Jake

Idle Thumbs 129: A Reminder

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Idle Thumbs 129:

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A Reminder

You're presented with two doors, and can only enter one. The choice seems simple but before you know it you've spent an hour in a psychosomatic tornado, endlessly circling around a subject you think you can grasp in full, only to realize you've been off on a tangent the entire time. This is The Stanley Parable. This is this week's podcast. This is a reminder.

Games Discussed: The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable Demo

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I'm playing it safe with this one and skipping it entirely in order to avoid spoilers. This is the first time I've done this with an episode of Idle Thumbs, but after playing the demo I'm pretty sure The Stanley Parable is something I want to go into completely unspoiled.

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We don't talk about any specific content of The Stanley Parable, though we do describe the content of the demo as an attempt to give an example of the game.

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I haven't listened to the cast yet, but having played The Stanley Parable, I'd say that it is hard to discuss the game at length without spoiling it to a large extent.

 

Edit: ahh ok.

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We don't talk about any specific content of The Stanley Parable, though we do describe the content of the demo as an attempt to give an example of the game.

 

Oh wow, alright. When I saw Stanley Parable as the only game on the discussed list, I thought that was a pretty good indicator this would be a spoiler cast.

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The resulting conversation is a good rendition of the game itself, because even if you've played The Stanley Parable a bit thoroughly, there's so many branch that could possibly fit the one they vaguely reference that there's no way to check if you are on the same mind track as them. :tup: 

Also, awesome looping.

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The episode tries to talk about the game by filling in the negative space around what the game is, and ends up kind of falling into a hole of madness as a result, which seemed appropriate in the end.

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You can get the "unachieveable" achievement. But the logic behind it has been changed since the release.

...

or maybe the devs are playing a trick on us

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This was one of the best episodes in ages, guys. Granted, I'm an avowed Nick Breckon fan (what's the word for this? Breckonista?), but you guys touched on a lot of topics that I found fascinating.

 

I'd like to go back to that conversation around Let's Play content.

 

I've been aware of the popularity of Let's Play content since I first started seeing these crop up on the Something Awful forums several years ago. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of it all. It initially struck me as odd that something as half-assed as the average Let's Play video could generate as much interest as the average Let's Play video. Soon, I realized that a significant percentage-- possibly the majority-- of the community surrounding these videos never buys the games. They seek out the videos as an alternative to purchasing the game, get hooked on the community surrounding the videos, and start investing their free time into consuming the videos of the games instead of the games themselves.

 

Now, I would normally view this as a big problem. But if Let's Play communities pose a threat to modern game developers, it is primarily to those developers that focus on making narrative-driven experiences (Crystal Dynamics, Irrational Games, Naughty Dog, et al). I'm less sympathetic in those cases because I believe that making a narrative-driven game today is foolish. It's been foolish for the past few years, and it's only going to be an even worse idea during the next console cycle, as the expectations of single-player campaign assets rise, and the cost of producing them rises accordingly.

 

So, in a way, I actually embrace the rise of Let's Play videos, even if they're not something that interests me. I view them as a way of accelerating the inevitable death of single-player narratives, creating a void that I am certain will be filled with simpler, more-mechanically-driven games. I have every confidence that, five years into the life cycle of the PS4, it will be a laughable notion that a game like Beyond: Two Souls-- a game that I believe will not be particularly profitable, even today-- could ever exist again.

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Getting a serious Welcome to Nightvale vibe from Chris as he reads reader mail this episode.

 

If unfamiliar with the reference, this post can easily be ignored.

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Something amazing happened while listening to this episode.

 

When Jake was in the middle of talking about Mario 3D Land, he skipped like a CD and everything fell silent in my headphones. I couldn’t help but laugh, because it was a pretty fitting gag when paired with the context of the Stanley Parable, repeating and restarting. I was anticipated someone to chime in with the Idle Thumbs introduction, but enough silence warranted investigation. Turns out, my podcast app had crashed.

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I'm so happy that Jake finally got past world 8. Now that that's out of the way, I don't feel bad saying that you can unlock something else by beating each level as both Mario and Luigi and getting to the very top of the flagpole at least once in each stage. It's not as cool as the eight additional worlds.

You get one last super-long stage filled with absurdly tricky platforming and almost every single weird mechanic in the entire game

 

 

Also, best episode. I lost it when I realized Chris had actually followed through on his plan to stop talking.

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I'm so happy that Jake finally got past world 8. Now that that's out of the way, I don't feel bad saying that you can unlock something else by beating each level as both Mario and Luigi and getting to the very top of the flagpole at least once in each stage. It's not as cool as the eight additional worlds.

You get one last super-long stage filled with absurdly tricky platforming and almost every single weird mechanic in the entire game

oh shit

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is it worse than SMW's tubular? Because I loath that level.

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This was one of the best episodes in ages, guys. Granted, I'm an avowed Nick Breckon fan (what's the word for this? Breckonista?), but you guys touched on a lot of topics that I found fascinating.
 
I'd like to go back to that conversation around Let's Play content.
 
I've been aware of the popularity of Let's Play content since I first started seeing these crop up on the Something Awful forums several years ago. At first, I wasn't sure what to make of it all. It initially struck me as odd that something as half-assed as the average Let's Play video could generate as much interest as the average Let's Play video. Soon, I realized that a significant percentage-- possibly the majority-- of the community surrounding these videos never buys the games. They seek out the videos as an alternative to purchasing the game, get hooked on the community surrounding the videos, and start investing their free time into consuming the videos of the games instead of the games themselves.
 
Now, I would normally view this as a big problem. But if Let's Play communities pose a threat to modern game developers, it is primarily to those developers that focus on making narrative-driven experiences (Crystal Dynamics, Irrational Games, Naughty Dog, et al). I'm less sympathetic in those cases because I believe that making a narrative-driven game today is foolish. It's been foolish for the past few years, and it's only going to be an even worse idea during the next console cycle, as the expectations of single-player campaign assets rise, and the cost of producing them rises accordingly.
 
So, in a way, I actually embrace the rise of Let's Play videos, even if they're not something that interests me. I view them as a way of accelerating the inevitable death of single-player narratives, creating a void that I am certain will be filled with simpler, more-mechanically-driven games. I have every confidence that, five years into the life cycle of the PS4, it will be a laughable notion that a game like Beyond: Two Souls-- a game that I believe will not be particularly profitable, even today-- could ever exist again.

 

I have to disagree with this. First, even if the majority of people that watch a Let's Play don't buy the game, that doesn't mean that they would have bought the game had there been no Let's Play for it. I am highly doubtful that the majority of people watching these use it as a substitute for actually playing the game anyways. And I am sure there are still plenty of people that never watch them to begin with so even if this was the case you are talking about a fraction of the subset of people that watch Let's Plays.

 

Second, I'm not sure why you think it is foolish to make a narrative driven game considering some of the biggest and most talked about games over the last few years have been narrative driven (Bioshock Infinite, Last of Us, Walking Dead, Uncharted games, etc.). There is just no realistic basis for claiming that narrative driven games will die or should die.

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Not finished yet, but this may be my new favorite episode.  I especially loved hearing Sean's comments on everything, I thought they were really insightful.

 

On the topic of Let's Plays, I follow a couple of them and more than one has convinced me to buy a game I might not have considered otherwise.  The Thumbs are a good example of this.  The Twitch streams can be considered a form of Let's Play and I have to imagine that they've sold several copies of Crusader Kings, Kerbal Space Program, and Spelunky at least.

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As someone who's at least as interested in the history of video games as playing them, I think Let's Plays could be incredible archives for future history. It's a shame that most of them are done by people who are painfully unfunny and have no interest in actually documenting how the game is making them feel. If more Let's Plays were like Spelunky Explorer's Club Daily Challenge videos, where people simply verbalize their thought process at any given moment, I'd probably watch more. Then again, outside of Thumbs streams, I don't really know of any good Let's Play people, I tend to just go with whatever's on the first page of YouTube searches. If there is in fact a huge culture around specific game streamers, I imagine they're probably good at it.

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It's a shame that most of them are done by people who are painfully unfunny and have no interest in actually documenting how the game is making them feel.

It's my fear of being like that that has kept me from streaming. I'll gladly make videos of dumb plays in Dota, because they amuse me and my friends, but I avoid any kind of regular streaming - even though I think I'd enjoy it. I only stream (and then upload to YouTube) the Spelunky runs because we're all doing it and it's a fun group activity. U:

 

Basically: I agree with you. Love the Thumbs streams.

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As someone who's at least as interested in the history of video games as playing them, I think Let's Plays could be incredible archives for future history. It's a shame that most of them are done by people who are painfully unfunny and have no interest in actually documenting how the game is making them feel. If more Let's Plays were like Spelunky Explorer's Club Daily Challenge videos, where people simply verbalize their thought process at any given moment, I'd probably watch more. Then again, outside of Thumbs streams, I don't really know of any good Let's Play people, I tend to just go with whatever's on the first page of YouTube searches. If there is in fact a huge culture around specific game streamers, I imagine they're probably good at it.

 

The Let's Plays that I follow I only watch because they're full of dumb people who are amusing and entertaining.  They don't try to do any kind of critical analysis of the game.  Really it's just people who like playing games having a good time and they happen to record it for their channel.  A lot of them aren't even any good at the games they're playing, which makes it simultaneously hilarious and infuriating.  Those are the Let's Plays that make me want to buy a given game more than any commercial because the entire thing is saying "look how much fun this game is".

 

But yeah, most of them are dumb and boring.

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It seems like Let's Plays only hurt narrative games if the narrative games do not change whatsoever from playthrough to playthrough and don't have particularly unique mechanics. I imagine an LP of something like DmC would probably help the game - it's nowhere near as terrible as DMC fans tried to paint it as, and being able to jump in on the middle helps with some of the accessibility problems games have.

 

If your drawcard is the storyline then you really should be ensuring your storyline is state-of-the-art - and that involves at least a little bit of responding to the player's actions.

 

I still do not get PewDiePie, because it looks like all he does is play creepy games and scream at them. How is this guy the most popular guy on YouTube? Like, all power to him but I do not get it.

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