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Idle Thumbs 114: A Heavy (Baboon) Heart

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It's Tuesday.

Idle Thumbs 114:

 

419__header.jpg

 

A Heavy (Baboon) Heart

With the tragic passing of Ryan Davis, we try to find a chuckle within a horrific simulator, just as we hope he would've wanted. Our thoughts and wishes go out to the guys at Giant Bomb and Ryan's friends and family. He was and is truly one of the greats.

 

Things Discussed: Surgeon Simulator 2013, Kinect Party, Back to the First Date (MolyJam), Faux Paws (MolyJam), Moly Dog (MolyJam), The Walking Dead: 400 Days

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Hey, you read my question! I'll probably reply to your answer sometime tomorrow.

 

But a less interesting example of what you guys are talking about where failure is just another step to a later victory would be the entire genre of upgrade based flash games. These are games that keep the players playing through gameplay loops where each attempt gains you enough money to do a little better the next time. Games like Shopping Cart Hero, Hedgehog Launch, and Infectionator are so popular and ubiquitous that there are even parodies, like UPGRADE COMPLETE!

 

But they are usually focused on keeping a player on the page (thus netting ad dollars) rather than making any kind of interesting point like Rogue Legacy or Back To The First Date.

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It's Tuesday.

 

 

Fuck.  This may be the first time I've ever dreaded listening to the cast.  I'm glad you guys did the stream before hand, that helped me out a lot.

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I'm sorry guys but I really didn't care about anything you guys had to say about vidja games today. Been such a downer day :(

Thanks for doing the stream, sure it will cheer up a lot of people including myself.

 

EDIT: I just saw the smiley that ": (" makes and that is not the emotion I intended to get across. 

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games where dying/failure is good thing (or a better more succinct version of that) there must be some but i can't think now, i will sleep on it and maybe i can think of some i have played

 

also loved 400 days here is fanart:

 

Nate and Russell's Road trip

nate_and_russell_s_road_trip_by_thestalk

 

http://fav.me/d6ckxee

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Although I find the game to be borderline impenetrable for the very same reasons I admire it; I've always loved that Majora's Mask, a Zelda game of all things, goes into borderline roguelike territory with its mechanics and themes Having not only the knowledge that Link will not succeed in saving the world in whatever his current iteration is (until the end of the game, of course), but a constant visual reminder of the fact by having a giant grimacing moon looming over you for literally the entire game threatening Termina's destruction is easily the most ingenious and artistic visual metaphor in the whole series.

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http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/unprofessional-fridays-020113/2300-7008/

 

I don't know if this is behind the subscriber wall or not, but at about 1hr 37 minutes Vinny plays Surgeon SImulator. It was the version made after a game jam this year, before it was released on Steam.

I was thinking of this as I listened to the cast, its a great video. I'll need to watch the archive of the thumbs playing it now.

 

Listening to you guys talk about ryan made me sad all over again, but also happy because he was such a great dude. I never met him personally, but I listened to him on a podcast weekly since 2008, so when I heard he died all of a sudden it was like a punch in the gut. He was such a staple of my media consumption, as weird a thing as that is to say, and I always liked him. I almost met him once, I was walking down 2nd street, past the CBSI offices, but I was on the other side of the street. Saw him out on the patio there working, so I tweeted at him asking if he was editing a podcast, he said he was! That made me pretty happy, its like I talked to a celebrity almost.

 

Anyway I find it weird that I'm so struck by the death of someone I have never met in person, but I am, and hearing you guys talk about it was sad but also comforting.

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Though he never got a chance to quicklook it, Ryan himself (thankfully not realizing Vinny had already brought the gamejam one on as already mentioned) did happen to play the full Steam release version of Surgeon Sim on another Unprofessional Fridays feature a few weeks back. If you're a subscriber (and you should be dammit) it can be found here; the segment starts at about the hour 18 minute mark, and it is of course a fun time as any playing of SS2013 must be.

 

While I'm at it, it seems kind of appropriate here to link to another Unprofessional Fridays where Ryan plays Thumbs favorite Cart Life, beginning at around 42 minutes in. It's one of the bits that's been popping into my mind since learning of his passing as his earnest, sincere, and simple praise for the game such a wonderful, low-key counterpoint to the many bits more hilarious and bombastic, but equally wonderful bits being shared in the wake of this worst news. I feel like it might be easy for those with just a casual, surface-level exposure of the guy might easily jump to the impression that he was a "games are just for fun, like wackiness and gory murder!" goofball (something he actually covered almost 5(!) years ago in a great super-early GB video review of Braid), which would be fine. But no: Ryan didn't just give a pass to stuff because it was trying to "meaningful" or "art", but he didn't disregard it either. He simply demanded that it be actually be GOOD at doing what it was trying to do.

 

Ryan David was clearly just such a real, awesome dude. Thanks for sharing the words, Thumbs.

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Sean, I think it is important to clarify that even if it was not the 90's Woodstock, one would never want to be Fred Durst on any occasion.

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Tonight at 11: new research indicates that you or your child may be Fred Durst, and not even know it. What does this mean for your family? Tune in to find out.

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I really wish those streams were at a time I could watch them (without setting an alarm in the middle of the night). Either way, I watched the stream yesterday and listened to the cast today. Surgeon Simulator 2013 is really horrible :tup:

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While discussing failure being a feature of gameplay the game that lept to my mind was Crusader Kings 2 where the monarch you are playing getting assassinated just means you start controlling the heir to the throne. The defining feature I guess is that failure doesn't interrupt the flow of the game, which is what typically happens in a game, you reload a save or whatever.

 

This, incidentally, is why the shooting sections of the Walking Dead really didn't work for me, because that was the part of the game where mechanical imprecision meant having to repeat a section over and over again. The game was otherwise very successful in not getting in the way of the player experience.

 

As far as why don't more games explore interesting aspects of existence like romantic encounters, I think it is kind of like why do so many games feature violent combat as the conflict of choice? Computers are really good at handling things like physics, which have specific formulae that can easily be calculated. That's why games are so good at presenting aspects of reality that aren't obvious in our everyday lives, but can be revealed through the application of well defined systems. We don't get to see how macroeconomic effects impact our everyday lives, but through an economic simulator this can become fairly transparent.

 

We don't get this luxury with human psychology where there just aren't the same formulae on hand to apply. Our relationships with other people are developed from specificity rather than general iron laws of nature. That's why Mass Effect's relationships are so crass - just follow these procedures, and you'll wind up in bed with another character. That doesn't gel with our experiences at all. Narratives are better at handling specificity than systems, which is why I suspect this exchange in the Walking Dead was successful. The Walking Dead allows you to make decisions that work on a purely narrative basis. You don't get bonuses or penalties for making a particular choice, you just experience a particular, specific outcome (that's also why I think morality in the Walking Dead is interesting, whereas it is not in most RPGs). No flow interrupted; the specificity of the encounter illuminated.

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Man, such a long conversation about dating sims and win conditions, and no mention of Save The Date?

 

 

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Man, such a long conversation about dating sims and win conditions, and no mention of Save The Date?

 

The discussion reminded me of that too.  I also thought of Spaceteam when Chris was describing the game about ruining a pilot's ability to fly a plane.

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i still can't exactly figure out exactly what you mean by progress through failure, do you mean games that ignore your failure (in the cave you can die but instantly respawn) or where you gain things by failing (rouge legacy and the shop) ?

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This was a great cast, guys. The fact that it was melancholy without losing its good humor made it so.

 

While discussing failure being a feature of gameplay the game that lept to my mind was Crusader Kings 2 where the monarch you are playing getting assassinated just means you start controlling the heir to the throne. The defining feature I guess is that failure doesn't interrupt the flow of the game, which is what typically happens in a game, you reload a save or whatever.

 

Yeah, I hate to be talking about Crusader Kings II two podcasts in a row, but it has maybe the softest and most interesting fail-states out there right now. You control a family, not a polity, so playing the game well is as much about having and raising children as it is about taxes and armies. Terrible things can happen, like the loss of a whole kingdom in a pagan invasion, but so long as the family survives and holds onto at least some land somewhere, you can always guide them back. Hell, one of the basic rhythms of gameplay is having your ruler die, sometimes unexpectedly, and having his heir take over, sometimes incompetently. Disappointment and failure are part of the game, but it's never permanent except in edge cases, like being independent along the Muslim/Christian border.

 

 

EDIT: Actually, looking back through the past two hundred years as the Bagratuni dukes of Armenia, almost all of them have died in their forties and fifties because of strokes or complications from strokes. I guess I bred that particular fail-state into my game, probably after a couple generations of (necessary) inbreeding with the kings of Bulgaria, and yet it's such a natural and systemic thing, with so many possible player responses to it, that I hardly noticed until now.

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i still can't exactly figure out exactly what you mean by progress through failure, do you mean games that ignore your failure (in the cave you can die but instantly respawn) or where you gain things by failing (rouge legacy and the shop) ?

 

The latter, certainly. The former is pretty much just a quickload, which they refer to as being the uninteresting / standard way of handling failure. I don't know that you even necessarily need to *gain* by failing, I think it's more the idea that your "failure" (whatever that means) doesn't end the game or require a restart, but instead just puts you in...a different situation. (I'm forgetting the name of at least one game that lets you play as a survivor in a tribe of people, and if that survivor dies you just start playing as one of the other tribespeople, with the world affected by everything you did as the last guy...)

 

Man, such a long conversation about dating sims and win conditions, and no mention of Save The Date?

 

I thought of that too, but wouldn't classify the win condition situation in Save the Date to really be related to dating at all. Definitely fits with the progress-through-failure discussion, tough!

P.S. I thought that game was silly.

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Regarding progress through fail state, despite being known as such a punishing game Dark Souls actually has some interesting elements of this. For instance, if you're okay with giving up your current souls or humanity, you can run out to certain doom to grab a valuable treasure and end up in a stronger position in the long run.

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Every character in Heavy Rain can die. There is no respawning, it simply alters the way the game resolves. I know the game gets a lot of (occasionally justified) hate, but it was super interesting that a character you've been playing as for a dozen hours can bite it thanks to decisions you made and the game continues on. It's that roguelike element that makes situations that much more intense when you know that a mistake will result in permanent death.

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Hi everybody! I couldn't believe that they read my question on the 'cast. I knew it was finally time to bite the bullet and actually register on the site now that we're new best friends.

 

I listened to this episode the day after the most recent Bombcast and just have to say that I wish everybody well in dealing with this loss. I love the analogy of Idle Thumbs as the punchy little brother to Giant Bomb and I don't think Ryan would have found it presumptuous at all. That made me smile.

 

Regarding the discussion on games that progress through a failure state the first game that came to mind for me was the original Wing Commander. I remember being fascinated by the idea that you could miss certain mission objectives and return to base early, or even just eject from your starship entirely, and the game would just carry on. Rather than having you do the mission over again it would just make the human position in the war effort more disadvantaged and the story would branch from there. This presented a problem, though, because as there was no penalty for dying aside from having to start the mission again it rendered the eject function nearly useless, being that you had unlimited re-tries if you died. 

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