Idle Thumbs 77: Our Neighbor Scoops

[Gormongous]

I loved the brief discussion on Oregon Trail and its educational potential. The benefit to be gained from allowing students to learn by interacting with authentically constructed systems, rather than just by flinging facts at them, is enormous in my opinion. Of course, it gets more difficult when history retreats into the increasingly undocumented swaths of time before the Renaissance, but that makes the few successful attempts really stand out.

Case in point: King of Dragon Pass. Yeah, I know it has duck people and the like, but playing that for a few nights accurately recreated a variety of things I'd spent months wrapping my head around from high-level scholarly monographs on early Germanic culture by names like Wolfram and Thompson. The cherry on the cake came when I realized my tribes had been self-destructing because my secular twenty-first century ass was ignoring sacrifices and magical spells in favor of concrete things like agricultural development and cattle-raiding, which would naturally have horrified almost any member of Western society prior to the seventeenth century.

Really, there are far too many historical games, most of all Paradox's grand strategy games, that fail to model properly the utter irrelevancy of the rational actor in history and politics, if only through systems working at cross purposes. Myself, I would love a game that had you manage a medieval monastery, taking in oblates and electing abbots, acquiring land and giving out benefices, playing the local bishop off the local lord, trying all the while to balance economic imperatives with personal and spiritual goals. It's one of many underappreciated yet crucial aspects of history, and games have the most apt tools to address it.

Edit: I don't mean to make King of Dragon Pass sound like a boring exercise in academics. It's got this awesome sense of organic and intuitive discovery that strongly encourages roleplaying on a level few games manage. It's just that said roleplaying also happens to have a great deal of verisimilitude with Bronze- and Iron-Age European culture, which gives my nerd heart thrills and chills.

[Nappi]

I think Tropico is kind of along the lines of what I'm thinking about, where one of your goals is explicitly to embezzle funds from your island dictatorship and one of your key sources of funds is to manipulate aid from foreign powers by pandering to them. It's not how you're supposed to run an island paradise, but it's how it works in practice, and by carefully modelling it you're reflecting the legitimacy everyone says they're not giving this in the real world.

Tropico is a very interesting game in that respect. My goal was always to make the lives of the inhabitants as comfortable as possible given the circumstances. I soon found out that this is achieved by building lots of mines and/or tobacco, coffee and sugar plantations early on. When that investment started paying off, I could focus on the necessary infrastructure to support my petty society.

In fact, one of my most memorable video game moments was in Tropico 3: My economy was booming, relatively speaking anyway, and I had a serious shortage of work force. To solve this problem, I issued an open doors policy in my immigration office. The nationalist faction soon grew pissed because of the filthy foreigners had stolen their work and women, or whatever. The situation got quite bad. Finally, my advisor Penultimo suggested that I should issue an order of rebranding all the immigrants with local names, so that the nationalist wouldn't know who to hate anymore. I agreed to this plan and it actually worked perfectly... for a while. The immigrants were absolutely enraged.

Now all of this was obviously scripted as hell and presented in quite a goofy way. Still, I was completely shocked to discover how easy it was for me to strip a large group of people of their identity just to silence a bunch of dickheads. Like I said, I always tried to think what was the best for my people. Still, I somehow had managed to distance myself of the hundred or so inhabitants of the island enough that it didn't even occur to me how sick and gruel the plan I had agreed on was.

I don't know if this was what the developers had aimed for. It was very impressive nevertheless.

[soggybagel]

This is a good point! You should email it to [email protected]

I will! But I'll try to edit it a bit so its less rambling and more succinct.

[Codicier]

Id agree Tropico is a pretty reasonable example.

Looking further back I'd argue there was at least one huge selling selling game series that had in parts both elements of the satirical and of parody, and that's the "Theme" series of games (In particular Theme Hospital).

but both the above are probable edge cases, for full no holds bar satire http://www.molleindustria.org/ is pretty much 100% gold(blum).

Unmanned is probably their most well known game, it's aim is to get across some of the mundanity of modern remote warfare. Its certainly not perfect but in terms of a game which is pretty much wholly satire it's harder to think of a better example.

[brkl]

Satire is Groucho Marx making The Great Dictator

[Badfinger]

I no longer have any idea how "old" I am relative to the internet anymore.

[Ravenlock]

I don't know where No One Lives Forever fits, exactly, but you guys brought up Monolith so it deserves to be mentioned. I thought it did a pretty great job of sending up both form and content while still being a very well made game.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I no longer have any idea how "old" I am relative to the internet anymore.

I think the "old guy holding up his finger" thing is to point out that Groucho Marx didn't make The Great Dictator.

[brkl]

It was actually Harpo Marx.

[twmac]

As much as I enjoy hearing Klepek. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't the real Hot Scoops on the podcast.

[Security_Tubbs]

As much as I enjoy hearing Klepek. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't the real Hot Scoops on the podcast.

I felt disappointed as well. I was fully expecting a full load of hot scoops to be cast right into my awaiting face, but what I got was lukewarm at best.

[BurnQuack]

Not sure if you guys have yet but if not you guys should play/talk about "Organ Trail"

Oregon trail but with zombies.

Picture because I love this games art style.

[Badfinger]

I think the "old guy holding up his finger" thing is to point out that Groucho Marx didn't make The Great Dictator.

Oh god dammit I was even having a conversation about Charlie Chaplin earlier this week. And then I read my post. And then I read your post.

How the hell did Groucho Marx get in my brain?

um.... The Great Dictator is satire though at least?

[TurboPubx-16]

Awesome episode guys! Shoutout to Odell Lake!

[Problem Machine]

The discussion of Torchlight as like a more fairy tale version of Diablo, combined with being in the process of reading Cloud Atlas and having read Sandman in the past, gave me the idea for a game where essentially what if that was LITERALLY the case? Like maybe Torchlight was the story told about the earlier, darker, legend of Diablo, which in turn was a retelling of an even stranger and darker a tale. So a game where you play through a light fairy tale, and then when you succeed in that you unlock the next difficulty which is the earlier legend, and so forth until perhaps you get to a real event.

I doubt I'll ever try to make that one unless I get another idea that feeds into it, but it's a fun one to think about. Definitely some shades of Binding of Isaac there too.

[Henroid]

I disagree with the notion that Torchlight had the same sort of intimacy that Diablo did. The settings every few floors in Torchlight would change rather nonsensically. I mean, even for a whimsical version of Diablo (which is a pretty apt description). Though to be fair, if that third area (the water temple) wasn't in, it would've flowed much better.

Edit - But another point of contention on that is how *vast* each floor is in Torchlight. I mean yeah, there's a lot more to do, but in Diablo the space being relatively small meant balancing each encounter with enemies to be harder. You were fighting for each step taken. That aspect was lost in Torchlight.

[Problem Machine]

I really like the water temple tileset, but it actually would have been cool if they relegated it entirely to special areas. It would have made it seem even more wild and exotic.

Something I really liked in Diablo was how each floor's random generation was a little different. The catacombs was by far the most granular, which meant that it had far more weird little corner piece configurations and dead ends than the other tilesets. But the catacombs was basically my favorite part of the game anyway, and the music for it still gives me chills sometimes. Everyone loves the town music, and rightly so, but the catacombs theme deserves just as much celebration.

[Henroid]

Full agreement on the Catacombs music. Or just in general, it was the best setting in Diablo. It had the right blend of having tightness to the rooms and corridors while still allowing you to see complete darkness down the way, and shadows moving about. The Caves actually could have hit it if it was generally tunnels you navigated, too. The claustrophobic feeling would've been paramount. It being a generally open room really sapped any menace there was to the place.

[Urthman]

Did Cow Clicker actually make money by using the evil Zynga methods it was trying to satirize? There's no way to know, but I'd guess that most people purchasing Cow Clicker transactions were basically giving Ian Bogost a tip for making such a good satire, not because they actually got hooked by the cow clicking.

"Prime numbers: IT'S WHAT COMPUTERS CRAVE!"

[SecretAsianMan]

Did Sean's GDC talk that almost was ever get posted?

[vimes]

Did Cow Clicker actually make money by using the evil Zynga methods it was trying to satirize? There's no way to know, but I'd guess that most people purchasing Cow Clicker transactions were basically giving Ian Bogost a tip for making such a good satire, not because they actually got hooked by the cow clicking.

Apparently, most user didn't perceive the satire http://kotaku.com/5846080/the-life+changing-20-rightward+facing-cow

[radaxian]

The Simpsons game comes to mind in the satire/parody discussion. This game presents players with levels based on spoofs of various games but fails to actually do anything with it other than say "hey, isn't it funny how games provide players with repetitive tasks based on simple mechanics? Games sure are dumb". This alone is not particularly insightful or interesting. Presenting the very same tropes and simply pointing out that you've done so does not make for an interesting experience.

Another example of the game's attempt at parody is through their use of achievements on the 360. They made choices like this:

Press START to Play

Easiest achievement...ever

5

which is amusing and an observation about the stupidity of achievements in general. However most of the rest of them are typical collectibles and time trial challenges:

Dufftacular Finish

Find all of Homer's Duff Bottle Caps

50

Complete Package

Finish every episode, find every collectible, and discover every Video Game Cliché Moment

150

The extent of the achievement parody is mostly limited to a nod of self awareness through some of the achievement names. They are otherwise suggesting players go through and do exactly the same things. It would seem to me there was a missed opportunity to make the collectible hunts so far fetched they're impractical etc. In reality the designers probably didn't have much scope for true parody given the mainstream audience and expectations surrounding a title like this. Also Microsoft may limit the extent to which developers can mock the achievement system.

I imagine a Simpsons style scene with a row of people from the publisher wearing white scientists coats and standing behind one way glass looking into a room full of focus testers. One of the testers would observe: "Yep, you sure are wasting my time just like all those other games do. You've done it again Video games - you clever little devils. But back to the task at hand, where are the rest of those collectibles..." - which would result in high fives all around.

[Sully907]

Hey guys! guys!

Boss lens

[ysbreker]

How would you guys categorize Saints Row 3 (In relation to the satire/parody discussion)?

[Chris]

How would you guys categorize Saints Row 3 (In relation to the satire/parody discussion)?

I haven't played Saints Row 3 but everything I know about it suggests it is neither of those things, instead simply reveling in nonsense and outrageousness. That seems to be what its primary appeal is, from a tone standpoint.