Jake

Idle Thumbs 120: The Spectacle Was Incredible

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I like to call them computainments, but best of all I like to hear Video Games become increasingly aggressive (though never very) while talking about "Video Games".

 

One of my favorite computainments ever was "Our House", which was a Family Circus Game! And by game, I mean that you would click on different things in a house and voice actors would tell you about what you were looking at! Then you'd look at stuff in a different room and different characters would tell you stuff! This game taught me what Parcheesi was, and what "percolate" and "facade" mean, and something about baseball cards and that's all I remember!

 

But as you can tell from my description, it's essentially the DOS version of Gone Home.

 

Unfortunately this is all I can find about it, no good screenshots or pictures of Their House. ALAS! I wonder if I still have this electrodiversion stored somewhere in Our House...

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Nick Breckon returns in his most Nick Breckon preformance of the year.

 

By the end of the cast, I forgot he was even there.

 

In Chinese, the term for "video game" is two words meaning "electric" and "play".  I love electric play.

 

Also, crazy commericals are a pretty common occurance across all of Asia, not just Korea.

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For what it's worth I think the person saying you guys should have streamed Gone Home was joking. I'm all for seeing more Spelunky streaming.

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Korean Dota 2 Commentators and their Knowledge of the Game

I haven't seen the streams of the brand new Korean Dota 2 players + commentators, so Sean is probably right that the commentators don't really know what's going on based on his assessment of how surprised/excited they sound by things, but I think it's worth mentioning that Korean commentating (according to my MINUSCULE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRACTICE) can sometimes be quite different than American style - rather than just "play by play" and "strategic analysis" which are the two things you usually get in American/English commentating, I think at least in Starcraft some Korean commentators (like ones on TV) even do stuff like hide parts of the game from the viewer only to reveal them at a climactic moment to heighten the tension (so like, hide the fact that a player is doing a drop or building a nuke until it's right about to happen, then reveal it for the excitement value). That kind of specific production and management of the viewer's excitement levels in a stagecraft sense suggests to me that something very minimal, like acting excited when a Dota 2 hero pulls off an ability you "didn't expect," is well within the ambit of Korean commentary.

Sean's probably right though, because if the players are new, for comedic value it makes sense to have new commentators too.

ALSO apropos of Korean Dota 2 commentary this video is tremendous - it's some translated Korean commentary from that 93 minute game that put Nick to sleep twice:

"Video Game" as a Term

In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (and presumably its sequel, The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa), in the future, video games are referred to as "vidcons." This is thus the canon term in the movie Space Jam, too, although I do not believe it occurs in the film proper.

I'm actually sympathetic to the point Nick was making, and I think the Gone Home era is a good time to make the point: right now, video games are casual games + things nerds play and not much else. In a future where a game like Gone Home is normal and a game like Gears of War is weird, I can see us as having gone through a phase where the general public had to pick something to call video games that wasn't "video game," just like the general public had to pick something to call MP3 players and tablets and more or less ended up with iPod and iPad (although that example isn't the best).

Also

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I just want to point out that even though we call old people "elderly" or "senior citizens", they're still fucking old.

 

Video games.

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In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden ,,,

I believe you mean: Tales of Game’s Studios Presents Chef Boyardee’s Barkley, Shut Up & Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa.

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Gone Home is basically the same. Your only means of interacting with the world is by pick up and spinning about realistic physics objects. Fullbright obviously spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that their objects have a heft to them and collided believably. This ensures the interaction the player has the world is satisfying and grounded.

Never once while playing Gone Home did I feel as though the quality of the physics simulation of the objects had any bearing on my ability to see the world as satisfying and grounded. I'd be interested to hear if they actually did spend a lot of time on this it was handled so proficiently that I never thought about it. That being said, my guess is no. I imagine the storytelling took up way more time than creating a satisfying physics simulation.

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Something I think is more important than the physics simulation unto itself is the ability to return an object back to its proper place—even if, when you first picked it up, it was not yet in its proper place. This allows (although does not force) the player to treat the environment as an actual home, and not simply a physics sandbox, which is a really important quality that many larger-budget games make no attempt to facilitate mechanically.

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Something I think is more important than the physics simulation unto itself is the ability to return an object back to its proper place—even if, when you first picked it up, it was not yet in its proper place. This allows (although does not force) the player to treat the environment as an actual home, and not simply a physics sandbox, which is a really important quality that many larger-budget games make no attempt to facilitate mechanically.

 

That was one of my favorite things about Gone Home.  It was really nice being able to put things back into place instead of casually discarding them on the ground and making a mess.  I think I would have felt more like a thief who broke into someone else's home and was ransacking the place while reading their most private thoughts if I couldn't have put things away properly like a normal person.  Although I did spend a few minutes being amused trying to close a drawer by throwing pens at it.  Also, I was slightly disappointed that while the water dispenser on the fridge works, you can't actually fill things up with water.

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You cant blame Nick for being quiet, it seemed like every time he said something he was jumped on.

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You cant blame Nick for being quiet, it seemed like every time he said something he was jumped on.

He's just in it for the cheeseburgers.

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I can understand not wanting to clutter things up with a bunch of specialized terms, but I feel like giving things like Gone Home, Dear Esther, The Path, etc a different label than "game" helps separate them from the things that a lot of people expect of a "game", like a win state and combat or puzzles or other sorts of explicit challenges and goals. The same way I'd describe Minecraft (and Maxis used to describe a lot of their products) as a toy, because there's no intrinsic goal, it's just a whole bunch of stuff you can play with however you like. I also get the impression that a lot of people react to defining these new categories as somehow dismissing or denigrating the recategorized programs, and that's not it at all. I think all of the titles I mentioned have things to offer to people who are open to and interested in that sort of experience. I just think that relabelling them increases the likelihood that the audience that is suited for them will find them and the audience that isn't can more easily steer clear or at least go in with more accurate expectations.

 

Anyway. Whatever we call Gone Home, I'd like to see it prompt more exploration of the possibility space it suggests, and I'm looking forward to what Steve and the rest of Fullbright turn to next.

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Something I think is more important than the physics simulation unto itself is the ability to return an object back to its proper place—even if, when you first picked it up, it was not yet in its proper place. This allows (although does not force) the player to treat the environment as an actual home, and not simply a physics sandbox, which is a really important quality that many larger-budget games make no attempt to facilitate mechanically.

This simple mechanic struck me more than a great many things. This is almost never mechanically simulated and yet it felt completely normal after the first time I was prompted to do so. It had a kind of narrative and environmental sense to it that made the mechanic itself blend into the background. It also prompted some reactions to my interference with the environment that I don't think I've ever felt in a video game before. When I didn't put stuff back I felt bad, as though I was actually making work for someone else to put everything back. It also made me painfully self-conscious when I rifled through a cabinet or shelf to find something I may have not been suppose to find. I quickly replaced things to cover my tracks.

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Something I think is more important than the physics simulation unto itself is the ability to return an object back to its proper place—even if, when you first picked it up, it was not yet in its proper place. This allows (although does not force) the player to treat the environment as an actual home, and not simply a physics sandbox, which is a really important quality that many larger-budget games make no attempt to facilitate mechanically.

Good point. It may have been what compelled me to do so much tidying up on my play through. Returning Christmas Duck to his proper place made perfect sense, I'm not a monster. Returning an empty can to a table top is far less intuitive so I'd always put junk items in the nearest bin. It also seemed like what a worried big sister would do and a part of me thought "Sam is going to be in so much trouble if mum and dad see this mess." Maybe my play style saw me using physics more than most as I got pretty good at chucking cans into bins.

Also the non-functional water cooler is a disaster, why wasn't is just broken? I was sure it would work so tried several different receptacles. Alternatively it should have spilled guts onto the floor like Viscera Clean up Detail.

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That is amazing.

 

And they have surprising good English.

 

It is worth noting that their other video is just as good.

 

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I can understand not wanting to clutter things up with a bunch of specialized terms, but I feel like giving things like Gone Home, Dear Esther, The Path, etc a different label than "game" helps separate them from the things that a lot of people expect of a "game", like a win state and combat or puzzles or other sorts of explicit challenges and goals. The same way I'd describe Minecraft (and Maxis used to describe a lot of their products) as a toy, because there's no intrinsic goal, it's just a whole bunch of stuff you can play with however you like. I also get the impression that a lot of people react to defining these new categories as somehow dismissing or denigrating the recategorized programs, and that's not it at all. I think all of the titles I mentioned have things to offer to people who are open to and interested in that sort of experience. I just think that relabelling them increases the likelihood that the audience that is suited for them will find them and the audience that isn't can more easily steer clear or at least go in with more accurate expectations.

I agree. I understand that genre expectations can be detrimental to the consumation of media, but it can also provide clues for how to go about appreciating it. If I buy a visual novel and find out that it is a kinetic novel (meaning that there are no branching narratives or choices), I'm disappointed because that is not the experience I was trying to have or thought I was having. I spend the first fifty pages wondering if the novel is kinetic, rather than enjoying the story. When a list of visual novels does not include the distinction of whether or not it is kinetic, it's a useless list for me.

I know that Idle Thumbs consists of various people and various opinions over time, but let me see if I understand an argument that seemed to be made over the course of a few podcasts:

[Genres can detrimental to the final product because they both reduce the idiosyncratic synergies of a game to a re-themed duplicate of a comparison, and because genres imply the inclusion of mechanics, theme, and presentation that may diffuse the expressive capability of the product.]

This may not be the opinion of any particular person on the podcast, but it's the one I'm going to respond to.

I agree that describing a game by categorizing it by a few precedent mechanics or themes can lead to the audience dismissing aspects of the game that would otherwise be valued, but I also believe that the opposite is sometimes true. Genres are template expectations that the consumer will typically have as a foundation when appreciating the art. If you were to listen to a cover of a song without previous knowledge of the original (or the many covers which have come before) you may enjoy the song, but there are certain aspects that contextual tools are necessary for enjoyment of. Thelonious

Monk sounds awesome, but when you know the standard he is playing, there is this sense of "Wow, I can't believe that he actually managed to get back to the original theme in a method conducive to the crazy path he was taking!". The standard has created expectations that are foundational for appreciating a certain aspect of the product, much like genres can.

Another great example of this ability specific to genre categorization is Charlie Kaufman's use of the biographical framework in Adaptation. That is all I can say about that, you know what I'm talking about if you have seen that film (hopefully).

But of course, genre definitions can create a checklist that game designers may include at the detriment of the experience. It's like everything else, it's not the tool, it's how you use it.

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labels and genre definitions are good at telling you what you will be getting without having to play/research the game, but of course they could also be detrimental eg. now if i hear "roguelike" i will avoid it because i don't like permadeath/permafail and generally i would be correct in avoiding it, however the game could be a roguelike that fixes the reason i don't like roguelikes or be a unique game that has no set genre but the closest fit is roguelike so i would be missing out on an enjoyable experience .

but i think that just means there needs to be more definitions of game types/genres, there should be a name for games like dear esther and gone home just so you don't have to say this new game is a bit like dear esther and gone home

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labels and genre definitions are good at telling you what you will be getting without having to play/research the game, but of course they could also be detrimental eg. now if i hear "roguelike" i will avoid it because i don't like permadeath/permafail and generally i would be correct in avoiding it, however the game could be a roguelike that fixes the reason i don't like roguelikes or be a unique game that has no set genre but the closest fit is roguelike so i would be missing out on an enjoyable experience .

but i think that just means there needs to be more definitions of game types/genres, there should be a name for games like dear esther and gone home just so you don't have to say this new game is a bit like dear esther and gone home

 

I propose a new game genre: Gonehomelike

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