really need to find out if my computer can run Prey.

[RubixsQube]

For anyone that cares (potentially nobody), here is the Covert Agent article that prompted me to write in. I think, regardless of how old and decrepit the discussion of ludology vs. narratology is, the article is pretty interesting, even if you don't care much about Covert Agent. 

 

Edit: On looking at a video tweeted by dante that goes into the "debate" between ludology and narratology, I think that I can see why I was so confused about the response made on the podcast. I think that perhaps I am still interested in what some of the people in this thread (and on the cast) were discussing. I think that it has to be really hard to create something like Breath of the Wild, or Dwarf Fortress, or Crusader Kings 2, or Far Cry 2, where a variety of systems have to interplay in such a way as a narrative can develop. Similarly, as SuperBiasedMan points out, some story-heavy games, like Night in the Woods, have interesting unique elements which make an individual play experience feel less authored. So as games mature as a medium, it feels like a difference in game styles (sorry for even raising the idea that there might be this gulf!) is being blurred more and more.

 

I think that perhaps originally, this wasn't an actual debate, sure, but I do believe there's a huge value in discussing it, especially since (as I mentioned in my overly long, dry email) it does seem to be at the core of Idle Thumbs, a show hosted by game developers who work on interesting, well-though-out, narrative-driven games but seem to more often discuss novel play experience and interacting systems. 

[osmosisch]

To be honest, I think it's harder to make an interactive system that won't have people generating stories out of it. It's kind of one of the defining characteristics of humans that we impute meaning and narrative to everything we see.

 

Having a complex interactive system that generates the stories that you as a designer wish it to engender in your subjects/consumers, now that's hard indeed.

[Jake]

7 hours ago, osmosisch said:

To be honest, I think it's harder to make an interactive system that won't have people generating stories out of it. It's kind of one of the defining characteristics of humans that we impute meaning and narrative to everything we see.

 

Having a complex interactive system that generates the stories that you as a designer wish it to engender in your subjects/consumers, now that's hard indeed.

 

I don't think anyone was arguing that there are interactive systems that don't generate player stories to some degree. I do think that more often than not, the foundational reason someone creates a game pretty cleanly lands on one side or the other of wanting to tell people about something versus wanting to give people a set of rules to play with... I just don't think that's a bad thing and get tired out when it becomes some sort of battle.

[eot]

Regarding the ludology / narratology debate, I know that Jake called out more or less what I'm about to mention as an example of something that doesn't work, but I think it did work.

 

There are two examples from the original Deus Ex that come to mind for me. The first one is when you are on the 747 and are told to execute Juan Lebedev. You have the choice to do it or not, because if you do nothing Anna Navarre will execute him in your stead. However, you can also choose to fight her in order to stop her from killing him. The second example is when you meet Paul in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen, and he's dying from the kill switch. He tells you sneak out through the window and leave him there, as he's too weak to go with you. If you stay with him and fight your way out it's actually possible to save his life.

 

Now of course both of these examples involve bespoke content, but the reason I think they work is because the game never tells you that you have these choices. It is the general systemic nature of the game that encourages you to explore what is and isn't possible. In some cases it leads to unique systemic outcomes, and in other cases to unique narrative outcomes.

[Jake]

15 hours ago, eot said:

Regarding the ludology / narratology debate, I know that Jake called out more or less what I'm about to mention as an example of something that doesn't work, but I think it did work.

 

There are two examples from the original Deus Ex that come to mind for me. The first one is when you are on the 747 and are told to execute Juan Lebedev. You have the choice to do it or not, because if you do nothing Anna Navarre will execute him in your stead. However, you can also choose to fight her in order to stop her from killing him. The second example is when you meet Paul in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen, and he's dying from the kill switch. He tells you sneak out through the window and leave him there, as he's too weak to go with you. If you stay with him and fight your way out it's actually possible to save his life.

 

Now of course both of these examples involve bespoke content, but the reason I think they work is because the game never tells you that you have these choices. It is the general systemic nature of the game that encourages you to explore what is and isn't possible. In some cases it leads to unique systemic outcomes, and in other cases to unique narrative outcomes.

 

The parking garage boss fight early in resident evil 7 is maybe another example of a scenario like this that bridges the gap by not expressly outlining the possible outcomes but supporting basically any systemically-reachable junction point with a little narrative twist that sets the scene for the next systems-based encounter. I don't know what to make of it because it still does end up feeling sort of like a pachinko machine to me where there are only so many bespoke exits to land in*, but you're right that scenarios like that are powerful because of how well they weave systemic input and narrragive output. 

 

* realistically that is true with most systemic-but-linear games anyway - you're going to reach your objective, you're going to get past or kill the guys etc etc, so it's smart to take all the possible ends , and all the possible turning points between, that you're allowing the player to hit, and putting little story buttons there. Still doesn't feel pure or clean to me all the same, even though I really like those sorts of scenarios, and I understand why when they can easily rankle. 

[slab64]

On 5/7/2017 at 7:02 PM, DoctorDake said:

Nick neglected to mention the most important part of Steep. Canonically, the mountain you are skiing down and slamming your body into is alive. You can activate missions where you follow a glowing light down the mountain and the mountain will speak to you about its history and the importance of nature and/or the sick tricks you were pulling on it (I admit I stopped paying attention to the soothing voice in favor of figuring out how fast I could slam into a tree).

 

Living mountains. GOTY.

 

Yeah I started yelling at the podcast around 52 minutes in when they started joking about there being "weird narrative stuff" in the game, thinking of the mission where you commune with the spirit of Aravis and listen to her tales while exploring ancient ruins (also she talks some shit about the "weird contraption strapped to your feet"). It's around 9m18s into this video if the timestamp link doesn't work.

 

Also this game contains a "Cursed Hot Air Balloon", there's probably some story behind that too, I dunno, I only played the open beta.

 

[Twig]

That sounds one step away from some cosmic horror shit.

 

I hope it's revealed that the mountain is eating people.

[cooljammer00]

Maybe Nick just assumed he was dreaming it in his ill video game haze.