Sean

Idle Thumbs 90: Passive But Deadly

Recommended Posts

I had to stop listening because that room escape sounds really cool and I live close enough to sf that I'm considering doing it. I'm not even typically a fan of the online room escapes that you tend to find, but something about actually being there is really appealing to me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That room escape sounds so awesome. The East Coast has a lot of really awesome things, but in my brain, somehow Seattle and San Francisco have all the WEIRD awesome things. Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre pales in comparison.

I do not actually own a copy of The Ship, but I am a proud owner of Bad Rats and can confirm the Bad Rats virus phenomenon. One of the things about that game is it's 4.99, but I'm pretty sure the copy I was gifted was on sale for 50 cents. The price slash they will do to move copies is insane.

Video Games Patron: I will sometimes buy games I know I'll probably never get back around to playing but were something I know I WOULD have played had I been fully cognizant and able to buy them at the time. I own the Thief series and Deus Ex because I should have played them. The original Thief is all but unplayble for me now but I feel good to own it on Steam.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Nick's appearance on this episode (on? in? why are both correct maybe?) made me kinda sad. He didn't seem to have any vigor or desire to say anything beyond talking about Tropico. Are you guys sure this was really Nick Breckon?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Nick's appearance on this episode (on? in? why are both correct maybe?) made me kinda sad. He didn't seem to have any vigor or desire to say anything beyond talking about Tropico. Are you guys sure this was really Nick Breckon?

Listen to the Book Club episode for this month for more Breckon.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I always thought "banana republic" referred specifically to countries where the government is basically a shell for American corporations (traditionally, a banana company, like Chiquita, infamous for paying death squads), so hearing Castro's Cuba referred to by that term was weird.

The discussion on procedural narrative is interesting, especially in relation to the Tropico discussion, because my first thought w/r/t successful procedural narrative was Crusader Kings II. By the standards the crew were talking about, CK2 is no such thing (the primary reason being it doesn't have dialogue), but what happens in CK2 nonetheless feels very much like procedural narrative: the events of the game basically systemically create Shakespearean plots (I wrote briefly about this here), with courtiers and generals and kings manipulating each other in attempts to gain power.

I think this gets at what the crew were talking about with Cart Life and how proceduralism only works for certain types of narratives. If narratives are about human relations, and proceduralism is about turning things into quantifiable systems, then procedural narrative requires turning human relations into numbers. I think we can all understand how this is inherently a dangerous thing to do--especially given (the idea that) most players optimize numeric systems at the expense of their own entertainment--and thus it's not surprising--maybe even inevitable--that the only successful procedural narratives are tragedies, and specifically tragedies of the failure of quantification: that is, Crusader Kings II, for example, is (in some ways) a game about being unable to see human beings as anything other than tools for conquering more territory, and the ultimate emptiness of that reality. Tropico is about accumulating wealth for yourself that you can never use: create an oppressive society for a high score.

They're like BioShock or Spec Ops, in a (much less direct) way: self-hating, mechanics trying to show you how evil the mechanics are. (Postmodernism, I suppose.) Is there a way for proceduralism to be positive? (I mean, outside of shit like Bioware relationships.)

I also wonder to what extent the problem is cultural. I mentioned above the idea that most players optimize numeric systems at the expense of their own entertainment--they take the path of least resistance even if resistance is what's fun. (A part of why a lot of people didn't get Far Cry 2, I think.) I say "the idea that..." because while the phenomenon is undoubtedly real, I think its influence is overstated, and I'm very curious to what degree it is (if at all). I mean, essentially that idea is saying that players are self-interested rational utility maximizers (homo economicus) except that (or rather and like that) they are compelled to maximize certain quantifiable goals presented by games even if that optimization is actually detrimental to their experience. And that's obviously not strictly true--I think it's not even remotely true--but I think there is a correlation between the kind of players who do tend toward that kind of play and high-feedback players (forum goers and the like) as well as developers (who want quantifiable things to measure about their game, especially in strategic games where "balance" is fetishized).

...I feel like my point has gotten away from me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Listen to the Book Club episode for this month for more Breckon.

I can do that. I actually haven't listened to any of the Book Club episodes because I am horrible and don't read, like ever. But I'll do it for Nick.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Crusader Kings doesn't have an explicit narrative, though. You create stories based on events that happen, rather than the other way around. It's a Historical Wackiness simulator. In theory if the constraints of the game allowed it, you don't even have to participate at all. If the person you'd chosen to dictate the choices of died without heirs, you could potentially continue to simulate the alternate reality to the end of the time frame.

http://lparchive.org/Crusader-Kings-2/ I am not much of a Let's Play guy, but I think historical simulators can be fascinating for that sort of thing. In that guy's playthrough, he takes what is literally a bug in the game (you can hold a tournament, which lasts for X months. Due to a glitch, the tournament did not end until his current character died like 15 years later) and turned it into a narrative touchstone in the story of the history he was telling.

In that way, I feel it's like the story of Miasmata the Thumbs were telling, in that noticing the detail of the non-shirted arms and the extremely detailed medicine bottles they created a character who was an 18th century naturalist nudist that I probably would not have created in my mind.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Crusader Kings doesn't have an explicit narrative, though. You create stories based on events that happen, rather than the other way around.

What would constitute an explicit narrative then? (Obviously part of the problem in these discussions is that "narrative" and "story" are such ambiguous terms.) I'm not talking about inventing stories based on what happens--I mean the direct, mechanical narrative of "the king's brother Claudius wanted to be king so he assassinated the king, but the old king's son Hamlet found out and assassinated Claudius in revenge but then some other courtier assassinated Hamlet and then Norway invaded and took over Denmark", which is totally a series of events and motivations that can occur in CK2 without any embellishment by the player. It's not Hamlet, sure, but that seems like a procedural narrative to me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Help! I don't have The Ship and I don't know what to do.

Yeah this is rediculous. There are so many people on Idle Thumbs that don't own this Steam Fruitcake yet. We need a plan, I'm happy to donate my steamfruitcake.com domain for this.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The talk about the real life room escape game and Cedar Point in the same cast reminded me that I should post this. It's called Wizard Quest. It's in Wisconsin, in a town that is 95% water parks at tourist shops (Wisconsin Dells...there's also a root-beers-of-the-world repository).

As the video above clearly shows, Wizard Quest is actually super fun, creepy little pixie statues included...especially when you've accidentally stumbled across Wisconsin Dells on a road trip at 2:00 in the morning in a thick fog while trying to find a motel near a national (or state?) park, as I did. (Imagine you've followed a GPS to a motel address, but it takes you to an abandoned field with a ramshackle barn. Terrifying. So you call the motel during a brief spike in phone reception and they give you better directions, and as you arrive 20 minutes later -- thinking there's nothing nearby but a national park, mind you -- you see looming up out of the mist, in succession, a dozen motels, then a giant statue of King Kong wrestling a Kraken on the roof of a building, and then suddenly, in the midst of it, you see something amazing and you scream "WIZARD QUEST"...we meant to visit the national park after all, but after clambering through all those secret tunnels the next day, we were pretty exhausted and were content to sample root beer instead).

So um. Yeah. I like things that are like Games. In real life.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Also, pst, you guys, are kinda still all press what with a popular podcast media empire you moonlight with...

Yeah, they get exclusive, hard-to-get review copies of The Ship!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What would constitute an explicit narrative then? (Obviously part of the problem in these discussions is that "narrative" and "story" are such ambiguous terms.) I'm not talking about inventing stories based on what happens--I mean the direct, mechanical narrative of "the king's brother Claudius wanted to be king so he assassinated the king, but the old king's son Hamlet found out and assassinated Claudius in revenge but then some other courtier assassinated Hamlet and then Norway invaded and took over Denmark", which is totally a series of events and motivations that can occur in CK2 without any embellishment by the player. It's not Hamlet, sure, but that seems like a procedural narrative to me.

An explicit narrative is what I guess I'd call the plot. Or something that ALWAYS happens. I'm not saying CK2 doesn't have a progression, or a cadence, or a logical series of events. I'm saying that Crusader Kings literally does not have a plot. You could potentially not do anything but maintain a single duchy for 400 years. You can make Crusader Kings into Hamlet, but you can't make Hamlet into Crusader Kings because Hamlet's father ALWAYS gets murdered by Claudius, and Ophelia ALWAYS drowns, etc. Hamlet is more like Call of Duty than CK2. You're just as likely to have positioned your spymaster in a good place, learn of the plot, ask Claudius to abandon it, forgive him, and arrange a marriage between your son and his daughter. Then it's not Hamlet anymore.

I suppose my position is that a procedural narrative isn't a story or a plot until you make it one.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

My ears perked up when Sean mentioned getting lost as a kid at Cedar Point because I grew up very near there in Ohio. I think I should mention a fairly Thumbs-y ride there that was recently closed called Disaster Transport. It was basically a late-80s/early-90s space-themed indoor bobsled rollercoaster with this ridiculous narrative surrounding it about attempting to deliver goods from a space station to Alaska when DISASTER strikes. (Lots of klaxons and lasers and strobe lights and that sort of thing.)

Why you were on a mission to Alaska and not Ohio always puzzled me as a kid, since you exit the building and there's Lake Erie.

Quoting from Wiki here:

The story of the ride was the passengers had been to deliver cargo from a suborbital factory to a station in Alaska. Large screen projections, simulated lasers, mist, and recordings were added to the ride. In the queue, guests would go through three rooms including Rocket Recovery, Mission Control and Repair Bay.

I remember there being this great sort of industrial, dirty-Tron motif in the queue where everything was lit with red lamps and black lights and these little animatronic sort of factory-style robots would ever so slowly rotate back and forth.

This is a pretty good example of what this all looked like.

Disaster_Transport_black_light_car.jpg

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's since been torn down, but it was awesome and funny and I thought you should know.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What's the other event in San Francisco Chris was talking about where they explored the city?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Nice discussion of Tropico 4. I like how it differs from the 3MA discussion where there was like this critique that the game is basically Che-Guevara-as-Santa-Claus, and it wasn't brutal enough in terms of having to put down political factions, and really capturing the difficult decisions a dictator has to make and distinguishing itself from a typical city builder. I kind of feel like that difference of opinion captures how both podcasts approach games.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I once accidentally locked myself out of my apartment with a pocketknife, the receiver to a cordless phone (which I had to be standing within ten feet of the door to use), a paper clip, and a debit card with seventy dollars on it. My brain immediately switched to Adventure game mode when I realized what I had done.

(it took me fourty minutes to get back in)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

(it took me fourty minutes to get back in)

I hope you also said out loud, "I can't use those things together," and "I can't reach it." every time you tried something.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I hope you also said out loud, "I can't use those things together," and "I can't reach it." every time you tried something.

Oops! You tried something we didn't think of!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

If narratives are about human relations, and proceduralism is about turning things into quantifiable systems, then procedural narrative requires turning human relations into numbers. I think we can all understand how this is inherently a dangerous thing to do--especially given (the idea that) most players optimize numeric systems at the expense of their own entertainment--and thus it's not surprising--maybe even inevitable--that the only successful procedural narratives are tragedies, and specifically tragedies of the failure of quantification: that is, Crusader Kings II, for example, is (in some ways) a game about being unable to see human beings as anything other than tools for conquering more territory, and the ultimate emptiness of that reality. Tropico is about accumulating wealth for yourself that you can never use: create an oppressive society for a high score.

They're like BioShock or Spec Ops, in a (much less direct) way: self-hating, mechanics trying to show you how evil the mechanics are. (Postmodernism, I suppose.) Is there a way for proceduralism to be positive? (I mean, outside of shit like Bioware relationships.)

I just don't think proceduralism is a problem, b/c I don't think it's different to what we've already been instinctively doing. We have the same discussions around authored buildings vs procedurally generated buildings in architecture too. I'll try and adapt the thinking from that realm to here. I could be very wrong but I’ll give it a whirl.

It feels a lot like a false dichotomy. Every architect or author has a set of internal beliefs about what constitutes a good windowsill or plot twists in a particular given situation. Their design/story instincts are rules. Very, very complex rules that are built by decades of observing the world & practice at their own craft. Give an author or an architect a scenario, and they’ll tell you what feels right. That logic is what I mean by rules.

So every person is a procedural narrative/architecture/art generator. The only difference between them and a program is our programs just aren't nearly as complex. They don't account for as many things about a character, or track as many variables. Authors account for many more things about characters than are typically tracked by variables, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be. I don’t think there’s a real difference between a person making decision about something (for instance, there’s lots of sun so we’ll make the window small) and coding that in a program that can then extrapolate that rule to other scenarios (There’s less sun so make the windows bigger).

Getting a generator to replace a good author would be super hard. eg. We know that particular architectural choices generate certain moods* but we don't know which, b/c it's extremely, extremely complex number of interactions between all the different elements. You could spend a lifetime writing a program, playtesting people's reactions to thousands of buildings, accounting for the variables and differences between them and the demographics of the people you're studying etc just to get the program to the point that a first year student is at, where it can look at its own drawing and say 'That looks solemn'.**

To me it looks like: Game mechanics are already procedural narrative generators. Just very, very simple ones.

Even the simplest game mechanics, say, Chess, creates a situation where each system in the game (pieces) has events happen to it. For us to call it a story, all that has to happen is certain systems become anthropomorphised. At this stage, it’s probably not a great story, at least in regards to the issues you’ve mentioned above - character motivation, character insight, prose etc. You can totally build and add those systems in. You can tie them to player actions.

But if you’re just trying to write one story, or even just a handful of story branches, it’s easier just to outsource that to pre-made set of complex rules in someone’s head and say “here, Author, you be the mechanic that overlays motivation and insight and prose and dialogue onto the possible outcomes of players interacting with our game mechanics, so we don’t have to spend the next 10 years writing a system complex enough to do it”. (we can do that b/c we limit system outcomes to the ones we want to write - within a certain range or you’re dead.)

If the game has just tons and tons of possible scenarios (or if say, you want to build an entire neighbourhood of houses, but you want each subtly adapted to its site) you might just want to write a procedurally generated narration and character dialogue program.

But here’s the thing, whether one outcome, or three, or millions, hand-written or procedurally generated, every game has a finite number of possible stories. Which is why it doesn’t feel that different from traditional game narrative to me. More part of a continuum than an opposite. Either in code or story design, someone has preset the outcomes for every possible player behaviour. Procedural stories are almost more like squishing a thousand games together.

Finally, I don’t think you need to worry about soullessness, at least, not more than with having an author. A thousand stories created by the same rules, if they’re good rules, like a thousand stories from the same head, if it’s a good head, will have a certain character to them. I think it’s a bit silly to worry that procedural narrative reduces characters to numbers, or turns a writer into ‘mere rules’. It’s like saying the universal is more meaningful if you don’t understand the rules that govern planetary movements, b/c it all seems like a beautiful mystery.

Only if you’re more in love with the feeling of mystery than the feeling of comprehending a complex, nuanced system.

My tutors feel that the city is beyond modelling, that the city is beyond the sum of its parts, & to create a digital model of the city is reductive, yet b/c games don’t hold the city sacred, SimCity just went ahead and did it. Like drawings or writing it is reductive, but acceptable for the purposes. Procedural narrative is the same. Devs can have the same attitude to the author’s mind: A glorious thing, but it’s not profane to model some of its systems.

* to an extent, while there's nothing that's universally felt the same way by everyone, it's fair to say that buildings tend to have similar effects on similar people, and while there's great diversity in humans, there's also a lot in common.

**If that seems like a lot of effort, remember how many failed architects and authors we train in the hopes we can find/train one that's good.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You're right (Akrasian, not Mington) but at the same time, just because it's not "procedural generation" as you've defined it that's the problem, maybe you would agree that "procedural generation" as it refers to computer programs trying to craft a narrative is indeed the problem when it comes to, for i n stance, human interactions, right? Sure, it's not the fact that it's procedural that trips us up, and really it's a fact about the nature of the narrative more than anything, but computers are bad at something humans are good at and a good way to describe this distinction when it comes to video games is procedural generation vs. a crafted narrative, because we're talking about what the game is doing. Just because you can say "oh, but the humans are also procedurally generating the story" doesn't mean that procedural generation isn't the issue, because it is: games can't do it (for certain kinds of narratives).

It's like saying that paper Pong is no different from normal Pong because they're doing the same thing (moving the ball and paddles and so on), just in one case the human does it manually by turning the pages and in the other case the computer does it. In one sense you're right, but the point of paper Pong is that humans are very bad at moving paddles and balls at a speed that is fast and accurate enough to make a fun game, whereas computers are really good at that, so when we play Pong we want to play it on a computer. And computers are bad at crafting human narratives with dialog and interactions and stuff, so when we do that we want the human to have done it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now