Chris

Idle Thumbs 156: The Holo-Violator

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As a note, when talking about the investment problem, I wasn't talking about me at all points in my life, or me when I first started playing Spelunky; I was talking about me now.

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I've been coming up against this for the past year or so. My gaming time generally comes in half hour to hour long chunks. I've found that one obstacle to playing longer-form games like RPGs or big strategy games is that I spend a large amount of my gaming time just remembering where I was and what I was doing. And that's for a game with which I already have some familiarity with the systems. Even more than that, there's no satisfying conclusion an hour or so in. It's difficult to walk away from the game when I have to since I'm usually just getting settled in. For these reasons I've mostly just played multiplayer RTS matches since I can have a self-contained experience in about a half hour. 

 

I don't know if this is what Chris was talking about, but it's how I related to/interpreted it. I also haven't tried Dark Souls yet. 

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Half of what I love about games like Journey, Gone Home, and Attack of the Friday Monsters is that it's so much more rewarding to me to experience a complete narrative in one sitting than to have to partition it out over several weeks.

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Re: Mad Men and Sean's comments about Betty.

 

I don't think January Jones has played the character all that convincingly, but I think it's due in a large part to the writing. The farm picnic to me was unconvincing overall, even though I can imagine a character like Betty reacting similarly they just didn't sell it.

 

Similarly I find Jessica Pare very unconvincing as Megan most of the time. Again taking this episode as an example, I think her scenes were quite well written but she wasn't convincing. To me there is something very self concious about her performance a lot of the time and and feels like she's constantly waiting for someone to say "and cut - well done Jessica".

 

On the other hand I think Peggy is an extremely convincing and well drawn character. Elizabeth Moss has done a great job with that character and is a great actress. I would recommend those interested in good quality slow paced crime drama to take a look at the mini-series she was in called Top of the Lake

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With my current work schedule, I only have one day off a week.  When I get time to play anything, I tend to favor short things I can finish a session of in a sitting (which these days is mostly Spelunky and FTL).  There's a great deal of satisfaction to be had in both enjoying the play and finishing a thing.  I certainly appreciate the fun in the long form games too, but with less and less time to play, I'm finding that I tend to prefer the short and sweet ones these days.

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I think there is a discussion to be had about how playing only short-form games or only long-form games can reduce the amount of potential experiences you can have regardless of motivation. One communicating the experience of another is an interesting hypothetical. Zen Studios seems to be on the forefront of this with their attempts to put long-form persistence into pinball tables like Epic Quest (where you level up your character over the course of many games) and Super League Football (where you play through a season against multiple teams on a bracket); but stat-heavy persistence doesn't add a ton of discoverability.  I wonder if it would be possible to communicate a world like Cyrodiil in a game that I was compelled to play in short sessions. I think that the long-form games communicate the qualities of short-form play because there are typically nested gameplay-loops like combat that happen frequently enough to allow for mastery.

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I think one of the reasons I enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1 over the later games is that its structure was ideally suited to playing in chunks: it was a little repetitive played all at once, you started out in the same location, warming up, and exploring a new chunk of city. It ended with a big, memorable climax, and the whole sequence took a predictable amount of time. As they tried to mix it up to get better reviews, each sequence started taking variable amounts of time, you'd get to new cities and be able to explore all of them, and for some reason they stopped doing assassinations where the circumstances of the assassination said something about the person you were killing. Hang-gliding across Venice had nothing to do with the random dude you killed when you got to the fort he spawned in.

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I'm not crazy about the absolutism of long vs short, compared to weighing individual works as successful compared to their own perceived goals. I absolutely understand somebody not having 25 hours a week to devote to video games too, har har. I can also see how not being able to devote any more time than the time spent sitting on public transit can pose problems to a person with a popular video games podcast. 

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Do Miasmata or Neptune's Pride respect their players' time?

 

The more I think about this concept the less I'm convinced it's a useful criterion for judging the quality of a game. I think there's something to be said for it maybe when thinking about MMOs, where in many cases much of the content is there to just keep you paying a subscription rather than providing an interesting play experience, but I think there are also a lot of games that just aren't interested in providing a compact, easily digestible gameplay session.

 

In the case of Miasmata, you could plausibly play for maybe 30 minutes and then throw your hands up and say "dude, I get it, physically running around and navigating an unfamiliar island is difficult in real life, why do I have to keep running back and forth doing fetch quests?". But I think this would miss the point of the game, or why it's interesting. In a sense, part of the appeal of Miasmata was its unwillingness to provide a tidy playthrough. Dark Souls, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2 all seem similar in this regard.

 

With Fract (a game which I haven't played), I could be completely wrong, but it sounds kind of like 'not respecting the player's time' is longhand for 'boring,' even if the aesthetic and music components were interesting.

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For clarity, the part that made me post the uncomfortable comment was when Chris said he had an announcement to make, and when it was about the daily challenge Sean was the most disgusted I've heard in weeks.

 

For contrast I guess, I thought this was hilarious.  

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I was also kinda bummed by his lead up and subsequent announcement. To be fair my only interaction with Chris+Spelunky is through the cast, so it basically dropped from my mind when he stopped talking about it regularly.

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Do Miasmata or Neptune's Pride respect their players' time?

 

The more I think about this concept the less I'm convinced it's a useful criterion for judging the quality of a game. I think there's something to be said for it maybe when thinking about MMOs, where in many cases much of the content is there to just keep you paying a subscription rather than providing an interesting play experience, but I think there are also a lot of games that just aren't interested in providing a compact, easily digestible gameplay session.

 

In the case of Miasmata, you could plausibly play for maybe 30 minutes and then throw your hands up and say "dude, I get it, physically running around and navigating an unfamiliar island is difficult in real life, why do I have to keep running back and forth doing fetch quests?". But I think this would miss the point of the game, or why it's interesting. In a sense, part of the appeal of Miasmata was its unwillingness to provide a tidy playthrough. Dark Souls, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2 all seem similar in this regard.

 

With Fract (a game which I haven't played), I could be completely wrong, but it sounds kind of like 'not respecting the player's time' is longhand for 'boring,' even if the aesthetic and music components were interesting.

 

I think maybe whether a game respects your time comes down to how much you trust a given game. Far Cry 2 horribly disrespects a player's time, but it does so in the name of a pervasive and interesting aesthetic that emerges after a certain amount of time invested. Until that point, you just have to trust that the game is disrespecting your time for a reason. Understandably with such an abstract game, maybe it's just harder to trust Fract OSC to do something with what feels like "wasted" time.

 

And yeah, in other contexts, it also seems like a circumlocution for "boring" so that we don't have to have another conversation about what "fun" means. I kinda wish we could just call games boring without any sort of relativism coming into play, but I'm the most guilty of that, so...

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Do Miasmata or Neptune's Pride respect their players' time?

The more I think about this concept the less I'm convinced it's a useful criterion for judging the quality of a game. I think there's something to be said for it maybe when thinking about MMOs, where in many cases much of the content is there to just keep you paying a subscription rather than providing an interesting play experience, but I think there are also a lot of games that just aren't interested in providing a compact, easily digestible gameplay session.

In the case of Miasmata, you could plausibly play for maybe 30 minutes and then throw your hands up and say "dude, I get it, physically running around and navigating an unfamiliar island is difficult in real life, why do I have to keep running back and forth doing fetch quests?". But I think this would miss the point of the game, or why it's interesting. In a sense, part of the appeal of Miasmata was its unwillingness to provide a tidy playthrough. Dark Souls, Fallout 3, and Far Cry 2 all seem similar in this regard.

With Fract (a game which I haven't played), I could be completely wrong, but it sounds kind of like 'not respecting the player's time' is longhand for 'boring,' even if the aesthetic and music components were interesting.

I do think a lot of even very good games that I like fail to respect the player's time often, and that doesn't disqualify them from being good due to any number of other qualities. But also, in Far Cry 2 and Miasmata, there's always the potential that something interesting or surprising or wacky or disastrous could occur in those "dead" moments, but as far as I can tell that's not true in FRACT. I mean, if I'm sucked into the world, and I just don't notice that I haven't actually done anything significant in 20 minutes, then it's sort of a moot point. But if I'm constantly being annoyed by it with little to no payoff (and I mean little payoff from the wandering itself, or direct result of the wandering, not from any other parts of the game), I'm more likely to consider it a real flaw and not just part of the game's structure or pace.

Also just in case anyone is conflating two topics (which I don't think the post I'm replying to is), there's definitely a distinction between games that genuinely bother me in this regard and games that I'm simply having a tough time getting psyched up for even if I suspect they're still good.

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Apparently this is the first topic I found when looking for Mad Men discussions.

 

I assume that with Twin Peaks Rewatch, doing a Mad Men weekly cast for the final season is no longer feasible?

 

I'd be okay with a spoiler-ed extra half hour of Mad Men talk at the end of each Idle Thumbs, but I assume some people would hate the idea.

 

Also the 4 letter search word minimum makes this show impossible to search for:

Mad Men...on AMC...Don...Pete...Joan.... 

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