Jake

Idle Thumbs 109: Prepare for the Jelly

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The naming discussion was pretty fantastic. Over the past few days I've been seeing tons of people rave about The Swapper and how good of a game it is. But every time I hear the name, I unintentionally switch the word 'swapper' with the word 'slap' or 'clap' and I've started to associate this game with slapping and/or clapping (the clapper?), which makes me not want to play it. It's completely irrational that I do this, but it demonstrates the weird ways we subconsciously process information and how much of an impact names can have on our interpretations of a thing. Conversely, I still cannot believe that the title 'The Name of the Rose' isn't a direct reference to anything in the book, because they are both such a perfect compliment to one another.

 

(Also, sorry Jake that your 100+ episode streak ended.)

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What's the problem? He doesn't spoil a plot element and having not played Metro Last Light, what he talked about made me want to buy it.

To be fair to the guy you're replying to, Nick said "I'm going to spoil it," and the person said he paused when he heard that, so how would he know it's not a plot spoiler?

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Man, I'm really looking forward to some sweet Russian vs. Opera vs. Jake discussion next episode. I fully expect the entire hour to be dedicated to it.

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I'm sympathetic to developers of shooters always including crouching because that's how these games are designed. I've seen so many people say they won't play a game if they can't jump. Why cause unnecessary anger?

Sure, but if you make a game that's basically just like every other FPS in terms of design conventions, except it doesn't have crouching, that isn't particularly interesting either. I mean even just starting from the assumption "this is an FPS" is practically a recipe for making something that's largely a carbon copy of a bunch of other games.

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If nobody ever made another FPS there would probably still be enough to play continuously for the rest of my life.

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Over the past few days I've been seeing tons of people rave about The Swapper and how good of a game it is. But every time I hear the name, I unintentionally switch the word 'swapper' with the word 'slap' or 'clap' and I've started to associate this game with slapping and/or clapping (the clapper?), which makes me not want to play it. It's completely irrational that I do this, but it demonstrates the weird ways we subconsciously process information and how much of an impact names can have on our interpretations of a thing.

 

I've been doing the exact same thing, to the point that I thought Idle Thumbs already had an episode discussing the game, before remembering that episode 91 was in fact titled "The Clapper".

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Question:  in TS2 do you play as the monkey?  Are you one of those people?

 

Always a robot. Usually Gretel in TS2 and some other robot in TS3.

 

I opened up this page to try to jog my memory of who I played as in 3, and man I forgot about how awesome the characters were.

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Crouch-jumping. It adds a little bit of alternate traversal that rewards those skilled at using it. Getting up somewhere behind enemy lines as a spy in TF2 and then stabbing people who (somewhat rightly) think they should be safe is great.

 

Also, I was promised an Eleven Dollar Swapper. YOU MONSTERS BETRAYED ME. Guess I'll just have to go with the not-as-cool Fifteen Dollar version.

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Crouching is quite useful in TF2 in terms of adding a bit of mobility and adding another axis on which you can dodge a headshot if you think someone is lining one up, but that's TF2. There's a lot of games where it really doesn't offer anything.

 

As another tangent to the same point, it's worth noting that IIRC TF2 doesn't bother with the Source engine convension of holding shift to sprint(HL2) or slow-walk(L4D). They wouldn't have any place in the game, so they're taken out.

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Chris just deliberately mangled the Nietzsche quote about becoming a monster, which was funny. Even moreso because earlier today I saw the Lords of Shadow 2 trailer, which put up the quote in full earnestness, which made me cringe a little.

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Wow, Chris, well done. Your response on JRPG/genre ossification is both very thoughtful and deliberately non-confrontational. I really appreciate how you go out of your way to clarify your point and expand your idea without trying to be right; it is both intellectually satisfying and respectful. And awesome. Well done. 

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I actually did the thing Sean's wife suggested in Warcraft 2. The AI in Warcraft 2 didn't know how to destroy stone walls, so I would go into the Mapmaker utility, create the largest map possible, with the enemy team baby-walled in a small corner of the map, unable to expand enough to create flying units. I think I had played Sim City 2000 at a friend's house, was jealous, and thought "fuck it, I'll make my own city simulator". I also populated the map with a lot of sheep, so my units would have something to do.

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Sure, but if you make a game that's basically just like every other FPS in terms of design conventions, except it doesn't have crouching, that isn't particularly interesting either. I mean even just starting from the assumption "this is an FPS" is practically a recipe for making something that's largely a carbon copy of a bunch of other games.

 

I agree that whether or not a game features crouching isn't an interesting design decision. I feel like the FPS is sort of on the tipping point of the ossification you were talking about on the podcast. The genre's actually much more diverse compared to its inception when it was a lot of Doom clones... I'm thinking about how different all of Valve's FPS games feel from each other despite having very similar controls/actions. On the other hand, FPS games are a genre I only dip my toes into the water on occasion so that might affect my perception of how stale the genre feels.

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 I can't help but imagine that in most cases, nobody ever brings up the possibility that you can make a first-person shooter without crouching. If it does come up, the answer must be "because players expect it." And that's a shitty way to make things.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for playing a game and having a familiar "vocabulary" of inputs.  If mouselook, WADS, jump, crouch, run, are all just there, then an experienced player can completely ignore the controls and focus entirely on the game.

 

When I played Myst V recently, there was an option to use a FPS mouselook+WADS control scheme instead of the traditional Myst interface.  It was amazing how much of a difference that made in making the environments seem like open spaces filled with solid objects rather than pictures of environments.  Even so, I kept having the urge to jump, or, yes, even crouch in order to get a better look at something.  Technically, there was no "need" for me to crouch -- the designers obviously didn't intend for me to need to see anything from that angle -- but not having the freedom to move around in that way unnecessarily shifted my attention from the game world to the interface.

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Crouch-jumping in TF2 always seemed really gamey to me.  It seems like it would have been just as easy to make the characters able to jump on those things without crouching.  I think the narrative idea is that when you crouch-jump, you're pulling your legs up under you in the air and getting that extra bit of height, but from a gameplay point of view it feels unnecessary to me.

 

Crouching in L4D, on the other hand, is a totally useful feature because it gives the people behind you a clear line of fire.

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Chris, I think your response to the JRPG emails was spot-on. There's a gulf between explanations and justifications, and I think simply appealing to Japanese culture for the values/structure of JRPGs only gets you to the former at best. And as you said, the existence of counter factual Japanese designers only emphasizes that those strictures aren't by any means necessary or imposed by the market on all games, putting more of the onus on the developer/designer to avoid those problems (instead of just appealing to the market only allowing for certain things).

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Crouch-jumping in TF2 always seemed really gamey to me.  It seems like it would have been just as easy to make the characters able to jump on those things without crouching.  I think the narrative idea is that when you crouch-jump, you're pulling your legs up under you in the air and getting that extra bit of height, but from a gameplay point of view it feels unnecessary to me.

 

Crouching in L4D, on the other hand, is a totally useful feature because it gives the people behind you a clear line of fire.

Yeah it's kind of a weird convention, and they got rid of that ability in the L4D games, though as you note there's plenty else to make crouching useful there (increased accuracy, getting out of your allies' way, hiding your outline from infected players, charging hunter pounce, hiding/spawning behind low walls). Crouching actually does have some utility beyond crouch-jumping, or at least the obvious applications of crouch-jumping, in TF2 though: Rocket jumping, faking scout double jumps as spy, hiding under cover, dodging headshots... And the game doesn't really pretend to a very robust narrative anyway, so the 'gamey' stuff doesn't bother me much, though I do appreciate why one would feel that way.

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Crouch jumping also has other effects, like enhancing rocket jumping.

 

I guess it does seem sorta arbitrary, but I feel like it has enough of an impact to make that arbitrariness worth it. SHRUG.

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Having just finished Call of Duty World at War on veteran difficulty, I can say that having the ability to crouch and go prone was absolutely necessary for survival. With varying types of cover I found myself either standing and peering around the side of cover or crouching behind cover and popping up to take a few shots. So in that case I thought the ability to crouch was meaningful in the context of the game and made it a little more realistic.

That being said, fuck that game. It was infuriating.

Also, I haven't read the latest cast yet so I'm just commenting based on what I've seen here.

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As another tangent to the same point, it's worth noting that IIRC TF2 doesn't bother with the Source engine convension of holding shift to sprint(HL2) or slow-walk(L4D). They wouldn't have any place in the game, so they're taken out.

Interestingly, the controls insert that came with the retail version of the orange box lists "Sprint---SHIFT" and "Use item---E" on the tf2 controls despite neither of these being possible in that game.

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Wow, Chris, well done. Your response on JRPG/genre ossification is both very thoughtful and deliberately non-confrontational. I really appreciate how you go out of your way to clarify your point and expand your idea without trying to be right; it is both intellectually satisfying and respectful. And awesome. Well done.

Thanks! Glad it came off in right spirit.

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Incidentally, what JRPGs does Chris like, just as an idea?

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Great cast. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts about the writing in The Swapper as you get further into it. I got to the part where the other character reveals

that the swapper swaps people's souls

and let out a groan. I think they took it in a direction that's kind of lame, rather than one that I would have liked more. Not a huge deal to me though because the puzzles and atmosphere are so fantastic I really don't care.

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I love the term 'genre ossification' and totally agree with Chris' thoughtful nuancing. I have a history of disliking JRPG's for much the same reasons, though my emphasis was always on figuring out how it came to be that the genre incorporates all those weird elements (random battles against invisible enemies, overblown storylines, seperate battle arenas). I see those as coming from the founding days of the genre, when Japan got heavily influenced by the western Wizardry series. At the time, technology was not advanced enough to create a super detailed and sophisticated world, so many of these aspects were developed to work around those limitations. Then they got set in stone by tradition. Having those same self-imposed work-arounds nowadays, when there is no need for them at all, is such a jarring experience.

 

However, after a while I felt like I was barking up a very large, impregnable, buttressed tree, so I've just accepted the damn genre for what it is and have learned to enjoy its idiosyncrasies every now and again. Currently I'm engaged in a playthrough of Tales of Vesperia with a friend, running now for over 2,5 years. It's a profoundly silly game, but I love it because it's so light-hearted and convoluted. To me, its worth lies way more in that I am doing it together with a friend, rather than for the game it is. It's a fun game to mock relentlessly as it throws ridiculousness at you. But that might not be how most fans would play it...

 

As for the naming thing... you know, I fully agree with the assessment that Gunpoint has an immediacy and appeal that The Swapper doesn't. And yet, I also think Gunpoint is an incredibly uninteresting moniker. It feels like a dime-a-dozen name, that conjures up images of ten thousand shooting galleries and FPS's. The Swapper, on the other hand, tickles me, because it's jarring and surprising and it makes my mind wonder what it could mean. That's really valuable for a science fiction experience that asks you to enter with an open mind. So, I understand the argument from a market place reality (no way that 'The Swapper' gets any attention), but for me personally I think it's the other way around.

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