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Zeusthecat

Intoxication in Video Games

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One thing I find very interesting is when a video game attempts to depict what a character experiences when they are intoxicated. It usually turns out to just be some cosmetic bullshit like the screen getting wavy or the controls getting all weird but sometimes games manage to do something interesting with this concept. A recent example for me would have to be a certain mission in GTA5.

In one mission you are driving your son to pick up some drugs and he tricks you into ingesting some kind of tranquilizer. As the tranquilizer takes affect, the games audio slows down, driving becomes incredibly difficult, and then your character blacks out. When he comes to, he is on an alien spaceship getting experimented on. Before long he is ejected from the ship and you get to play a segment where you are freefalling towards a vibrant, neon looking version of Los Santos with some awesome music playing. What's interesting though is that you aren't really freefalling, but hovering over the city unless you lean forward to descend. So you are able to basically just float all around this weird dreamscape and when you finally make your character hit the ground you black out again before waking up on the sidewalk in nothing but your underwear.

I had a blast on this mission and thought it was one of the rare cases where a game managed to represent the experience of intoxication in a unique and entertaining way.

I'm curious what other people here have experienced in this regard or how you think this concept could be used effectively in games. Would it be possible to make a game that entirely revolves around this concept and have it be as affecting as a movie like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was for some people?

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I hate how the primary depiction of drinking in video games is standing at a bar alone ordering shots. Who does that? Then after 3 you are fucked.

When Shepard in mass effect want's to have a drink it should roll a short cutscenes of Shepard sitting down and enjoying a beverage with some crew mates, and the more times you do it the polite conversions with crew mates becomes arm wrestles and hugging and I LOVE YOU MAN finishing off with people passed out on the table and Shepard getting kicked out of the bar. That would be hugely entertaining and far more interesting than buy 3 drinks and screen goes blurry

That GTA V section mentioned above was great. The slowmo shooting clowns/aliens not so much

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Rockstar have been great with that. Fabled (probably not so much) is my drunken adventure in Red Dead Redemption, that's surely written up somewhere 'round these parts.

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The best drinking scene in any game ever though is out of the Mass Effect series, when you get drunk reminiscing with the doctor in ME2.  Then in ME3 it can happen again as a yearly ritual.

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According to Wrestle during yesterdays grand thumb auto your character can be drunk in GTAIV.

 

Anyway, I once made a small mod for UT2004 called Capture The Beer. Instead of flags you had to steal a crate of beer from the other team, but while carrying you would consume the beer (the score for getting the bare back to the base was determined on the number of bottles left). Given the short timeframe I had the only effect was messing with the mouse input. The drunker you were the worse your mouse movement would become (using a simple sine wave). I was planning to add more effects like accelerate quick movements and falling down when moving too fast.

 

There have been a bunch of games with drunk effect, but I can't recall them right now.

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I wonder if dream-sequences should count. Even the chronologically broken narratives of Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving seem somewhat related to me. Partial memory, confusion, and a sense of urgency are things I associate with some forms of intoxication.

There was an instance of colors becoming very saturated and trailing in some game I played recently. I think it may have been GTA V. I thought it was pretty novel.

I'd like to see a game where if your character is intoxicated, NPC's seem more intense. Maybe the environment and sound could reflect whether or not you are in their favor.

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In proper English fashion, you can get quite drunk in Sir, You Are Being Hunted by Robots. I like to imagine that character, after getting thoroughly drunk, running into another human being, and trying to explain, slurred words and all, that he/she was being hunted by robots.

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I want a game that explores the problems of drug and/or alcohol addiction. Max Payne 3's story was quite restrained and interesting in how it told Max's problem with pills and booze, but it didn't show that in a ludic way, for the gameplay was all pew pew slow mo. I like pew pew slow mo, but I wish your addictions were something that you could control or affected you during gameplay. That game eot posted looked very interesting.

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I think of vampirism in the Elder Scrolls series as a allegory for addiction and withdrawl.

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Wasn't there a discussion about this on Crate & Crowbar at some point? I don't remember what any of them said, just that it was a thing.

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I want a game that explores the problems of drug and/or alcohol addiction. Max Payne 3's story was quite restrained and interesting in how it told Max's problem with pills and booze, but it didn't show that in a ludic way, for the gameplay was all pew pew slow mo. I like pew pew slow mo, but I wish your addictions were something that you could control or affected you during gameplay. That game eot posted looked very interesting.

Where did the slo mo come from if not the pillsnbooze?

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A more accurate representation of the morning after would be worry and guilt. Has any game implemented a 'what did I say?' worry feature where you spend the entire weekend filled with confusion and self-loathing before Monday when you discover it's all good and everyone else was similarly too pissed and self-absorbed to notice anyone else's bullshit?

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How about a game where you can black out after too much of a substance, the game procedurally generates actions your character undertook while blacked out, then you wake up in the morning with no idea what you did and have to deal with the consequences?

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One thing I always liked about WoW was, when you are drunk in game, the mobs appear to be a lower level then they actually are. I can take you bro.

 

 

 

How about a game where you can black out after too much of a substance, the game procedurally generates actions your character undertook while blacked out, then you wake up in the morning with no idea what you did and have to deal with the consequences?

 

 

That is pretty much the opening of just about every "amnesia" storyline in gaming history, give or take the alcohol.

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GTAIV wins for best PSA against drunk driving. Shits hard yo!

 

The Mass Effect drinking scenes may be unrealistic but they usually had the most interesting scenarios. Tended to feel like inspiration drawn from a detective serial. Whether it was getting roofied by the Turian in ME1 to trying to seduce the Asari on the dance floor in ME2 there was always an interesting scenario playing out within the context of the space-bar. So I guess it gets points more for design and plotting than novel mechanics.

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Speaking of WOW, I loved how the game slurred whatever you typed into chat when your character was drunk. For the longest time I thought people were just role playing when their characters were drunk.

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Speaking of WOW, I loved how the game slurred whatever you typed into chat when your character was drunk. For the longest time I thought people were just role playing when their characters were drunk.

 

Ah yesh, that ish pretty neat too hic!

 

I got drunk in wow in DM the other day. It lasted about 10 minutes for some reason and made me feel like i had cataracts. I hope it was a bug and that doesn't happen to everyone (it was some manner of brewmaster boss thing we were fighting).

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I found the intoxication in Bioshock Infinite to be pretty... odd.  I'd be wandering around the environment, hitting "E" on everything I could find and every once in a while my character would get drunk, woozy camera and all. It would last 30 seconds, then completely go away. Since I was never scavenging during a gunfight, it didn't have any impact on how the game played. Felt like kind of a weird design decision to include. When the primary gameplay is mechanically moving something around (aiming, jumping, etc), drug use just serves as a hindrance, which isn't very interesting.

 

I'd love to see a game that includes conversation trees to see interactions changed by the drugs taken. Sharing more with alcohol, having crazy/funny observations on sativa, becoming paranoid on bad weed, being super friendly and thirsty on molly, being super annoying on coke, etc.

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Hey did you know in Space Quest 1 when you drink too much your direction keys keep randomizing so you walk the wrong way a lot? It only lasts while you are inside the bar. Amazing, huh?

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