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Garple

Making the Game Your Own

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I've been re-listening to old Idle Thumbs episodes lately and I'm struck by Chris' ability to almost always find some weird wrinkle to augment or change a game's fiction based on a quirk of the mechanics or presentation. His imagination seems to stretch the limitations of the system. The only example that comes immediately to mind is Alpha Protocol. Chris talked about how the character he choose looked like a South American dictator, so he imagined he was a Latin American military leader who'd been recruited by the CIA. Also...the stuff he talked about with Assassin's Creed 2...the pickpocketing mechanic that was also the fast-walk button...walking around town with a coterie of prostitutes and stealing from every single person he passed etc...

So...my point is...share some stories about your own experiences with this kind of thing. How have you used your imagination to make a game "your own"?

Obviously...this will be more natural in open world/sandbox games...so this thread could also branch off into discussion of how this can happen within the strictures of a more focused and/or linear game (in which case it's probably mostly about how one perceives what is happening). I'll try to dredge up some examples of my own too. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of video games because it's where the player's interaction really comes to a head.

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It's weird, I actually imagined while playing Assassin's Creed 1, what it would be like if all these rooftop guards were players, as opposed to idiotic AI. Unfortunately, now knowing that 90% of the people who play AC multiplayer are imbeciles who sprint around killing people for tiny sums of points, that dream is a bit sour for me.

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While my friend and I were playing through Dark Souls we did a lot of minor stuff to enhance our own senses of our characters. For a while we were both wearing the same knight armour and deliberately hired ourselves out to other people wearing it and being "knight bros". We also both joined the Warriors of Sunlight and would make sure to always use the Praise the Sun greeting for other Warriors of Sunlight and always bow to the host or other phantoms when summoned to help. Additionally, now and then we would return to Firelink Shrine and just sit down at the bonfire in our individual worlds, allowing our weary knights a well-earned respite.

In Assassin's Creed I never went too far with it as the characters themselves are fairly defined, but I certainly always tried to keep to my idea of what they would do. As a result I always tried to be as stealthy and nonchalant as possible, silent assassinations always being preferred and so on. In Brotherhood I started using the guild assassins a lot more because it's so smooth and is in-keeping with Ezio's new status.

I suppose these are largely just roleplaying the characters rather than actually creating new fiction for the world... I'll keep giving that some thought.

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It's weird, I actually imagined while playing Assassin's Creed 1, what it would be like if all these rooftop guards were players, as opposed to idiotic AI. Unfortunately, now knowing that 90% of the people who play AC multiplayer are imbeciles who sprint around killing people for tiny sums of points, that dream is a bit sour for me.

Did you ever play Thievery UT? It's an UT mod, heavily inspired by Thief but multiplayer -- some players are thieves and some are guards. (Nachimir worked on that I think). I played some of it, but it was less fun in practice than in theory.

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This is always something that I love to hear about but seldom manage to immerse myself so far within a game that I can defy the obvious objective in favour of self gratifying tasks which often consume time.

Of course my first example stems from Skyrim because I've been playing the hell out of it, tending to my house by arranging bookshelves and cooking meals regularly soon became too tedious for my liking, especially when the results are visible only to me.

However, I often enjoy recounting and listening intently to stories of video game events such as in The Elder Scrolls and Far Cry 2, if this falls within the same category.

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I suspect that personally I play games in almost the most boring way possible. Mage is usually the most interesting way to play RPG's, but I'm not a big fan of mages.

I also usually play the good guy. I would prefer 'true neutral' (as it was in Baldur's Gate), but Skyrim for example doesn't give you that choice often. Some quests are good, some are evil. Sometimes you can make a very obviously good/evil choice.

Most people in Skyrim play warrior (don't remember where I read that) and so do I. I think it's just the obvious way to play -- this game is about Vikings, after all. I do plan to actually go Thief and Assassin after I'm done with the main quest, though (and feel kind of bad that I decided to forgo the opportunity of getting a certain powerful dagger that would probably be perfect for the latter).

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I don't think I do that a whole lot like Chris, Groucho. I can roleplay a character -especially in Elder Scrolls- but I don't think that's what you mean. You mean deliberately changing the existing fiction of a game based on weird gameplay quirks, not roleplaying a blank character.

I think the problem with me is that I like it too much to play the way the makers intended. Though my Batman could be quite an ass.

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While my friend and I were playing through Dark Souls we did a lot of minor stuff to enhance our own senses of our characters. For a while we were both wearing the same knight armour and deliberately hired ourselves out to other people wearing it and being "knight bros". We also both joined the Warriors of Sunlight and would make sure to always use the Praise the Sun greeting for other Warriors of Sunlight and always bow to the host or other phantoms when summoned to help. Additionally, now and then we would return to Firelink Shrine and just sit down at the bonfire in our individual worlds, allowing our weary knights a well-earned respite.

I kind of did this too, and it seems like a lot of people really kind of got swept up in the role-playing aspect like that, and for a game that doesn't really seem like it would encourage it at all. I think the anonymous, silenced MP kind of helps it along. It keeps you immersed in that world, what there is of it.

I did also kind of piece together an imagined backstory for my Argonian in Skyrim, which is something i've used to kind of guide the choices i've made story-wise.

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I did also kind of piece together an imagined backstory for my Argonian in Skyrim, which is something i've used to kind of guide the choices i've made story-wise.

I accidentally committed a couple of crimes in Skyrim by accidentally clicking on things (I clicked on the ledger in an inn just to see what would happen) so I decided that I'd been falsely accused since it was accidental. With all the turmoil and strife in the land, the people of Skyrim are jumpy, so I'm building up a reputation as some kind of sneak-thief and any time I touch a chest to admire the woodwork or glance toward a ledger I'm convicted.

I used a preset for my character and the guy who runs the Hall of the Dead in Whiterun looks exactly like me, so I've decided that we're actually brothers, but the two characters don't know it even though I (the player) have discovered it.

The Jarl of Whiterun sits in that awkward slouchy way with his arms all askew and he doesn't wear sleeves which looks fine on a warrior, but I've never seen a guy sitting on a throne who didn't have some kind of sleeves. I've decided he's a product of the incest that supports the longevity of titled families.

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I started playing Daggerfall (because it was free!), but kept dying in the first ten minutes.

I created two different characters and selected several different difficulty levels, but after getting pummeled by bats and rats I could neither fight nor run away from the archer or skeleton in the next few rooms. What was I doing wrong?

I went on YouTube to see how people were playing through the first few minutes of this game: how did anyone survive?

Players were adopting the same tactics that I used, with one addition: they were resting after each battle. Kill a bat—rest three hours. It took one player a full in-game day to get to the point where I had given up.

I don't know if can play in that fashion; it seems cheap. Especially coming from New Vegas Hardcore Mode where resting heals nothing.

I guess in Remo adaptable-metafiction mode, I should consider Elder Scrolls champions to be narcoleptics? Then it would be OK to play like that!

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The dungeon start in Daggerfall is notoriously crazy. Once you get out in the open and can properly go prepare yourself with some supplies and stuff, it's not nearly so bad.

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In order to bump the thread here's another moment from Skyrim.

I got killed by a bunch of imperial soldiers who tried to extort me on a road outside of Whiterun, so as I was making my way down that road again, expecting to encounter the same soldiers, I imagined my character turning to his traveling companion (Lydia: the housecarl from Dragonreach) and saying "This is a rough area...I've had bad experiences here before. Be Careful." This was made even better by the fact that the second time we went down the road, we didn't encounter the soldiers. So either my character was paranoid, or it was like a real life situation, where often you walk through a neighborhood with a bad reputation and nothing actually happens.

Edit: Also, I never steal in the Elder Scrolls games, although I feel perfectly fine stealing in the Bethesda Fallout games since I'm in a wasteland desperately trying to survive. In Skyrim, I feel like civilization is more or less completely intact in spite of various large-scale crises, so I try to obey what I percieve to be the social contract.

Edited by GrouchoClub

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Not sure if this counts, but when I was playing LA Noire I liked to imagine I was a more interesting character involved in a more interesting series of cases.

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While playing Resident Evil 5 I imagined I was a massive racist.

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I was playing Serious Sam 3 co-op with my stepdad during my vacation, and we started treating it like big game hunting. Any time we felled a powerful enemy in a particularly compromising position, one of us would pose over it and the other would take a screenshot for "the trophy wall." Took an already pretty sweet game and added some more fun to it. I'd post one, but apparently Steam is having issues with my screenshots right now and everything I've ever taken is a broken image link. Dang.

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For me I think its always been about interweaving a narrative on the side. The two standout examples I can think of are probably Football Manager and Caesar 3.

In the former I tried to win everything with a youth side playing total football. Scouting young talent, coaching, and tweaking tactics were integral to achieving results against (usually) superior teams. A few friends and I kept an online journal online of our triumphs and failures, and occasionally wrote fake newspaper articles of each other's games. That was fun.

Caesar 3 was easier just because I'm an architect. Empathizing with the plebeians, and the joy of seeing your city come to life were natural parts of the game for me.

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This is kind of long. TL;DR version: I projected my angst about a game into my character, as angst about the universe he was in. It's also about needing a way to say "The End" when something feels endless.

-----

I had a two week trial of Eve Online. I'd messed around with markets before, and MMOs too, so it felt familiar yet advanced. It was kind of like playing Space Crusade as a ten year old, then taking a look through the rules for Warhammer. Exactly that feeling.

The early game was a churn of mining, making paltry amounts of money, then buying upgrades. It was tedious even when it didn't require my full attention, and I got burned a few times by buying things then finding I didn't have the right skills trained to equip them. I also realised I was unlikely to find the same kind of niches that had allowed me to prosper in games like Kingdom of Loathing. Eve didn't quite feel futile, but I realised that to succeed in it would require a lot of study and effort. This wasn't a small, friendly market. Looking at all those figures felt like staring into an endless and turbulent void, filled with noise and difficult to extract useful information from.

As this all sank in, I'd been playing the game for a week, in the background to everything. Eve was so alt-tab friendly, and the "Warp drive active" voiceover on long journeys so lullingly calm. Sometimes, I'd flick back to it during trips, just to watch space. The game had got under my skin, despite the way I now felt about playing it. I wasn't going to be able to leave by just logging out and not looking back. My character needed a fitting end, so I decided he'd take a last journey. I was a minnow with no involvement in the politics of Eve, so there was only one thing that seemed meaningful.

I wired all my money to another player I knew, picked a route, and set the autopilot. For a few hours, the game had my undivided attention. It was a long journey through 0.0 space in a small, weak ship. The scenery was captivating. These systems were things most of the players hadn't seen, and might never. I think it took a few hours to get to my destination, and I was probably very lucky in that nobody ambushed me at a gate. When I got to the last star system, I looked out into nothing and had a quiet moment at the edge of the galaxy.

I didn't have to go far to find some NPC pirates to blow the ship to bits. After making sure they weren't following me, I put my capsule into orbit around an asteroid, then logged out for the last time.

Did you ever play Thievery UT? It's an UT mod, heavily inspired by Thief but multiplayer -- some players are thieves and some are guards. (Nachimir worked on that I think). I played some of it, but it was less fun in practice than in theory.

I made a map for it, though was only part of the team later on.

As someone who didn't play it online much, one of the weird things I found with Thievery was how professional the core players became. It led to some amazing match reports and replays of people taking risks, but they understood the system so well that as I newbie, I felt like I didn't stand a chance on either team.

It even extended to metagaming. Sound propagation in UT99 was pretty basic, and I think there was some kind of hack to attempt to make sound propagate along pathnodes. Once, I was crawling through a flowerbed very slowly and carefully, and a player controlled guard inside the house ran out the front door, around the side, into the bed and beat me to death with a mace.

(That makes it sound like a horrrible community, but it wasn't. The most active players were generally all lovely and helpful).

Edited by Nachimir
(added introduction)

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In AC Brotherhood, when one of my trainee assassins died, I made all the other trainees wear black to mourn their lost comrade. New recruits who had not been there would get standard colours again so towards the end only a handful of veterans still wore black. Pity graduated assassins all looked the same.

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In an attempt to not buy Skyrim ($$$ and huge backlog) I started up Morrowind, had made a few attempts back in the day but never followed through (40 hours in now!)

Getting to Balmora to talk to Caius for the first time I noticed he never has a shirt on and he made a sniffle noise with his nose and there were lots of illegal drugs under his bed and empty bottles all over his tiny one bedroom place and he made the hot chick whistle at my female character. He seemed like a huge douche.

His bed:

RwI0Ll.jpg

edit: added image.

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Caius always seemed like a satyr to me because he has this reddish complexion (possibly due to interior lighting) and his pants look like hairy legs.

Man, I envy people who go out looking for the Dwemer puzzle box for the first time.

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I put my capsule into orbit around an asteroid, then logged out for the last time.

That's a neat story. I've had the most difficult time trying to figure out how physical space worked in Eve, and your story made it clear that there is something to it that can be appreciated.

It makes me wonder if it would be possible to create your own derelict ship in Eve, filled with riches or proximity bombs or something fun, just to see what other players do with it.

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