Idle Thumbs 85: "An Indulgent Dateline" or "An Indulgent Episode Title"

[Badfinger]

The discussion of whether Halo 4 is a good/fun game reminds me of some of the comments made by Lead Designer Walt Williams on Spec Ops on one of the spoiler casts done for that game. He said something along the lines of "The opposite of fun in video games isn't UNFUN, the opposite of fun is BROKEN. The game stops being fun when it doesn't work." He was talking about thinking about is the game "engaging" rather than is it "fun". So if the game is competently made but you feel unfavorably about your time with it then it didn't engage you. I don't think about that all the time, I do like having rad explosion fun often, but I do reflect on it from time to time listening to people talk about, and talking about, games.

Totally agree with Chris and Jake about being frustrated with overwrought stories in games, especially as part of the larger trend of trying to turn everything into a franchise and stapling the hero's journey over everything. Sometimes it comes from an outright patronizing view of the audience, but sometimes it's also just a lack of confidence in focusing on what they're good at.

And on a side-note, canon/lore is the worst thing to happen to popular entertainment in the last half-century—and I say this as someone who owned the Star Trek Encyclopedia as a teenager. It's become completely disgusting and is even starting to turn me off back-stories in general in media. Like, I reflexively flinch.

p.s. game boat is real and the real product listing is amazing.

The Bombcast this week came to the realization that Halo, Assassin's Creed, and Mass Effect are all exactly the same game with different presentations. It's frightening. And like them, I don't know if I can do better but I know someone out there who is good at writing could do a better job. Not everything is a hero's journey.

[Sno]

They were mostly going off on the commonality of the abusive precursors thing, which has for a long time already been a ridiculously common trope in sci-fi and fantasy.

Assassin's Creed is kind of an edge case there, though Halo and Mass Effect do have weirdly a lot in common, but they're both pulling from a lot of well established tropes.

[I_smell]

I laughed out loud at the image of the words "GAME BOAT" on the box. Cos like "GAME HEADPHONES" or "GAME MOUSE" might make some kind of sense, because games use those, but what horrible shade of reality are we living in where I'm looking at a BOAT for my VIDEO GAMES???

"I was thinking you could move your Xbox to the study."

"No, no, the game boat will never fit in there."

"I thought I'd play this new game on the weekend, but I couldn't find my boat."

Oh then I also laughed out loud at the description and how blatantly stupid it is.

EDIT- I obviously can't stop thinking about this, but the hilarious thing is that the boat doesn't do anything. So I imagine someone playing Kinect Adventures, and then getting the Game Boat, and then playing Kinect Adventures the EXACT SAME WAY but with a boat under their feet. "Why did I buy this?"

[BigJKO]

This was excellent. Kirk "Delicious Dish" Hamilton was an excellent guest.

[Gormongous]

Yeah, I was impressed how well "The Dish" fit in with the regular podcast crew.

[pabosher]

Yeah, Kirk was a great guest. Good job guys.

[feelthedarkness]

My favorite "frenetic game" is the original Painkiller. (also my favorite FPS)

No quick or regular saves, only check points, but always placed right before or after an event. They'd refill all your health and ammo which in effect primed you for absolute recklessness. I'm surprised this isn't more standard because it's an invitation to have MAXIMUM FUN. They also used this as an opportunity to dump much more than the average number of units. 10-20 squishy jerks at a time.

That team's other game Hard Reset does it to, but robots are sadly a little less satisfying to mulch.

[Max Ernst]

They were mostly going off on the commonality of the abusive precursors thing, which has for a long time already been a ridiculously common trope in sci-fi and fantasy.

Assassin's Creed is kind of an edge case there, though Halo and Mass Effect do have weirdly a lot in common, but they're both pulling from a lot of well established tropes.

See, this is why I really enjoy the narratives that have been written by Chris Avellone (Black Isle, Obsidian). He makes a strong point of not having the character save the world, and instead tries to write his stories in two different ways: an introspective journey in which the protagonist learns about themselves in relation to the world around them (Planescape: Torment), or the protagonist simply acting in a very small role of a much larger social/historical movement (Fallout: New Vegas).

Also, its cool that Chris can look past the plot/characters bullshit and enjoy the mechanics of Halo. As much as I enjoy the encounters in the game, without the narrative motivating me to continue, I soon lose interest. Halo is great game if you want to witness storytelling at its absolute worst. Gross pandering bullshit, insipid dialogue, shoehorned story beats that are stick out because they are obviously there to justify set pieces, and flat, lifeless characters. The annoying thing is, between all of these moments, the encounter dynamics are really, really interesting. So I might try Chris' method and just skip every cutscene.

[Sno]

I'm a little confused, I don't really see what it was in my post that is relevant to what you're saying here. You might prefer the direction those stories go in, but they are no less immersed in well worn tropes.

I'm guessing you're more speaking to the line of conversation about so much of everything else specifically being a "hero's journey."

[Max Ernst]

Yeah, I am very tired and bad at forums.

[deptchargeeng]

Gahahahahaha YES!

Also, about this weeks podcast:

1.) Totally digging the new, tighter wizard a capella stinger. It sounds super sweet.

2.) Love Chris's analogizing a certain type of play to practicing music. Astute, hilarious metaphor.

3.) Kirk "Delicious Dish" Hamilton is an awesome guest. He's funny, smart, excellent at explaining his viewpoint on things beyond "that was good" or "that was super rad", and I think he fits in perfectly with the Idle Thumbs guys. I really hope you guys have Kirk again in the future. He's a rad dude.

[Henroid]

From the latest trailer for Far Cry 3.

Take that IGN.com!

[Henroid]

Apparently Jeff Gerstmann said of the Far Cry 3 protagonist and his friends, "They deserve to be sold into slavery or killed." I'm still looking up the actual direct quote but the sentiment is enough for me to say that is fucking disgusting of him.

I get that "bro" characters are usually dumb, but that's ridiculous and tasteless.

[Merus]

I listened to Chris' discussion of the elemental nature of the Covenant with great interest, not having played much Halo, as it reminded me of one of my all time favourite puzzle games, DROD. In that game, each of the enemies you have to kill to advance have very simple behaviours, and the puzzles come from the interplay between their behaviours and the room design. Complex enemies in the DROD series are less interesting because there's only one "right" way to approach them, as they effortlessly counter everything else; simpler enemies, in inconvenient combinations, support multiple tactics. This lets the developers make interesting encounters out of the same pieces simply by using them in different ways, changing the tactics required.

[I_smell]

Apparently Jeff Gerstmann said of the Far Cry 3 protagonist and his friends, "They deserve to be sold into slavery or killed." I'm still looking up the actual direct quote but the sentiment is enough for me to say that is fucking disgusting of him.

I get that "bro" characters are usually dumb, but that's ridiculous and tasteless.

It was the Far Cry 3 Quick Look, in like the first 10 minutes, and a couple times later on. He basically says "This Voss guy's a real villain... but oh god all these characters who're on your side are the FUCKIN WORST! ...I'm with Voss, these people SHOULD be sold into slavery!"

He's joking about how much he doesn't like the characters and not really taking a political stance on things, but yeah in the context of tourists actually getting kidnapped and held hostage in real life that's not a suitable punchline for anything anywhere.

[Badfinger]

Apparently Jeff Gerstmann said of the Far Cry 3 protagonist and his friends, "They deserve to be sold into slavery or killed." I'm still looking up the actual direct quote but the sentiment is enough for me to say that is fucking disgusting of him.

I get that "bro" characters are usually dumb, but that's ridiculous and tasteless.

It was ridiculous and tasteless. And purposefully hyperbolic, which made it over the top and funny.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Chris' point about how he wishes games like Halo could just be like a sport, without all the arcane lore shoehorned into them in the form of cutscenes all the time, struck a chord with me. I simultaneously would love it and hate it if games went in that direction.

So, on the one hand, I would love it. Multiplayer only games are of course quite good at leaving narrative by the wayside, and things like Warsow or Quake III Arena are to me stupendous in part because they're pared down to the heart of the gameplay, with zero fat. The original Doom and Duke Nukem 3D were like this as well - a perfunctory story that had zero impact on the game. Meanwhile we have games like Thirty Flights of Loving or The Walking Dead which realize that they are about the narrative and don't force you to collect 12 items or shoot 18 people to advance the story or whatever. So I really like the idea of games that are about mechanics just narrowing down and focusing on the mechanics, while games that are about stories should feel free to just discard most of what we think of as "gameplay" as long as it's not integral to the story. Like, obviously Hotline Miami or BioShock couldn't get rid of the gameplay and tell the same story (BioShock could ditch a lot of it actually) but this doesn't mean that every interactive story needs a game and certainly every game doesn't need a story.

But... on the other hand, I really like seeing the narratives that get tacked onto these things. Typically they are somewhere between "awful" and "bullshit" on the quality scale, often with a good dose of "offensive" and "morally bad" (like when Cortana gets turned into a voluptuous purple player-worshipping naked purple lady) but this is all just trashy grist for my interpretative mill. Like whatever stupid story they've stuck in the Transformers movie or in Avatar or even in The Avengers (despite Joss Whedon's best attempts to make that interesting), the stories people tell with these games intrigue me not because they're amazing but because in their own way they can also reveal little chunks of the human condition. Typically the narrative itself doesn't say much of anything, but the meta-narrative, the process of "look, we need a story for this Assassin's Creed game, what are we going to do" is often fun to think about. What does it mean that they didn't feel like they could just straight up make a game where you played an Assassin killing Templars? Is the sci-fi stuff an excuse to have walls around parts of the city to gate your progress? Do they think their audience can't relate to characters in history and will need Desmond, the Generic White Man, to play as if they're going to stay involved? By couching the narrative in science fiction are they hoping to avoid controversy?

That's not quite accurate, though, because as interesting as I find those questions, I find it even more interesting to just straight up think about game narratives as I would think about any other narrative, even if the game isn't exactly Shakespeare. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 are actually pretty good for this. The plot is straight up bullshit but there are nuances you can read into it, just because it's a story and in a story there is always interpretative leeway. Do the games deserve the effort I put in to thinking about what they say? Maybe not - maybe Halo isn't really stepping up to the plate and giving me enough to think about. But I often find that I can make a Delicious "Kirk Hamilton" Dish out of the ingredients I'm given, even if they're not the greatest ingredients.

PS Waking Mars got Greenlit.

[Justin Leego]

Do they think their audience can't relate to characters in history and will need Desmond, the Generic White Man, to play as if they're going to stay involved?

You know, for the first two and a bit Assassin's Creeds, I managed to convince myself that Desmond was at the very least of mixed race ethnicity. In the same vein, it was a tad disappointing to learn that the Dead Space Marine Isaac wasn't a Dead Space Marine of color. But maybe that's just me.

Come to think of it, maybe I've been the one racially profiling video game protagonists based on nothing more but their forenames. That's a concerning quirk, but what's more, I never would have expected a pair of major label games to have been the ones to highlight it.

PS Waking Mars got Greenlit.

Yesss!!

[CaptainFish]

Desmond isn't of mixed race? Isn't that like necessary based on the protagonists of the previous games?

As for games without narrative, it's interesting when you look at early fighting games how they were pretty much given just enough plot for the game to make sense. We want a variety of fighters and styles, so we'll make it an international tournament. And that's pretty much as far as it goes. Every time they bolt on more story, it seems just for the express purpose of adding on more mechanics (superheroes having a more bombastic fighting style), bringing in more characters or new levels to fight on.

However when you make a fps or strategy game, developers put that conflict front and center. Rather than just story telling between missions, the action is literally stopped so that characters can have conversations and drive the narrative. I'd say it's because the 'developers' (using quotes to include anyone who can influence the development) believe that the mechanics aren't strong enough to drive interest alone, but that is the opposite of the case in the multiplayer, which is often a more gripping and compelling experience for a lot of players, just based on time played.

[Sno]

There are definitely fighting games that go to great lengths to tell a convoluted story, and you see a thing like MK9 even being praised for breaking up its action with a ton of cutscenes. First person shooters have so much story in them because it's what people want. (Also, frequently, it seems to be what the developers want.)

Okay, but for games that break it down to the barest essentials, I'm definitely reminded of Quake 3. (And specifically not UT, which still has a ton of dumb fiction behind it.)

Quake 3 has essentially no context to it, it's a game that broke down everything to the very basest of elements, as far as a retail game could reasonably get away with. You know, and then you'd see pro players take it even further. You would see people who would mod the game so that they were seeing naked level geometry with uniform lighting, while clearly visible hitboxes bounded around throwing sprites at eachother.

If you take it that far, i feel like you can lose something. A little context is important, even Chess is ostensibly a war game. When i play Halo, i don't give a shit about the Chief's personal journey, but i enjoy that there is a universe there to give literally any context to my actions.

Still, specifically on Halo again, the idea of the campaign experience without the story, Reach's firefight mode was pretty phenomenal. A superb survival mode with an unprecedented level of flexibility. You had the ability to set up custom rules to modify waves and their enemy composition, adjust scoring mechanics, have skulls be enabled and disabled on the fly, define loadouts for the players, or even set it up so that you could have somebody playing with the AI's against the other players who are trying to survive.

It's not in Halo 4 though, instead there's an episodic co-op campaign that has so far proven to be nothing more than Firefight stripped of its scoring system and customizable rules, with only pretty CG cutscenes to fill the gap. It feels like they took firefight and gutted it so they could cram a story into it.

[Justin Leego]

Desmond isn't of mixed race? Isn't that like necessary based on the protagonists of the previous games?

You're right. But I had hoped for bolder steps in III, for a historical avatar that wasn't merely a convenient excuse for kills; something closer to the more daring choice in AC Liberation that leads players to question the basies for racial, economic, and gender divides both historical and modern (if I understood Evan Narcisse's Kotaku article correctly*). Something that would make AC more of an uncomfortable, illuminating and, through player involvement, edifying social commentary than a polished rationale for buying the next game in 12 months' time.

*http://www.kotaku.com/5957411/im-surprised-by-how-black-assassins-creed-liberation-feels

[I_smell]

I've not played Assassin's Creed 3, but surely it's some kind of big deal for the whole game that the guy is native American, right?

[Henroid]

I'm not sure it's mattering one way or the other. There was this very very brief moment of "HMMMMM" when the trailer came out regarding him raising a tomahawk in the air before presumably scalping someone, but it went away and I haven't seen it since. Nor has there really been a, "Finally, a Native American protagonist!" cry.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I'm not sure about crying or anything and I haven't played AC3 but I know they got a legitimately Native American voice actor for the character which is pretty stupendous and his name (Ratonhnhaké:ton) is also admirably authentic. When I said Desmond was a generic white protagonist I didn't mean to imply that he had pasty skin or didn't have any races other than Caucasian in his ancestry (because obviously he's related to Altaïr). What I meant was that culturally he's interchangeable with the protagonist of any other uninteresting Space Marine narrative - he's a trendy bartender from America who speaks with an American voice and has that buzz cut that every game hero has. Of course if you go back far enough his ancestors aren't blond haired blue eyed Aryans but that's hardly necessary for a protagonist to be "generic white dude" in your game. He's from South Dakota and his main distinguishing characteristic is that he has none.

[Triforce of Liberty]

You guys totally paved over Hitman L _L