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Chris

Idle Thumbs 114: A Heavy (Baboon) Heart

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another world is a good example of a failure state game, no? rolling around in those bloody tunnels

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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. 

 

Yeah, and in some of the games, it gets ridiculously hard if you go too far down the underachiever branch. You'd have a much easier time if you got yourself killed or just manually restarted the mission until you got through.

 

It makes narrative sense that your losses would make it that much harder to claw your way back to victory, but from a more gamey standpoint if a player is having that much trouble, maybe ramping up the difficulty isn't so great.

 

If there was a "permadeath" kind of thing going on, it would be cool that ejecting means you still get another shot, even if it's harder. Steel Battalion did that interestingly, although it didn't branch, so the narrative part was weird. Successfully ejecting meant you didn't die (and therefore your save file wouldn't be deleted) and you'd now have to go forward with probably a less expensive and capable Vertical Tank, making the mission harder, but it would still be the same exact mission over again with no dialog or anything to suggest that you're repeating your actions.

 

God, I love Steel Battalion. (A good game to stream, I would say.)

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There was that Wii game Baroque that used death to progress the plot. I can't really say much more about it because I disliked pretty much everything about that game. <_<

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There was that Wii game Baroque that used death to progress the plot. I can't really say much more about it because I disliked pretty much everything about that game. <_<

Deus Ex does the same thing (albeit under a "whelp you got knocked out" trope), which games sometimes use as an excuse to take away all your weapons/gear. Usually it gets handled through a cutscene, but I was happily surprised to see Deus Ex handle it through just normal gameplay.

And as far as interesting failure-ish states go, Homeworld had a persistent fleet that drove me crazy because I felt I had to be as perfect as possible in missions, as well as one or two cases where you'd be best served by building a particular kind of fleet in advance of a difficult level. Never did finish for that reason.

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Burnout had those amazing destruction game modes where the goal was to damage as many other cars as possible while mid-physics defying crash (fail state of a normal racing game). Saints Row 3 also had at least one minigame of the same ilk.

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Prince of Persia: Sands of Time had the prince narrate the story to the player and whenever you died you'd here the Prince say something like "no no thats not how it went." Still a pretty standard fail state but I felt like that little effort to weave it into the narrative went a long way.

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Prince of Persia: Sands of Time had the prince narrate the story to the player and whenever you died you'd here the Prince say something like "no no thats not how it went." Still a pretty standard fail state but I felt like that little effort to weave it into the narrative went a long way.

"Then I fell into a pit of spikes. No wait that's not how it went, then, I fell into a pit of spikes."

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I just caught up with the cast again. I took a break for a few days because the bombcast came out. Short (only 2 hours!) but a great, yet saddening, reflection about ryan. 

 

Anyway, that aside, I think it would surprise nobody to say that the benefits of a small team are far from exclusive to the games industry. I work in sf as a programmer at a startup doing medical software, currently 12 people strong (4 of us are programmers), and working in a close knit small team is fantastic, games or not. Of course, there are projects that are too big for everyone to be involved, or even know about all of it, but working at a small company, or on a small team, where everyone knows the general idea of all of it and is working together is fantastic. I'm lucky enough to be able to pick and choose where I work, and that there are enough places in my industry that I can just continue to work on small teams. It really is great though. 

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"Then I fell into a pit of spikes. No wait that's not how it went, then, I fell into a pit of spikes."

 

Not many people know that the original plot for Prince of Persia 2 recounted the Prince's battle with early onset Alzheimer's

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To follow up on my Baroque post, death was actually required in that game, and you'd need to die to unlock new parts of the dungeon and new dialogue, it was apparently a rogue like.

More importantly, I got Surgeon Simulator today (daily steam deal). You guys forgot to mention that the music is completely fucking rad (er well outside of the meet the medic level's music, which you did comment on). Also, after playing through I really think you guys need to get to the very last level of it.

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oh yeah more ryan davis chat if nobody say it. GB Just posted a great vid of some classic ryan (and as far as I can' tell, video that was not otherwise posted before) http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/video-thing-that-s-so-ryan/2300-7682/

 

Hey, that guy was funny. A great guy.

They followed up that video with another one: http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/buckner-and-garcia-s-found-me-the-bomb-revealed/2300-7680/

 

Ryan has what is an entirely appropriate response to the absurdity of having Buckner and Garcia write a song about your dumb Video game website.

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I'm a little amazed that nobody brought up Planescape: Torment in the context of death as progression. It had puzzles that were solved by dying repeatedly, and is a classic.

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I have a vague memory of a flash game that was puzzly in nature, where you had to climb up stairs to the next floor (it was time limit based). It was impossible to finish the game on a single life, but when you continued your previous lives would all be doing their thing and solve puzzles, or parts of puzzles, as you progressed. I can't remember where it is on the net nor its name.

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This afternoon, I'm leisurely considering some ideas for putting romance mechanics into a board game. I'm realizing that courtship mechanics are vastly different than romance mechanics. Courtship is based on tactical decisions that a player makes in order to achieve a specific cooperative relationship. Romance is a matter of designing the game so that players are motivated towards choosing partners with which to cooperate, independent of increasing their chances of achieving win conditions. It should be more pleasurable and satisfying to lose with a well-matched partner, than to win with a poorly matched one. The partner qualities can't be dependent on the real life personality traits of who is playing the Shoe piece and who is playing the Thimble. I guess that means that there should be some sort of player-abilities (kinda like enchantments in Magic the Gathering, but they only affect partners or maybe players within an area of effect) that would be revealed from each player's individual decks during the course of the game. These abilities would have complementary effects on each other that would give players a sense of elation in receiving access to new cooperative abilities. As more of these player abilities (representing personality traits) are revealed (possibly selectively revealed), some partnerships would become more attractive than others, and possibly change the landscape of motivation.

Once I started thinking about this, I realize that there is a possibility within these mechanics for wonderful romantic tropes like seeing a desirable personality trait in someone that they cannot see in themselves; or jealousy.

Even if romance can't be systemized to a perfect representation, attempts to do so will give us symbolic behavioral algorithms that can evoke examinations of ourselves and of our relationships with others. And it feels like expectations of these representations in games are so pitiful that any attempts will be appreciated greatly.

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A discussion of "progression through failure" and not a single mention of Dark Souls? I'm dissapointed, thumbizens, I really am.
Sure, there's no funky generational system or anything like that - when you die, you simply lose all your unspent souls (which double as XP and currency), and all the monsters respawn. When you rest at a campfire (to spend those souls), all the monsters respawn. It's a simple mechanic BUT ERMAHGERD SO FUCKING EFFECTIVE! In Dark Souls, dying isn't a "fail state", per se - it's a didactic process.
You see, unlike what you've probably have heard from a million mouths, Dark Souls is not a Nintendo-Hard ragefest. It's not exactly easy, sure - but mechanically, there are way, way more diffucult games out there. No, what Dark Souls requires, above all, is patience and the power of observation. By dying, you slowly learn how to approach the enemies and the environment, and if you don't act like a complete baby, you will prevail. Couple that with a finite ammount of health replenishes, and you've got a Risk/Reward-System that is just absurdly satisfying.

Although, to be fair, there are a few situations that are entirely unfair and frustrating. I mean, fuck you, Anor Londo Archers!

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A discussion of "progression through failure" and not a single mention of Dark Souls? I'm dissapointed, thumbizens, I really am.

:|

 

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.

8|

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This afternoon, I'm leisurely considering some ideas for putting romance mechanics into a board game. I'm realizing that courtship mechanics are vastly different than romance mechanics. Courtship is based on tactical decisions that a player makes in order to achieve a specific cooperative relationship. Romance is a matter of designing the game so that players are motivated towards choosing partners with which to cooperate, independent of increasing their chances of achieving win conditions. It should be more pleasurable and satisfying to lose with a well-matched partner, than to win with a poorly matched one. The partner qualities can't be dependent on the real life personality traits of who is playing the Shoe piece and who is playing the Thimble. I guess that means that there should be some sort of player-abilities (kinda like enchantments in Magic the Gathering, but they only affect partners or maybe players within an area of effect) that would be revealed from each player's individual decks during the course of the game. These abilities would have complementary effects on each other that would give players a sense of elation in receiving access to new cooperative abilities. As more of these player abilities (representing personality traits) are revealed (possibly selectively revealed), some partnerships would become more attractive than others, and possibly change the landscape of motivation.

Once I started thinking about this, I realize that there is a possibility within these mechanics for wonderful romantic tropes like seeing a desirable personality trait in someone that they cannot see in themselves; or jealousy.

Even if romance can't be systemized to a perfect representation, attempts to do so will give us symbolic behavioral algorithms that can evoke examinations of ourselves and of our relationships with others. And it feels like expectations of these representations in games are so pitiful that any attempts will be appreciated greatly.

 

I really enjoyed reading this.

 

Also, I think my question wasn't phrased particularly well. Jake and Sean obviously couldn't really reply to my last line about Telltale making an It Happened One Night game (which, in retrospect, is probably the kind of thing they hear all the time and probably gets real annoying, so sorry for that) but that actually pointed more towards the sort of thing I was wishing for. The same way that The Walking Dead isn't really a systems driven game but still tells a great story in the zombie genre, I'd love a game that was in the Telltale (or comparable adventure game) style, but was in the romantic comedy genre, or another theme that didn't have to include zombies. The love triangle between Bonnie, Leland and Dee is compelling on it's own. It doesn't need to happen in a game that has zombies. If you just played a recovering addict who fell in love with a married man, that'd be a super compelling game on it's own, sans zombies.

 

And obviously the answer is that the financial realities of the games industry can support a bold narrative driven game if there are zombies, sweet headshots, and a popular brand attached. I guess I just wish there was a way around that.

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making friendship a realistic mechanic is an almost impossible task let alone love, i think you could do it in a the walking dead game type way, but making friendship/love a systems based thing would probably require multiple psychological studies and incredibly complex AI development before it becomes anything more than just perform favorable action and get +1 on the friendship bar, because common interests, personal history and world views are generally the reason why people get along well or not and to actually make those things a system you could simulate would be incredibly hard

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I suspect that there is more complexity in world events over the period of centuries than there is complexity in the personal relationships of four or five friends. Yet Civilization has come out with five games that people enjoy. I don't find anything sacred about friendship and love as a subject for systemic representation. It doesn't have to be perfect. Civilization has massive incompletions in its design and it plays differently than other civilization based games. The systems in these games are particular perspectives that are not necessarily predictive of real life, but thought provoking and expressive. I would expect the same to be true for relationship games. No one is saying that a film can't express love in all its complexity and so romance movies shouldn't be made. Well actually, I say that sometimes, but when i do, I'm wrong.

As far as commercial viability, I'm no marketing executive, but the amount of fan-fare that the Bioware games have received for putting incredibly simplistic romance and friendship systems in their games seems symptomatic of an incredible appetite for this stuff. But I imagine that in order to make the cash, a studio would need to build a reputation for making romance games well, because as of now, everyone knows that romance games suck.

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The problem with the Civ comparison is that nobody has personal experience of world history over millennial. Unless your academic field is history or anthropology, all you've got is a generalized understanding of how things worked, so the generalizations of Civ or Anno or what have you go somewhat unnoticed. But everybody has a personal experience of forming relationships, so the generalizations that would come with a systematized interpretation of how relationships grow would far more obvious and jarring.

 

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it would be a lot harder than making a game that models something so removed from everyday human life as the entire body of world history.

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