GameDreamer

Thirty Flights of Loving

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For the most part, people agree that TFoL is a game and that the debate of whether it is one or not doesn't matter.

Then don't engage in it...?

Most of us have voiced various explanations of why we disagree with you. Deal with it.

I've only ever responded to people specifically telling me why I'm wrong, or to respond to clarification. I haven't taken apart other people's opinions unless they were directed specifically at me.

If you played it and somehow concluded it's not a game, call it what you think it is.

I'm not sure there's a term for it yet.

We won't give a shit or whine at you if you call it a deterministic digital interactive diorama or whatever you want if that's what you think it is.

This would make perfect sense if people weren't actively trying to deconstruct my opinion -- apparently the "we" you refer to does give a shit.

Looks to me more like someone's playing the oppression olympics.

Yes, that appears to be you, doesn't it?

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I'm not sure there's a term for it yet.

Then we'll just have to call it a game. If an alternative term emerges and gains widespread acceptance, fine. Until then, the argument is basically moot. Or it belongs in an actual thread dedicated to it. But this entire thread is located in the "Video Gaming" forum and we have nowhere else to put it. If you want to make a new thread about this topic in this forum or another one, fine.

This conversation needs to end. It has completely derailed a thread about a really cool THING that bears discussion in its own right entirely aside from the word used to describe the category of thing it is.

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Has anyone played the other Citizen Abel games? I almost bought Quake II from Steam to play them but Brendon Chung said stuff about how they were pretty amateur compared to his later work so I figured I'd give them a pass. Can anyone tell me if they're worth checking out?

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I played Gravity Bone a long time ago, but I didn't accept it well. Not sure if I ran into issues, or if I was not ready for the experience. I've replayed it as part of TFoL, and it was a bit buggy in gameplay.

Anyway... In the end, I'm not really getting the whole Citizen Abel stuff. For me, it's too vague, it's too implicit and I'm not getting it.

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That's a shame--I actually like Gravity Bone more than Thirty Flights of Loving. There both great for sure, but the ending of Gravity Bone made me literally stand up and shout (when I played it, I had no idea who Brendon Chung was or what to expect from his game). Going into TFoL, I knew a little bit more about what I should expect and that slightly diminished the pure glee I was able to have while playing Gravity Bone.

Objectively TFoL is probably the better game, but I had such a blast playing Gravity Bone; it's not a gaming experience that I'll easily forget.

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I didn't mean Gravity Bone, sorry - I assumed that anyone with TFoL had also played GB since they come packaged together. I love them both but for different reasons - I think I like TFoL more but I go back and forth. Really they're kind of hard to compare. They are just the latest two entries in the Citizen Abel series, though, which is why I was asking about the others.

(I played Gravity Bone back when it came out and loved it so much that I almost backed the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter even though at that point I had never listened to the podcast at all. It is in part the good taste shown by getting TFoL as a backer reward that drew me to eventually become an Idle Thumbs reader.)

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A while ago I had my sister play GB and TFoL back-to-back and she enjoyed GB somewhat and thought that TFoL was nonsensical garbage. She's not a non-gamer but I thought it was an interesting reaction.

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Of the two, I think Gravity Bone is much more geared towards gamers, because much of what makes that game great is how it subverts expectations about things like how many items your inventory will hold or when a level is going to end or whatever. Thirty Flights of Loving still has stuff that gamers are more likely to appreciate (being able to grab the bullets and the guns even though that does nothing) but its narrative and its impact is much more divorced from typical gaming tropes.

Which is not to say either are great games for non-gamers... except... kind of... argh. This sort of line of reasoning brings me to a larger point that I don't have the wherewithal to write about now, simply because I really ought to be doing other things, but...

Well, this is tangentially related to the idea of gamers being educated about games, in terms of being able to appreciate them. On some days I think there's a ton of truth to that notion. Sit a person who doesn't play games down in front of basically any game and marvel at how much they miss. People who haven't played FPS games before tend to spend 40% of the time looking at their feet, and they never look up, or in the right direction, or anything like that. They miss 80% of the game.

(I once watched a livestream where someone had his roommate, who does not play games, play through Amnesia: The Dark Descent. At one point she missed some elaborate scripted thing and he said "some little Swedish man that made this game is devastated because he spent ages on that and you didn't notice." At another point he said, truthfully, "A lot of the scariness of this game is ruined by the fact that you just don't fucking pay any attention.")

And since both Gravity Bone and especially Thirty Flights of Loving move at such a fast pace, are so visually dense, and are so purposefully disorienting, your average "oh god I'm lost" non-gamer is probably going to be just... at sea.

So that's what I think half the time.

The other half of the time...

One of my hobbies is watching playthroughs of Thirty Flights of Loving on YouTube. People who want to be the next TotalBiscuit load the game up and say "hello everybody I'm xXxDragonSlayerxXx and I just bought this game from Steam so here is a let's play" and it's fascinating because you get to see someone's first encounter with the game and hear their stream of consciousness (which is what you often get in Let's Play videos). And... these people, whose hobby it is to not just play video games but to play them obsessively enough to record their thoughts each time they play and post it all online for strangers... they miss stuff. Like, lots of stuff. I've seen people go through the hideout without "using" Anita or Borges, meaning they miss the introductions to those characters, and so on. People run through without looking at things or paying attention to things. I'm not talking "you missed the Three Days of the Condor reference behind the bar," I'm talking "you didn't notice that Borges was on the wanted posters that slowly covered every available surface" or "you didn't read any of the plaques or anything in the museum at the end." Pretty much anything it's possible to miss, people miss in droves. Gamers miss in droves. When I first played the game, I lost track of Anita and Borges on the roof and wandered around for 4 minutes before I noticed them sitting at the table.

And of course it doesn't help that both games are fairly obscure and don't go through the effort to convert their story to easily digestible bits of pablum that you could understand if they were fed through Google Translate and turned into Russian then German then back into English and told to you while you were half asleep, like many games tend to do.

So what's my point? I don't really know, except that as hostile as I suspect GB and TFoL are for non-gamers, I'm not so sure they (or anything, really) are accessible to gamers either. People are just bad at "reading" (playing?) games. And movies and books, I think. People often aren't careful, and I think a large part of what separates people who like "boring" or "art" movies/books/games from other people is whether they are careful when they consume these things, or whether they want to turn off their brain when they are entertained (and thus enjoy Transformers). People who are careful like to play, watch, and read things that they can get something out of if they put the work in. And I think GB and TFoL are amazing games for someone who wants to put the work in. But for other people I'm not sure how well they work. They're certainly colorful and equipped with awesome soundtracks, so that can't hurt, but anyone engaged just enough to want it to make sense but not enough to see the brilliance is probably going to be left cold, perhaps like Luftmensch's sister.

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One of my hobbies is watching playthroughs of Thirty Flights of Loving on YouTube. People who want to be the next TotalBiscuit load the game up and say "hello everybody I'm xXxDragonSlayerxXx and I just bought this game from Steam so here is a let's play" and it's fascinating because you get to see someone's first encounter with the game and hear their stream of consciousness (which is what you often get in Let's Play videos). And... these people, whose hobby it is to not just play video games but to play them obsessively enough to record their thoughts each time they play and post it all online for strangers... they miss stuff. Like, lots of stuff. I've seen people go through the hideout without "using" Anita or Borges, meaning they miss the introductions to those characters, and so on. People run through without looking at things or paying attention to things. I'm not talking "you missed the Three Days of the Condor reference behind the bar," I'm talking "you didn't notice that Borges was on the wanted posters that slowly covered every available surface" or "you didn't read any of the plaques or anything in the museum at the end." Pretty much anything it's possible to miss, people miss in droves. Gamers miss in droves. When I first played the game, I lost track of Anita and Borges on the roof and wandered around for 4 minutes before I noticed them sitting at the table.

And of course it doesn't help that both games are fairly obscure and don't go through the effort to convert their story to easily digestible bits of pablum that you could understand if they were fed through Google Translate and turned into Russian then German then back into English and told to you while you were half asleep, like many games tend to do.

So what's my point? I don't really know, except that as hostile as I suspect GB and TFoL are for non-gamers, I'm not so sure they (or anything, really) are accessible to gamers either. People are just bad at "reading" (playing?) games. And movies and books, I think. People often aren't careful, and I think a large part of what separates people who like "boring" or "art" movies/books/games from other people is whether they are careful when they consume these things, or whether they want to turn off their brain when they are entertained (and thus enjoy Transformers). People who are careful like to play, watch, and read things that they can get something out of if they put the work in. And I think GB and TFoL are amazing games for someone who wants to put the work in. But for other people I'm not sure how well they work. They're certainly colorful and equipped with awesome soundtracks, so that can't hurt, but anyone engaged just enough to want it to make sense but not enough to see the brilliance is probably going to be left cold, perhaps like Luftmensch's sister.

I've actually done this as well. It's often really interesting and funny, but also often is a bummer in how it highlights the way we're taught to consider works in a super media-heavy environment. Because people are doing these playthroughs live, there's an inherent tendency to just analyze everything in real-time, with no meaningful thought or consideration. (I realize the irony in the fact that Idle Thumbs does occasional livestreams.) Suddenly at the end of the game, people toss out their immediate understanding of the events, which usually boils down to, "Well that was crazy!" and nothing else, and they put a quick conclusion on it, and that's it. These kinds of videos are a really extreme example of it, but I think that's generally speaking the amount of time people are expected to spend judging things at this point--posting real-time reactions on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, immediately finishing an article and commenting on it (or not commenting, but still absorbing a bunch of other kneejerk comments), and so on.

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I didn't mean to make much of a point about the immediacy of it - I like to think of most of the playthroughs not as specifically crafted examples of a one-time consumption of some piece of media that subverts the normal way of experiencing it, but rather as sample playthroughs that more or less match the average experience of someone playing the game. Not everyone records their first (and potentially only) time through Thirty Flights of Loving, but I suspect that those who do record it and who post it on YouTube are not entirely outliers when it comes to how they play. I suspect they're pretty average.

So when someone rushes through the game and misses everything, I wasn't taking that to mean "wow, these people are seeing it as a one-time reaction generation engine for YouTube." I was taking as a "when people play through games, they miss things, whether or not they are recording it for the benefit of the world at large." And I think I'm right, given the times I've seen people play things in a more natural setting, just on their own for fun. They play in largely the same way that most of these YouTubers play, except they don't vocalize their experience (except sometimes to me since I happen to be standing there).

So my point was really a larger one about games literacy and media literacy generally: how much do people really get out of the games they play? And specifically, how good are they at reading games? I teach at a university and right now I'm teaching the first of a 5 class English sequence where the students read great works of literature from throughout history: the Bible, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Inferno, etc. A lot of what I do is teaching people to read, not in the "you are functionally illiterate" sense but in the "let's learn how to get something out of these books other than what you could get from the plot summary on Wikipedia" sense. Being really literate in a medium means being able to explain what a movie made you feel and why and how it made you feel it. It means being able to explain what lessons you got from a novel and why you think you got those lessons. And it means being able to say something about Thirty Flights of Loving more than "well, that was crazy," and even more so it means being able to say something about Gravity Bone other than "the game forgot to give me the third tool."

Although I do think you're right that maybe a culture of immediacy doesn't help this sort of thing - nobody primed to find something to tweet about is going to do the work it takes to conduct an in-depth analysis of the movie they just saw - I think a larger part of it is just how people approach entertainment media and what they want to get out of it. If people want to switch their brains off, the last thing they want to do is read what they consume. If people want to turn their brains on, I think they'll be more inclined to read things into what they experience and thus get more out of it.

Which is sometimes why I think games are especially prone to being glossed over: people play games to turn their brains off, a lot of the time, and the rare games that specifically give you something of substance to chew on* (TFoL, Spec Ops, Dear Esther, Analogue: A Hate Story, etc.) often get passed over by people who aren't looking to chew on things. But I think even worse is that people just are never taught how to chew on games (or to a lesser degree film). Nobody takes a high school class where their teacher introduces them to an amazing game and shows them that there is so much more going on than just clicking on stuff, but if you're lucky, a teacher in high school at least tried to get you to appreciate Shakespeare (at the very least they acted like you ought to appreciate him).

So I think people are just bad at reading games and that gamers aren't particularly literate. Whether this is because gamers tend to play games to turn their brains off, or because people just don't have practice reading games and don't think about it as a possibility, or because our culture of immediacy makes them more concerned about having something to post to YouTube or tweet than they are about finding meaning, or something else, or some combination, I'm not sure, but I know I lean in certain directions.

I've thought about writing some sort of article or making some sort of video about how to read games, and using Gravity Bone as an example because that game more than most rewards reading it as a game specifically in so many instances, but, well, obviously I haven't gotten around to it yet.

* This is a bad way of putting the point. Every game gives you something to chew on, even mindless, stupid games. Stupid movies and books give you things to think about too. I've seen tons of interesting stuff written about Transformers and Twilight. But of course games like TFoL and Spec Ops invite more active intellectual participation from the person playing than something like Quake 3 invites.

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Very interesting thoughts, Tycho. You've pretty much got your article right there :)

Anyway, this is making me return to Gravity Bone right away, since I never finished it. I couldn't figure out how to negotiate the window sills i n the second level.

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Damn those flagpoles are fucking annoying >_< That's a bad bit of shit right there.

Finish! I was seriously pissed off about the flagpole jumping, which took me some twenty loads to get right. The problem was that my laptop choked on that bit of level and you need to jump onto the pole itself, whereas the knob of the pole (we're getting into porn territory here) was constantly glowing and shining - making you believe you had to jump there to latch onto it or something. Combine that bad signposting with a with louse framerate and that's a recipe for extreme frustration. I'll tell you, I didn't expect to enjoy this game anymore after that. I was too worked up, too agitated. I hated it.

Then there was a bit where I

stepped on a table full of food, shattering every glass in my way,

and that made me smile again and the game still won me over in the end. It wasn't a full pleasure though, thank jupiter that TFoL didn't have any horrible jumping bits in them. Fuck me.

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This conversation needs to end. It has completely derailed a thread about a really cool THING that bears discussion in its own right entirely aside from the word used to describe the category of thing it is.

But that's The Idle Thumbs Way

Edit: Panic over, we're talking about Gravity Bone now. *phew!*

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I wonder how much a recorded gameplay stream differs from an unrecorded session. When I see people breezing past rooms in Let's Play TFOL videos, I figure I'd probably do something similar were it me being recorded, and I'm the guy who spent several minutes poring through Gordon Freeman's locker in Half-life 1 (why does he have a baby picture? Whose baby is that???).

But I also do think part of it is because of game vocabulary and expectations. In my game Quadrilateral Cowboy, there are sticky notes and signs and objects that give hints and tutorials. When I demoed Quadrilateral Cowboy at PAX, a fair amount of these signposts were missed - partly because they need some work, but general feedback I got was that people assumed the signposts were decorations and incidental details.

TFOL is able to get away with it because recognizing the world details are not required to finish the game.

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Forcing people to come to terms with the scale of world they have to interact with is weird, when it's anything other than "doors 2x taller than you, and guys you shoot." I imagine that if you force them into a room where they have to look around for little signs and stuff to get into the next room, they will be more inclined to consider items of that scale important later?

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It would probably make sense, in that case, to make some kind of primary input that reinforces that looking at details is going to be important. Like on the cast, you mentioned Miasmata's primary input pulls up a compass and watch, and, I think similarly, in Portal 2 the scroll wheel zooms in, which really clearly says you're going to need to examine things either in close detail or at a great distance. I think you already do that in TFoL with the whole press E to look thing, so I dunno, if people are still missing that maybe their expectations are just already skewed.

I probably sound like a jerk for saying this, but I think it's fascinating and delightful that Brendon (or should I say you? I don't know if this is going to be a second-person type conversation) posted process images of what amounts to a pretty simple doodle, the kind of thing that I feel like most people would just do in one final pass to pass the time. I dunno, I actually appreciate that sort of stuff a lot. Your (his? Argh if he didn't appear in the thread pronoun choice would be so easy) drawings and assets aren't technically impressive masterpieces in the classic sense of the word, but do actually have a process and weren't just magically concocted into existence in one deft stroke of the artist's brush.

I'm certain it will never amount to anything as interesting and meaningful, but that's kind of what I have in mind with keeping a so-called development diary of my own game engine tinkering. Because I guess most tutorialized stuff you see is by people who have really honed their craft almost to a formula and basically know it inside-and-out, and probably don't remember what it feels like not to have been good or know what they're doing. It's probably totally inappropriate for me to compare me keeping a diary of falling repeatedly on my face trying to make a trivial Source SDK compile run a stock map to you (Brendon) drawing a nice little picture of Anita relaxing, but whatever, that's my thoughts.

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I wonder if the lack of literacy in games today is at all related to how much more mainstream video games have become. I always hear discussions about how video games in the 80s and 90s--a time when fewer people in general played games--were much more challenging (I didn't play many games besides Crazy Taxi in the 90s, so I can't really say if games were harder than or not, so if anyone wants to interject here, please do). Today, video games are much more mainstream, and the bigger games at least, are constantly trying to appeal to a wider audience who might have limited video game experience and therefore lack game literacy. If you're trying to appeal to the widest audience possible, it makes sense to put a lot of tutorials in your game and effectively tell the player how to play the game. People can't develop a game literacy, because the game actively won't let them.

With the rise of indie games like TFoL, which doesn't need to appeal to as wide an audience as say a Dead Space 3, you can get away with putting more complicated challenges in the game that people need to actually pay attention to in order to figure out. But if you're used to playing a typical 'big' game, you might not have the patience or even ability to correctly read a game like TFoL, because you've never been taught to while playing a game.

Maybe this is completely off base or really obvious, but I think this is what's causing the problem of game illiteracy.

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Forcing people to come to terms with the scale of world they have to interact with is weird, when it's anything other than "doors 2x taller than you, and guys you shoot." I imagine that if you force them into a room where they have to look around for little signs and stuff to get into the next room, they will be more inclined to consider items of that scale important later?

This is basically what Antichamber is all about.

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I wonder if the lack of literacy in games today is at all related to how much more mainstream video games have become. I always hear discussions about how video games in the 80s and 90s--a time when fewer people in general played games--were much more challenging (I didn't play many games besides Crazy Taxi in the 90s, so I can't really say if games were harder than or not, so if anyone wants to interject here, please do). Today, video games are much more mainstream, and the bigger games at least, are constantly trying to appeal to a wider audience who might have limited video game experience and therefore lack game literacy. If you're trying to appeal to the widest audience possible, it makes sense to put a lot of tutorials in your game and effectively tell the player how to play the game. People can't develop a game literacy, because the game actively won't let them.

With the rise of indie games like TFoL, which doesn't need to appeal to as wide an audience as say a Dead Space 3, you can get away with putting more complicated challenges in the game that people need to actually pay attention to in order to figure out. But if you're used to playing a typical 'big' game, you might not have the patience or even ability to correctly read a game like TFoL, because you've never been taught to while playing a game.

Maybe this is completely off base or really obvious, but I think this is what's causing the problem of game illiteracy.

I dunno, I think it's unfair to call people nowadays games-illiterate. If you go back to the early days of video games, you had these really challenging games, and of course you still had pretty simple stuff like Pong and Tetris, but a much, much greater proportion of people fell below even the ability or desire to play a game at all, regardless of the challenge. I think game literacy, as it were, is at an all-time high, but the highly literate class of players is proportionately much smaller than the overall player base, and the poorly-literate population is just really big now.

Maybe we're just thinking of different ideas of illiterate. I'm thinking, it's not fair to call someone game illiterate if they have experience and understanding of how to play a video game. There's a difference between picking up the sports page and reading Mason & Dixon, sure, but it's still literacy.

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There are at least 3 or 4 conceptions of "illiterate" floating around here, which is my fault because I did not go through any trouble to make it clear what I was talking about when I introduced games illiteracy.

The first fundamental distinction is between "understanding how to interact with the game" and "understanding what you get out of a game when you interact with it." The former idea concerns the ability to, for instance, play a first person game and look at the things you want to look at without having to consciously think about moving the mouse, or the ability to play a platformer and time your jumps and so on so as to overcome the obstacles. The former idea relies on things like hand-eye coordination, muscle memory, and spacial reasoning, and it's the sort of thing people get good at just by playing games. People who are "illiterate" with respect to games in the first sense are just bad at making the game work, and thus they often can't make things happen that they want to make happen. This is probably the closest to the traditional definition of illiteracy when it comes to text: you literally cannot read something in a book, and thus you just can't make it happen. Lots of people are games illiterate in this first sense because they don't play a lot of games.

The second sense ("understanding what you get out of a game when you interact with it") can also be broken down into two parts. The first part is "understanding what a game says by way of understanding how a game says it" and the second part is "understanding how to interpret any text/work of art" (I use "text" as a generic name for things we interpret but that's just a personal quirk - games aren't texts in the literal sense). The first sense concerns what some people see as the only real way to "read" a game, which is to read a game as specifically a game, interactive systems and all, and look at what the game does insofar as it's a game to deliver a message. People are literate or illiterate with respect to this first sense to the extent that they can interpret interaction not just in the base, mechanical sense (you push a button to do X in the game) but in a meaningful sense (having the player push the button makes them feel X). People who are illiterate in the very first sense of the term (see the previous paragraph) are likely to be illiterate in this second sense of the term. Because they lack the skills to pull off most game interactions, they're going to have trouble interpreting the meaning of a lot of game interactions. Because games involve the player in producing the message, you can't be literate with respect to games in this sense without having a lot of empathy or, more obviously, having the ability to make the games work yourself (by playing them).

Then there's the second sense of illiterate in this second distinction (so, the third sense of illiteracy) which is not being able to read texts in general and thus not being so great at reading games. People who aren't used to talking about how movies say things with their palette or their camera shots or their lighting or their pacing, or who aren't used to talking about how novels say things with their plotting or their diction or whatever, are presumably not going to be so great at talking about how games say things with their level design and user interface and so on (they also won't be so great at interpreting a game's plot in the normal, "X said Y and this means Z" sense either). This third kind of illiteracy will make it tough for anyone to analyze a game no matter how literate they are in the first two senses, because you can be an amazing gamer in the first two senses but largely blind to what games actually say. Everyone is an amazing movie watcher (you just have to stare at the screen) and most people can read, but this doesn't mean everyone is good at interpreting (or just "reading") film or literature.

This is likely more complicated than I'm making it out to be and also much simpler than my explanation makes it sound. If that makes sense.

But the short version is: the majority of the populace is bad at playing games because they don't play games. Because they are bad at playing games, they are bad at reading games, because reading a game typically requires having some knowledge of what it is to play the game. Finally, they are bad at reading games because they are also bad at reading film and literature, and gamers too are bad at these things so really it doesn't matter that everyone is bad at the first two things. Which is not to say that getting better at the first two wouldn't help anyone. Film critics would probably get a shitton out of playing Thirty Flights of Loving if they were able to absorb the narrative for what it is rather than wander around in confusion because they can't control the character, they don't understand that they can "Use" things in a video game, etc. Good film critics are likely games illiterate in the first two senses but not in the third.

This is one reason I like Twine games so much. Almost nobody can be Twine illiterate because the skills required are pretty much just "click on words and read stuff." I think Twine is, for the near future at least, the way to go if anyone wants to make the case for "games can say things" to a non-gamer, because a game they can play that isn't coated in a thick layer of impenetrable "learn how to use a gamepad and navigate a complex three dimensional world" is going to let them bring their interpretive skills to bear immediately.

Although I do remember Jake or Sean tweeting about a conversation they had with their mom about The Walking Dead, and the tweet was something like "I'm glad I make games that my mom can talk to me about," the point being that The Walking Dead doesn't really force you to learn much game shit either. The third person perspective helps massively, I imagine, as does the relative lack of time pressure in anything other than the QTE parts, which are pretty easy to learn.

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