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Jake

Idle Thumbs 121: (I Know You're Having Fun But) I'm Still Working

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Maybe so. But I could have you listen to a dozen random songs or watch a dozen random TV shows and I doubt you could name which, if any, were written with any awareness of the iPhone business model. Conversely, if I took a dozen random games, I bet almost any casual gamer would immediately see the difference between games that ask you for money as you play and games that don't. So i think Chris is right that this is a thing that sticks out when you play games in a way that is really different to how it sticks out (if it does) when you watch movies or listen to music.

You are doing the same thing -- having two separate conversations and not realizing it. I am not saying that the iPhone in app purchase model specifically applies to TV and music. I am saying that modern technology is shaking up all mediums with the introduction of new ways to acquire, parcel out, and by extension create, new works in those mediums. It's different per medium. Software of all kinds IS being impacted by in app purchases, music is being altered by digital music stores and single-song/mix/playlist based music players, and television is being changed by streaming and dvr.

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Meh... there will always be companies who'd like me as a customer.

 

The take-away that Twitter person has from that percentage is pretty stupid. Five percent of whatever the total App Store revenue is is still an intensely huge amount of money, and there is no doubt in my mind that it's still a viable market.

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The guy who punched that other guy is at home kicking himself right now. He set up this amazing set piece where he punches someone in the face, but forgot to set the lighting and sound cues properly so that you're drawn to the event. It might as well never had happened. :P

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Regarding the perceived challenge doldrums in tower-defense games: I think that Castle Storm is trying to solve the problem of feeling like everything is under control by offering an additional mechanic that allows you to push when secure. The division of your attention makes it so that you will eventually overextend and have to regroup your efforts to play defensively again. Then when you feel confident, you can switch to an aggressive mode and push for a little while until you overextend again. I like the idea, but find it too stressful. I do tend to appreciate when I can increase my risk/reward at any time during a game though. Denki's game "Juggler" simplifies that idea to a point of elegance by allowing the player to just catch an additional ball.

Also, if the world of Plants versus Zombies can satisfy you without the mechanics, then you might want to check out the Plants versus Zombies video-pinball table. It has modes where you hit the zombies with your ball and you can buy bonuses from Crazy Dave. It's a bit too easy for my taste, but it's novel.

Regarding how non-traditional gamers view micro-transactions:

My wife works with a lot of adults who would not consider themselves gamers, but have found themselves playing and discussing Candy Crush Saga frequently. She says that they describe the game to each other as "free". They pass around iphones and ipads before work and on lunch-breaks to see who can get past a level. The group that plays, talks of the legendary woman among them who "finished the game" by saying that she only spent $2; so there seems to be pride in not micro-transacting. Also, they trade tips on how to get extra-lives for free (such as changing the time on your device) in such a way that it reminds me of discussing Zelda secrets in grade-school.

The only negative she has heard about micro-transactions is an indignance regarding their kids making purchases unknowingly. They seem to feel that it is an unethical design decision intended by the game-makers.

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Having played through almost all of PvZ2, I can say that the Free to Play BS doesn't ever get to the level where I felt the need to spend money. I'm sure that I could have made my playthrough much easier if I had spent money, but I enjoyed the difficulty of the game having not spent any money.

 

The coin currency to buy plant food/instakill skill is more than plentiful enough to use it when you get in an "OH S#$%" moment without ever needing to buy anymore. The keys that drop to unlock gates is pretty rare, but by the time I beat all the levels in the initial two zones, I had earned more keys than needed to unlock everything. I had to replay some levels a few times because I didn't spend coins when I could have, but I lost to levels in PvZ1 sometimes as well when I didn't plan ahead far enough.

 

If the Free to Play crap bothers you, then don't pay them anything. Enjoy a difficult but very fun game and pretend that the microtransaction stuff doesn't exist. I will whole-heartedly recommend this game to anyone who asks.

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The take-away that Twitter person has from that percentage is pretty stupid. Five percent of whatever the total App Store revenue is is still an intensely huge amount of money, and there is no doubt in my mind that it's still a viable market.

 

The 95% also covers a whole bunch of business models, from paid DLC for  paid games, to games that let you try them for free and then unlock the full game with one or more IAP, to, yes, microtransacty bullshit. Some of these models are perfectly fine and probably a lot more viable, on a platform where pricing has been on a race to the bottom from day one, than charging a single significant chunk of change. Models designed to get you to funnel in a constant stream of gameplay-affecting microtransactions, on the other hand, need to die the death.

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Great episode. I'm not sure if there's a way to communicate what I mean, and maybe I'm not even sure what I mean, but I think the Papo & Yo discussion is one of my favorite game-centric conversations I've ever heard. The information itself was interesting, but like, the context in which it was presented and received... there's an understanding there and an implicit and self-assured framing of the conversation that I found really great.

It's a mixture of a lot of things. First is the way Jake (Jake, right? Or maybe Sean) cycled through the various things that impressed him, and the reasons they impressed him, and the way Chris elicited/assented to those comments with those little appreciative noises humans make that can be pretty subtle in their implications. The underlying implication there is that games can be sources of interesting things to think about and talk about, not ways to waste your life, but more importantly they're sources of interesting ways of interacting, something other mediums don't often (or ever?) give us. In what other context would you talk about the crafted experience of picking up a frog with tangible weight but no impact on the critical path? More importantly, talk with genuine appreciation?

Second is how the Thumbs think about things because of their knowledge of game development, but in an interesting way (this is where more of the genuine appreciation comes from) - the talk about what time was spent on, and what edges are rough and when and why, but not in an antiseptic shop-talk sort of way, where the game is picked apart into its component pieces and examined as a bare piece of work rather than a work of art, but rather in terms of what it means, emotionally (or in some other sense that I can't nail down) for things to have been made they way they were by the team that made the game (like the work that went into the frog).

Third is that all of this is so unique. I mean, it isn't, there are people who can do and do do what the Thumbs do, and I'm sure these conversations happen all the time between like-minded people (I don't have any gamer friends, or at least none I talk with often), but in the context of the discussion and culture around games, the Thumbs and things like them stand out. By way of illustration, I Googled "Papa y Yo" to try to figure out if I was spelling it right (nope) and IGN gave it a 4.0 out of 10, with the best/worst fucking IGN quote since the blow you away thing - they say "A moving experience you shouldn't have." Like holy shit. Imagine seeing games like that, or anything in the world like that. A moving experience to avoid. (I read the review - the issues are largely that the graphics are bad, the game is buggy, and the reviewer found the puzzles too easy and therefore tedious.) More generally, you don't exactly get Idle Thumbs quality discussion at, say, NeoGAF.

So, thanks for having these conversations and putting them on the Internet for people to download and grow angry at because they never got their sweet Saitek mouse. I appreciate it.

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Word TychoCelchuuu.
I don't know if you were able to communicate what you mean, but your attempt was illuminating.

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Jake mentioning how cool it would be to fly the Millennium Falcon and do all those crazy moves reminded me of X-Wing Alliance.

 

The first third or so of the campaign in the game had you flying around in freighters like the Millennium Falcon but it felt like you were flying around in a bath tub rather than doing all sorts of cool shit. Playing with my crappy joystick I couldn't hit enemies partly because of the whole bathtub thing, and as a result I flew around with the turrets on the thing set to autofire to kill the enemies.  Getting to the part of the game where you're actually flying around in fighters again was such a relief and that's the point when the game became enjoyable to me.  Not as enjoyable as Tie Fighter mind you, but still a pleasant experience once you get past the freighter stuff.

 

 

I'm tempted to find my Tie Fighter CD and play through that game again.  I played it a few years ago and while the graphics by today's standards are pretty bad, once I started playing I got sucked in and didn't notice it at all.

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I still remember the Super Nintendo game for Return of the Jedi, where you fly the Falcon first-person through the Death Star. Twice in a row. The first stage you can take it at your own pace but the second you have to constantly hold down a throttle button. I have a vague memory that you had to press select in order to enable barrel rolling with L and R, which was really crucial for getting through it the second time (and for some reason not the first, but maybe that's my memory being fuzzy). It definitely wasn't quality though and you didn't have to account for the entire ship being to the left of the cockpit.

 

The Falcon seems like it'd be a real pain in the ass to pilot. It's not quite the same as sitting on the driver side of a car and having to account for the few feet of car to your side.

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You're probably right that films are relatively untouched, because their distribution is still basically same as it ever was (theater --> living room).

I'd argue that movies have changed too thanks to shifting economic models—but that it started earlier with Star Wars and the rise of "toyetic" filmmaking. And now, we see everything being ground into franchises because quicker release cycles mean that well-received films don't reap the financial rewards until sequels. (Amongst other things, the reason why The Dark Knight hit it out of the park after an ok showing from the almost-as-good Batman Begins.)

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The Marvel movie universe feeling like a very expensive, slow motion TV series supports that. It doesn't impact all films obviously, but it impacts a measurable quadrant of them, and changes what kinds of films get made and get theatrical space booked.

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In the game thread I posted thoughts on PvZ going free to play: http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8817-plants-vs-zombies-2-its-about-time/page-2

 

I think I groaned the loudest of anyone when I heard that PvZ was going to free to play.  But if the game is fucking over anyone, it's the people who pay money and suck the difficulty ramp out of it. This is one of the only f2p games I don't hate, one of the only exceptions to the free to play trend.

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I'd argue that movies have changed too thanks to shifting economic models—but that it started earlier with Star Wars and the rise of "toyetic" filmmaking. And now, we see everything being ground into franchises because quicker release cycles mean that well-received films don't reap the financial rewards until sequels. (Amongst other things, the reason why The Dark Knight hit it out of the park after an ok showing from the almost-as-good Batman Begins.)

I dunno if films emulate the "quick make franchises and put out as many as possible" thing that video games are going through. Even if they do decide on trilogy franchises, it takes many years for these things to see fulfillment. Like the Chris Nolan Batman films took many years between each installment, but not because that was the fastest they could pump out films. If they wanted to, they could've had one out every year and a half (probably every year). But the Hollywood structure, including the business end, understands the importance of creative freedom. At least to a better degree than the video game industry currently does. A lot of it has to do with Hollywood's ability to parlay a film into other products (soundtracks, toys, advertising partnerships with Burger King or whatever else, etc). They have other ways of monetizing the product that doesn't require a lame formulaic or rushed design.

 

The only way economic structure affects film production is that movie studios will hop on a gold mine for films of a particular theme or genre (which is what the video game industry does too). But overall the saturation of products from the motion picture industry is way less than video games (both in terms of actual flat numbers and ratio of types of movies coming out vs. all movies coming out for the year). In VG if there's a zombie bandwagon, there's just this deluge from everybody to make zombies. In film you're still getting big studios releasing other kinds of movies at least, with as much promotion or backing as the latest "everybody do this."

 

Last note: btw this is why The Dark Knight Rises was a terrible movie; it was forced into being a "oh this is part three of a trilogy long story arc" instead of "a third film featuring this setting."

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... That was a super ramble and I dunno if I said anything that mattered or addressed any topic actually at hand.

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This isn't super on topic either, but speaking of quickly turned out franchises, I was talking about The Matrix with a friend, and I had forgotten that the sequels to that original film came out 6 months apart along with The Animatrix and Enter the Matrix, something that I think hasn't been seen since (unless I'm mistaken). Perhaps lessons were learned there, specifically.

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This isn't super on topic either, but speaking of quickly turned out franchises, I was talking about The Matrix with a friend, and I had forgotten that the sequels to that original film came out 6 months apart along with The Animatrix and Enter the Matrix, something that I think hasn't been seen since (unless I'm mistaken). Perhaps lessons were learned there, specifically.

They tried to do it with the hobbit but couldn't pull it off quickly enough so they went back to annually, which is still bonkers.

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The two Matrix sequels were also produced back to back and came out four years after the first film. Though in the film world, considering how special-effects-heavy those films are, that's pretty damn fast. Though they weren't planning on it being a trilogy. And I guess when you make a half trillion dollars on a single film you have all the money in the world to burn on making CGI go into overdrive for production.

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RE: The Reader mail about Gone Home/physicality of movement.

The ARMA franchise absolutely simulates the whole body of the player character. Many people consider it very clunky because of that but it is of importance to the way that game works to have every part being 'real'. You can totally free-cam around to look at your chest and get stuck in doors if you're carrying a big gun in a weird angle as an example.

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Wow, I didn't know this but apparently one of the earliest example of two movie sequels being made back to back is Back to the Future Parts II and III. They were even released six months apart like the Matrix sequels. It's weird because I always thought of them as very different movies. 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_back_film_production

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This was probably not implied at all, but I got the feeling maybe Chris was thinking that Rayman Legends using the farm crap per level thing was a newer design trope for the series. Just in case maybe that was the thought, I just wanted to pipe in that you could not finish the very first Rayman without getting every single cage in the game. The last level was just barred from entry until you did so. That game was particularly difficult because the cages were often just a matter of walking into blank areas and hoping you hear a ding where a secret is unlocked somewhere else on the map. Rayman 2 also did this somewhat by having you collect x amount of lums before checkpoints in the world map, but it incredibly more forgiving. Both Rayman Legends and Origins are much more of a throwback to the more meticulous first game.

 

But again, that probably was not implied at all and I'm most likely just taking advantage of that short detour in the podcast to take it upon myself to blab Rayman trivia no one actually cares about.

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Here is a neat article that makes similar comparisons between tent-pole summer movies and social gaming.

It's interesting to think that these free-2-play in-app-purchase gates are a mutation from the hooks in the social-game format that exploded a few years ago. This is just the single-player version.

good article, it matters that games designers are evil because they could be good, that is my answer 

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Wow, I didn't know this but apparently one of the earliest example of two movie sequels being made back to back is Back to the Future Parts II and III. They were even released six months apart like the Matrix sequels. It's weird because I always thought of them as very different movies. 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_back_film_production

 

It might be mentioned in that link, but Zemeckis has said that the decision to do it that way compromised the editing of BTTF 2 (and I'm with him, I prefer 3 overall).

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